Rochester Review

March-April 2015, Volume 77, No. 4

Editor

Scott Hauser

Associate Editors

Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

Kathleen McGarvey

Contributors

Valerie Alhart, Emily Boynton, Adam Fenster, Peter Iglinski, Bob Marcotte, Melissa Mead, Mark Michaud, Sara Miller, Dennis O’Donnell, Leslie Orr, Monique Patenaude, Scott Sabocheck, Leonor Sierra, Helene Snihur, Sofia Tokar, 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

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Contents

Two Horatio Algers

Letters

Size and Scale of a Celestial Scene

Garnering a Grammy

Armed Against HIV?

A Head for Business

Whither the part-time degree program?

Stepping Up

Optical Scientists Create Highly Water-Repellent Metals

Living Well in the Dying Light

Cloak and Mirrors

Data Science Initiative Receives $3 Million

Cataloging a Congressional Career

An engineer takes part in ‘a cultural project of the highest kind’

The International Flavor of Squash

A Winter Roundup . . .

What Is the Value of a Rochester Education?

Working Class Heroes

Bob Goergen ’60

Ed Hajim ’58

Bringing University History to Life

‘As My First Insurrection . . .’

A Hospital: ‘A Complex Social Institution’

‘Just Go to It’

‘The Girls Felt That Building Belonged to Them’

A ‘Close Personal Connection’

In Our Midst

Curating Curiosity

Pulling Teeth?

A Small, Plastic Box that Could End Malaria

Books & Recordings

Mentoring Matters

Who ♥’s U of R?

Two Horatio Algers

By Joel Seligman

LEADING BY EXAMPLE: Trustees Ed Hajim (left) and Bob Goergen “are true embodiments of the Horatio Alger legacy . . . and today are giants in the history of the University.” (Photo: William Taufic (Goergen); Shannon Taggart For Rochester Review (Hajim))

The Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans annually recognizes renowned leaders who grew out of humble beginnings to achieve success and demonstrate commitment to philanthropy and education.

In the past two years, two remarkable alumni members of our Board of Trustees have been recognized: Bob Goergen ’60 and Ed Hajim ’58. Bob and Ed demonstrate startling resilience, tireless work ethic, and genuine commitment to giving back to their communities.

Bob has been a trustee since 1982 and served as chairman from 1991 to 2003. He was a member of last year’s class of Horatio Alger honorees. Bob says the word Meliora has shaped his approach to challenges because it means never being satisfied, always trying to improve. Bob persevered through harrowing childhood experiences.

He spent time in foster care while his young mother struggled to raise two boys through rocky marriages and on her own. His mother held him to a high standard and was firm that Bob do what was expected of him. Bob loved school and sports and discovered he enjoyed being a leader as a crossing guard in elementary school. His SAT scores and strong basketball prowess earned him a full scholarship to Rochester, where he was elected to the student council and served as chairman of the finance board and president of the Interfraternity Council.

Bob graduated in 1960 with a bachelor’s in physics and went on to earn an MBA from the Wharton School of Business. His career has included research and development at Eastman Kodak, manufacturing at Procter & Gamble, the advertising agency McCann Erickson, and management consulting with McKinsey & Co. He is the founder, chairman, and chief executive of Blyth Inc., one of the leading marketers of candles, home fragrances, and home décor products in the world.

For five decades, Bob has played a significant role in the University’s development. His support and counsel have led to consequential improvements to scholarship, teaching, research, and campus life. With his wife, Pamela, and the Goergen Foundation, Bob has contributed more than $70 million in total philanthropic commitments to many institutions.

Their contributions to Rochester have supported undergraduate programs, funded an annual award for excellence in teaching, enabled a new athletic center on campus, and facilitated interdisciplinary research. In 2007, we opened the Robert B. Goergen Hall for Biomedical Engineering and Optics, a 100,000-square-foot academic building that houses the University’s Institute of Optics, the Department of Biomedical Engineering, classrooms, laboratories, and faculty offices. “I came from a dysfunctional family,” Bob says. “But . . . [t]hrough my education and goal-setting personality, I achieved familial and financial success. Now I want to educate and encourage less fortunate young people so that they too can grow and reach their full potential.”

Our Board Chairman Ed Hajim is among the individuals who will receive the Horatio Alger Award this year.

Ed traveled a long journey through personal hardship to where he is today, spending time in foster care, in an orphanage, and deprived of any reliable parental involvement for many years.

Through his own initiative, Ed qualified for a Naval ROTC scholarship that made it possible for him to attend college. He chose Rochester and enrolled in 1954 in what became his “first real home.” He earned a BS in chemical engineering in 1958, and subsequently earned an MBA degree with distinction from Harvard Business School in 1964.

Throughout a highly successful career in investment management and financial services, Ed has generously committed time and resources to a variety of leadership positions. Together with his wife, Barbara, and the Hajim Family Foundation, Ed has provided financial support to a variety of charities, including education, health sciences and health care, arts and culture, conservation and preservation, and recreation.

Ed became chairman of the Board of Trustees in 2008, and soon after made a transformational gift commitment of $30 million to the University—the largest single donation in the University’s history—in support of engineering and applied sciences. This was during the tumultuous 2008 economic recession. To honor this extraordinary support, in 2009 the University dedicated the Edmund A. Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences. Ed has provided more than 200 scholarships to deserving students at Rochester, Harvard Business School, the University of Vermont, the University of Denver, the University of San Diego, Westchester Community College, the Brunswick School, and Middlesex School.

As true embodiments of the Horatio Alger legacy, Ed and Bob overcame significant obstacles in their early lives. They are today giants in the history of the University of Rochester.

Letters

SNOW DAY? A four-season campus (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

Thanks to Dean Burgett

I read with great interest the well-deserved article about Paul Burgett ’68E, ’76E (PhD) (January-February), who was dean of students at the Eastman School of Music while I was an undergrad.

Undergrads need an anchor, someone on the premises who they can go to for academic, personal, and professional advice. Paul Burgett is an extraordinary individual who knows no limits. No one was ever considered out of bounds and anyone could go to him for advice, as I did.

Additionally, at my audition at Eastman, 33 years ago in February, Dean Burgett took time to talk at length to my father, who, to this day, remembers being deeply impressed by him. Paul Burgett is a very rare person who makes everyone around him better by his mere existence. This is not an exaggeration, it is pure truth.

Every student and colleague who ever conversed with Paul was simply the better for the experience, as all of us are.

A very belated thank you, Dr. Burgett, for all of your wisdom, compassion, kindness, humor, and generosity.

May the universe bestow upon you the same goodness you have shared with us over the years.

Ava Estis Liss ’86E

San Diego

Thank you for the wonderful article on Dean Paul Burgett. While I never took one of his classes, my peers all spoke very admiringly of him, and I always enjoyed running into him on campus. Your article brought tears to my eyes. We are lucky to have this man as part of our University community.

Marina Isaacson ’12

Washington, D.C.

What was barely a blip in the vast expanse of Paul’s life was a major focal point for me. During his short stint as director of the Hochstein School, he took a chance and hired a brazenly determined, yet honestly inexperienced, teenager to teach dance in his summer program. I fabricated some of my prior experiences (he probably knew this), but did a convincingly energetic job for two consecutive summers.

Thanks, Paul, for your confidence. I went on to teach at Boston University, the Yale School of Drama, New England Conservatory of Music, perform my own choreography at Jacob’s Pillow, and found the Dance Complex in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Without his first vote of faith, and the real experience I gained, I might have never. . . . But I did, and I am forever thankful to a great man.

Rozann Kraus ’72

Cambridge, Massachusetts

The writer is the resident choreographer for the Central Square Theater.

Thanks to the Ferraris

The article about the Ferrari Symposia (“Ferrari Symposia Host Celebrated Humanist,” January-February) should have used the space devoted to the picture of Professor [Stephen] Greenblatt’s wonderful book (I’ve read it and recommend it heartily) to mentioning the generosity of my classmate, University Trustee Bernard Ferrari ’70, ’74M (MD), and his lovely wife, Linda Gaddis Ferrari, in establishing and endowing this program.

His and his wife’s contributions and support should have received a little more recognition than they were given.

Daniel Fink ’74M (MD)

Beverly Hills, California

No Thanks to Snow

I appreciated your article on snow days (Ask the Archivist, January-February). I, of course, remember the 1966 blizzard when I was a graduate student in the medical school’s Department of Radiation Biology. I had quite a time getting to campus that week from the northern part of the city. I walked many blocks to Lake Avenue, where I was able to get a ride from my then mother-in-law who was an administrative assistant in the Dean of Student’s Office.

Another storm that you didn’t mention when the campus was closed was, I believe, either 1958 or ’59 when I was an undergraduate. I managed to get from Penfield to campus and found a place to park, but drifts going from the men’s dorms to the library were up to my waist and higher. I got to the library only to be told that all classes were canceled.

John Parker ’61, ’68M (PhD)

Lansdale, Pennsylvania

Department of Corrections

A listing for the book, The Anxiety Code: Deciphering the Purposes of Neurotic Anxiety, by Roger Di Pietro ’04M (Pdc), in January-February’s Books and Recordings should have identified the author as a doctor of clinical psychology.

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.

