Rochester Review

March–April 2013, Volume 75, No. 4

Editor

Scott Hauser

Associate Editors

Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

Kathleen McGarvey

Contributors

Valerie Alhart, Adam Fenster, Susan Hagen, Peter Iglinski, Melissa Greco Lopes, Mark Michaud, Sara Miller, Dennis O’Donnell, Leslie Orr, Leonor Sierra, Helene Snihur, 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 © 2013 University of Rochester

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Contents

Launching College Town

Letters

Fanfare

Tourney Talk

Like It’s 1969

Welcome to College Town

Counting Up College Town

My, How You’ve Grown!

Cell Metabolism Yields New Insights

The Lady with the Alligator Purse

Intellectual Property Expert Named to Head Technology Transfer

The Knight’s Tale

Point Taken

Yellowjackets Look to National Tourneys

Team Spirit

Libraries Unbound

One Medicine?

Poet & Epistolarian

A Vanishing Past?

‘Green Is Everyone’s Business’

What Time Is It?

In the News

Rocky Around the World

Lost and Found

M. Parker Givens: Gentleman and Scholar

Books & Recordings

Picture of an Exhibition

Who’s Got Spirit?

Launching College Town

By Joel Seligman

(Photo: Courtesy of Fairmount Properties and Gilbane Development)

College Town has been launched! College Town will provide 500,000 square feet for retail, a hotel, a parking garage with 1,500 spaces, restaurants, and housing on a 14-acre development at the intersection of Mt. Hope and Elmwood avenues. Soon, thousands of students, residents, Medical Center patients, and campus visitors will start visiting College Town.

The new development will break ground later this year, and an official opening is planned for 2014. The project is the product of extraordinary collaboration among development partners Fairmount Properties, Gilbane Development, and the City of Rochester, as well as the University.

On December 19, 2012, College Town received $4 million from the State of New York as part of the Finger Lakes Regional Economic Development Council program. This capstone funding for this $100 million project allowed the University the next day to announce that we would go forward with College Town. We believe that College Town will spur economic development through the creation of hundreds of jobs, revenue through sales, income, and property taxes, and the conversion of an unused, tax-exempt site into one that will generate taxes and keep residents and goods and services within city limits.

College Town will feature a Hilton Garden Inn and Conference Center consisting of 136 rooms, 3,000 square feet of meeting space, and an 85-seat American fusion restaurant.

Flour City Provisions, a 20,000-square-foot supermarket, will be a vibrant grocer that will offer prepared foods, wood-fired pizza, salads, and sandwiches, as well as gluten-free, natural, local, and organic offerings.

College Town notably also will include a two-story, 20,000-square-foot Barnes & Noble bookstore that will be our official University bookstore and offer programs with broad appeal to the community, including such programs as children’s story hours, lectures, and book signings.

More than 20 street-level retailers, including a salon and spa, a bank, and multiple restaurants with outdoor patio seating, will be part of College Town. The upper floors will provide new residential housing for those who seek proximity to the University, the Medical Center, and Rochester’s central business district, as well as space for University administrative offices. Alas, College Town will mark the demise of the Towne House, which was a hotel until 1982, when it was converted into student housing and other spaces, including the University’s primary data center.

In its place will be an attractive urban village center. College Town is designed to promote walkability in an environment with wide footpaths and green space to create a park-like atmosphere. In the future, a visit to College Town may include attending a concert in the open-air gazebo, purchasing fresh produce from the farmer’s market, enjoying a meal, or visiting a local art show.

I am especially thrilled that College Town will provide more than 1,500 parking spaces, including 948 University-designated spots, surface lots, and on-street parking.

Let me particularly express my gratitude to Ron Paprocki, our senior vice president for administration and finance, who did an outstanding job quarterbacking our efforts to make College Town a reality.

College Town is the culmination of years of planning and coordination among the University, the City, neighborhood residents and businesses, and project participants, including the Mt. Hope Avenue Task Force, the Mt. Hope Business Association, the Southeast Area Coalition, and Mt. Hope Cemetery. Working together, we have adhered to a comprehensive community-based vision of what our neighbors in the Mt. Hope area want to see for their neighborhood. Within a short while, College Town will be here.

Letters

Online with Education?

I read with interest the discussion about online education by President Seligman (“President’s Page,” January-February) and another transcribing an interview with Dean [Rob] Clark (“Starting an Online Conversation”). I too am very interested in online education related to my own teaching, and I very much appreciate their guarded approach to the issue (while making sure that “ . . . Rochester is ‘part of the conversation’ . . . ”) and the full involvement of the faculty in the process of exploring this new educational tool.

However, I was quite surprised that there was no mention of participation by or leadership from the Warner School of Education in either of these articles. The omission was all the more surprising given the cover photo and the extended article on Dean [Raffaella] Borasi’s leadership of the Warner School and the new Raymond F. LeChase Hall (“Advanced Education”).

While science/engineer types such as myself and Dean Clark certainly have good ideas regarding pedagogy, I certainly hope that the U of R takes full advantage of the research-based approach of the Warner School faculty to help guide us into the future of this new learning medium.

Daniel Gauthier ’82, ’83 (MS), ’89 (PhD)

Durham, N.C.

The writer is the Robert C. Richardson Professor of Physics at Duke University.

Congratulations, Wind Ensemble!

What a pleasant surprise to read in the recently received copy of Rochester Review that there will be a celebration of the 60th year of the Eastman Wind Ensemble (“A 60th Celebration,” January-February). The recalling of the founding of the ensemble is indeed an occasion for celebration!

I was a master’s student at the school between 1960 and 1962 and a member of that fantastic musical group. So many great memories! I remember Fred Fennell ’37E, ’39E (MS), ’88E (Honorary) calling me at my home in Milwaukee, before I even thought about Eastman, to discuss the possibility of my playing in his ensemble. I had recently returned from France, where I had won a first prize at the Paris Conservatory.

I did, in fact, apply and enroll, and it became my pleasure to play alto saxophone in the ensemble under his direction. Those two years were a very exciting and stimulating time. Several recordings were made during the time I was a member. While in school, I formed a really fine saxophone quartet with fellow students from Eastman.

In the spring of 1962 I presented a recital in New York’s Town Hall, but after I had completed the master’s degree and even though I had begun work on my DMA, it was time to move back to the Midwest. I received an invitation to teach as a full-time music faculty member at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

I eventually completed my doctoral work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and regularly played with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra whenever they required a saxophonist. At Northwestern, I progressed from department chair, to senior associate dean, to interim dean, and faculty representative to the Big Ten Conference and NCAA. I have always taken a great amount of secret pleasure in knowing, after many intense conversations, that I convinced John Paynter, then director of bands, to form a wind ensemble at Northwestern. Last

June an almost weeklong celebration of my 50 years of full-time service to Northwestern University completed my career. Two hundred former students returned for the celebration. The greatest pleasure was that my family, including Nita, my wife of 54 years, our children, Elizabeth and Frederic, and their spouses, along with our four grandchildren were able to be with us for this important occasion.

My career has been greatly influenced by the days I spent at Eastman. My heartiest congratulations to the Eastman Wind Ensemble and all of you who are able to claim the ensemble as an important part of your own musical life. What a wonderful contribution to the entire world of music this organization has been.

Frederick Hemke ’62E (MM)

Wilmette, Ill.

The writer is the Louis and Elsie Snydacker Eckstein Professor Emeritus of Music at the Henry and Leigh Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University.

Reading the article “A 60th Celebration,” in particular the section about the Eastman Wind Ensemble’s recording of Stravinsky’s Octet and Histoire du Soldat, I thought it might be of some interest that I had a long connection with the Russian composer. My brother, Robert Craft, was Stravinsky’s associate and, as such, introduced me to him in the late 1940s. I worked as their editorial assistant in the writing of the Conversations books and spent considerable time with the Stravinskys through his death in 1971 and until the end of Madame Vera Stravinsky’s life in 1982.

Unfortunately, I was unable to be present when the composer and my brother conducted a concert at Eastman in 1966. Bob told me, however, that he was impressed with the musicianship of the Eastman students. My daughter, Diane, then a junior at Cornell, did attend. Also, of possible interest to alumni, her daughter, Wendy Rumble Van Bronkhorst, received her MD from the School of Medicine and Dentistry in 1999.

Phyllis Craft Crawford ’42

New Paltz, N.Y.

History of Snowball Fights

In regards to the undated photo in the January-February issue under Class Notes, I am the woman on the right successfully pummeling my friend, Carol Lambie-Parise ’77N, with snow. We believe that this occurred our freshman year. Of note, she later became my sister-in-law.

Regina Parise Lewis ’77N

Newton, Mass.

Last September when I was at my dad’s house I discovered a box of childhood “treasures” in his attic. In the box was a yellowed copy of a newspaper from my college days. I wondered why I’d saved it until I saw the photo of two of my friends having a snowball fight. I scanned it and sent them a “remember when” copy of the picture. Imagine my surprise to open Rochester Review and see the very same photo. The two mystery combatants are Carol Lambie-Parise and Regina Parise Lewis, both of whom graduated in nursing in 1977.

Nono Burling ’81

Olympia, Wash.

History of Old Photos

Scott Hauser writes: In the January-February issue, we noted that alumni had identified four of the five students in a 1952 photo by Ansel Adams. We seem to have the fifth.

The unidentified woman is the late Betsy Van Dusen, a woman I dated at the U of R; a wonderful and kind person, she often wore a sweater with a necklace. She was an English honors major, Class of 1954.

Ray Harrold ’54

Northborough, Mass.

Several correspondents also noted that Ruth Adams, the assistant professor leading the seminar in the photo, went on to become president of Wellesley College. Adams, who taught at Rochester until 1960, left Rochester to become dean of Douglass College at Rutgers University. In 1966, she was named president of Wellesley, and in 1972, she became the first woman vice president at Dartmouth College, retiring in 1988. She died in 2004—Scott Hauser.

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.

CAMPUS LIFE

Fanfare

(Photo: Photograph by Keith Walters for Rochester Review)

Bright Night: Sabrina Hu ’16 (right) and Jessica Cheung ’14 perform during China Nite, an annual celebration of the Chinese New Year sponsored by the Chinese Students’ Association. Held this February in Strong Auditorium, the evening featured performances—such as “A Rainy Night,” a work choreographed by Jasmine Cen ’16 that combined traditional and modern elements of Chinese fan dance (pictured)—as part of a program of skits, dances, and other presentations to celebrate Chinese culture.

ATHLETICS

Tourney Talk

(Photo: Photograph by Keith Walters for Rochester Review)

TEAM MEETING: Men’s basketball coach Luke Flockerzi talks with the Yellowjackets during a break in their January game against NYU, a victory that helped launch the men to a No. 1 ranking in late January. While the men later fell out of the top spot, going into the final game of the season for the men and the women, both teams were waiting to find out whether they had secured a place in the Division III national tournament. Follow the Yellowjackets at the athletics website: www.uofrathletics.com.

CONCERTS

Like It’s 1969

(Photo: Adam Fenster)

MUSICAL MOMENT: Actors Jon Patrick Walker as John Lennon (left), David Chandler as Luciano Berio, and Robert Stanton as Karlheinz Stockhausen rehearse 1969, a multimedia work by Eastman-born new music ensemble Alarm Will Sound. The ensemble, which includes more than a dozen Eastman graduates, presented a special performance of the work at Kodak Hall in February. Developed by conductor Alan Pierson ’06E (DMA), Nigel Maister, director of the International Theatre Program, and writer Andrew Kupfer, 1969 includes arrangements by Gavin Chuck ’04E (PhD), Stefan Freund ’02E (DMA), Payton MacDonald ’01E (DMA), and Matt Marks ’02E.

CAMPUS DEVELOPMENT

Welcome to College Town

(Illustration: Steve Boerner for Rochester Review; Source: Fairmount Properties and Gilbane Development)

Work begins this spring on a 500,000-square-foot project to create College Town, a planned, mixed-use development at the intersection of Mt. Hope and Elmwood avenues that’s designed to create an urban village center for students, residents, and shoppers alike. “This project will create a vibrant neighborhood, enhance the quality of life for this community, and spur economic development by adding hundreds of jobs and millions in tax dollars to the city and region,” President Joel Seligman said this winter in announcing College Town. Based on a partnership involving the University, the City of Rochester, development partners Fairmount Properties and Gilbane Development, and Mt. Hope neighborhood leaders, the project is designed to serve as a gateway to the River Campus and to the Medical Center. Located on 14 acres of land owned by the University, College Town is expected to be completed by summer 2014.

FACTS & FIGURES

Counting Up College Town

Since the 1990s, University, City of Rochester, and neighborhood planners have been exploring ways to develop the area near Mt. Hope and Elmwood avenues.

In 2008, plans for the intersection coalesced through workshops and meetings involving area residents and representatives from the Mt. Hope Avenue Task Force, the Mt. Hope Business Association, the South East Area Coalition, Mt. Hope Cemetery, the City, and the University.

In December, the project received $4 million from New York’s Regional Economic Development Council program. The funding was part of a total $96.2 million award to the Finger Lakes Regional Economic Development Council, representing the state’s investment in projects aimed at creating 50,000 new jobs in the region over the next five years.

Under the plans, the University will own the acreage on which College Town sits and lease it long-term to the partnership College Town LLC, which will manage the development.

In addition to anchor tenants Hilton Garden Inn, Barnes & Noble, and Flour City Provisions, the development includes 73,000 square feet of street-level shops and restaurants, 50,000 square feet of office space, and 154,000 square feet of rental residential space.

Here are some other facts and figures about the project:

$17 million Total in public infrastructure improvements invested by the City of Rochester in the Mt. Hope and Elmwood avenue intersection, including landscaped medians, new sidewalks, broadened roadways, reduced curb cuts, new signals, signage, and traffic controls.

$2.5 million Estimated annual sales tax generated from the retail operations of College Town, in addition to $1.8 million in income taxes and $600,000 in annual hotel taxes.

1,200 Estimated number of new jobs to be created, both in construction and in local services.

COGNITIVE SCIENCE

My, How You’ve Grown!

Cognitive scientist Jessica Cantlon investigates how kids’ brains change as they acquire intellectual skills.

By Susan Hagen

LOOKING TO LEARN: Research assistants Vy Vo (left) and Courtney Lussier help Mason Ray, 4, of Penfield, N.Y., become acquainted with an fMRI machine. Cognitive scientist Jessica Cantlon (below) is carrying out research using brain imaging to find out how kids’ brains change as they learn. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

How does learning change the brain?

That’s a question that Jessica Cantlon, assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences, has been asking—and with the help of children, Big Bird, and a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, she has begun to find the answer.

Children whose neural maps more closely resembled those of adults scored higher on standardized math and verbal tests in Cantlon’s study. In other words, the brain’s neural structure, like other parts of the body, develops along predictable pathways as it matures.

Cantlon’s study also confirmed locations in the brain where the developing abilities lie. For verbal tasks, adult-like neural patterns in the Broca area—which is involved in speech and language—predicted higher verbal test scores in children. For math, better scores were linked to more mature patterns in the intraparietal sulcus, a region of the brain known to be involved in the processing of numbers.