PLANETARY SCIENCE

Size and Scale of a Celestial Scene

(Illustration: Ron Miller)

STAR TURN: An artist’s rendering illustrates new details about the size and scale of a system of rings circling a celestial object about 430 light-years from Earth that has been studied by Eric Mamajek, associate professor of physics and astronomy, for the past several years. Mamajek and colleagues from Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands reported this winter that the system, located near the sun-like star J1407, consists of more than 30 rings, is about 200 times larger than that of Saturn, and may provide the first evidence of a moon orbiting an object outside the solar system. The ring system, discovered by Mamajek in 2012, circles a brown dwarf star or an exoplanet as much as 40 times the size of Jupiter.

AWARDS SEASON

Garnering a Grammy

(Photo: Adam Fenster)

Life of a Lutenist: Paul O’Dette, professor of lute at the Eastman School of Music, won the second Grammy of his career at this year’s Grammy Awards competition. O’Dette and Stephen Stubbes, who serve as artistic codirectors of the Boston Early Music Festival, were nominated for their work as conductors for the album Charpentier: La Descente d’Orphée aux enfers. The album features Christel Thielmann, assistant professor of conducting at Eastman, along with Avi Stein ’97E and Zachary Wilder ’06E. The 57th Annual Grammy Awards marked the sixth time that O’Dette has been nominated for a Grammy. Also at this year’s event, Bob Ludwig ’66E, ’01E (MM) won three Grammys for his work as an engineer. He won for Best Surround Sound Album, for his work on Beyoncé’s self-titled album Beyoncé; Best Engineered Album Non-Classical, for Beck’s Morning Phase; and Album of the Year, for Morning Phase—the third year in a row that Ludwig was recognized in the Album of the Year category. Altogether, Ludwig has won 10 Grammys as well as two Latin Grammys.

CLINICAL SCIENCE

Armed Against HIV?

(Photo: Adam Fenster)

Oral examination: A member of a Medical Center team testing a new vaccine to prevent HIV holds one of the trial’s capsules. Rochester researchers and colleagues at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center are conducting a clinical trial to see whether the vaccine—which is unusual because it is being given in the form of a capsule rather than a shot—can prompt a more robust immune response against the virus that causes AIDS. The study, conducted in collaboration with the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, began early this year.

ADMINISTRATION

A Head for Business

Raising a profile requires a long view, says the new dean of the Simon Business School.

Interview by Kathleen McGarvey

DETAILED MOVES: New Simon School Dean Andrew Ainslie says that moving the school higher in the rankings will involve many small steps, but the underlying principle is focusing on “getting our students great careers.” Ainslie, who was formally inducted in February, succeeds former dean Mark Zupan and is the school’s seventh dean. (Photo: John Smillie)

Andrew Ainslie was inducted as dean of the Simon Business School in February, succeeding former dean Mark Zupan. He is the school’s seventh dean. A native of Zimbabwe, Ainslie came to Rochester from the UCLA Anderson School of Management, where he was senior associate dean of the full-time MBA program. Ainslie received a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Cape Town in 1983 and an MBA in marketing from Cape Town in 1990. In 1998, he earned a PhD in marketing and statistics from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

What is your vision for Simon?

I think I’m being fairly consistent in saying I don’t have one, because I think it’s dangerous to walk in with strong preconceptions. I know what our task is: our primary task is improving where we stand in the rankings. Simon stood in the high 20s for most of the ’90s, and we’ve allowed that to drop a little. I think a very sharp and long-term focus pays off for every member of the business school community. The bigger question is how to achieve that—and usually it takes a lot of detailed, small moves, not one gigantic move.

We’ve started down that road with the appointment of David Tilson as associate dean of the MBA program. We know we need to find our students the best career opportunities possible, and that’s a gigantic issue. It requires that we attract students who are attractive to corporate America, that we have a curriculum that serves them well, and that we help them in going out to the marketplace. In the long run that will bring us better students, and better recruiters, and better opportunities for our students. And in some sense it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.

How is business education changing?

Business education changes a lot less than a lot of people would like to admit. Sometimes it feels like we go through cycles. In the late ’90s, everyone was interested in business analytics, but with the dot-com bust, some of that interest went away. But in the late 2000s, it started to come back. This is a cycle we love, because Simon is well positioned for it. Simon has been much more focused on analytics than most schools and instrumental in introducing the idea of analytics of businesses in general. Some of the strongest intellectual property and capital that comes out of great business schools is in business analytics, and we have amazing research going on all over this school, in operations, strategy, marketing, accounting, finance, pricing.

What are some of the challenges and opportunities for Simon?

Geography is a challenge, but I don’t like playing on that too much because I think one of the worst things any manager can do is allow a challenge to become a scapegoat. And it may seem insurmountable—we can’t move to New York City tomorrow—but it’s not so much insurmountable as it is something that requires us to work a little harder. We have buses that run regularly between here and New York City to help students get there. We’ve run trips to places like Silicon Valley recently. We’re remote from the major markets, but so are Cornell, Dartmouth, and Michigan, for example. We believe this is a surmountable issue.

Another challenge, I suppose, and it’s related to why it matters so much about rankings, is we’re both a small school and a school that’s sitting in the 30s in rankings. We don’t have the brand equity some other schools have. We have to get out there and let recruiters know why they should be interested in our students. We’re a strong regional school and a strong international school. We’re good at attracting students from China and India, but it’s hard to recruit students nationally. We need to do better in the Midwest and on the West Coast.

How do you shift the rankings?

A million small things. You have to focus on the objective function, and that’s getting our students great careers. We’re a professional school and we have to remember that. When it comes to a new program or initiative, my first question is always going to be, how does that help us with our objective of getting our students great careers? And if it doesn’t do that directly, we need to think about why we’re doing it.

Simon has a large body of international students. How does that fit into the school’s long-term goals?

We owe it to both ourselves as a community and to each individual that we bring into the program to be very clear about whether we believe we can do the best we can by them in terms of getting them placed. And that means that we have to remember that an international student, to be hired in the United States—and I went through this as an immigrant—must get an H-1B visa, and if they don’t, companies trying to hire them might be left with an open place. Foreign students have a higher bar than do American students. We need to be sure they stand a really good chance, and I think that’s ethically sound for the school and the students we bring in.

There has been a tendency to bring in students to bolster GMAT scores, and that seems to me to be a terrible reason to bring in a larger number of foreign students. Every time we look at a candidate we need to think, how will this candidate do in the corporate world?

In other venues, you’ve identified a well-rounded class as a priority. How do you achieve that?

We don’t focus on one thing. I think it’s easy for people to say we need students who are “X,” and X might be incredibly intelligent, it might be amazingly good at networking, it might be deep experience in a particular career or field. And I think at different times different schools have said, we’re really going to focus on one of those things.

But you need to be looking across all of those. I’m not saying every single candidate needs to be all of those—that’s impossible to find. But we need to be thinking about all three and finding people who have one or two so that we don’t become monotone as a class. There are many things people look for in candidates for their companies, and we need to think as they think.

Student satisfaction increased significantly during your tenure at UCLA. What contributed to that satisfaction?

I don’t think there are any simple answers. At UCLA, we bumped up from 21st to third in student satisfaction in the Businessweek rankings. And that was in part because of student involvement. We all need to realize that we’re in this jointly and everyone can benefit from getting involved. As students get involved, talk to us, and work with us, everyone benefits. Students should have a strong say in how the school is managed, and they should be involved in student governance, committees, and clubs, to put everybody in a stronger position over the years. And that’s tough for them because the hard work students do today may only benefit the classes after them. But as the school does better, the equity of your MBA goes up. It’s also important they get involved afterward as alumni.

It’s the perennial battle: I guarantee you that the school at number three in the rankings is trying to be number one. All of us are constantly thinking of how to be better, and in part it’s a product of a long-run engagement with our community.

What has best prepared you for your new job?

I think it was the really wonderful privilege of running the MBA program at UCLA. Anyone who steps into a position like this without having that sort of administrative experience would find it very difficult. UCLA is a fantastic school, but at the time I walked into that position they felt they’d been struggling a little and their reputation wasn’t where it deserved to be. Working on that for four years was an incredible experience. But my new position is much richer. My job now becomes to get everybody the materials and assets they need to do well, helping each of our academic groups make sure they can get great new people onto the faculty, helping alumni find ways to get involved in the school, and helping students do the best they possibly can.

Another advantage I have is that I spent 10 years in industry, before the 20 years I’ve now spent in academia. That combination is very useful. Universities are unique entities, and understanding a university requires you to have spent a long time at it. I think it’s difficult for people who become deans from corporations to understand the academic environment—but it’s also important to understand the corporate environment we’re sending our students into, and that’s the advantage of having spent time in both places.

ASK THE ARCHIVIST

Whither the part-time degree program?

A question for Melissa Mead, the John M. and Barbara Keil University Archivist and Rochester Collections Librarian.

ECLECTIC EDUCATION: Students enroll for classes during registration for the University College of Liberal and Applied Studies, circa 1960. The program, which traces its roots to the early part of the 20th century, existed until 1982, when its courses were absorbed into other schools and units. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

How long did the UR offer the University College program?—Charles Masick ’65, ’68 (MS) (both through University College), ’70S (MBA)

For more than 65 years, from 1916 to 1982, the University College—as the program for students who enrolled as part-time students and those who took classes in the evenings and on the weekends was eventually known—was an integral academic division operating alongside the regular undergraduate College and graduate schools. With an enduring legacy of thousands of alumni in the Rochester area and beyond, it has existed in various forms throughout our history.