Cantlon used fMRI to observe the neural activity of children and adults while they watched a video from Sesame Street. Scientists are just beginning to use brain imaging to understand how people process thought during real-life experiences. For example, researchers have compared scans of adults watching an entertaining movie to see if neural responses are similar across different individuals.

(Photo: Adam Fenster)

“But this is the first study to use the method as a tool for understanding development,” Cantlon says.

The novel use of brain imaging during everyday activities like watching television opens the door to studying other thought processes in naturalistic settings and may one day help to diagnose and treat learning disabilities. It isn’t possible at this point to measure the thought processes of the children while they’re engaged in an actual classroom lesson, but by using the educational television show, Cantlon has sought to do the next best thing.

Eventually, insight from fMRI may help pinpoint the cause when a child experiences difficulties mastering school work. “Psychologists have behavioral tests for trying to get to the bottom of learning impairments, but these new imaging studies provide a totally independent source of information about children’s learning based on what’s happening in the brain,” she says.

Until the advent of fMRI the only way to evaluate children’s cognitive development was behavioral testing. “A future goal for cognitive neuroscientists is that brain data could be used to inform diagnoses and interventions in learning—but that is still a distant goal,” says Cantlon.

She and her former research assistant, Rosa Li, now a graduate student at Duke, published their findings in the journal PLoS Biology.

For the investigation, 27 children between the ages of 4 and 11 and 20 adults watched the same 20-minute Sesame Street video. Like the regular program, the recording featured a variety of short clips focused on numbers, words, shapes, and other subjects. The children then took standardized IQ tests for math and verbal ability.

To capture neural responses, researchers turned to fMRI. Unlike X-rays, CAT scans, and other types of brain imaging, fMRI involves no risks, injections, surgery, or exposure to radiation. Using magnetic fields, the scans virtually segment the brain into a three-dimensional grid of about 40,000 pixels, known as voxels, and measure the intensity of neural signals in each of those tiny sectors. The study, which was carried out over three years, produced 609 scans of each participant—one every two seconds—as they watched the video clip. Using statistical algorithms, the researchers then created neural maps of the thought processes for the children and the adults and compared the groups.

Using normal activities, such as television watching, may provide more accurate indications of children’s learning and brain development than the short, simple tasks typical of fMRI studies, Cantlon and Li argue. Like the Sesame Street video, they say, academic lessons in schools are delivered in a richly complex environment.

To test that assumption, Cantlon and Li had the children perform traditional fMRI tasks by matching simple pictures of faces, numbers, words, or shapes. During the more limited activities, the neural responses didn’t predict children’s test scores, as they did when children watched the video.

While the authors don’t advocate television watching, the study does show that “neural patterns during an everyday activity like watching television are related to a person’s intellectual maturity,” Cantlon says. “It’s not the case that if you put a child in front of an educational TV program that nothing is happening—that the brain just sort of zones out. Instead, what we see is that the patterns of neural activity that children are showing are meaningful and related to their intellectual abilities.”

Cell Metabolism Yields New Insights

SLOW METABOLISM: Scientists have found some leukemia cells generate their energy in a different way than previously thought. (Photo: Science Source)

Medical Center scientists think they know why one of the most aggressive cancers is so difficult to cure. Some cells that drive acute myeloid leukemia appear to have a much slower metabolism than most other tumor cells.

While that seems to allow leukemia cells to survive better, it may also allow for a new approach to fighting several forms of leukemia. In a study published in the online edition of Cell Stem Cell, the team found that leukemia stem cells generate all the energy they need in a cellular powerhouse called the mitochondrion, by way of a single process, oxidative phosphorylation. Other cancer cells and normal stem cells also rely on a second fuel source, known as glycolysis, to generate energy. Even the most modern cancer treatments were developed under the assumption that all cancer metabolism relies on glycolysis.

The research team has been testing an experimental drug tailored to attack the unique metabolic status. Craig Jordan, the Philip and Marilyn Wehrheim Professor at the Wilmot Cancer Center and a corresponding author of the study, is working on forming a partnership with a drug maker to conduct further testing. The compound under laboratory study has already been used in clinical trials.

—Leslie Orr

Skin Cells Show Promise in Treating MS

Human brain cells created by reprogramming skin cells have the potential to be highly effective in treating multiple sclerosis and other myelin disorders.

A study by Medical Center scientists is the first successful attempt to use special cells—known technically as human induced pluripotent stem cells, or hiPSC—to produce a population of cells that are critical to neural signaling in the brain.

It “appears that cells derived from this source are at least as effective as those created using embryonic or tissue-specific stem cells,” says neurologist Steven Goldman, the Edward and Alma Vollertsen Rykenboer Professor of Neurology. He was lead author of the study, which was published in Cell Stem Cell.

The discovery opens the door to potential new treatments using hiPSC–derived cells for a range of neurological diseases characterized by the loss of myelin, a fatty tissue that ensheathes the connections between nerve cells and ensures the crisp transmission of signals from one cell to another. When myelin tissue is damaged, communication between cells can be disrupted or even lost.

Multiple sclerosis is the most common myelin disorder, a condition in which the body’s own immune system attacks and destroys myelin. Loss of myelin is also the hallmark of a group of serious, often fatal, diseases known as pediatric leukodystrophies. Several thousand children are born in the United States with some form of leukodystrophy every year.

—Mark Michaud

#how’s your health?

Rochester researchers last year showed how Twitter can be used to predict the likelihood of a particular Twitter user becoming sick. Now they’ve used the social media application to model how other factors—including exposure to pollution, social status, and interpersonal interaction—influence health.

Henry Kautz ’87 (PhD), professor of computer science, and postdoctoral researcher Adam Sadilek ’12 (PhD) have developed a data-mining technology that allows them to monitor tweets—many of which are geotagged, showing Twitter users’ locations—and make predictions. By following thousands of users, researchers can estimate interactions between users and between users and their environment.

At the International Conference on Web Searching and Data Mining in February, Sadilek showed how the new model accounts for many of the factors that affect health and how it can complement traditional studies in life sciences. Using tweets collected in New York City over a month, they looked at 70 factors—including how often a person takes the subway, goes to the gym, or dines at a particular restaurant—and then evaluated their impact on users’ health.

Some results—such as proximity to pollution sources having a negative effect on health—aren’t surprising. Never before, however, has such impact been extracted from the online behavior of a large, online population. The team’s paper also indicates a broader pattern, in which virtually any activity involving human contact leads to significantly increased health risks.

—Leonor Sierra

Model for Brain Signaling Flawed

A new study has overturned a long-accepted understanding of how brain cells communicate. The new work indicates that the tripartite synapse—a model long accepted by the scientific community, in which multiple cells collaborate to move signals in the central nervous system—doesn’t exist in the adult brain.

The longheld concept doesn’t represent the process for transmitting signals between neurons in the brain beyond the developmental stage, say Medical Center scientists in a study published in Science.

Neurons are connected to each other via axons or “arms” that extend from the cell’s main body. Communication between neighboring neurons takes place where axons meet other nerve cells—called a synaptic juncture—when an electrical charge causes chemicals called neurotransmitters or glutamate to be released by one cell and “read” by receptors on the surface of the other. The two cells don’t actually touch, so the chemical messages must pass through a gap in the synaptic juncture. The space around this gap is insulated by glial, or non-neuron, cells known as astrocytes.

Under the tripartite synapse model, both astrocytes and neurons were believed to play a role in the conversation between cells—an understanding based largely on animal models, which showed active receptors and neurotransmitters between not only the nerve cells but also the nearby astrocytes. Scientists believed that they must, in some way, modulate the signaling process between brain cells.

While this model has held sway for decades, scientists have long been frustrated by their inability to influence the process by targeting it with drugs.

Collaborating with researchers at the Institute of Optics, Maiken Nedergaard, lead author of the study and codirector of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine, and her team developed a new 2-photon microscope that enables researchers to observe glial activity in the living brain. They discovered that glial cells don’t directly respond to synaptic neuronal signaling.

The transmission process of the tripartite synapse model “appears to just be a simplistic signaling pathway that ‘teaches’ the synapse how to behave,” Nedergaard says. “Once the brain matures, it goes away.”

—Mark Michaud

Men Are from Earth, Women Are from Earth

For decades, popular writers have entertained readers with the premise that men and women are so psychologically dissimilar they could hail from different planets. But a new study shows it’s time for those theories to come back to Earth.

A Rochester-led analysis of 122 different characteristics—from empathy and sexuality to scientific inclination and extroversion—involving more than 13,000 people shows that men and women, by and large, don’t fall into different groups. In other words, no matter how inscrutable your partner may seem, gender is probably only a small part of the reason.

Instead of clustering at either end of the spectrum—the way scores do with height and physical strength—psychological indicators fall along a linear gradation for both genders. With few exceptions, variability within each sex and overlap between the sexes is so extensive that study authors Harry Reis, professor of psychology, and Bobbi Carothers ’03 (PhD) conclude it would be inaccurate to use personality types, attitudes, or psychological indicators as a sorting scheme.

“Sex is not nearly as confining a category as stereotypes and even some academic studies would have us believe,” says Carothers. The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

—Susan Hagen

WOMEN’S STUDIES

The Lady with the Alligator Purse

ICONOGRAPHY: The material culture and social norms of Susan B. Anthony’s times are the topic of a course and lectures this spring. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

This spring a course and a companion Humanities Project are examining Rochester resident Susan B. Anthony. Her connection with 19th-century reform movements—for abolition, temperance, and women’s suffrage—are well known, but less so are details of the physical, material, and cultural worlds that shaped her life and work. Honey Meconi, the Susan B. Anthony Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, developed the course and project.

How did Susan B. Anthony become the iconic figure of the women’s suffrage movement?

People assume it was her brainchild, but she wasn’t there at the beginning. Her parents and her sister got involved in the movement for women’s suffrage before Anthony did.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the originators of the movement, became more radical as the years went on and became controversial even within the movement. Anthony was more pragmatic. And she was out in public much more. Cady Stanton had seven children to bring up. But Anthony was one of the best-traveled people in the world at the time, male or female. She was considered indefatigable, going from coast to coast, sometimes staying in a different town every night. She traveled around New York state in winter because she knew most entertainers wouldn’t—and so people would come out to hear someone talking about almost anything.

You brought Miss Manners to campus to talk about Anthony. What’s the connection?

You could argue that it was the social expectations for women that really spurred the whole thing. Cady Stanton traveled to London with her abolitionist husband in 1840 for the World Anti-Slavery Convention. Lucretia Mott was there, too, and at the convention women weren’t permitted to be delegates, to speak, or to sit with the men. And Cady Stanton and Mott decided there should also be a movement to end this quasi slavery for women. Obviously it took them eight years to get around to starting that movement.

Women didn’t have a public voice. Women could work behind the scenes, but it was unladylike to speak in public. So was clapping—women waved their handkerchiefs in what was called a “Chautauqua salute.”

Did Anthony play a special role in the movement?

Because her family was involved in abolition, she got involved, too. She found that her métier was being a professional organizer.

As an unmarried woman, Anthony could make a business contract. A married woman couldn’t make a business contract in her name—and almost everyone else in the movement was married. So Anthony was the one who could rent the halls. In a sense she was the business manager.

The project looks at fashion, too. How is it important to the movement?

Anthony, like other members of the movement, adopted a style of dress—a shorter skirt, with pantaloons—that gave women freer movement. Crowds of men would jeer and laugh, and the women stopped wearing those clothes because it was detracting from their message. Anthony wore stylish black dresses. When huge sleeves were in, she wore black dresses with huge sleeves. And she had pretty lace collars on. She wore a beautiful cameo. She met the norms for a staid lady at the time—in a way that didn’t detract from listening to what she said.

She also used to carry around a large alligator bag. There’s a children’s jump-rope rhyme, “Miss Lizzie had a baby . . .” Do you know how it ends, in some versions? “Vote, says the lady with the alligator purse.” She dressed in a way not to detract from her message but as an icon she was closely identified with these physical things.

—Kathleen McGarvey

NEUROLOGY

(Photo: Corbis)

Fish Food for Thought

Does the “good” outweigh the “bad” when it comes to eating fish? A new study by Medical Center researchers adds to evidence that when expectant mothers eat fish often, they’re giving their future children a boost in brain development in spite of the neurotoxin methyl mercury in fish—a food more than 3 billion people depend on for basic nutrition. Pediatric neurologist Gary Myers has been a member of the Seychelles Child Development Study team since it began in 1989.

What problems and benefits can come from eating fish?

If a problem is going to show up, you don’t know what age it’s going to show up in. One of the populations in our study is now 22 years old, and we have yet to find any consistent evidence of adverse effects.

What we’re looking for basically is a needle in the haystack because these are low-level exposures. So you’re trying to find out whether the mercury in fish causes nothing at all or something really small. The question is whether these very low levels of exposure that you get from eating fish are bad. Our study in the Seychelles has the highest level of exposure of any study in the world.

What’s become abundantly clear to us is that omega-3 long-chain fatty acids are really important, and fish is the primary source.

What do omega-3 fatty acids do for us?

They’re incorporated into the cell walls of nerve cells and other cells of the nervous system. They’re important in turning genes on and off, and in neurotransmission. They’re also anti-inflammatory. They’re beneficial across the lifespan. They tend to prevent and decrease the significance of macular degeneration in the elderly. They’re very important to all kinds of things.

What’s the news from the latest study?

We found more beneficial effect from the long-chain fatty acids at five years of age in this second nutrition cohort. We’ve found a correlation between prenatal exposure to omega-3 fatty acids and the children’s neural development for language.

How did you start looking into the issue of mercury and fish consumption?

We’d done an earlier study, in the 1970s, in Iraq, where there was a poisoning epidemic. That study pointed to the possibility that low levels of methyl mercury exposure might have consequences for the developing fetus. Since we already knew that you could get low levels of mercury exposure from eating fish, the natural question was, could you eat enough fish to cause a problem?

Our group looked for a place in the world where people eat a lot of fish, figuring that was our best shot at finding something wrong, if there was something wrong. And we ended up choosing the Republic of Seychelles in the Indian Ocean for a variety of reasons—they ate fish every day, sometimes twice a day, and they have a fairly high birth rate.

We started a study looking for adverse effects of mercury from eating fish on the developing fetus. And after almost 10 years, we were finding that when the mercury exposure in the women was higher in these low-level exposures, the children were actually doing better. And we knew it wasn’t the mercury, because there is no purpose of mercury in your body.

—Kathleen McGarvey

Intellectual Property Expert Named to Head Technology Transfer

An alumnus who most recently managed intellectual property issues for Abbott Medical Optics in Santa Ana, Calif., will oversee technology transfer for the University. Scott Catlin ’92 has been appointed associate vice president for innovation and technology commercialization, which includes directing the Office of Technology Transfer. That office is responsible for protecting the University’s intellectual property and facilitating the commercialization of technologies.

Catlin, who earned a bachelor’s degree in optical engineering at Rochester before getting his law degree at Notre Dame, was legal section head for Abbott Medical Optics. He is registered to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Catlin will report to the senior vice president for research.

SOUND SPACE: Kedar Shashidhar ’14, who interned last summer at Blackdog Recording Studios in Rochester (above), is one of several students pursuing a new major in audio and music engineering. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

New Major in Audio and Music Engineering Offered

In response to rapid changes in the field of audio engineering, the University is combining its expertise in music and engineering to help students succeed in the redefined industry.

The New York State Department of Education has certified Rochester’s new undergraduate audio and music engineering major, which is being offered to students for the first time this academic year.

Students enrolled in the major will develop knowledge and skills in recording and sound design, acoustics, electronics, digital signal processing, and computer programming. About 15 students have declared the new major. Beginning in fall 2013, programs for the new major will be housed in Ronald Rettner Hall for Media Arts and Innovation, now under construction between Wilson Commons and Morey Hall.

Scholar of Inequality Receives Douglass Medal

Noted anthropologist Yolanda Moses received the University’s Frederick Douglass Medal in recognition of her scholarship and public service. A former president of the City College of New York, Moses is a leading scholar of the origins of social inequality. A past president of the American Anthropological Association, she is currently the associate vice chancellor for diversity, equity, and excellence at the University of California at Riverside, where she also is a professor of anthropology. She is involved in national projects to promote diversity in education with the National Council for Research on Women and the Women of Color Research Collective, and she was a driving force behind the creation of a traveling museum exhibition, RACE: Are We So Different? Using comparative ethnographic and survey methods, she has focused on gender and class disparities in the Caribbean, East Africa, and the United States. More recently, she turned to issues of diversity and change in universities and colleges in the United States, India, Europe, and South Africa.

CHAMPIONSHIP POSE: Congresswoman Louise Slaughter (second from right) met with students in Rochester’s McNair program—advisor Nick Valentino, Sierrah Grigsby ’13, Alisa Jimenez ’14, and Grace Cannon ’13—after Slaughter was presented with the Champion of Science Award from the Science Coalition, a national science advocacy organization. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Science Coalition Honors Louise Slaughter

The Science Coalition honored Congresswoman Louise Slaughter this winter with its Champion of Science Award in honor of her commitment to funding basic research. President Joel Seligman presented the award at a University event attended by Medical Center CEO Bradford Berk ’81M (MD/PhD), researchers, and students.

Seligman called Slaughter—who holds degrees in microbiology and public health—a “true friend of science” and praised her “passion, leadership, and tenacity.” In accepting the award, Slaughter said, “In an age when our politics often give us reason for despair, the constant progress of science gives us confidence in the realization of a better tomorrow.”

Slaughter also toured the Upstate Stem Cell cGMP facility at the Medical Center.

University Again Named a Tree Campus USA

For the third year in a row, the Arbor Day Foundation has named Rochester a Tree Campus USA. The title comes from a national program of the same name, created in 2008 to honor colleges and universities for effective campus forest management and for engaging staff and students in conservation goals.

The Horticulture and Grounds Department achieved the title by meeting the program’s five standards, which include maintaining a tree advisory committee, a campus tree-care plan, dedicated annual expenditures toward trees, an Arbor Day observance, and student-learning projects. Last spring, Rochester was one of five Tree Campus USA schools nationally to receive $1,000 from the Arbor Day Foundation to help fund an Arbor Day tree-planting event. To view a tree map of the River Campus, visit www.facilities.rochester.edu/arboretum/photos/map.pdf.

New Memorial Honors Veterans

A memorial to honor veterans of the U.S. Armed Forces was dedicated in a January ceremony at the Saunders Research Building.

Located in the atrium, the memorial was inspired by philanthropist and namesake Philip Saunders, who provided the lead gift for the building, which opened in 2011. The memorial is inscribed with a quote from Saunders: “Let us never forget the sacrifices made by our veterans and their families, and may the research within this building bring healing to them and others.”

The building is home to the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, as well as academic departments. It also houses research programs in cancer, pediatrics, emergency medicine, neurological disorders, and cardiovascular disease.

MEMORIAL ART GALLERY

The Knight’s Tale

The Memorial Art Gallery has built its permanent collection through the art of storytelling.

By Kathleen McGarvey

ART OBJECT: Intricate etchings on a suit of armor purchased by the gallery firmly tie the popular piece to art history. A medallion on the breastplate, which shows the biblical story of “Daniel in the Lion’s Den,” is a trademark of the Brunswick armors. An inscription surrounding the medallion—a rare feature—dates the piece to 1562. (Photo: Memorial Art Gallery)

You’d be surprised how tough it is to find a good suit of armor these days.

For more than a decade, beginning in the 1990s, the Memorial Art Gallery was in search of a suit of armor for its collection, spurred by its sense that such an object would hold a deep appeal for the community—its children especially—and provide an important narrative anchor for its Renaissance collection.

“But it’s very, very difficult to find armor intact,” says Nancy Norwood, curator of European art. A popular collector’s item in the 19th and early 20th centuries, armor became the victim of a heated marketplace, with dealers cobbling together suits out of wildly mismatched pieces and forgers passing off new items as artifacts of history.

And the gallery wanted a highly decorated suit of armor that would make plain armor’s significance as an art object and example of fine craftsmanship and that would—through the decorative metal etching—link to other Renaissance arts. Such a requirement made the challenge of the search even greater.

As she carried out her hunt, Norwood worked with the guidance of Stuart Pyhrr, curator of the Arms and Armor Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For certain pieces, such counsel is essential, says chief curator Marjorie Searl, and the gallery seeks out the opinions and advice of experts in the most specialized niches of art history to be sure it acquires art wisely.

“Some people say the best deaccession policy is a strong accession policy, because if you’re very careful about what you bring in, then you don’t have problems at the other end,” she says.

(Photo: Memorial Art Gallery)

As the search wore on, Norwood worked to arrange long-term armor loans from the Met. But then in 2006 events moved quickly: the London arms and armor dealer Peter Finer offered the gallery the opportunity to acquire a partial suit of Renaissance armor from the Brunswick Armoury in Germany, part of a collection sold off by the Royal House of Hanover. British armor expert Ian Eaves, with whom the gallery consulted on the purchase, pronounced the suit “part of a distinctive and highly interesting group . . . [that] represents the Brunswick school of armourers at its apogee” and a “work of art of exceptional quality.”

The suit the gallery acquired features a close helmet, a breastplate, a backplate, shoulder plates, a collar—called a gorget—and thigh protectors, called tassets. Norwood likens the pieces to clothes for paper dolls: they are basic pieces of armor that could be mixed and matched as needed, to be worn for the field, tournaments, or parades.

The varied functions of the pieces—the helmet, for example, is heavy armor, not lightweight as the breastplate and tassets are—actually made the suit more interesting to the gallery. “For us, it serves an educational purpose,” says Norwood. Adding to its desirability was its unambiguous history. “We know where it came from, and so much armor has wandered. The provenance was unquestioned, and that’s extremely unusual in anything from the Renaissance—especially armor.”

The etched decoration on the armor was also key. It’s an exceptionally beautiful piece, says Norwood, with intricate etchings drawn from contemporary printed sources by artists such as Cornelis Bos and Virgil Solis. The etching on the armor, which results from acid biting into the surface of the metal, emerged from the same practice in decorating medieval metalwork.

“It’s something you can build an art story around,” Norwood says.

Today the armor is a showpiece of a new installation, Renaissance Remix: Art and Imagination in 16th-Century Europe. “We expected that this suit of armor would really capture people’s imaginations—and I think it does,” says Searl.

Appealing to imaginations, and doing so through stories that museum-goers might never even be consciously aware they’re being told, is a key part of a curator’s job in building a museum collection.

“Everything we have really is about communicating—with visitors, with students, with artists—about the story of art,” says Searl.

Over the past hundred years, the gallery—which will mark its centennial in the fall—has built its collection, from the improvisational atmosphere of its earliest days to today, when it holds more than 12,000 works in its permanent collection.

In the first year after the gallery’s founding, “just a handful of objects were essentially gifts. There was no money to buy art The whole focus was the building,” says Searl. Constructed on University Avenue, the museum building was a gift of Emily Sibley Averell Watson in memory of her son, architect James Averell, who died in 1904.

Members of the Rochester community, together with the larger artistic community, pitched in to help the gallery get its footing. “We borrowed a lot, from patrons who lived in the community—many members of the board had wonderful collections, and they wanted the Rochester art museum to have the same quality of work,” Searl says. “And the director of the gallery, George Herdle, had a lot of contacts in New York, and he’d get shows here with some of his artist friends.”

Sometimes Emily Watson would purchase and donate pieces on exhibition. For example, she bought for the gallery a monotype by American Post-Impressionist painter Maurice Prendergast, making the piece the artist’s first work to enter a museum collection. “Along the way some of these extremely fortuitous things happened, because people were helping us to acquire work, and they were people who were collectors and connoisseurs themselves,” says Searl.

By the 1930s, however, the gallery was beginning to receive not only gifts of art but acquisition funds—funds that came then, and come today, almost exclusively from private donors. The gallery’s curators could think more deliberately about what to collect.

When the gallery was founded, the trend was to create encyclopedic collections of art so broad that they encompassed the entire world of art. That origin is still felt in the gallery now. Its permanent collection spans 5,000 years and represents every world culture, ancient and modern.

But even with a generalist approach, curators still must make decisions. “What is the story that we’re looking to tell—and how do we tell that story through objects?” says Searl.

At the center of the acquisitions process is the gallery’s Art Committee, a subcommittee of the board that accepts work for the gallery on the board’s behalf, approving all acquisitions, loans, and deaccessions. “You’re always trying to prune a collection and acquire in a judicious way. You want to have a collection that’s meaningful,” says Searl, and she credits the rigorous process that the committee heads—with justifications from curators, evaluations from conservators, and assessments from specialists—as essential to their success.

“Every acquisition is important,” says Norwood. “It all has a story to tell, and as a curator it’s your job to tell the story—and to make good decisions.”

Ultimately, it’s a story of art that reaches beyond the confines of any one museum, says Searl.

“We’re stewards, and we build a collection. Other museums build similar collections, and we all, together, create a great whole in terms of our cultural heritage.”

MEN’S BASKETBALL

Point Taken

Point guard John DiBartolomeo ’12 helps lead the Yellowjackets to the top of the national rankings.

By Dennis O’Donnell

READING RIGHT: Known for his ability to read opposing defenses, DiBartolomeo was ranked among the nation’s top in points per game, assists, and free throw percentage. (Photo: Keith Walters for Rochester Review)

John DiBartolomeo ’12 came to Rochester as a point guard—the position on the men’s basketball team best known for guiding his teammates to the basket.

And although the senior from Westport, Conn., has been the team’s top scorer for the past two seasons—and ranks among the top scorers nationally in Division III—he still sees himself in the role of trying to make things happen for the team.

“I’ve always thought of myself as a point guard,” he says. “A lot of my reads are based on how (the opponents) play us.”

For most of the 2012–13 season, opponents have had difficulty keeping up with the Yellowjackets. Jumping out to an 18–0 run to start the season, the team was ranked No. 1 in the country in late January, the first top ranking in five years for men’s basketball.

Going into the final weekend of the season, the team was 21–3 overall and 10–3 in the UAA. At the top of the UAA for most of the season, the Yellowjackets were awaiting an NCAA tournament invitation at the end of the season.

Leading the team throughout the year has been DiBartolomeo, whose scoring average ballooned from 11.4 points per game (ppg) as a freshman to 17.7 as a sophomore and 19.1 as a junior.

His team-leading average of 22.8 points per game in early February placed him ninth in the country among Division III players. He also was ranked third in free throw percentage at 91.6 percent; 17th in assist to turnover ratio, a measure of his ball handling skills; and 20th in assists with 5.5 per game.

As a freshman, he scored a then career high 30 points against Roberts Wesleyan in an overtime victory in the Wendy’s College Classic semifinals at the Palestra.

“That was a one-game thing,” he said of the Roberts win. “I didn’t have a ‘breakout’ game until my sophomore year when we changed the offense.”

The change in offense came with a change in the head coach’s chair. Longtime Rochester head coach Mike Neer, who recruited DiBartolomeo, retired. Luke Flockerzi, then the head coach at Skidmore College and a former Rochester assistant under Neer, was hired to succeed Neer.

Flockerzi installed an offensive system that called for DiBartolomeo—as the point guard—to have a “paint touch” on every possession. That is, to make sure he handles the ball in the lane.

“If you can draw someone to you,” DiBartolomeo says, “you’re doing it right.”

His read-and-react philosophy as he wheels down the court tries to draw an opponent toward him.

“If no one stops you,” he says, “You have to score. If I’m not shooting, I’m not making people help [on defense] and then I can’t pass.”

That’s not a simple play that Flockerzi can draw on a white board in the middle of the week.

It’s a feeling for the game developed by playing, and playing, and playing some more. Since walking onto the Rochester campus for the 2009–10 season, DiBartolomeo has been working and refining his game.

Last year, he spent the summer working during the day at an advertising agency in midtown Manhattan. In the evenings, he played at one league at home in Westport, one league at the Chelsea Piers recreation site in midtown Manhattan, and a weekend league in Trumbull, Conn.

He hopes there’s more basketball in his future, especially after graduation. DiBartolomeo would like the opportunity to play in Europe when his college career is finished.

Assistant coach Jeff Juron played in Holland after his graduation from Rochester in 2008. He and DiBartolomeo have talked at length about finding contacts, making the adjustment to international rules, and living overseas.

DiBartolomeo wants to find a spring internship. “All my [class] clusters are done,” he says, referring to a key component of his academic work under the Rochester Curriculum. “I’ll look locally to see what I can find.”

Read-and-react. It’s something he has been successful at.

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

HIGHLIGHTS

Yellowjackets Look to National Tourneys

Women’s basketball, swimming, and squash eye NCAA and national bids.

Winning 11 of 12 games down the stretch, the Yellowjacket women’s basketball team went into the final game of the regular season tied for the UAA title at 11–2. The 11 wins tied the school record for UAA victories and set up a season-ending winner-take-all game for the UAA championship and automatic bid to the NCAA Division III playoffs.

Including a first-ever sweep of Washington University, by mid-February Rochester was ranked No. 2 in the East Region.

With one game left, Ally Zywicki ’15 topped the team in scoring (11.1 points per game), assists (90), and steals (34). In one six-day stretch, she matched her career high in assists (10) and points (24). Breanna Madrazo ’15 was second in scoring (8.4 ppg). Jackie Walker ’13 and Amy Woods ’13 provided an inside presence (Walker: 8.0 ppg and 5.3 rebounds per game; Woods: 7.7 ppg; 6.6 rpg) along with Loren Wagner ’14 (7.3 ppg; 8.0 rpg) and Danielle McNabb ’14 (6.8 ppg; 6.3 rpg).

Swimming and diving: At the UAA championships, Rochester broke 10 school records and produced 12 NCAA provisional qualifying times.

For the men, Adam Bossert ’13 qualified in the 100 breaststroke, the 200-medley relay, and the 400-medley relay. He also broke the school record in the 200 breaststroke. James Frauen ’15 broke the school mark in the 200 backstroke and provisionally qualified for nationals. Frauen and Bossert were joined by Brian Wong ’15 and Chris Doser ’15 in the 400-medley relay, breaking a Rochester record and qualifying under the NCAA’s “B” standard.