In 1850, it was possible for qualified students—later given the designation “eclectics” and what today might be called “nontraditional students”—to take courses at the University as nondegree, “partial course” candidates.

With the encouragement of our second president, David Jayne Hill, an “Extension Department” was organized in 1894 to offer evening and Saturday lectures “to bring systematic university instruction within reach of all classes of men and women . . . without interfering with their daily work.”

Lectures in the sciences and humanities were offered, taught by University faculty, including Professors Burton, Lattimore, Fairchild, Forbes, and Shedd. Several courses were taught by Helen Barrett Montgomery, who was designated an “Extension Lecturer on History”; in this role, Montgomery predates Elizabeth Denio, who is generally credited as being our first woman instructor, by almost a decade.

Montgomery was a strong proponent of the admission of women to the University, and she was the first woman elected to the Rochester School Board in 1899, a remarkable accomplishment given that her election was 20 years before women had the vote.

This effort ended in 1902, but an extension division was re-established in 1916. Many of its enrollees entered the workforce directly from high school and were interested in taking college-level courses “with a view to increasing their knowledge and individual economic value,” according to the Bulletin. As before, the classes were coeducational and taught by University faculty, usually during the late afternoons and evenings, and on Saturdays.

By 1944, the utility of the division for educating returning service men and women was self-evident, and it was reorganized to give it equal standing to other divisions in the University. Renamed “the University School of Liberal and Applied Studies,” its students would earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in general studies, business administration, accounting, and nursing, and they could take a full-time courseload.

Students in the school had their own government, held events and dances, and published their own newspaper called the Campus Crier and a news-sheet called the Chanticleer.

In 1958 the schools of business, education, and engineering (today the Simon, Warner, and Hajim schools) opened and began enrolling “both full-time and part-time evening session students” in classes relevant to their disciplines.

The school became the University College of Liberal and Applied Studies in 1972; a final Course Bulletin was issued for 1981–82, after which the school was fully absorbed into the other divisions and schools of the University.

The opportunity for “all who find life interesting and desire better to understand it” that was heralded in 1916 continues today through the Office of Part-time Studies, which provides “students, adult learners, business professionals, educators, and the community the opportunity to take classes on a part-time basis for intellectual enrichment or professional development.”

STUDENT LIFE

Stepping Up

The Black Students’ Union hosts an annual competition fostering community and celebrating African-American dance.

Interview by Kathleen McGarvey

INTRODUCTIONS: Alexandra Poindexter ’15, president of the BSU, says the group’s annual step show is fun and serves as a way to introduce school-age participants to college. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Alexandra Poindexter ’15, a political science major from Lawrenceburg, Indiana, is president of the Black Students’ Union, or BSU. Founded in 1968, the group organizes educational and cultural events that promote diversity within the University community. In February, BSU hosted its 12th annual step show for students in Rochester-area schools.

What is a step show, and what’s its history?

Stepping has a rich tradition rooted in African-based communities and uses movement, words, and sounds to convey a message. It draws originally from African foot dances such as gumboot, a dance created by South African miners who would communicate with the stomping of their boots. The stepping tradition in the United States stemmed from African-American fraternity and sorority life’s song and dance rituals starting in the early 1900s. A step show is simply a showcase of a community or school’s talents in the genre of stepping. This show can be competitive or exhibition. Most step shows usually have a theme.

How did the BSU create its annual step show?

We started in 2004, when LaShara Evan ’05, ’06W (MS) was in her first term as president. She and her copresident, Tanisha Lisle Johnson ’05, ’07W (MS), along with the social and cultural chair, Yannize Joshua ’08—who was also the Black History Month chair—wanted to revamp Black History Month into four major events. This included the step show, the Pan-African Expo, the Black Tie Affair, and a dating auction.

How does the show work?

The show is typically split up by grade level. This year, we had an elementary and middle school category and a high school and college category. All teams in each category competed for one specific prize.

What is your group’s connection with students in the community?

BSU has been involved in various precollege initiatives over the years. Usually the schools reach out to us and we help to provide tutoring, college advice, or mentorship. The step show in particular works as outreach as it brings the students into the University space. In the past, students have said that they didn’t feel like the University of Rochester was an attainable goal or they would never just come and visit here. The step show gives the students an easy way to be a part of the University space and also meet students who have similar backgrounds.

How does the community, on campus and off, respond to the show?

The show has been well received. All sorts of people come to our step show. I take pride in the number of community members who come out annually to support their steppers!

What about the show makes you proudest? And what’s the most fun?

What makes me most proud of the show are the step show participants. They take this competition very seriously, and as a high school student, I don’t think I had an outlet to which I dedicated so much passion and drive to win. A close second would have to be my executive board. It’s a high-intensity event, and it takes all 12 of us to manage the day and ensure it runs smoothly.

What is most fun is the day of the competition. The atmosphere, the anticipation of the sets, the performances are all so much fun. It is a very challenging process to get the step show well organized, but it all pays off when the step teams hit the stage.

Optical Scientists Create Highly Water-Repellent Metals

BOUNCING: Water droplets bounce off a surface that has been treated with a new laser-based process that makes metals water-repellent. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Institute of Optics scientists have used lasers to transform metals into extremely water-repellent, or hydrophobic, materials without the need for temporary coatings.

Super-hydrophobic materials are desirable for a number of applications, such as rust prevention, anti-icing, and sanitation. But most current hydrophobic materials rely on chemical coatings.

In a paper published in the Journal of Applied Physics, Chunlei Guo, professor of optics, and Anatoliy Vorobyev, senior scientist with Guo’s group, describe a laser-patterning technique that creates an intricate pattern of micro-and nanoscale structures to give the metals their new properties. The work builds on earlier research by the team that used a similar technique to turn metals black.

“The material is so strongly water-repellent, the water actually gets bounced off,” says Guo. “Then it lands on the surface again, gets bounced off again, and then it will just roll off from the surface.”

The work has piqued the interest of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has supported the research, for its potential applications in collecting rain water and creating cleaner, healthier latrines in developing countries.

—Leonor Sierra

Neutrinos Can Deliver ‘Glancing Blows’

In what they call a “weird little corner” of the already weird world of neutrinos, physicists have found evidence that the tiny particles might be involved in a surprising reaction.

Neutrinos are famous for almost never interacting with other matter. For example, 10 trillion neutrinos pass through your hand every second, and fewer than one actually interacts with any of the atoms that make up your hand. However, when neutrinos do interact with another particle, it happens at very close distances and involves a high-momentum transfer of energy.

A new paper published in Physical Review Letters shows that neutrinos sometimes can also interact with a nucleus but leave it basically untouched—inflicting no more than a “glancing blow”—resulting in a particle being created out of a vacuum.

Kevin McFarland, professor of physics, is a scientific co-spokesperson with an international collaboration that carries out neutrino-scattering experiments at Fermilab, near Chicago. McFarland, who also heads the Rochester team that was primarily responsible for the analysis of the results, compares neutrino interactions to firing a bullet at a bubble, only to find that the bubble was left intact.

“The bubble—a carbon nucleus in the experiment—deflects the neutrino ‘bullet’ by creating a particle from the vacuum,” McFarland says. “This effectively shields the bubble from getting blasted apart and instead the bullet only delivers a gentle bump to the bubble.”

Producing an entirely new particle—in this case a charged pion—requires much more energy than it would take to blast the nucleus apart, which is why the physicists are surprised that the reaction happens as often as it does.

“The production of pions from this reaction had not been observed consistently in other experiments,” McFarland says. By using a new technique, the team measured how much momentum and energy was transferred to the carbon nucleus—showing that the nucleus remained undisturbed—and the distribution of the pions that were created.

—Leonor Sierra and Peter Iglinski

Is the U.S. Slipping in Medical Research?

Once the undisputed center of global innovation in medicine, the United States is steadily losing ground to Asia and Europe—and will, if trends continue, relinquish its leadership in the coming decade.

That’s the conclusion of an analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association, coauthored by Ray Dorsey, the David M. Levy Professor in Neurology.

The study tracked medical research activity from 1994 to 2014 in the United States, Europe, Asia, Canada, and Australia, compiling data on funding by public and private sources, the creation of intellectual property, and the size of the medical and scientific workforce.

U.S. spending on medical research grew at an average annual rate of 6 percent between 1994 and 2004, according to the report. The pace fell sharply in the following decade, when the annual rate of growth decreased to 0.6 percent, falling behind the pace of inflation. With the exception of the temporary increases brought about by federal stimulus spending in 2009 and 2010, the last five years have seen a decrease in research funding when adjusted for inflation. Overall, medical research and development funding has declined in real terms by 13 percent since 2004.

The report highlights a move away from investing in early-stage research. The authors point out that new knowledge often takes from 15 to 25 years to go from a discovery in the lab to a clinical application in people. With the private sector moving more resources to late-stage research, that leaves the shrinking resources provided by the federal government and often very small companies as the primary sources of funding for early-stage, high-risk research.