For the women, Vicky Luan ’16 was part of three record-breaking efforts, one of them twice. She finished third in the 50 freestyle, breaking her own school record time (23.84) and provisionally qualified for NCAAs. With Farrell Cooke ’15, Meg Waring ’15, and Lauren Bailey ’15, Luan broke the school record in the 400-medley relay, which also met the NCAA “B” cut. The 200-medley relay team of Karen Meess ’14, Waring, Bailey, and Luan broke their own school record with a 1:47.75 time. After the meet, the four swam a time trial, breaking the record again (1:46.39), qualifying provisionally for NCAAs. Diver Elliott Lasher ’13 finished eighth on both the one- and three-meter boards—scoring more than 400 points on each—while Sara Spielman ’13 finished fourth on the three-meter board and fifth on one-meter.

Squash: Rochester was ranked sixth in the mid-February rankings by the College Squash Association, going into the team championships at Yale University. That ranking would set up a match between the Yellowjackets and third-ranked Harvard University in the first round.

With a 9–5 dual match record, the team repeated as Liberty League champions. Andres Duany ’13 was 9–5 at the No. 1 position in dual matches, 10–6 overall. Ten of his matches came against nationally ranked opponents. Neil Cordell ’16 was 10–4 at No. 2 with Adam Perkiomaki ’13 at 11–5.

Indoor track & field: Several Yellowjackets qualified for the ECAC championships in New York City in early March.

For the men, the qualifiers include distance runners Adam Pacheck ’14, Dan Hamilton ’13, and Yuji Wakimoto ’14. Boubacar Diallo ’16 qualified in both the long jump and triple jump, joining Jonathan Kuberka ’16 as a qualifier in the long jump. The 4-by-800-meter relay qualified twice, and the 4-by-200-meter relay qualified three times.

Rochester’s women had five ECAC qualifiers in a meet at NYU. Middle-distance qualifiers include Becky Galasso ’14, Claire Crowther ’13, Catherine Knox ’16, Caitlyn Garbarino ’16, and Cameron Edwards ’16. Yvette Igbokwe ’15 qualified in the 60 meters and in the 200 meters. Emily VanDenbergh ’16 and Carina Luck ’13 qualified in the long jump and triple jump. The 4-by-200-meter relay and 4-by-400-meter relays have both booked spots for ECACs.

WOMEN’S BASKETBALL

Team Spirit

(Photo: Keith Walters for Rochester Review)

FINAL FOURS: This spring marks the 10th anniversary of the first trip to the Final Four of the NCAA tournament by the Yellowjacket women’s basketball team, and in recognition of the milestone, coach Jim Scheible invited members of the 2002–03 and 2003–04 teams to be honored during a game this winter. Recognized were (back row, left to right) Megan Damcott ’05, Sarah Sullivan Dubowsky ’03, Kelly Wescott ’05, Ashley Latimer Joseph ’05, Danielle Muller ’07, Jessie Graham Swain ’06, Megan Fish Galloway ’05, Megan Krebbeks ’07, and Bobbi Stewart Snowden ’06; (front row) Shannon Higgins Borchardt ’04, Jenna Filia ’06, Tara Carrozza ’05, Emily Bango ’07, and Emily Lyons ’07.

Libraries Unbound

With ‘winning formulas,’ Mary Ann Mavrinac is guiding River Campus Libraries into the future.

By Kathleen McGarvey

SEWARD STEWARDS: Students of history professor Thomas Slaughter (right), including film preservation graduate student Heather Harkins (left), are digitizing the papers of the William Seward family. An archival collection, the papers will now be broadly accessible—a development characteristic of the 21st-century library. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

For a glimpse at the future of libraries, at Rochester and beyond, you might want to consult the papers of William Henry Seward. Yes, that Seward—secretary of state to presidents Lincoln and Johnson.

A collection spanning the years 1730 to 1917—public, private, and family correspondence of Seward and his family members, files and records from his long political career as governor and secretary, speeches, diaries, and other documents—was given to Rochester by Seward’s son, William Henry Seward III between 1945 and 1951. Now students of Thomas Slaughter, the Arthur R. Miller Professor of History, are bringing those papers into the digital age, transcribing and coding them to make them accessible to scholars, students, and curious readers anywhere in the world. The class—a two-course sequence, The Seward Family’s Civil War and The Seward Family in Peace and in War—meets in the Libraries’ Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Designed for undergraduate and graduate students, the course combines traditional efforts of historians—among them, transcribing, editing, and annotating primary historical documents—with intellectual tasks for the digital age: creating and implementing the Seward Project, a website collection of digitized Seward family photos and documents.

Slaughter teaches the class in conjunction with manuscript librarian Lori Birrell; film studies librarian and director of the Digital Humanities Center, Nora Dimmock; and Melissa Mead, the John M. and Barbara Keil University Archivist and Rochester Collections librarian. They have met not only in a conventional classroom and in Rare Books and Special Collections but also in a digital humanities computer lab in the Janis and James S. Gleason Library. “It’s the first time the library has had a collaboration on this scale between its different units and between faculty and students,” Slaughter says. The course has drawn history majors, computer science and engineering majors interested in technological applications, and master’s students from the Selznick Graduate Program in Film and Media Studies at the George Eastman House who are interested in expanding their knowledge of film preservation to encompass manuscript preservation.

“They’re working with our content, and learning from the expertise of faculty members and librarians. They’re learning technological skills—and it’s embedded in the curriculum. That’s a winning formula, and that’s what our future is in working with students,” says Mary Ann Mavrinac, the new vice provost and Andrew H. and Janet Dayton Neilly Dean of River Campus Libraries.

A leader in the creation of learning spaces and the development of digital services, Mavrinac brings a decade of experience as chief librarian at the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus, part of the University of Toronto Libraries, the third largest library system in North America. She was formally installed in the deanship in December, though she began her work at Rochester last summer.

Larry Alford, chief librarian of the University of Toronto, says Mavrinac is “very innovative. She wants to experiment and achieve a high level of excellence for the library in teaching and learning.”

“She doesn’t grandstand,” says Anne Kenney, the Carl A. Kroch University Librarian at Cornell. “She comes out with quite thought-provoking and forward-moving approaches.”

Slaughter attests that Mavrinac’s presence is already strongly felt. “She’s contributing to an atmosphere where collaboration is encouraged and supported, and she’s brought creativity to making that collaboration possible in our project.”

CONNECTIONS: Mary Ann Mavrinac, the new Neilly Dean of the River Campus Libraries, calls libraries “a convergence space, connecting the content.” (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Mavrinac comes to Rochester at a significant moment in the modern history of libraries. “I don’t know if I would call this a pivotal point—it’s a constant evolution that’s actually accelerating,” she says, pointing to “an unrelenting march in terms of technological change and innovation, and the broader environmental trends that, really more than anything, are having an impact on libraries.” Her response is both pragmatic and confident: “We could see them as threats—or we can look at these as opportunities to allow us to really engage and collaborate with our constituencies: faculty, students, the broader community, other research institutions and academic libraries, and other cultural organizations.”

The River Campus Libraries—the largest component of the University’s library system, along with the Medical Center’s Edward G. Miner Library, the Eastman School’s Sibley Music Library, and the Memorial Art Gallery’s Charlotte Whitney Allen Library—hold more than 3 million books in print and electronic formats, more than 40,000 active journal titles, and microforms, videos, and other formats. It’s Mavrinac’s task, and that of her colleagues, to help students and faculty make the best use of those resources and navigate an information landscape that, increasingly, exists on a screen as much as in a physical building.

University libraries have changed significantly in the past decade and a half. “If you were a student 15 years ago and you reentered academia, you’d say it’s all different,” says Suzanne Bell, the business librarian in the Business and Government Information Library. Increasingly, libraries are social hubs on campuses. Food and drink, once forbidden, are now not just permitted but actually for sale on the premises, all in a quest to create a welcoming and comfortable environment for patrons. Digitization is one of the most obvious and far-reaching changes, as libraries become increasingly concerned with information itself and less devoted to the physical objects that contain it.

The most vivid shift in academic libraries between 2004 and 2010 was the number of e-books they hold in their collections—from 32.8 million to 158.7 million, according to data released in 2011 by the U.S. Department of Education. Spending on print books and other non-journal printed materials fell in the same period by nearly 20 percent when adjusted for inflation, from $550.6 million to $515.9 million. According to a report on the data in Inside Higher Education, one thing that has held steady, however, is teaching information literacy—though as of 2010, only 20 percent of institutions with a strategic plan for information literacy included libraries in the effort.

It is that kind of disconnect that Mavrinac has already worked to overcome.

Formerly, a library “really was a siloed organization in many ways,” she says, bound up in the collection and preservation of printed documents. For even something as simple as an address for somewhere beyond the scope of one’s local phonebook, a library was the place to go—a “vertical, hierarchical means by which people obtained information.”

The Internet, of course, changed all that. “It’s definitely what we would call a ‘killer app,’ ” she says, something with “the power to alter the marketplace, alter how fundamental business occurs. The telephone did that, and the automobile. It changes the whole marketplace, in many cases for the better. And that’s what the web was.”

Cornell’s Kenney says that in the wake of the web, the role of libraries on campuses “isn’t as self-evident as it once was. It’s a more complex environment.”

The key to adapting, for librarians and users alike, is to focus on content rather than format, says Dimmock. “A book, a physical book, is a format. Is it the content that matters? Being a film librarian, I’ve always had to think about those issues. In my back room, I have 16 millimeter. I have laser discs. I have VHS. I have DVD—and now even DVD is dead. They’re just containers. It’s the content.”

And moving away from that materiality is “a new service model,” she says. “We’ve very much organized around collections, and we have to change the way we think about collections.” As digitization brings greater uniformity to libraries’ collections—publishers sell journals, databases, and other resources in bundles, much like cable companies do channels—rare books and manuscripts take a special place. “I think that the collections that are going to matter the most to libraries are the special collections, because those are the unique things,” says Dimmock.

While the Internet has made address-hunting trips to the library unnecessary, students’ need for guidance in navigating libraries’ resources is only growing more acute. Students today “have been using technology since they were toddlers,” says Toronto’s Alford, but they don’t necessarily understand how academic information searching works. “There’s extraordinary complexity of information access and discovery.”

The flexibility of digital holdings makes them more convenient—there’s no need to put on your shoes and hike to the library when you can search databases in your pajamas from the comfort of your own couch—but their intangibility is also an obstacle, Mavrinac says.

Libraries “used to be storage, a warehouse medium with user spaces—and now we’re almost a convergence space, connecting the content. When things are electronic, students don’t necessarily know what’s available. When you walk into the stacks, you can see the books—you may not know which ones you need, but there they are, and you’re probably pretty sure you can find the right ones with some help.” But when those resources are intangible, findable only through well-informed digital sifting, the librarian becomes even more essential. “It’s a big role for us, to connect those dots,” she adds.

Students like Caitlin Mack ’13 (T5), of Essex, Vt., find themselves using the library in both its new and old forms. “I like getting books occasionally. I enjoy the aesthetics of it,” says Mack. But her practical side has taken a shine to electronic editions. “I appreciate the convenience of having everything on my laptop.”

Yet students at Rochester crowd the library, as they do at campuses across the country. For Mack, the library is a place to gather as much as it is to work; in fact, the two functions are intertwined. “I find the environment there is a lot more conducive to studying” than working alone in her room, she says. “People go for the atmosphere—you see people doing their work, and you get to see your friends.”

As libraries and their resources increasingly become virtual, what becomes of the physical spaces they inhabit? Mavrinac calls it an area “of profound opportunity.” At one level, the library fosters interaction—and that draws students. Like most people, “they’re hungry for human contact, human connections,” she says.

But Mavrinac is convinced that the library works best when it is more than a gathering space. “We’re evolving our learning spaces,” she says, and the evolution turns on “the integration of technology, not for technology’s sake, but technology that’s meaningful for the task at hand.”

To look at libraries solely as study spaces, she says, doesn’t provide students with the support they need. “Students might come here and think all they need to do is find a table and hang out while they do their studying, but I think it’s incumbent on us to step that up a level and provide them with a higher level of support. They might say, this is all I need, but when you present them with alternatives, it’s really of interest to them.”

She cites the Rare Books and Special Collections project as one example of how library space, technology, expertise, and curriculum can come together. She has experience from Toronto, where she oversaw the creation of an award-winning academic learning center that attracts more than 1.3 million visits per year.

“It’s the connection of program, content, expertise, spaces, and technology that I think is a winning formula,” she says. “You’re basically turning students away at the door when you get into that kind of perfect alignment with the curriculum and with the program.” Learning spaces are increasingly being built with a specific need in mind.

The Finance Learning Center at the Mississauga library is an example. “It was almost like a company involved in trades,” Mavrinac says. The setting was designed by faculty to work with their pedagogy, and the center was directed by a librarian with a background in finance. Toronto business leaders and bankers would visit to talk to students and judge their trading competitions. Financial literacy programs were offered for college and high school students.

As they map out a strategy for Rochester, Mavrinac and her colleagues are determined to make the libraries a collaborative hub of innovation—not just for student learning but also for faculty research.

A Center for Digital Scholarship, proposed by Mavrinac, would support that collaboration, with expertise, advice, support, and technological tools and resources for scholars and students engaged in digital humanities.

Such models have taken hold in scientific fields. The impact of the digital era is felt more deeply in the sciences, where “e-science” first emerged two decades ago. Scientists collaborate with colleagues in labs across the globe, and the quantities of data they are amassing are transforming data storage and preservation methods.

“Everything we do revolves around what scientists do. And scientists are now doing research in a totally different way,” says Zari Kamarei, the Somerville Director of the Carlson Science and Engineering Library. Curating data, storing it securely, and making it accessible to users are what she sees as her library’s core tasks.

Mavrinac also sees opportunities in the shift to a more collaborative approach. She’s confident that libraries—and librarians—will be at the forefront. Technological developments allow libraries to “operate not just with the output of scholarship but with the entire scholarship process, and the entire learning process,” she says. “We can be deeply engaged with student learning, enable their use of technology, embed different literacies in the curriculum. Working with faculty, we can support the life cycle of scholarly research and new modes of scholarship, like digital humanities and e-science. We can be technological hubs for the academy. We didn’t have these roles before,” Mavrinac says.

“We are transitioning to a digital future, whether we like it or not. There are broad and pervasive trends that no library can duck, and they’re informing how we go about our business.”

One Medicine?

At the University and the zoo, Rochester veterinarians advance human, environmental, and animal health simultaneously.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD) | Photographs by Adam Fenster

SAY ‘AH’: Jeff Wyatt, veterinarian at the Seneca Park Zoo and the Medical Center, takes a peek at Kumang (below), a Bornean orangutan; Wyatt examines an X-ray of Jefferson (above), an olive baboon, before removing a nasal mass. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

The ritual begins on the path that curves along the northern edge of Rochester’s Seneca Park Zoo. Set away from the animals, it’s a place for deliveries and transport. Early in the morning, a truck has come to deliver a load of willow branches, which now sit in mounds along the path’s grassy curb.

Jeff Wyatt ’95M (MPH), the zoo’s chief veterinarian, and his colleague, veterinarian Louis DiVincenti, each grab a fistful of branches and head up the hill to greet the orangutans. There are three at the zoo: the 33-year-old matriarch, Kumang; her 13-year-old daughter, Dara; and Denda, an 11-year-old male who arrived in 2011.

Wyatt greets Dara first. She bounds toward him. He crouches close to the wire mesh, clutching the bouquet of willow branches, and whispers in her ear.

“She’s a big flirt,” DiVincenti says, looking on, and handing large chunks of vegetables to Denda. He notes that Dara, rust-colored herself, shows a propensity for redheads.

In the moments since Wyatt and DiVincenti have arrived, a small group of visitors has gathered. Wyatt introduces himself and the orangutans, and begins to chat with the group. Turning to Kumang, he has her open her mouth and say “ah.”

“Denda’s trained to pee in a cup!” he says next to his audience of rapt preschoolers.

(Photo: Adam Fenster)

Wyatt and DiVincenti are beginning their usual morning rounds. They’ll spend much of their time talking, feeding, and playing games with the animals. The games will often consist of asking the animals to perform certain behaviors—such as opening mouths and lifting feet—that will make it easier for the veterinarians to perform basic examinations. To deliver care to animals—any animals, but especially ones who are large or ones who are smart, like orangutans, sea lions, elephants, to name just a few—requires building trust. Before the rounds are over, Wyatt and DiVincenti will have looked into the noses, ears, mouths (and other key orifices) of elephants and sea lions, and performed a minor procedure on a baboon.

Their work at the zoo is only part of their job. Wyatt and DiVincenti also serve in the Medical Center’s Department of Comparative Medicine, where they join two other veterinarians in overseeing the care of laboratory animals and working “shoulder to shoulder” with researchers, DiVincenti says, as part of biomedical research teams.

They’ve installed ventricular assist devices in cows. Helped researchers studying the papilloma virus obtain tissue samples across species. Assisted researchers using chinchillas in hearing research. (“A chinchilla has the same number of turns in its inner ear as humans,” Wyatt explains.) Both have completed studies that have earned them Medical Center degrees—Wyatt has a master’s degree in public health, and DiVincenti will be awarded a master’s degree in clinical and translational research, a new program, in 2014.

Wyatt and DiVincenti both say that their dual role is unusual. And as some public health officials around the world increasingly call for closer collaboration between medical and veterinary professionals, Wyatt’s and DiVincenti’s breadth of experience may prove invaluable.

In 2006, the American Medical Association, the Animal Veterinary Medical Association, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other professional and public health organizations built a partnership around the concept “One World, One Medicine, One Health.” Representatives from the organizations created a task force to develop what they called the “One Health Initiative.” The initiative was to launch “a movement” dedicated to building collaborative alliances among doctors, veterinarians, and environmental scientists.

This past fall, the World Medical Association and World Veterinary Association followed up by signing a Memorandum of Understanding, pledging support for the One Health Initiative and urging cooperation and collaboration in education, clinical care, and research.

From the outset, the One Health Initiative has been driven by two insights. The first is that a large and increasing percentage of infectious diseases identified in humans begin in animals. According to the One Health Initiative Task Force Report, 60 percent of infectious diseases in humans originated in animals and three-quarters of the infectious diseases that have emerged in the past three decades originated in animals.

The second insight is the broader recognition that human, animal, and environmental health are interrelated.

Not surprisingly, the notion that the fortunes of people, animals, and the planet are interrelated enjoys widespread currency. But acting on its implications means that institutional and professional conventions must evolve. “We’ve been siloed for far too long,” says Nancy Bennett, vice president at the Medical Center and director of the University’s Center for Community Health, of the physician and veterinary communities.

Bennett knows firsthand the kinds of contributions veterinarians can make to human health. In the early 1990s, as upstate New York was experiencing an apparent raccoon rabies outbreak, Wyatt led a study of the epidemiology of human exposure to rabies.

“What we were trying to understand was the nature of the exposures that people had to potentially rabid animals,” says Bennett. “Jeff’s work really helped us understand the patterns of exposure.”

For zoo vets, the slogan “One World, One Medicine, One Health” resonates almost intuitively. For one thing, they’re far more attuned than the average physician to thinking about habitat.

Wyatt grew up in Cincinnati, home to one of the oldest and largest American zoos. As a youth, he volunteered in an education program for visitors.

“We were conveying conservation messages back in 1972 and 1973,” he says.

But that message has changed in important ways. In the past decade or so, Wyatt says, conservationists have begun to recognize that no animal or environmental conservation program will succeed unless it addresses human needs.

It’s a message he’s used to delivering at the zoo. Back by the orangutan exhibit, Kumang, her fingers wound around the wire mesh, is growing restless as Wyatt’s attention has turned to the visitors. Propelled by her 200-lb. heft, she issues an arresting grunt.

“She’s tired of this story,” Wyatt tells the group.

The story is about the critical endangerment of orangutans. Wyatt talks about measures the zoo is taking, with help from Medical Center physicians, to keep Kumang, Denda, and Dara as healthy as possible. Orangutans are susceptible to heart disease, and in 2011, Dara was examined at the zoo animal hospital by Medical Center cardiologist Karl Schwartz, who gave her an echocardiogram, giving Dara's heart a clean bill of health.

But their counterparts in the wild are facing dire conditions. Members of the family of great apes—humankind’s closest kin—their population is falling fast. While they once thrived across much of southern Asia, orangutans are now found in the wild in only two places: the Indonesian islands of Borneo and Sumatra.

TALK TO ME: With Seneca Park Zoo elephant manager Lindsay Bronson looking on, Wyatt examines the African elephant Genny-C as part of his morning rounds. A highly intelligent mammal, Genny-C responds to more than 50 verbal commands. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Rapid deforestation on both islands is destroying their habitat. On the island of Borneo, orangutans can be found roaming amidst fallen and decaying trees strewn across muddy stretches of land. Within those same stretches are pools of standing water that have made diseases such as malaria, dysentery, and upper respiratory illness significant challenges to human health.

Two years ago, the Seneca Park Zoo began working with an organization in Portland, Ore., called Health in Harmony. The nonprofit enjoys official partnerships with Yale and Stanford universities, as well as several zoos and foundations. The group’s mission is to improve the health of people, endangered animals, and their shared habitat simultaneously by helping to secure medical care and to build alternative, sustainable industries in areas of environmental degradation.

The organization has been working with villagers in Borneo, where illegal logging and the development of palm oil plantations have destroyed much of the orangutans’ habitat, to develop a conservation model that can be used around the globe. Last fall, Wyatt invited the organization’s executive director, Michelle Bussard, to the Medical Center to talk with physicians and residents about the organization’s work.

Bussard told the group that the reason the environmental destruction is taking place is very clear. “It’s a destructive cycle that starts with inadequate health care, which leads to debt, which leads to environmental degradation.” To save a child, for example, or to restore an injured breadwinner to health, an Indonesian family will do whatever it takes to gather the means for care—including assisting industries that are harmful to the environment, illegal, or both.

As Bussard was in Rochester, DiVincenti was in Borneo, where he brought medical supplies, and where he performed a consulting role with Indonesian vets and an advocacy role for the program. In 2011, Wyatt traveled to the island to help provide care to cattle and goats being raised by small family farmers for milk, meat, fiber, and manure for organic farming. And this fall, he was with Bussard, hoping to recruit physicians to share knowledge with Indonesian physicians delivering care to villagers living on the edge of Gunung Palung National Park, home to 10 percent of the world’s last wild Bornean orangutans.

Among the physicians at the gathering was David Adler, an assistant professor of both emergency medicine and community and preventive medicine. A specialist in the prevention of infectious diseases in the developing world, Adler oversees the School of Medicine and Dentistry’s international emergency medicine fellowship.

“Jeff contacted me because he was looking to build on this idea of connecting human health with habitat preservation and primate conservation,” Adler says.

Initially, Wyatt was seeking to identify physicians who might be willing to go to Borneo to provide health care. Adler knew that emergency physicians would be ideal, because they’re trained to work in suboptimal conditions. And in his role as a mentor, he knew that residents would find work in Borneo a valuable experience. But he grasped Wyatt’s broader message as well.

“It’s not as if human beings are dependent on a primate for their direct well-being,” says Adler. “But they share a habitat, and habitat health is important for both, because habitat provides the sustenance, whether it’s nutritional or pharmacologic or environmental.”

Wyatt and DiVincenti have delivered that same message elsewhere in the Medical Center. And their efforts, after a few “false starts,” according to Thomas Pearson, principal investigator at the University’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute, have started to bear fruit.

In his office in the Saunders Research Building, Pearson’s face lights up at the mention of the names Wyatt and DiVincenti. He encountered Wyatt for the first time when a proposal for institute funding came across his desk from the Department of Comparative Medicine. It was an application for a small voucher program designed to provide investigator teams with up to 10 hours of specialist consultation in support of a research project. Approvals are virtually automatic, according to Pearson, assessed only for their relevance to the institute’s mission. As articulated by the National Institutes of Health, that mission is “to accelerate the process of translating laboratory discoveries into treatments for patients.”

The application from the University’s veterinarians “created quite a stir,” Pearson recalls. “They were looking at ambient nitrogen levels in vivariums, and some of my staff felt that they were not eligible for our funding.”

After some deliberations at the institute, the application was approved. “The patients have funny little ears and long tails, but they’re still patients, and so from a veterinary medicine standpoint, it’s still applied,” Pearson says.

Not too long after, Pearson encountered DiVincenti in a grantwriting class he was teaching, designed for Medical Center investigators. The course has helped many University scientists win their first large grants, and he says he was a bit startled when DiVincenti’s proposal crossed his desk.

“Here I was reading all of these papers about anemia, obesity studies, and cancer treatments, and then here’s this study on sturgeon.”

Sturgeon are a species of fish that predate dinosaurs and live only in the Northern Hemisphere. Among the varieties of sturgeon are so-called lake sturgeon, which inhabit the Great Lakes and the broader system of rivers and lakes in the region.

As a result of industrial pollution, by the mid-20th century sturgeon had all but disappeared from the Lower Genesee River, the portion of the river that runs from Downtown Rochester into Lake Ontario. As part of a quest to repopulate the river with sturgeon, the U.S. Geological Survey and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation released a total of 2,000 baby sturgeon into the Lower Genesee in 2003 and 2004 and have periodically gauged the population’s growth.

Wyatt latched onto the project as a conservation story for the zoo to tell. After all, the Lower Genesee was right in their backyard. But the survey only involved netting the fish, measuring their length and weight, tagging them, and returning them to the water.

FISHING: On the Genesee River with Wyatt and Emily Waldt of the U.S. Geological Survey, veterinarian Louis DiVincenti shows a sturgeon thriving in the once uninhabitable river. (Photo: Courtesy of Dawn Dittman/U.S. Geological Survey)

In fall 2010, Wyatt and DiVincenti began talking about what other data they might gather from the sturgeon. For example, they could take blood samples of the sturgeon to gauge the health of the ecosystem. The proposal that crossed Pearson’s desk—and later won a $300,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency—proposed sampling the sturgeon’s blood for a variety of pollutants.

Sturgeon provide a unique opportunity to measure toxicants. They’re “bottom-feeders,” living and feeding within the sediment where contaminants settle. They live a century, on average, meaning that baseline data can be used to measure progress in the very same animal across a span of 50, and possibly of 100, years.

DiVincenti says they could have applied for a grant through the zoo, but chose the University instead. “It was a very conscious thing to do it through the U of R. It was all about creating a bridge between animal, environmental, and human health—about showing that this is a human environmental health problem, and not a sturgeon problem.”

Pearson was impressed. “Only a veterinarian or a wildlife biologist would have understood all of the characteristics of that species in that setting in order to apply it for that application,” he says. “You could sample water from now until Kingdom Come, and you wouldn’t get a better view of the clean-up of the Genesee. I don’t think at this point anyone even blinked that this wasn’t relevant to translational medicine.”

Pearson, who is a clinical and research physician specializing in cardiovascular disease, says he’s worked with veterinarians in his laboratory over the years. Their understanding of animal anatomy, physiology, and disease processes have aided his research on cardiovascular disease in humans.

But today, he characterizes their role not only as supportive, but integral. “They’re not only providers of care to their patients, but also key to this whole area of comparative science,” he says.

That Wyatt and DiVincenti are experienced veterinarians of exotic animal species makes their contribution all the more valuable. “Their role at the zoo is very interesting. If you have a small animal practice, you probably would be able to tell me all about cats and dogs. But these two? Armadillos! Orangutans! All kinds of animal systems.”

Reflecting on the One Health Initiative, Pearson says it’s right in line with what the Clinical and Translational Science Institute is designed to do.

“We’re taking basic discoveries and translating them to applications that are relevant to human health. And the subtext to that is to really break out of the usual boxes we’re in, where we say, ‘Oh, you can’t work with the nurses,’ or ‘Oh, the vets. You can’t let them out of the vivarium.’”

“Away with that,” he says, flinging his arms wide into the air.

Poet & Epistolarian

A collection of letters offers a new look at the life of poet Anthony Hecht.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

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

October 9, 1976

Rochester, N.Y.

My dear young man,

It is, I think, salubrious and worthwhile for us all to meditate, from time to time, on the great theme of mutability and transience, to mortify our overweening vanity, and to say with the preacher, ‘What profit hath a man of all his labour, . . .’ and so forth. What, after all, is Fame? And what, Celebrity? Fleeting evanescences, mere toys and illusions. I know you will think this simple modesty in me, and dismiss it with a casual wave of the hand. But when you attain to my age and gravity, you will know that some of those goals, which in your youth seemed the only possible or valuable target upon which attention could seriously be fixed, turn out in the end to be gossamer-friendly or utterly illusory. What are we, after all, but a handful of dust, if I may thus express myself?

So wrote the poet Anthony Hecht to his friend William MacDonald, an archaeological historian. The letter concerned Hecht’s purchase of a book in the University of Rochester bookstore—on the remainder shelf, at a steeply reduced price. The book had been a classic in Roman history, and in his musings to MacDonald, with whom he enjoyed especially colorful exchanges, the eminent poet expressed the anxieties born of acclaim with his characteristic wit and rhythmic prose. Even the decision to purchase the book, he described with a flourish.

I sighed the sigh of Heraclitean Flux, and a tear from the depths of some divine despair, of which Tennyson speaks, rose to my eye. But I bought it, and took it home.

A ‘SECOND LIFE’: In a reference to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Hecht wrote that with his marriage to Helen D’Alessandro (above), he’d “[r]eceiv’d a second life.” Scholar Jonathan Post (below) points to the happy union as an important factor in Hecht’s productivity in the years that followed. (Photo: Dorothy Alexander)

(Photo: Blake Little for Rochester Review)

Anthony Hecht taught at the University for 18 years, 17 of them as the John Hall Deane Professor of Rhetoric and Poetry. Beginning in the 1950s, largely due to the efforts of Hyam Plutzik, who became the first John Hall Deane Professor of Rhetoric and Poetry, the English department had begun to build a culture around poetry writing and performance. In the fall of 1967, when Hecht arrived in Rochester to help continue that tradition, he was already a well-regarded poet.