—Mark Michaud

Discovery May Explain Why We Gain Weight

Rochester researchers believe they’re on track to solve the mystery of weight gain. They’ve discovered that a protein, called Thy1, has a fundamental role in controlling whether a primitive cell decides to become a fat cell—making the protein a possible therapeutic target, according to a study published online in the FASEB Journal.

The research brings a new biological angle to a problem that’s often viewed as behavioral, says lead author Richard Phipps, who holds the Wright Family Research Professorship in the Department of Environmental Medicine.

The protein was discovered 40 years ago and has been studied in other contexts, but its molecular function has never been known. Phipps’s laboratory showed for the first time that when fat cells are developing they lose Thy1, suggesting that obesity could be treated by restoring the protein.

The researchers are also working to develop an anti-obesity drug and have applied for an international patent to protect the invention.

—Leslie Orr

POINTS OF VIEW: Early 20th-century postcards and other images shed light on Japan’s modernization and pop culture. (Photo: Courtesy of “Re-envisioning Japan”)

Digital Humanities Project Turns Lens on Prewar Japan

A new interactive archive and research project called “Re-envisioning Japan: Japan as Destination in 20th-Century Visual and Material Culture” is now online. Created by Joanne Bernardi, associate professor of Japanese, and developed with the help of the Digital Humanities Center, the project uses images and objects to investigate representations of Japan and its place in the world in the first half of the 20th century.

Bernardi—who first visited Japan as an undergraduate with prize money she won in a national photography competition—has documented views of the country and its modernization with hundreds of early 20th-century postcards, films, brochures, advertisements, and other objects now on display in the online archive.

“What a lot of people have in their minds about prewar Japan is rising fascism,” Bernardi says. “And yes, there was that. But there was also a very vibrant popular culture.”

The archive can be visited at http://humanities.lib.rochester.edu/rej.

—Bob Marcotte

Living Well in the Dying Light

Talking with patients about what’s important to them is the key to palliative care.

Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

COMMUNICATOR: Norton cochairs a national task force to identify quality measures to improve practices in palliative care. (Photo: Medical Center)

How can clinicians best care for patients nearing the end of life? Sally Norton is the inaugural Independence Chair in Nursing and Palliative Care. A faculty member at the School of Nursing since 2001, Norton has secondary appointments in the Departments of Family Medicine and Medical Humanities at the School of Medicine and Dentistry.

When and how should clinicians start an end-of-life conversation?

Some people think it’s never too early to start these conversations. For clinicians, I think it’s when somebody has a serious progressive illness and the treatments that are available become increasingly burdensome, to the point where the burdens may begin to outweigh any benefits.

Some people will want to continue treatments that may have even a little bit of benefit, and they’ll tolerate a lot of burden. Other people may say, “I don’t want all this burdensome treatment that makes me feel terrible. I would rather have a shorter amount of time where I feel better.” The opportunity to make that choice is predicated on thoughtful and informed conversations.

When the conversation begins, it’s essential first to try to find out what the patient understands about what’s going on now. Clinicians have to strike a fine balance between spending a lot of time talking in their comfort zone, which is their area of expertise, and checking in with the patient and family about what they understand. We can think that we’re communicating really well, but not really have the other half of that equation. If you leap right in to your own understanding of what patients might need, it can be really far off the mark.

What’s the role of the palliative care clinician?

Palliative care clinicians focus on what’s most important to you: what symptoms bother you the most; how can we help improve the quality of your life; and what would quality of life look like for you? Patients who receive palliative care may still receive active treatment to prolong life.

One thing palliative care clinicians might do is help people establish goals for care. Or reestablish goals for care if the conditions change. Sometimes people have this idea that they’re going to do this treatment, and their goal is it will cure their disease. When it becomes increasingly clear that the treatment isn’t going to cure the disease, then the clinician has to help the patient understand that they aren’t going to get the outcome they’d hoped for. So they help the patient to see “Here are the outcomes that are clinically feasible, given where you are now.” Often that means: what’s important to them, what treatments are available, what are the side effects? And what are their goals? Do they have short-term timelines that they really want to meet, that they would tolerate some pretty high-burden, low-efficacy treatments for? Or not?

What’s the state of quality and access to palliative care?

Right now there’s a lot of variation nationally. Every patient deserves the best care we can provide. We’ve made tremendous progress recently through a project called Measuring What Matters, which I cochair. It’s a joint task force between the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine and the Hospice and Palliative Nurses Association. We’ve identified a set of quality measures that are meaningful to patients and families, and that will allow us to benchmark, evaluate, and improve our practices across all settings that deliver palliative care. Those standards are rolling out now.

Rochester is really an epicenter of research and clinical practice in palliative care. Right now, we’re implementing palliative care teams in nursing homes, trying to figure out what helps it be successful and what barriers get in the way. We’re doing amazing work in communication. We have an incredible web of investigators and clinicians who work together quite well.

We think of best-case scenarios in terms of cures. What’s a best-case scenario for a palliative care patient? The best case scenario is that people receive the best treatment to provide the highest quality of life possible.

I’ve seen people who didn’t want to live any longer get wonderful treatment of their pains and symptoms. All of a sudden, they start making different choices. They might start eating. You see the world differently when your symptoms are addressed.

Some of the earliest successes are in Oregon, where I did my postdoc. Partly, it was because they passed the Death With Dignity Act. It caused clinicians to say, “We don’t want people to choose to end their own lives because we’re not doing a good job managing their symptoms.” So you saw a real shift in Oregon toward some of the most progressive palliative care in the nation. There was an increase in the percentage of patients who died at home, who died with home hospice, and a tremendous decrease in deaths in the hospital among certain subpopulations. And a miniscule number of people who actually went through with the Death With Dignity assisted suicide protocol.

Cloak and Mirrors

Looking behind the invisibility-producing ‘Rochester Cloak.’

(Illustration: Steve Boerner)

The “Rochester Cloak” was all over the news in the fall. A simple invention that uses four lenses to hide objects from view—reminiscent of the invisibility cloak J. K. Rowling dreamed up for Harry Potter—the cloak is excitingly new while simultaneously tapping into ancient longings.

“The desire to be invisible has been around for thousands of years. The Greeks had it, and it’s been part of popular stories for centuries. Invisibility is just fun to think about,” says John Howell, professor of physics.

The cloak developed by Howell and doctoral student Joseph Choi uses ordinary lenses to hide an object from a range of angles. Director of the Center for Coherence and Quantum Optics, Howell is at the helm of several funded research projects on subjects from cold atoms to quantum imaging to slow light. But the simple, unfunded projects on cloaking have captured a lot of people’s imaginations.

He first started thinking about cloaking while on sabbatical three years ago, when he came across a paper by a group of Cornell researchers on temporal cloaking, or hiding an event in time. “And when I saw their experimental layout, I realized there were really simple ways to think about cloaking in space, not just in time,” he says.

One way was so simple that he and his sons built it at home using two L-shaped fish tanks they fashioned out of plexiglass. “When you look into a fish tank, you see all kinds of optical illusions,” he says. “You can see the same fish twice—but with an L-shaped tank, if you look in the right place, you can see the fish disappear.” Using two such tanks, Howell and his sons created a device that cloaks the object in between them. Then they started experimenting with lenses and mirrors, doing a playful demonstration of principles involved in cloaking and creating the kind of optical illusion magicians have used for centuries. “But the thing that was always limiting in those situations is, it pretty much only worked if you looked in a single direction. If you moved to one side or the other, then the optical illusion went away.” Howell and Choi set their sights a little higher, but not so high as the kind of device that would make an object invisible from any vantage point, like the fictional Harry Potter’s cloak—or wearable, come to that. “We wanted to solve a simpler problem—we call it multidirectional rather than omnidirectional.”

Howell and Choi created a mathematical formula in which they can replace a volume of space with a set of optical instruments that behave exactly as a volume of space would. “So you think light has gone in a straight line—in other words, it satisfies all your deep intuitions about how light should behave, except that light’s not behaving that way,” says Howell. “The lenses have exactly the same mathematical properties as light propagating through space, and so it’s as if the lenses aren’t there.”

He says he can imagine many applications for such a cloaking device, from giving surgeons unobstructed views to eliminating blind spots for drivers, but adds that the project has been “mostly for fun, low-tech fun.” Nevertheless, it has been intriguing enough that he and Choi are continuing to hone their cloaking technique.

“A physicist likes to answer open questions,” says Howell. “And there’s been a long-running open question about whether you can achieve broadband—covering all the spectrum of physical light—omnidirectional invisibility: no matter how you look at it, it’s invisible. There are some good arguments for saying that might not be possible. But what we’re saying is, OK, that’s a hard problem—but can I solve a simpler problem? Can I have broadband multidirectional invisibility? And we believe the answer to that is yes. In how many directions is still an open question.”

“Just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be studied,” says Howell. “We study things that are a lot harder—and those are fun, too.”

—Kathleen McGarvey

Data Science Initiative Receives $3 Million

LEADING SUPPORTERS: Robin and Tim Wentworth (Photo: University Advancement)

A $3 million commitment from University Trustee Tim Wentworth and his wife, Robin, will endow the directorship of the Institute for Data Science, part of a strategic priority to greatly expand the University’s work in the burgeoning field of data science. As a centerpiece of the University’s current five-year strategic plan and a top priority of the $1.2 billion goal of The Meliora Challenge, the data science initiative features the construction of a new building to house the institute, as well as support for new faculty members with expertise in the field.

The parents of a current Rochester student and an alumna, the Wentworths have also been key supporters of Raymond F. LeChase Hall, the new home of the Warner School of Education. The Wentworth Atrium in LeChase Hall is named in recognition of their support.

University Earns Reaccreditation

The University has earned reaccreditation from the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. One of six regional accrediting associations in the country, the commission every 10 years reviews member institutions to ensure compliance with standards of accreditation and characteristics of excellence in higher education.

As part of the process, the University completed an extensive institutional self-study, and members of the accreditation team interviewed trustees, University leaders, faculty, staff, and students.

A steering committee cochaired by Richard Feldman, dean of the College, and Donna Brink Fox, senior associate dean of academic and student affairs at the Eastman School, guided the effort.

The commission’s report is available here: http://www.rochester.edu/provost/middlestates/index.html.

The self-study can be read here: http://internal.rochester.edu/provost/middlestates/SelfStudy.pdf.

INCUBATION: High Tech Rochester, a University-affiliated start-up incubator, will move to new space (shown here in an architect’s rendering) in the former Sibley building in downtown Rochester. (Photo: Courtesy of HTR/TAT Architectural Team)

Business Incubator Moves Downtown

A University-affiliated program designed to help foster the growth of high-tech start-up companies is moving to the Sibley Building in downtown Rochester. The new $24 million facility for High Tech Rochester (HTR)—the region’s only state- and federally designated incubator—will serve as the cornerstone of the city’s new innovation zone.

The new facility is possible due to support from New York State. In December, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Regional Economic Development Council initiative awarded HTR $5 million, for a total of more than $10 million over the last four years.

The funding will support the creation of the Finger Lakes Business Accelerator Cooperative, which is led by HTR in partnership with RIT, Excell Partners, and the region’s Small Business Development Centers and Industrial Development Agencies. The Center for Governmental Research projects the accelerator could create 1,000 jobs over the next five years.

HTR will relocate to the facility when construction is completed next year.

College Access Innovator to Deliver Commencement Address

The founder of one of the country’s most comprehensive college access and readiness programs for urban high school students is scheduled to deliver the 165th commencement address this spring.

Deborah Bial, the president of the Posse Foundation, will address the members of the College Class of 2015 during the Arts, Sciences & Engineering ceremony on May 17.

Founded in 1989 in New York City, the foundation sends cohorts of 10 high-achieving students together as a group to selective colleges and universities, including Rochester, where this year’s freshman class included a cohort from the Washington, D. C., area. Rochester committed full-tuition, merit scholarships to the students as part of the program.

An expert in education and leadership development, Bial has earned national recognition, including a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 2007.

Additional information about commencement activities is available at http://www.rochester.edu/commencement. The May ceremony will be webstreamed live.

GUEST: MLK speaker Khalil Gibran Muhammad meets with student leaders before the annual address. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

MLK Speaker: History Is a ‘Matter of Life and Death’

The nation should guard against turning the “unconventional” Martin Luther King Jr. into “a conventional legacy.” That was a message from Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, who delivered this year’s Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Address.

A former member of the history faculty at Indiana University, Muhammad since 2011 has directed the Schomburg Center, an archive repository for information on people of African descent worldwide. The author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, in which he explores the roots of the popular conception of black criminality in America, he has been widely called upon to discuss the lives of African-American men, including Trayvon Martin in Florida, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Eric Garner in New York City, and Tamir Rice in Cleveland, and others whose deaths have made national headlines.

In his speech, Muhammad said that King’s legacy is in danger of becoming “family-friendly programming of our history.” He went on to ask, “Are Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice the harvest of our collective unwillingness to confront the past?” History, he noted, “is an essential tool of empowerment. It is a matter of life and death.”

The culmination of a weeklong celebration of King’s life and the kick-off for Black History Month, the address is cosponsored by the Office of Minority Student Affairs and the Office of the President.

Medical Center Names New Chief Financial Officer

A financial manager with more than three decades of experience in academic medicine is the new chief financial officer at the Medical Center.

David Kirshner, who is credited with engineering a financial turnaround at Boston’s Children’s Hospital, succeeds Michael Goonan, who retired in December. During a 15-year tenure at the primary pediatric teaching affiliate of the Harvard Medical School, Kirshner worked to improve credit ratings and implement financial information systems to improve forecasting and productivity and to reduce operating costs.

Most recently a vice president at the health care company Valence Health, he also was the founding director of an Atlanta-based consultancy specializing in academic medical centers.

RIVER CAMPUS LIBRARIES

Cataloging a Congressional Career

(Photo: Adam Fenster)

‘Soaking & Poking’: Scholars and political junkies interested in the U.S. Congress, congressional elections, and the personalities behind them have access to the work of Richard Fenno Jr., one of the nation’s leading political scientists. Working with a web-design firm founded by Steve Bennett ’73 and with Robert Sachs ’70, who with Fenno started the University’s Washington Semester Program in 1968, River Campus Libraries has launched a website, www.richardfenno.com, that showcases Fenno’s national stature in political science as well as his 50-plus-year tenure on Rochester’s faculty. Known for what he called his “soak and poke” approach, Fenno was regularly given behind-the-scenes access to candidates and elected officials, drawing on those experiences to explore the lives of politicians and the nation’s political institutions in more than a dozen books and other publications. Now holding the rank of Distinguished University Professor Emeritus, Fenno marked 50 years of teaching in 2007.

GLOBAL ROCHESTER: PERU

An engineer takes part in ‘a cultural project of the highest kind’

AT WORK: Perucchio (second from left) and Peruvian colleagues measure the dynamic response of adobe walls in Huaca de la Luna. (Photo: Courtesy of Renato Perucchio )

In northern Peru stands a monument at the core of the vanished Moche civilization. Huaca de la Luna—or Temple of the Moon—is a vast pyramid built alongside a volcanic mountain, Cerro Blanco. It is part of a complex of ruins near Trujillo that forms what Renato Perucchio calls “the Rome of the Moche civilization.”

Since 2010, the professor of mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering has been part of a team of engineers who are working with archaeologists and architectural conservationists to protect the structures. The pyramids are made of adobe, which “can be very easily damaged by the torrential rains produced by El Niño and by earthquakes,” Perucchio says. Huaca de la Luna “is a very fragile monument—it’s essentially just mud.”

The Moche civilization developed approximately at the time of the beginning of the Christian era, and ended around 850 CE. Since 1992, the site has been the focus of an extensive archaeological project sponsored by the Peruvian government. The project has three components: archaeological study, conservation, and involving the local population in maintaining its cultural heritage.

In the field, Perucchio and fellow engineers have carried out studies to model the pyramid’s response in case of an earthquake. It is multidisciplinary research. Cynthia Ebinger, professor of earth and environmental sciences, has visited the site to do geophysical prospection of the area. Spaniards cut slices through the structure in their hunt for treasure, and those cuts, too, affect how the structure will respond to seismic activity. Working with Benjamin Castañeda ’09 (PhD), a specialist in image processing and now associate professor of electronic and electrical engineering at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, or PUCP, the team has created models that accurately reflect the current state of the structure.

Rochester has a collaboration agreement with PUCP that provides for Peruvian faculty to visit Rochester each fall, teaching courses in the Archaeology, Technology and Historical Structures program. There is also a student exchange that runs in both directions. Such collaborations, Perucchio says, have stimulated research projects, including another project near Cuzco, where Perucchio and other team members are studying “baroque Andean” churches built by the Spaniards atop Incan temples. Their interiors are filled with paintings and frescoes—and, like the pyramids, they’re built close to an active seismic area. Much of the restoration of the churches has been aimed at the artistic surfaces. About two years ago, Perucchio and his Peruvian colleague Rafael Aguilar, associate professor of civil engineering at PUCP, began to analyze one of the churches following a procedure virtually identical to what they’ve used at Huaca de la Luna. Based on their preliminary results, PUCP has granted them funds to continue their studies.

An irony of archaeological work is that as it exposes lost structures to study—for example, at Huaca de la Luna, bas-relief carvings, once covered by sand, that tell the creation story of a culture that left no written record—their very exposure begins their deterioration. “In order to acquire knowledge we risk the destruction of the structure,” he says.

But the work of the engineers aims toward preservation. Says Perucchio, “I feel particularly satisfied that I’m giving my contribution to the conservation of a spectacular example of a culture that flourished in Peru and could easily vanish.”

—Kathleen McGarvey

People

- 23 alumni living in Peru

- 11 current students from Peru

- 1 student Fulbright recipient

- 44 study abroad students since 2001

- 3 exchange students from Peru in 2014, part of an exchange agreement begun in 2000

Curt Cadorette, the John Henry Newman Associate Professor of Catholic Studies, is an expert on religion in Peru and created a long-standing program for students to visit the country.

Carmala Garzione, professor and chair of earth and environmental sciences, works in the central Andes of Peru and Bolivia to study the geodynamic processes involved in raising the Andean plateau.

Lynne Massaro, assistant professor of clinical nursing, takes nursing students to Peru for a capstone project.

ATHLETICS

The International Flavor of Squash

With 11 players from seven different countries, Rochester’s squash team boasts student-athletes from around the world.