Then, the following spring, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his second book of poetry, The Hard Hours. Whereas the Pulitzer might have been the capstone of his career, it was more a midpoint. He would receive the prestigious Bollingen Prize in 1973, be named the U.S. Poet Laureate in 1982, and publish five more collections of poetry and four books of essays and criticism. Following his death in 2004, he was widely heralded as one of the most significant American poets to come of age in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Professional achievements, of course, occur in relation to a backdrop of personal struggles and triumphs, and it takes some type of record, whether it be a firsthand account or the recorded memories of others, to shed light on the interplay between the two.

Hecht left an extraordinary written record of those struggles and triumphs, a sample of which can be seen in The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht, edited by Jonathan Post ’76 (PhD), and released in January by Johns Hopkins University Press.

“There’s a frankness in the letters which reveals a great deal about him and his character,” says Post, “and to some degree that frankness will be a surprise to many people.”

Post is Distinguished Professor of English at UCLA and a scholar of English Renaissance as well as modern poetry. He entered the University’s graduate program in English in the fall of 1970 and met Hecht for the first time in the spring of 1972, in Hecht’s graduate seminar on William Butler Yeats and Theodore Roethke.

“It was a wonderful exploration of poems and also a kind of whirligig of activity,” Post recalls. The course was held at the Hecht home. Helen had given birth to a son, Evan, in April, whom Post recalls as a “silent auditor in the class.” That seminar marked the beginning of what would be his lifelong friendship with the Hechts.

Months after Anthony Hecht’s death, Helen began what would prove a monumental task: recovering what would turn out to be more than 4,000 letters the late poet had written over the course of almost seven decades.

Helen Hecht recalls the germination of the project in a conversation reported to her by Anthony Hecht’s literary executor, the poet J. D. (Sandy) McClatchy. McClatchy had been talking one evening with fellow poets John Hollander and Richard Howard. “They said what a great letter writer Tony was, and the letters should all be collected.”

A happenstance phone conversation led to Post becoming the editor who would, with Helen’s input, whittle those few thousand letters, many of which are now part of the Anthony Hecht archive at Emory University, to the several hundred that appear in the book.

The letters begin in 1935, when a young Hecht was writing home from summer camp, and end in the summer of 2004, just months before he died. They chronicle nearly every major phase in between—his discovery of poetry as a student at Bard College, his service during the Second World War, his troubled first marriage, and his joyful second marriage, to Helen D’Alessandro, in 1971.

Post anticipates that scholars and other readers and writers of poetry will be interested in Hecht’s correspondence with a host of other luminaries, including Howard, Hollander, and McClatchy, as well as Richard Wilbur, Allen Tate, Anne Sexton, James Merrill, Elizabeth Bishop, and others.

EASTMAN QUAD: A member of the English department from 1967 to 1985, Hecht, who won the Pulitzer Prize shortly after arriving at the University, served at Rochester longer than at any other institution. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

Post finds the collection’s greatest significance, however, in the early letters.

“The later poems and the later Hecht is better known because he was something of a public figure then. But the part leading up to The Hard Hours is really revelatory. All of that is going to be seen and read for the first time. And I suspect that that will make a significant difference in terms of how people begin to think about the long and substantial career that he had as a poet.”

Hecht, born in Manhattan to privileged and cosmopolitan German-Jewish parents, had enjoyed an elite private school education, but had been, by his account, a mediocre student prior to his matriculation at Bard College in 1940. He began college with little confidence in himself academically.

“At first I felt quite self-conscious; I thought everyone was laughing at me behind my back,” he wrote to his parents in September of his freshman year. Within a couple of years, he had developed substantially as a student and discovered his love for poetry—as well as the challenges of writing it.

“My poetry is coming slowly,” he wrote to his parents in the spring of 1943. “Producing it, even in small quantities has always been for me a painful and laborious process. (I mean painful here not in the sense of unpleasant to do, but only difficult in the extreme.) I have picked a particularly hard job for myself in deciding to write a sestina.”

McClatchy says the letters not only offer “a fuller portrait” of Hecht himself, but also “reveal the personality and character of the writer, as he is writing and as he is living, experiencing what he will later transform into art.”

Among the experiences he transformed into art was his presence at the liberation of the Flossenbürg concentration camp in April 1945.

“This letter is written primarily to inform you that the war is over, and I have come through it unscathed,” he wrote to his parents the following month. “Unscathed, of course, does not mean unaffected. What I have seen and heard here, in conversations with Germans, French, Czechs, & Russians—plus personal observations combine to make a story well beyond the limits of censorship regulation. You must wait till I can tell you personally of this beautiful country, and its demented people.”

His wartime experiences were material for some of his most haunting poems, such as “ ‘More Light! More Light!’,” which he dedicated to his friends, the German philosophers Heinrich Blücher and Hannah Arendt, both of whom fled from Nazism.

Post is at work on a book about Hecht’s poetry that will encompass the poet’s entire career. “The letters shape a number of the chapters. I use the letters oftentimes as springboards,” says Post. He adds that the advantage of writing a critical book about Hecht’s work is that “I’m freer to investigate more interpretive questions in relationship to the poems and also in relation to the life as I understand it, partially through the letters.”

For her part, Helen Hecht is struck most by the consistency and uniqueness of the voice in the letters.

“It was like having him in the room,” she says, recalling the first time she read through the letters, one by one. “The voice in the letters was so distinctive and clear and characteristically his own. I would have recognized it anywhere.”

A Vanishing Past?

Can science save the daguerreotype, the first successful medium of photography?

By Kathleen McGarvey

FACES FROM YESTERDAY: Daguerreotypes of unknown subjects from the Eastman House’s study collection. University and Eastman House researchers are working together to find out how to preserve daguerreotypes in the face of mysterious deterioration. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

As the microscopes of the Integrated Nanosystems Center in Wilmot Hall hum and thrum with power, a tiny piece of the 19th century—sharply etched, infinitely fragile—undergoes their inspection.

“There!” says photo conservator Ralph Wiegandt, pointing excitedly to an image on his screen that looks like a giant insect conjured from a science fiction movie. “You’re looking at 33,000 times magnification.”

The object of his scrutiny is Robert Cornelius’s 1841 daguerreotype of chemist Martin Hans Boyè. Cradled within the electron microscope, the daguerreotype begins to give up the secrets of its surface. To the naked eye, it is flecked with small spots. Under the electron microscope’s exacting gaze, it is another world.

“I’m a daguerreian rover,” Wiegandt says, only half facetiously, “and I’m now negotiating myself around the terrain of a daguerreotype.”

His adventures there are no lark. Daguerreotypes are the first photographic images, formed by a process Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre invented in 1839. The predominant mode of photography in the United States from that year until the Civil War, daguerreotypes are unique, nonreproducible images of almost confounding clarity—and they may be deteriorating before our eyes. No one knows exactly why, or how to save them.

So Wiegandt—senior project conservator at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film—together with Nicholas Bigelow, the Lee A. Dubridge Professor of Physics, are racing for answers. Using 21st-century technology, they’re trying to learn more about the science of daguerreotypes, the nanotechnology created by 19th-century inventors that makes them possible, and the activities of nanoparticles that may be their undoing.

The Eastman House, just four miles from the River Campus, holds one of the world’s largest collections of daguerreotypes, with about 5,000 images. In 2005, the Eastman House organized a major daguerreotype exhibition, Young America, a comprehensive retrospective of the works of Boston daguerreotype firm Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes. One of the first photographic studios in the United States, it operated for 20 years beginning in 1843 and counted figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Daniel Webster among its clients.

The greatest proportion of the 160 daguerreotypes on display came from the Eastman House, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In a review, art critic Holland Cotter of the New York Times described daguerreotypes as “diamond-cut empiricism bathed in apparitional light” and called the exhibition “precious in the very best sense: literally beyond price, and almost, but not quite, beyond praise.”

Just one month after the exhibit opened at the International Center of Photography in New York City, curators discovered degradation in the condition of some of the daguerreotypes: a disfiguring bloom or white haze on the surface of the images. It was decay, sudden and unmistakable, that no one could explain. Thirty daguerreotypes showed damage; for five of them, it was critical degradation.

“To an art curator, this is traumatizing,” says Bigelow. “The notion that you had just sent these irreplaceable objects on tour and something happened, that overnight you could ruin them—what’s going on?” “We always thought it was okay to shine light on a daguerreotype, unlike paper,” because it was essentially a silver surface—“like a silver teapot,” says Malcolm Daniel, senior curator of the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Photographs. But for this exhibition, the lighting was “absolutely meticulous,” as was the documentation of the daguerreotypes’ condition. Lighting didn’t cause the “dramatic” degradation, says Daniel, but “light-sensitive photochemistry was there, waiting to be triggered.”

NEW TERRITORY: Physicist Nicholas Bigelow is bringing his expertise to bear on the field of photo preservation through research on daguerreotypes as 19th-century instances of applied nanotechnology. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

One thing that the group’s microscopic explorations have revealed is that the silver daguerreotype plate is a biologically active surface, a remarkable finding because silver is naturally antimicrobial. But on virtually every daguerreotype the team has examined, small colonies of fungi are growing—and damaging the surface. “They’re not just living out there—they’re engaging with” the daguerreotype, Bigelow says, bringing the daguerreotype’s metals into the fungi’s biological system and then, perhaps, extruding them to the surface, as metallic nodules and other forms.

It’s quite an astonishing discovery, “almost like finding life on Mars,” says Brian McIntyre, a senior engineer at the Institute of Optics who is collaborating with Bigelow and Wiegandt. Daguerreotypes that have been stored improperly often have visible accumulations of filament-like material on their surfaces. The growths’ appearance suggested fungi to early observers, but later analysis indicated that the filaments were purely chemical. The scans Wiegandt and McIntyre have made, however, show growths “clearly biological in nature,” Bigelow says. That was confirmed by a study published last year in which a group of Harvard microbiologists and photo conservators confirmed the filaments were fungal by identifying their DNA.

“There’s a miraculous piece of all this—forget about the daguerreotype for a minute: what on earth is going on in the physics that underlies this, and the chemical process that forms this?” says Bigelow.

Through the technology available at the Integrated Nanosystems Center—known more familiarly as URnano, with Bigelow as its director and McIntyre, its director of operations—the team is pursuing answers to those questions. They’re using a focused ion beam to extract samples, revealing activity below the surface—“like a biopsy,” says Bigelow, and performed only on samples that are not of museum quality. A scanning electron microscope scatters electrons off the surface of the daguerreotypes, providing magnification of 150,000 times and analyzing the elemental composition of any given spot on the image. A transmission electron microscope offers magnification of 250,000 to 300,000 times, and installation in the spring of a new device for X-ray photoemission spectroscopy will offer yet another avenue of investigation.

“Even 10 years ago, what we’re doing would have been very different,” says McIntyre.

The project has received $450,000 in support from the National Science Foundation, through its SCIART award program that funds projects bringing together science and art. The team’s work has also benefitted from an alliance announced in 2010 between the University and the Eastman House. “I always think of art and science as great collaborators,” says Thomas DiPiero, dean for humanities and interdisciplinary studies. “This time we’re working with a partner institution, and the science is in service to our cultural heritage.”

What initially drew Bigelow—chair of the physics department, also a professor of optics, and an expert in quantum optics and quantum physics—to the project was something extraordinary about daguerreotypes. The daguerreotype isn’t only the first form of photography; it may also be one of the first forms of controlled nanotechnology. Daguerreotypists used nanotechnology to create pictures, and now, more than a century and a half later, scientists and conservators are turning to nanotechnology in a bid to save them.

Most people think of nanotechnology as nanochips or tiny electronic circuits, the processor in their computer tablet or phone, the whiz-bang of modern microelectronics. “But it’s a much broader field,” says Bigelow. Nanoscience is the study and control of materials, biological or chemical, that are between one and 100 nanometers in size. A nanometer is just a billionth of a meter; this sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometers thick.

One part of nanoscience involves building things on the nanometer scale; another is constructing tools with which to see at that scale and understand how nanoparticles work. Matter behaves differently at the nanoscale than it does when in “bulk.”

To create a daguerreotype, photographers treated a silver-plated copper sheet with halogens—reactive elements such as iodine or bromine—in vapor form. Bonding to the silver, the vapor created a light-sensitive surface of silver halide.

Light reflected off the object or person to be pictured in the daguerreotype and created an image on the silver plate. The bromide or silver iodide converted to silver where the light reflected; the images were dark where the silver halide remained. Wiegandt compares the effect to “condensation on a mirror after you take a shower: with no light above, if you then wipe the glass, the wiped area will look black.”

Daguerre discovered that he could develop a latent image by exposing it to mercury fumes. Doing so created silver-mercury crystals in tiny, snowlike grains, forming an exquisite direct positive photograph. A wash of sodium thiosulfate fixed the image by removing the unreacted halogen, leaving on the plate a pure silver surface and the silver-mercury crystals—a “mirror with a memory” and a “triumph of human ingenuity,” as Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in 1859.

In 2011, a research group at the University of Louisville, aiming to create a solution that would yield nanoparticles, stumbled upon precisely the formulation of gold chloride and sodium thiosulfate, heated slightly, that 19th-century French physicist Hippolyte Fizeau developed to make daguerreotypic images physically stronger and visually more lively.

IN PURSUIT: Working at the transmission electron microscope at URnano, Ralph Wiegandt (standing) and Brian McIntyre examine the degradation process of daguerreotypes in search of solutions. (Photo: Brandon Vick)

“These guys had discovered how to do nanotechnology—in the 1800s. It was probably one of the first examples of people discovering a nanotechnology and really harnessing it,” Bigelow says. “I think all evidence has it that people were thinking like a chemist would think. ‘Nano’ was just not in the vocabulary.”

Nineteenth-century inventors couldn’t see the nanoparticles they’d created in the solution or in the finished daguerreotypes—it wasn’t possible to do so until the 1990s, when nanoscientists began to use microscopes capable of observing nanoscale objects. The nanoparticles that form the image of a daguerreotype would need to number between 100 and 1,000, if stacked side by side, to equal the width of a human hair. Those nanoparticles make daguerreotype images extraordinarily precise, so sharp that a good example can be enlarged 20 to 30 times—something most photography today can’t achieve, Wiegandt says. “We often say photography was born fully mature,” says Daniel.

Daguerreotypes “degrade through a number of mechanisms—the daguerreotype, its container, things happening on the surface,” says McIntyre. Exposed to sea air, as those produced by Boston-based Southworth and Hawes would have been, daguerreotypes can experience corrosion similar to the rust a car would acquire in a coastal setting. Other factors in their environment could have equally damaging effects. “The daguerreotype, probably as much as any single object I can think of, is actually an environmental sensor, so it will record, with extremely high sensitivity, events that have occurred to it,” says Wiegandt.

“There isn’t any one thing. There are many modes of degradation that we observe,” Bigelow says. “Some of them are interrelated, and some might be quite distinct.”

Thirty years ago, a graduate student at Penn State began the first comprehensive, modern study of the science of daguerreotypes. Using an electron microscope, she scanned daguerreotypes and found that much was happening beneath their surface. On the basis of her scans, she and other experts proposed cleaning methods and restorative techniques that they believed were safe but that Wiegandt says new research has shown to have “altered the surface structure” of the daguerreotypes. It was premature advice, he says.