By Ben Shapiro ’16

WORLD COURT: All-Americans Ryosei Kobayashi ’16 (left), Mario Yanez-Tapia ’16 (top right), and Neil Cordell ’15 have helped lead a squash team whose roster includes Yellowjackets from seven countries. (Photo: Athletics and Recreation)

The racquet sport of squash—played by two or four players in a four-walled court with a small, hollow rubber ball—was invented in 1830 at a British prep school. From there, squash expanded throughout the British Empire and to the rest of the world.

Today, the sport’s world rankings feature players from Egypt to Germany, Colombia to Malaysia.

Rochester’s current squash team also reflects the sport’s global status. Here’s a look at a few of their stories:

United by a Common Sport

An upstate New York university may seem like an unusual choice for a native of Great Britain, but world travels are nothing new to Neil Cordell ’15.

At 13, Cordell left England for his first international event, an under-15 tournament in Belgium. Over the next several years, he traveled throughout Europe and to places as far as California, Israel, and Qatar.

Such travel proved necessary. As one of England’s best players, there were few area competitors to challenge Cordell. He eventually transitioned from international junior tournaments to professional events.

After experiencing life on the road as a squash player, the idea of continuing his career at an American university appealed to Cordell. He contacted fellow squash players who had attended Rochester. They put him in touch with head coach Martin Heath. Heath

was so enthusiastic about Cordell coming to Rochester that Cordell says he didn’t look at other universities.

Now in his third year as a Yellowjacket, Cordell continues his success on the court. He earned All-American honors as a freshman and sophomore, and ranked seventh nationally last year after notching 14 wins during the season.

Opening Doors at Home and Abroad

Formerly the top-ranked junior player in his native Mexico, Mario Yanez-Tapia ’16 credits squash with enabling him to see the world and meet new people. At a tournament in Canada, he met Heath.

Yanez-Tapia had not considered attending college in the U.S. He reconsidered after learning about the academic and athletic opportunities. While top squash teams—including traditional powerhouses like Harvard and Trinity—actively recruited him, Rochester was the best fit.

Now Yanez-Tapia is part of the Yellowjacket team, an adjustment for him since squash is largely an individual sport. Overall, it’s been a positive change. “I think it’s better to train as a team,” he says, noting that practicing with a tight-knit group creates extra motivation to work hard.

That practice is paying off. Yanez-Tapia is an All-American and Rochester’s current top player. He amassed a record of 28–4 and earned a top 10 national ranking in his first year and a half as a Yellowjacket.

All in the Family

More than a decade ago, the racquetball-playing father of Ryosei Kobayashi ’16 wanted to familiarize his then seven-year-old son with racquet sports. Instead of racquetball, the two played a game of squash.

That was the first step in a successful athletic career for the sophomore All-American who is currently ranked 11th nationally by the College Squash Association.

Rather than seeing squash as a niche sport, “my dad thought squash had more opportunities to go higher,” says Kobayashi. Since racquetball is not a collegiate varsity sport—and high-level competitions are few and far between—Kobayashi knew he would have to work hard, something he was more than willing to do. After school, he traveled an hour by train to a squash club, where he practiced for five hours a day.

Kobayashi supplemented his training with competitions throughout Asia, in places such as Hong Kong and Malaysia. One of his most important trips came at age 17. He traveled to the U.S. for the first time to participate in a tournament at Harvard.

It was there that college squash in the States became an option. Coaches from the top squash programs in the country, including Heath, spoke with Kobayashi.

Several schools vied for the top-ranked Japanese junior, but Rochester proved the right fit. “I was interested in business, and at the same time I wanted to play squash seriously. Rochester was the best option for me.”

In many ways, Kobayashi’s rationale for choosing Rochester echoes his father’s thinking about squash all those years ago: “I thought coming here would give me an advantage for the future.”

Ben Shapiro ’16 is an athletic communications assistant for the Department of Athletics and Recreation.

HIGHLIGHTS

A Winter Roundup . . .

PACESETTER: With a time of 1:14.92, Becky Galasso ’15 (T5) had recorded the fastest 500-meter run in Division III as of mid-February. (Photo: Athletics and Recreation)

The women’s swimming and diving team produced six NCAA provisional qualifying times and three school records at the UAA championships at Emory. Rochester finished sixth out of eight teams.

Men’s swimming and diving rewrote some records as well. The Yellowjackets had six NCAA provisional qualifying results and broke five school records at UAAs. UR finished seventh out of eight teams.

Women’s basketball produced one of its biggest wins of the season, a 76–75 decision over Washington University in the Palestra. The Bears were ranked No. 7 nationally entering the game and were tied for first place in the UAA. The win assured Rochester of a winning season (13–9 with three games left). Two freshmen combined for 42 points and 26 rebounds to lead the way.

Over a three-week stretch in mid-winter, the men’s basketball team won five of six games to climb within one game of first place in the UAA standings. With two weeks left in the season, Rochester was the only UAA men’s team to sweep both games in a UAA road trip.

In the Boston area, the men’s indoor track & field team’s distance medley relay broke a 36-year-old record running at the Boston University Valentine Invitational.

The women’s track and field team broke four school records. Between them, the men and women had more than eight ECAC qualifying performances. Becky Galasso ’15 (T5) finished 12th among collegians in the 500-meter run at Boston. Her time was the fastest in all of Division III when the meet ended.

Squash finished 12–5 and fifth overall at the College Squash Association championships. The Yellowjackets lost an opening match to Harvard, 5–4, but bounced back to defeat Franklin & Marshall and Yale, both of whom defeated Rochester in the regular season. The Yellowjackets defeated two top-ranked teams during the season—Harvard and Trinity—both by scores of 5–4.

. . . and a Spring Preview

The spring holds promise for a number of athletic teams. Softball is ranked No. 10 in a preseason poll by the National Fastpitch Coaches Association . . . The baseball team is touted by D3baseball.com as a strong contender for the Liberty League title and an NCAA bid . . . Lacrosse has a strong cast of veterans returning from a team that was ranked highly in Division III in turnovers caused and fewest goals allowed per game . . . The golf team has a chance to secure its second straight NCAA bid when the Yellowjackets host the Liberty League championships at Locust Hill Country Club . . . Rowing will compete in the Liberty League championships as part of an ambitious spring schedule . . . Men’s and women’s tennis will each play four UAA opponents before competing in the UAA championships in Florida in late April . . . The men’s and women’s outdoor track and field teams will look to carry over success from the winter season, hosting the Alumni Invitational on April 4 and the New York State Collegiate Track Conference’s multi-event championship, April 26–27.r

—Dennis O’Donnell

What Is the Value of a Rochester Education?

The University begins a project to analyze its ‘value proposition.’

By Scott Hauser

(Photo: Steve Boerner (photo illustration); Ken Huth (original photo))

Chris Antola ’98, ’05S (MBA) would be the first to admit that he didn’t really know what he was going to get from spending four years at Rochester. When he sent off the paperwork for admission from his home in Los Angeles, all he knew was that the University was well regarded academically, seemed to offer a lot of opportunity for students to get involved with campus life, and was small enough that he would be able to interact closely with his professors.

“I had no idea what I wanted to do when I went to the U of R,” says Antola, who today is senior vice president of strategic programming at FX Networks, the entertainment cable TV networks owned by Fox. “I remember sitting around my family dining room here in LA, and on the application they asked what you wanted to major in, and I hadn’t the faintest clue. I figured I would go to Rochester and experience as much as I could and try to hone in on what I wanted to do with my life.”

Once on campus, he crammed in as much as he could: after taking classes with Tom DiPiero, then the chair of the modern languages department, Antola eventually decided on a French major and completed a journalism and psychology minor as well as a business certificate. Equally important for him, though, he was a production control manager and a DJ at WRUR, he wrote for the Campus Times, he studied abroad in France, he took classes at Eastman and Simon, and he was a Take Five scholar, completing a project with ethnomusicologist Ellen Koskoff at the Eastman School of Music. He returned in 2003 to get an MBA from the Simon Business School.

“When you’re an undergrad, that’s really a key period of your life. It’s four years when you grow probably more than you did in the previous 10. And being in an environment where you’re surrounded by smart people and given access to opportunities and experiences that shape your life—it’s hard to argue against the value of that.”

Antola’s experience is the kind of story that warms a dean’s heart. It’s almost axiomatic among academics, higher education administrators, and many graduates of liberal arts programs that such an investment of time, effort, and money is well “worth it,” “invaluable,” “life-changing,” enriching the career opportunities and the life satisfaction of individual students.

Steeped in the traditional ethos of the liberal arts, Rochester’s curriculum and programs are designed to offer students a broad-based academic grounding in critical reasoning, problem analysis, and the ability to communicate effectively, coupled with the personal and social skills that are sharpened from engaging intellectually and socially with a talented group of peers.

But the value of spending four years studying at a liberal arts– oriented institution has come under increasing scrutiny in the post–Great Recession era of the 21st century. In political circles, President Barack Obama has launched an effort to develop a federal system to rank the nation’s higher education programs while the governors of North Carolina, Louisiana, Wisconsin, and other states have publicly questioned whether taxpayers should support higher education programs that can’t demonstrate they result in jobs for graduates.

Elsewhere, there’s been a steady rise in calls from technology-enthusiasts that higher education is ripe for “disruption,” giving the impression that MOOCs (massive open online courses) and other online “delivery systems,” for-profit institutions, and a narrow focus on credentialing represent the future of higher education.

Given all that, it’s easy to feel as if a liberal education is under siege.

That’s not entirely mistaken, says Debra Humphreys of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, a national consortium, which includes Rochester and that dedicates itself to “the quality, vitality, and public standing of undergraduate liberal education.”

“Since the economic downturn and since the contraction of available public monies to invest in public education—as states have faced serious budget shortfalls, higher education is an area where people have narrowed their vision and talked about [education] in terms only of workforce development,” she says. “I think that trend is dangerous—both for our democracy and frankly for the very economic vitality that we need to bring the tax revenues back up again.

“What we’ve seen consistently in our own research and in the broader economic research is that we actually don’t need narrow training. We need more liberally educated graduates with higher and higher levels of capacity. This society and this economy are demanding that. Misguided policy pronouncements about the need for training and a pulling back from a long-standing tradition of providing and expanding the opportunities for more and more students to get a broad liberal education—I think that that’s very short-sighted.”

So how can universities like Rochester articulate their “value proposition,” as the entrepreneurs would say? Is a liberal education a financial investment that “pays off” over time? Is it worth going into debt for? Is it a time to discover intellectual passions regardless of a particular job goal? Is it a proving ground for developing the personal and social skills required in a diverse democratic society? All of the above? More of one than another?

While such questions play out on a national level, Provost Peter Lennie says understanding how Rochester has influenced—and continues to influence—the lives of its students, their families, and the social fabric of the country is increasingly important. A robust understanding of that influence can help faculty, students, alumni, and parents understand how Rochester graduates not only advance professionally but also how their interaction with Rochester has enriched their lives in other important ways. The information also could help academic leaders enhance the University’s programs, strengthen admissions, advising, and career initiatives, and feed back into the College’s cocurricular opportunities.

“These are extremely important issues as we look toward the future of the University,” Lennie says. “Having a more robust sense of what our alumni value about their experience here, how we helped shape their lives, how they think we can do better, and how we can draw on their life experience will help us better demonstrate the value of a Rochester education.”

Beginning this spring, Lennie is leading a project to survey alumni who earned undergraduate degrees from Arts, Sciences & Engineering about their experience at Rochester. Hoping to capture both quantitative and qualitative information, the goal is to build a more complete picture than earlier surveys have provided of Rochester, its alumni, and their lives after graduation. As the undergraduate effort is fine-tuned, the survey will be rolled out to other units of the University.

Since the University’s founding, a hallmark of Rochester’s educational experience has been a grounding in a broad spectrum of disciplines in the arts and sciences. In his 1854 inaugural address, the University’s first president, Martin Brewer Anderson, spoke on the theme of “The Ends and Means of Liberal Education.”

Writing in the early 1960s, historian Arthur May noted that while much of Anderson’s address was couched in the temper of his times, his comments “reflected the wisdom of the ages in the sphere of education and enshrined plain horse-sense, which is stable-mindedness. He developed at some length a doctrine later known as ‘Holism,’ that is, the training of youths for rounded careers during a half century or so of mature life, as distinguished from narrowly confined vocationalism, or ‘the mercantile point of view,’ in Anderson’s phrase. Decrying the prevalent American materialism, he pleaded, ‘Let us shape our educational system to make men.’ ”

More than 160 years later, Anderson would be surprised to learn how the Rochester student body has changed. About evenly divided between men and women, undergraduates represent every state in the country. About 12 percent are under-represented minorities, and about 20 percent come from nearly 100 countries outside the United States.

But the idea of giving students a broadly conceived liberal education remains very much intact. Under the Rochester Curriculum, introduced in the early 1990s, areas of study are divided into three major categories—natural sciences (including mathematics and engineering), social sciences, and the humanities. Students choose a discipline to major in, based on their primary academic interest, and choose two sets of three related courses—known as clusters—in each of the other two areas.

Combine the curriculum with a strong residential focus—nearly all students live on campus for at least two years and many live in University housing for all of their four years at Rochester—and Rochester becomes a “life-changing” experience for students, says Richard Feldman, dean of the College and a professor of philosophy.

“What was true and remains true is this: if you assemble 5,000 or so bright, inquisitive undergraduates and get them into a community and get them to interact with one another, what they will learn from one another, what they will cause one another to learn, what they will inspire in others is a terrific experience. And it would be missed if we didn’t have a residential college and if we didn’t have the sense of community that we have. That’s a great strength.

“When you add to it the diversity of the College, the range of interests, the backgrounds of the student body, and you think about the world that students will be graduating into—that’s something special that we’re able to provide. That makes it, for me, vital that we do everything that we can to promote those valuable interactions among students.”

Feldman says he’s confident that most alumni would say that they have been successful over the long arc of their lives, but he’s particularly curious about those who have graduated over the past 10 to 25 years. He and other College leaders know that student interests (and those of their parents) have shifted in recent years, leaning toward science and engineering and away from the humanities, but he says having an up-to-date picture will guide strategic decisions about how to improve both academic and nonacademic programs.

“I’m not looking to discourage students from choosing a major in any particular discipline,” Feldman says. “I’m looking to arm our departments with information about what students who study in their fields can do after graduation.”

Knowing more about how the career paths of alumni—whether they pursued other educational opportunities to achieve their goals, for example—could be helpful in enhancing majors and in helping guide current students to develop a combination of interests, skills, and abilities that will serve them better, Feldman says.

Al Robinson ’04 can vouch for that kind of combination. Now an investment manager for a private insurance company in London, Robinson was a double major in religion and computer science.

While he says that having a computer science degree is “sort of a lifelong ticket to a job,” his major in religion was the “life-changing” experience for him.

One of his first classes as a freshman was Emil Homerin’s course, History of Islam. “This was before 9/11,” he says. “I knew nothing about Islam, and I thought, I’m in college now and this is exactly what you’re supposed to be doing: learning about stuff that you would never in a million years hear about in high school.”

The course—not to mention Homerin and his colleagues in the Department of Religion and Classics—was so compelling that he took several other classes in the department and declared a major.

As a religion major, he was introduced to a like-minded corps of fellow student scholars, almost all of whom had a second major in another field, and all of whom were excited about intellectual discovery.

“For me, that became a core part of my experience at the University—getting that much social exposure to people who were doing all sorts of different things but who were also very interested in a common topic,” Robinson says. “That was really cool. It’s just such an unexpected thing. The problem is that I can see that it’s not something you can easily market to people.”

Sara Nainzadeh ’99, a portfolio manager for a New York City investment firm, says it would be a shame if current and future generations of students shied away from a liberal arts education because they were concerned about the marketability of their degrees.

An English major at Rochester who did a Take Five project combining economics, finance, biology, and English courses, she says students have little sense for the wide range of opportunities that will be available to them after graduation. Having a rigorous liberal arts background provides not only perspective and analytical skills but also enhances the ability to adapt and be flexible, depending on their professional and personal circumstances, she says.

“Most of the English classes I took had nothing to do with making money, which may be ironic,” Nainzadeh says. “But they helped me develop my own perspective on what I was doing in life. And that’s what differentiates you in the market. You have to be able to dive into something and do a deep investigation and be able to appreciate it from different points of view. If you can find perspectives that are different from those of others, you can be one step ahead.”

Kenneth Gross, professor of English, says such stories can be gratifying for faculty in the humanities. Faculty hope that students discover that their intellectual interests will prepare them for satisfying lives and careers, but they often have little more than anecdotal evidence to support it.

That’s why in 2012, he asked about 2,000 graduates to reflect on how their work as English majors stayed with them in later life. Gross, who was then director of undergraduate studies for the English department, is careful to point out that his project was not intended to collect statistical data. He wanted information and details but also, as a literature professor would, he wanted to hear the stories of the department’s graduates.

About 200 graduates have responded so far, representing a wide range of occupations. They included alumni in fields connected to literature, such as teachers, professors, writers, editors, and others in media, as well as those in finance, medicine, engineering, law, public policy and service, business, manufacturing, and other areas.

None of them answered the survey strictly in terms of financial success. Instead, Gross says, they spoke with energy of how their study of literature increased their powers to think and speak, to write fluently, and to imagine in ways that enhanced their lives and careers. They credited their studies with helping them analyze people’s words and arguments, but also to sympathize, and to help them understand better the difficult issues faced by employers, colleagues, and families.

“It was moving to read,” Gross says. “No matter what they did after graduating, they saw in their lives, in their relationships, in their career choices, a connection to their work as English majors. They were very alive to what their time at Rochester did for them.”

Jonathan Burdick, dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, says prospective students and their parents continue to value a residential college experience.

The curriculum, in particular, has enormous appeal among incoming students because, in many ways, current undergraduates approach college much as graduate students did 25 years ago.

“They have a pretty good idea of what they want to study, they know where they want to go with their education, and they’re happy if we stay out of the way,” Burdick says. And most, he says, expect that they will need further education—whether formally in graduate school or in other venues—to achieve their goals over the course of their lives.

That requires thinking of education with a broad perspective, Burdick says, and while institutions like Rochester need to be nimble and open to new ideas, the core appeal of the best institutions remains intact. “Students want to be with their peers and be in a learning community,” says Burdick.