New technologies for microscopy and nanofabrication now permit much closer examination, and at URnano, Wiegandt and McIntyre are able to see, at strengths of hundreds of thousands of times magnification, what investigators in the 1980s saw only at 1,000 to 5,000 times enlargement. “What really counts, at some level, are these nanoparticles and what’s going on with them,” Bigelow says.

The group’s work may help pave the way for technological applications far beyond the preservation of the daguerreotype. “Self-assembling nanotechnology” is an area of fervid research, especially in the area of biomedical applications—and self-assembly of nanoparticles is what Bigelow, Wiegandt, and McIntyre are finding in the active surface of the daguerreotype. Even the holes, pores, and cavities that they’ve found formed beneath some of the particles hold clues to nanoscience’s potential. It’s a “network of holes through which moisture, or anything in the atmosphere, if it gets in there can actually undermine the image and allow it to decay from within,” Bigelow explains. Dire for the daguerreotype, similar hollow particles could be a boon to medicine as medical nanocapsules.

As up to 170-year-old examples of nanotechnology, daguerreotypes, already cultural treasures, may also be invaluable for what they can demonstrate about how nanoscale materials age. “We don’t know what’s going to happen to these nanoparticles we’re making now—but you know, we’ve got almost 200 years of damage on these daguerreotypes. We can recreate conditions and see what’s happening,” McIntyre says. “It’s got a million applications.”

But for now, the group cares, foremost and fiercely, about the fate of the daguerreotypes. In February, Bigelow and Wiegandt traveled to New Zealand to speak to conservators at a conference sponsored by the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works and the International Council of Museums. Their aim was one of urgent persuasion: “to alert the community of photograph conservators to the reactivity of the daguerreotype’s highly nanostructured surface composed of silver and gold and their unique nano properties; and to propose new preservation strategies that can halt the virtually undetectable nano-level deterioration before it advances to micro and macro stages,” they wrote.

At the Eastman House, under Wiegandt’s guidance, those preservation strategies include cases that seal the daguerreotypes in an argon atmosphere, which will hold them in a suspended state. The argon displaces the air from the daguerreotypes’ environment, taking moisture out of the system and stopping most of the chemical activity. “It’s literally the only action I think we can take,” he says.

The tools to restore the damaged daguerreotypes have yet to be invented, Wiegandt says, and he doesn’t want to act in haste. For now, he, Bigelow, and McIntyre are engaged purely in exploration and analysis. “Nobody really robustly understands what’s happening, either to create the image or what’s happening as the image degrades. Understanding the fundamental chemistry and physics of the daguerreotype process is seminal to understanding how to preserve them,” says McIntyre.

“We see infinitely more surface structure and what’s going on” than earlier analysts could, Wiegandt says. “It’s essential that we revisit assumptions that have been made by previous analyses to understand the material object better, and take care of it better.”

As befits a man who has devoted his career to one of the more extraordinary creations of the 19th century, his prudence is informed by a belief in the power of technology.

“I have enough faith in science that I don’t want to preempt what might be done in 50 years.”

‘Green Is Everyone’s Business’

That’s the motto of the infant U.S. Green Chamber of Commerce, led by Irene Berkowitz Stillings ’61.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

GREEN LEADER: Stillings, the new president of the U.S. Green Chamber of Commerce, founded in 2011, is an experienced and effective institution builder as well as an energy industry veteran, colleagues say. (Photo: Denis Poroy/AP Images for Rochester Review)

For exactly 101 years, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has enjoyed a reputation as a widely accepted representative—some would say the representative—of the American business community.

But according to Irene Berkowitz Stillings ’61, the former executive director of the nonprofit California Center for Sustainable Energy, that reputation doesn’t capture much of what’s going on in business today. There’s a “green industrial revolution” on the horizon, she says, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been slow to get on board.

“Most of them perceive their job as representing the needs of the business people in an advocacy role,” says Stillings of the branches of the Chamber she’s worked with in California. “And the advocacy role, particularly in California, is to fight against any additional regulations or taxes or mandates. They don’t represent the businesses within their fold that make their living by helping others become more efficient, or who have, in fact, decided that they were going to be sustainable.”

In 2009, a number of high-profile businesses, including Nike, Apple, and Pacific Gas & Electric, left the Chamber in protest against the organization’s position against climate legislation. In San Diego County, a group spun off to become the Green Chamber of San Diego. And in February 2011, the Green Chamber of San Diego, after forging alliances outside the state, renamed itself the U.S. Green Chamber of Commerce, launching its campaign to go national.

Leading that charge is Stillings, who several people associated with the Green Chamber say is uniquely suited for the task. In 2002, she left the corporate world to become the executive director of a small nonprofit called the San Diego Regional Energy Office. In 2006, when then Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law the Global Warming Solutions Act—a bill establishing targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions throughout California and a host of regulations to compel businesses, municipalities, and residents to meet them—Stillings seized on the opportunity to develop the office, which had supported the legislation, into a resource to help institutions comply with the new rules. In a few short years, the seven-person outfit, renamed the California Center for Sustainable Energy, had grown more than tenfold, offering courses, workshops, consulting, and other services to businesses, municipalities, and residents.

David Steel, CEO of the Green Chamber, says he “couldn’t be happier” to have Stillings at the helm of the infant organization.

“She took an organization that was very small, that nobody had heard of, and created something very powerful,” he said of her work at the center.

Gail Welch, the senior manager of sustainability at Qualcomm, a telecommunications firm that worked extensively with the center and now with the Green Chamber, notes that Stillings “knows how to engage people to bring about action.”

“She has a reputation for making things happen,” Welch says.

As for going national, Stillings says, “I think that the concept is ready to take off. Various kinds of green business organizations are popping up all over the country. The movement is very fragmented. And our purpose is to find a way to bring it together.”

Her commitment to environmentalism has been long-standing. “I remember reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring as that came out,” she says of the classic book, published in 1962, that many credit with helping launch the modern environmental movement. “I remember being horrified.”

Today, she’s equally clear about what motivates her. “I have nine grandchildren.”

So far, the Green Chamber has established branches in Texas and Florida and launched an initiative called the “100 Cities for Change” challenge to sell its mission and drum up membership. Stillings says the organization will focus on providing resources and networking opportunities to help small- and medium-sized businesses develop sustainable practices.

“They’re the hardest people to convince that they should take action,” says Stillings. “And it’s for good reasons. A lot of the things that are going to make a business efficient and sustainable take some time and take some money.” The goal of the Green Chamber, Stillings says, is to help business owners weigh financial, health, and environmental benefits in their decision-making processes.

Anyone who’s observed Stillings’s career over decades may recognize a pattern. In 1975, she got her first job in the energy industry as an assistant in customer service at New York State Electric & Gas. As a utility, it faced no competition. But Stillings drew the company’s attention to costs it hadn’t recognized: the time and money spent responding to customer complaints to the New York State Public Service Commission. Stillings collected and read customer comments. “We put on the back of the bill a place where they could write things. And it had been there before I came, but nobody ever looked at it,” she says. She used the comments as a springboard for a bimonthly report to management called “The Voice of the Customer,” which became a launching pad for new customer service initiatives.

By 1984, she’d been named an assistant vice president and by 1990, a vice president. Shortly after that, she retired—for the first time. She took on some private consulting projects and, her children grown and her friends retiring elsewhere, picked up with her husband, Tom, and moved to San Diego, the home of many of her clients, in 1999.

Rob Wilder, CEO of Wildershares, creator of a clean energy index, says she’s kept a bit of the East Coast with her. And that’s good, he thinks, for San Diego and for the organizations that she’s run.

“She’s got an East Coast persona,” says Wilder, a native of Baltimore. “We’re not as laid back as Californians. We tend to get to the point.”

What Time Is It?

It’s complicated, says anthropologist Kevin Birth ’85.

Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

COUNTING THE HOURS? Birth, a Queens College anthropologist, says it’s misguided to measure productivity in terms of clock hours, or “the assumption that one hour is equivalent to any other hour.” (Photo: Amy Sussman/AP Images for Rochester Review)

Ask Kevin Birth ’85 what time it is, and he just may give you a history of the watch.

Birth is a professor of anthropology at Queens College, City University of New York. He’s been studying time since he was a graduate student at the University of California at San Diego more than 20 years ago.

While the 24-hour clock and the Gregorian calendar are nearly universal, how people experience time differs substantially across cultures. Some societies are more dependent on timekeeping devices than others—and perhaps none more so than ours.

In his most recent book, Objects of Time: How Things Shape Temporality (Palgrave Macmillan), Birth explores the ways in which timekeeping devices such as clocks and calendars are only approximately related to the astronomical cycles they purport to reflect. Moreover, he argues, we’ve allowed them to “think for us,” organizing our lives in ways we might not realize with consequences we don’t fully understand.

What is a clock actually measuring?

Your clock is measuring something called the International System second. And that second is defined by an atomic standard. Now you take 86,400 of those seconds and you get something that is roughly like what’s called the mean solar day, a solar day being the time it takes for the Earth to rotate 360 degrees on its axis.

So the 24-hour clock does not actually correspond to a 360-degree rotation of the Earth on its axis?

No. The 24-hour day is an approximation, not an exact measurement, of a single rotation of the Earth on its axis. Imagine the Earth spinning in space, and imagine it moving in its orbit at the same time. The orientation toward the sun has shifted slightly from one day to the next. So in fact only four days a year are even approximately equal to 24 hours.

How does my clock account for the variation?

There is something called the leap second, which occurs about every 18 months. But as we speak, the international regulatory agency in charge of these sorts of policies is considering dropping the leap second, at which point there would be no relationship between clock time and rotational time.

In what ways do we allow our clocks, as you say, to “think for us”?

We’ve allowed our clocks to dictate the organization of our daily lives, even as we’re diurnal mammals whose hormonal cycles are tied to light. We need so much sleep, and we need to sleep at a particular time—basically, night. But we no longer develop our schedules in relationship to daylight. We go to bed based on clock time. And most of us use an alarm to wake up in the morning. So we’re getting up at the same time of day regardless of the amount of daylight. And we’re going to bed at the same time of day regardless of the amount of daylight. And what often determines when we’re going to bed is not how tired we are, but when our shifts end, which is defined by the clock, or when that television program we want to see ends, which is defined by the clock, or when some evening meeting ends, which is defined by the clock.

How might we think differently about time?

We can think of it in terms of points of time, or timing. The people with whom I worked in rural Trinidad, for example, displayed a lot of sensitivity to the timing of things. Not the duration so much, not the clock time so much, but the right order in which to do things, or the optimum time for doing something. They use clocks—the same clocks we do. But they have this sense that not all activities can be adequately represented by minutes and hours. Certain activities take more time if you do them at the wrong time. And you can’t necessarily measure work in terms of a clock hour. You definitely can’t measure productivity in terms of a clock hour. Yet we’ve created a work regimen; we’ve created an educational regimen; we’ve created all sorts of things based on this assumption that one hour is equivalent to any other hour.

Doesn’t globalization compel even more reliance on the clock?

Yes. But one of the ironies of this age of globalization is that we’re increasingly compelled to ignore the fact that we live on a rotating globe. In globalization, we erase the globe. We just deny its existence.

What are some of the most worrisome consequences?

Some of the most famous accidents—like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Union Carbide, Exxon Valdez—are all in that period of night when, as daylight mammals, we’re worst in our functioning ability.

What can be done?

A lot of us are in positions where we don’t have the ability to make choices for ourselves. The boss says this is what we need to do. In order to be competitive, we need to be up at three in the morning for the opening bell of a European stock exchange. For those of us who can, the more we can learn to control our schedules and defend what’s good for our minds and bodies, the better off we are.

In the News

And the Winners Are . . .

Eastman School alumni Renée Fleming ’83E (MM) and Robert (Bob) Ludwig ’66E, ’01E (MM) walked away winners at the 55th annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles in February.

Fleming was awarded Best Classical Vocal Solo for Poèmes, her album of four French orchestral song cycles, and Ludwig received a Grammy for his role as mastering engineer on Babel, by Mumford & Sons, which was named Album of the Year.

Who’s with the Who?

Hornist J. Greg (J. G.) Miller ’06E served as the brass section leader on the Who’s “Quadrophenia and More Tour” from November 2012 to February as well as during the band’s performance at the “12–12–12” benefit concert for the victims of Hurricane Sandy, held at Madison Square Garden last December.

For the past several years, Miller has been an active freelance teacher and performer in the Los Angeles area while working toward his doctor of musical arts degree at the University of Southern California. He’s performed on film scores for Parental Guidance, The Amazing Spider-Man, Snow White and the Huntsman, as well as Oblivion and Monsters University, both to be released later this year.

Most recently, Miller has won a place in the U.S. Army Field Band. He’ll begin later this year, after completing a course of basic combat training.

MR. SECRETARY: Appointed at the start of President Barack Obama’s first term, Chu served as energy secretary until January, when he announced plans to return to academia. (Photo: Corbis)

Energy Secretary Chu Returns to Academia

Steven Chu ’70, who served as secretary of energy during the first term of President Barack Obama, resigned in January in order to return to academia. A Nobel laureate who studied mathematics and physics at Rochester, Chu served on the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley and led the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory prior to joining the first Obama administration.

An avid proponent of wind and solar energy, Chu made the pursuit of clean, renewable energy sources the centerpiece of the department’s agenda. In a statement, Obama said, “As a Nobel Prize–winning scientist, Steve brought to the Energy Department a unique understanding of both the urgent challenge presented by climate change and the tremendous opportunity that clean energy represents for our economy.”

Rocky Around the World

Rocky, the University’s mascot, keeps popping up in all sorts of places.

His complete travel album can be found at www.facebook.com/URAlumniRelations, along with instructions about how you might take Rocky with you on a trip of your own.

Here are some highlights of his recent travels.

Rocky in Tel Aviv, Israel, with Ben Nissan, graduate student at the Warner School . . . (Photo: Rochester Review)

. . . onboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour with Dan Koharski ’85 . . . (Photo: Rochester Review)

. . . with Anupa Gewali ’12 and Sorcha Dundas ’12 in Kathmandu, Nepal . . . (Photo: Rochester Review)

. . . helping out Laura Zimmerman ’11, a volunteer at the National Mall on the morning of the 2013 presidential inauguration . . . (Photo: Rochester Review)

. . . and scaling Alabama’s highest point, as part of a 2,500-mile road trip across the South with Steve ’78S (MBA) and Barbara Shepard. (Photo: Rochester Review)

Lost and Found

REUNITED: Bigler (left) hands the inscribed wristwatch he found in Ohio to Salmon, who lost the watch in Vermont. (Photo: Brandon Vick)

“I have a strange request,” said Terry Bigler into the telephone, to Karen Thering in the Office of Alumni Relations.

Bigler wasn’t an alumnus. But he was from the area and had once worked at Genesee Hospital. Later, he’d worked as a truck driver, and near a rest stop in Columbus, Ohio, he’d found a watch. The watch had the University of Rochester insignia on the front, and on the back was the inscription D. B. S. May 1979. Could she help him find the owner?

Within a short time, Thering and her colleague, Francine Lynch, did just that. Thering placed a call to Del Benjamin Salmon ’79 of Schenectady, N.Y., and left a lengthy voicemail that began with, well, a strange question. A gentleman had found a University of Rochester watch in Columbus, Ohio, with Salmon’s initials and class year on it. Was it his?

Yes, it was. And it was a prized possession, given to him by his late parents. He’d worn it every day until the day it disappeared in a University of Vermont library when he was a law student nearly 25 years ago.

“I’m the beneficiary of the kindness of strangers,” Salmon said, as he, his wife, Randie Rudin Salmon ’80, and Bigler met over lunch at the Alumni and Advancement Center in January. Following lunch was a walk around River Campus, offering a chance for Del and Randie to reminisce about their wedding at the Interfaith Chapel and reception in Wilson Commons.

This had been Bigler’s second attempt to return the watch. He’d found it in 1995, glistening in the dirt underneath a bush he’d approached in order to photograph a flock of turkeys roaming just beyond it.

“I was on my hands and knees,” said Bigler, who’d stopped at the rest stop for coffee, but was also an avid photographer. He’d called the University then, but the switchboard operator had been unable to help him. This past fall, as he was cleaning his attic, Bigler thought he’d give it another try.

Neither man would hazard any guesses as to how the watch made it from a library in Vermont to a bush in Ohio. Salmon simply noted that the watch, which Bigler found dirty and corroded, was cleaned, polished, and “keeps perfect time.”

—Karen McCally

TRIBUTE

M. Parker Givens: Gentleman and Scholar

MENTOR: Givens influenced generations of optics students at Rochester, where he began teaching in 1947. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

It was after 4 o’clock on Thursday afternoon, and in the darkened room on the fourth floor of Dewey Hall, the students in the optics teaching lab were frustrated that the interferometer that looked so simple in theory proved so impossible to align in reality. After all, they were seniors in the premier optics program in the country. How could they spend all afternoon trying, without success, to align the apparatus?

Finally, they called on Professor Givens. He walked over—perhaps not as steadily as he had 53 years before, when he joined the optics faculty at the University—scanned the set up, and adjusted one of the many knobs just slightly. The experiment worked.

“You almost had it,” he said. “It just needed a little tweak.”

Another generation of students had learned that the gray-haired gentleman with a slightly soft accent that betrayed his Virginia roots was an incredibly capable optical scientist.

M. Parker Givens was born in Richmond in 1916. After graduating from the University of Richmond in 1937, he went north to study physics at Cornell. He received a doctorate in 1942 and, after brief stints at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and Penn State, joined the Institute of Optics as an assistant professor in 1947. Although he spent the rest of his life in upstate New York, he remained a southern gentleman, in the best sense of the term. When his wife of more than 50 years, Gene, died, he buried her in Virginia, and when he died this past January, he was buried next to her.

A specialist on the spectroscopy of metal surfaces, over the years he worked in many areas, including holography, photogrammetry, and physical optics generally. He was involved in early balloon flights in the 1940s to study the ozone layer of the atmosphere and in the development of the Todd-AO widescreen movie camera and projection system. He and other institute faculty members went to Manhattan to join Michael Todd, the director of Oklahoma!, and his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, at the film’s opening.

In the early 1960s, just after the laser was invented, he and Bob Hopkins, the institute’s then director, traveled to universities to demonstrate the new device. Out of that came the “Optics Road Show,” a collection of demonstrations that have gone out to colleges, high schools, and even elementary schools.

Parker and Gene raised a family in a cobblestone house in Williamson, N.Y. The long daily commute allowed them to indulge in his favorite hobby, beekeeping, and hers, raising prize-winning Afghan hounds. He kept his friends and colleagues supplied with honey and even taught a class in beekeeping at the University once or twice.

One of his doctoral students, James Wyant ’69 (PhD), a University trustee, paid him a rare honor in endowing the M. Parker Givens Chair in Optics while Parker was still an active member of the teaching faculty. In 1981, when Parker turned 65, there was still mandatory retirement, but he remained on the adjunct teaching faculty for 22 more years. All of us who knew him will fondly remember a kind, wise, and caring mentor who was always a gentleman.

—Per Adamson and Carlos Stroud

Adamson is director of the Optics Teaching Laboratory, and Stroud is a professor of optics at Rochester.

Books & Recordings

Books

The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht

By Jonathan Post ’76 (PhD)

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013

Post, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles, draws a selection from the roughly 4,000 letters written by the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and longtime Rochester English professor. The collection spans the time from Hecht’s childhood until his death at age 81 in 2004.

Elliott Carter’s ‘What’s Next?’: Communication, Cooperation, and Separation

By Guy Capuzzo ’00E (PhD)

University of Rochester Press, 2012

Capuzzo, associate professor of music theory at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, offers a detailed exploration of the 1997 one-act opera by composer Carter.

High Performance Integrated Circuit Design

By Emre Salman ’09 (PhD) and Eby G. Friedman

McGraw-Hill, 2012

Salman, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Stony Brook University, and Friedman, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rochester, provide an overview of the most recent techniques for designing high-performance integrated circuits in nanoscale technologies.

Susan B. Anthony and the Struggle for Equal Rights

Edited by Christine Ridarsky and Mary Huth ’81 (MA)

University of Rochester Press, 2012

Ridarsky, Rochester’s city historian, and Huth, the retired assistant director of Rush Rhees Library’s Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, present a collection of essays by prominent scholars in women’s history on the reform movements that Anthony embraced and helped to lead, including women’s rights, racial equality, and temperance.

In the Blink of an Eye: The Deadly Story of Epidemic Meningitis

By Andrew Artenstein ’81

Springer, 2013

Artenstein, an infectious disease and biodefense specialist and chair of the Department of Medicine at Baystate Health, surveys the 200-year history of epidemic meningitis. The book begins with the earliest descriptions of the illness and ends with the development of a vaccine for meningococcal meningitis and ongoing efforts to prevent outbreaks.

Shh! It's a Secret: A Novel about Aliens, Hollywood, and the Bartender's Guide

By Daniel Kimmel ’77

Fantastic Books, 2013

In his first science fiction novel, movie critic Kimmel tells the tale of friendship between an alien and a Hollywood movie executive as they pursue a top-secret film project.

Critical Insights: Eugene O’Neill

Edited by Steven Bloom ’73

EBSCO/Salem Press, 2013

Bloom edits a collection of up-to-date scholarly essays on the playwright Eugene O’Neill designed for undergraduates. Bloom is a professor of English, dean of undergraduate education, and associate vice president for academic affairs at Lasell College in Newton, Mass.

Del Archivo de la Memoria: Reminiscencias y anécdotas II

By Armando Filomeno ’71M (Res)

Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, 2012

In his native Spanish, neurologist Filomeno offers his second volume of Archives of Memory—“interesting, amusing, odd, or regrettable short stories,” based on his experiences in both the United States and Peru.

Lost Source

By John Martin ’69

iUniverse, 2012

Through the story of a strike against the outsourcing of American jobs, Martin’s novel explores the decline of manufacturing in the United States and the challenges posed by manufacturing strength in China.

Sensor and Data Fusion: A Tool for Information Assessment and Decision Making (Second Edition)

By Lawrence Klein ’66 (MS)

SPIE Press, 2012

Klein, an electrical engineer and principal of Klein & Associates in Santa Ana, Calif., makes the case for the benefits of sensor fusion with an analysis of infrared, microwave, and millimeter-wave sensors. The expanded second edition includes new applications as well as an additional chapter on data fusion in multiple-radar tracking systems.

Too Good to Be True

By Benjamin Anastas ’91

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012

Novelist and essayist Anastas presents his third book, a memoir detailing the collapse of his marriage and promising literary career, and his quest to hold on to his relationship with his son and “find [his] way back from something close to ruin.”

Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History

By Aaron Hughes

Oxford University Press, 2012

Hughes, professor of religion at Rochester, explores the creation and dissemination of the term “Abrahamic religions,” and the problems it poses. Although Abraham, as the common root of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, is often perceived as an ecumenical symbol, Hughes argues that ahistorical versions of Abraham are often used to stoke division and exclusivity.

Lair of the Jade

By Dalia Woodliff ’62

BookBaby, 2013

Woodliff presents a mystery set in Rochester and inspired by J. R. R. Tolkein’s ring quest. The e–book, first in a trilogy, concerns a death in the Rush Rhees library tower.

15-Minute Freezer Recipes

By Kelly McNelis ’09 (PhD)

New Leaf Wellness, 2012

McNelis, a Pittsburgh-based wellness coach, includes favorite freezer recipes, along with nutritional information and tips for freezing, in an e-cookbook that’s downloadable for computers, tablets, and smartphones (www.NewLeafWellness.biz).

The Virtues of Poetry

By James Longenbach

Graywolf Press, 2013

Longenbach, a poet and the Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of English at Rochester, offers a collection of 12 essays exploring the virtues of poetry—virtue as understood, Longenbach writes, in the earliest use of the word as “a magical or transcendental power, a power that might be embodied by any particular substance or act.” Essays include analyses of Yeats, Pound, Shakespeare, Lowell, Dickinson, Ashbery, and others.

Transgressive Transcripts: Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Chinese Canadian Women’s Writing

By Bennett Yu-Hsiang Fu ’96 (MA)

Rodopi Press, 2012

Fu, assistant professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the National Taiwan University, explores the construction of female subjectivity in contemporary Chinese-Canadian literature through the analysis of works by Sky Lee, Larissa Lai, Lydia Kwa, and Evelyn Lau.

Recordings

Hudson City Suite

By Scott Healy ’82E

Hudson City Records, 2012

Los Angeles jazz keyboardist Healy performs nine original tracks, performed by an 11-piece ensemble that includes trumpeter Tim Hagans.

Some People’s Lives

By Moira Danis ’80E

Moira Danis, 2012

Teacher and singer Danis performs works from established songwriters such as Stephen Sondheim, Cy Coleman, Tommy Wolf, and Jimmy Webb, as well as newer artists such as Sara Bareilles, Susan Werner, and Chely Wright.

Derek Bermel: Canzonas Americanas

By Alarm Will Sound

Cantaloupe Music, 2012

The 20-member ensemble presents a selection of works by Derek Bermel chosen to showcase the stylistic variety within the composer’s oeuvre. Founded at Eastman in 2001, the group includes Miles Brown ’00E, ’12E (DMA), Caleb Burhans ’03E, Gavin Chuck ’04E (PhD), Michael Clayville ’00E, Stefan Freund ’02E (DMA), Bill Kalinkos ’03E, Matt Marks ’02E, Payton MacDonald ’01E (DMA), John Orfe ’99, ’99E, Courtney Orlando ’03E (DMA), Alan Pierson ’06E (DMA), Jason Price ’05E (DMA), John Pickford Richards ’02E, ’04E (MM), and Elisabeth Stimpert ’99E (MM), ’01E (MM). Nigel Maister, artistic director of Rochester’s International Theatre Program, is staging director.

Call Me a Dreamer

By Chesley Kahmann ’52

Orbiting Clef Productions, 2012

Vocalist and pianist Kahmann performs a new selection of songs with her singing group the Interludes and her son, trumpeter Ames Parsons. The recording is the eighth volume in her Kahmann Touch series.

Exposition

By Nick Finzer ’09E

Outside in Music, 2013

Jazz trombonist and composer Finzer performs 10 original compositions on his debut CD. Bassist David Baron ’10E also performs on the recording.

Live at Eastman

By John Covach

John Covach, 2012

Covach offers a recording of a concert he performed in July 2012, entirely on acoustic instruments, in the Eastman School’s Hatch Recital Hall. Performing works by Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Yes, and medleys of songs by the Beatles and Steve Howe—with no amplification—Covach showcases the hall’s acoustics. Covach is a professor of music theory at Eastman, professor of music and chair of the music department in the College, and director of the University’s Institute for Popular Music.

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.

Picture of an Exhibition

Behind the scenes with Sarah Otto ’02, ’03 (T5), exhibitions coordinator at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

(Illustration: David Cowles for Rochester Review)

The Cleveland Museum of Art was the first museum I ever visited. I grew up in Cleveland, and my family took me there as a small child. I went to their summer art classes. It’s a really cool thing that I work there now; it’s really a full-circle moment for me.

Being an exhibitions coordinator is a very interesting vantage point, especially for someone who’s always enjoyed visiting museums. We’re the hub between all of the various departments, so it’s a place to witness the whole process of putting an exhibit together.

It’s pretty remarkable all that goes into an exhibit. Our exhibitions are in the planning stage for several years. It begins with things like requesting the loans, looking for another museum to partner with, and figuring out preliminary budgets; and when you get closer, refining the list of works in the show, developing the thematic organization, and of course, all the design. The artworks themselves might have to undergo conservation treatment. Then there’s mounting preparation, and gallery construction. And the programming that accompanies the exhibit needs to be planned as well as the opening event.

Working in exhibitions really requires you to be flexible and responsive because inevitably something is going to happen that you couldn’t have predicted. The first exhibition that I worked on at the art museum was a show about an ancient Peruvian civilization called the Wari. Toward the end, a shipment of a number of our loan objects was delayed. The installation team worked around the clock. They really made magic happen. They were putting the last objects in cases moments before the donor reception. It was really, really down to the wire. But they did it. And no one in the public would ever have known there was a scramble like that.

Maybe it’s old-fashioned of me to say, but I think there’s a lot to be said for just a really beautiful design. I think an exhibit is really successful when everything—not just the artwork, but the colors, the lighting, everything—has conspired to transport you to somewhere else. So many subtle design decisions can create an incredible feeling in a space. I have a lot of respect for my colleagues in the design department for that reason.

I didn’t start off in museums. I was a student at Harvard Divinity School when I got my first museum job, at the university’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography. I’d gone to divinity school to become a professor. I double majored in religion and psychology at Rochester. But I’m such a dabbler at heart. I’d gotten interested in sacred objects. I spoke to a curator, and that’s when I really started thinking about working in museums. Even though I’d always loved visiting them, it had never occurred to me to work in one. I don’t know why.

I didn’t know the first thing about planning exhibits when I got that job. But museums are places where, once you get your foot in the door, you learn so much on the job. I started as a research assistant, then next thing I knew, I was bouncing from department to department, learning as I went along. Museums really are a place where you can start where you are.

Sarah Otto ’02, ’03 (T5)

Cleveland, Ohio

Exhibitions coordinator, Cleveland Museum of Art

Best part of Rochester: “So many things. But the Take Five program alone, I tell anyone who will listen about it. It was just so geared for people like me. I double majored, dabbled everywhere, and still wanted to take a fifth year, to study music.”

STUDENT LIFE

Who’s Got Spirit?

(Photo: Adam Fenster)

GROUP HUG: Members of the 2014 and 2015 Class Councils show their affection for Rocky, the University’s mascot, as part of the kick-off to this winter’s Spirit Week. Sponsored by the 2016 Class Council, the week features a series of events—including an “I ♥ Rochester” Day, complete with a commemorative T-shirt—and activities designed to celebrate Rochester and student life on campus.