Having that small, connected community was important to Nainzadeh.

“People [at Rochester] really do care about you,” she says. “It’s big enough where you can meet a lot of different people and still have the sense that there is a lot of opportunity for you to take advantage of. At the same time, it’s small enough where you can stand out. You can pursue almost any avenue that you want to. It’s all at your fingertips.”

Providing that community is expensive, a point not lost on those who have higher education in their political and policy crosshairs. At Rochester the average undergraduate tuition bill was $46,150 for 2014–15, a sticker price that for many students is offset by financial aid and assistance from Rochester’s endowment, donor-supported scholarship programs, and other funding sources.

But, counter advocates for liberal education, the cost is worth the investment on behalf of students and their families, as well state and federal programs. As Humphreys of the Association of American Colleges and Universities notes, many colleges provide students a quality liberal education at lower tuition costs than Rochester, but it’s incumbent on each institution to make clear how students come out ahead in the long run.

“All the economic data suggest that individually if you get a college degree, it pays off dramatically,” she says. “Even if you borrow some money to do it. In the sheer dollars-and-cents analysis, there’s no question that it’s a good investment of individual time and money. A place like Rochester can certainly point to its graduates’ success and say not only is it valuable to get an undergraduate degree in general, but also getting a degree from a place like Rochester is going to set yourself up even more dramatically for success in a knowledge economy.”

Antola is willing to attest to that.

“I look back and I feel a little guilty that I didn’t apply at the UC schools that would have cost my parents a lot less, but I think you get a lot more out of a Rochester education than you would elsewhere,” he says. “When I was applying to business schools, which was on my own dime, I chose Rochester again for the exact same reason. I knew the place. I knew the players. I knew the ease of access to everything that you want to do. It’s relevant to real-world learning processes—to figure out what you want to do as much as what you don’t want to do. And how, through those experiences, to tailor your education to achieve the goals that you set for yourself.”

Those goals and those interests change over time, he says. But the value of a Rochester experience has not.

“I look back on my experiences there—and the farther I get away from my graduation in 1998—the more I look back, the more I realize that it was a great experience, and the resources that I had access to were amazing. To me, the true value of a Rochester education is above and beyond what you do in the classroom.”

College Graduates, Watch Your Email

A University project to survey alumni who hold undergraduate degrees from Arts, Sciences & Engineering is scheduled to begin in March.

A randomly selected sample of graduates will receive the survey by email, with directions to an online instrument, where recipients will be asked to answer several questions about their Rochester experience.

The survey will include prompts for traditional quantitative and demographic information as well as questions intended to elicit qualitative information about professional and career achievements, personal fulfillment, social engagement, and other topics.

A report based on the results is expected to be completed later this spring.

Working Class Heroes

What’s a uniquely American model for success? To work hard, rise, and give back. Bob Goergen ’60 and Ed Hajim ’58 receive national honors for doing just that.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

UPWARD BOUND: As college students, Hajim (left) and Goergen were recognized campus leaders. In business, both would continue to distinguish themselves through leadership. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

Bob Goergen ’60 and Ed Hajim ’58 were just boys when an obscure school counselor named Kenneth Beebe decided young people needed more encouragement to grasp at the American dream. It was just after World War II, and Beebe, an admirer of the works of Horatio Alger, decided as an incentive to young Americans to present awards to two young men whom he believed embodied the rags-to-riches success stories that the 19th-century children’s writer had celebrated in his popular novels.

Beebe’s program grew, and each year since 1947, the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans inducts a select few business and civic leaders. All come from humble circumstances, and all are eager to reward hard work and character in those who begin their lives with few other advantages.

In the past two years, Goergen and Hajim—both University trustees (past and current chair of the board, respectively) and among the most generous supporters of the University since George Eastman and Joe Wilson ’31—have been winners of the Horatio Alger Award.

The award isn’t merely a medal to hang on a wall and be admired. It comes with a duty. Though the heroes of Alger’s books are often recalled as scrappy and self-reliant individualists, in fact, the original Horatio Alger success stories required another kind of hero: the educated gentleman of means, who saw virtues in the young boy and decided to assist him on a path to the middle class.

Goergen and Hajim are modern exemplars of both heroes in this social contract. And their induction comes with the obligation to continue to offer financial support for young Americans vying for a higher education against great odds.

For Hajim, this makes his induction especially poignant.

“My emphasis over the last 25 or 30 years has been scholarships. And the main thrust of Horatio Alger is taking people with austerity in their background and giving them scholarships,” he says. “This changed my life, and in many respects, our interests are totally aligned.”

When Hajim was three, his parents divorced. His father took custody of him, and his mother disappeared from his life. But his father was in the Merchant Marine, away at sea except for short intervals at home. Hajim spent most of his childhood in foster homes and orphanages. “I was a one-man team,” he says.

Goergen was born in Buffalo to a young mother. The two were abandoned by Goergen’s father. His mother remarried, but the relationship was not a stable one. For a time, Goergen and his younger half-brother lived in foster care, and then with an aunt in Virginia. They returned to the Buffalo area, after which Goergen’s mother divorced and remarried again.

Despite her difficulties, Goergen’s mother was a stalwart source of emotional support for her sons and had high aspirations for them. “She always had in her mind that I would go to college,” says Goergen. In business, Goergen has

shown an aptitude for knowing how to create conditions in which employees can thrive. “I feel that most people don’t start out as superstars,” he once told Wharton Magazine. “So if you can channel them with a strategy and help them focus on certain goals, the chances of their becoming a superstar are much higher.”

With the public sector shrinking, and the reliance on philanthropy growing, the social compact Alger mythologized remains relevant. Both men are routinely asked to share their stories, and how their ability to overcome obstacles shapes their approach to their professional and personal lives today.

Bob Goergen ’60

Founder and executive chairman, Blyth Inc.

CALCULATED RISK-TAKER: As an investor, Goergen has excelled by identifying the diamonds in the rough passed up by firms looking for greater polish. (Photo: William Taufic)

> It’s good to work for an organization, but even better to create one.

Many young college graduates seek careers with big companies, thinking that size and stability go hand-in-hand—and not minding the prestige of a well-recognized organization, either.

Goergen believes these assumptions are often misguided.

“Large corporations don’t create jobs,” he says. “Large corporations eliminate jobs.”

Early in his career, Goergen left the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. It was a prestigious firm to work for, and its clients were major corporations. But he preferred small companies, and preferably ones in which he could hold a financial stake. He took a job with a venture capital firm Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette instead, and found his calling in identifying promising, but poorly run, small enterprises, which he could reorganize and build.

Goergen was among the first people to suggest that academic institutions could play a strategic role in fostering business creation. In 1997, he went to his graduate alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, and offered to endow a program in entrepreneurialism. For a school renowned for training generations of Fortune 500 leadership, the proposal was an unusual one. But Goergen’s offer was accepted, and since then, the Goergen Entrepreneurial Management Program has grown to offer more than 20 courses to about 2,000 students at any given time.

At Rochester, Goergen’s desire to foster business creation inspired him to contribute a lead gift for the creation of the Robert B. Goergen Hall for Biomedical Engineering and Optics. The building was designed as shared space for the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Institute for Optics to foster collaborations. It significantly increased available lab space and added demonstration rooms as well as a Center for Institute Ventures that puts faculty in contact with sources of venture capital.

> The STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—are essential for the country’s success. But these careers aren’t for everybody, and that’s OK.

Goergen studied physics at Rochester, graduating with honors. And to this day, he credits his study of physics with giving him “skills and discipline” that he’s applied to his business career. Yet he acknowledges that STEM isn’t for everybody, and his investment decisions demonstrate that there are plenty of opportunities for individuals outside those fields.

For example, his greatest business success is not in any high-tech enterprise, but in one of the oldest and lowest-tech industries around: candles. In the late 1970s, Goergen put $25,000 into a small, regional candle manufacturer based in Brooklyn. It was what’s called a “hobby investment”—one he pursued on his own, because it was too small to interest his private equity group. Through acquisitions and the development of new products, such as fragrance candles and an array of home décor products, he built the company, which he renamed Blyth Inc., into an international firm that surpassed $1 billion in annual sales in 2000. It took innovation, to be sure, but innovation in management and organization more than in science and technology. And because Blyth’s products are distributed through direct sales, it’s given thousands of individuals a chance to earn extra cash and test their mettle running their own small enterprises.

> Live by the words meliora, kaizen, and omphaloskepsis.

Goergen says he has encountered three words—one in Latin, another in Japanese, and a third in Greek—that sum up his approach to work and life.

Goergen and those closest to him say he can’t sit still. So it’s not surprising that the University’s motto Meliora—the Latin word that translates as “ever better”—would resonate with him. As much a concept as a word, it implies resistance to self-satisfaction. “Meliora means never being satisfied,” he says. “Whatever you’re doing, there’s always an opportunity to improve.”

Many entrepreneurs have big plans, but some can stumble when it comes to carrying them out. Entrepreneurs see themselves as bold, but caution is part of the mix as well. That’s where kaizen comes in. A concept Goergen encountered when he was reading about Japanese approaches to management, it means thoughtful, gradual change—or, says Goergen, when it comes to expansion, “Do it in steps you can manage. Don’t jump so far that you have to fall back.”

And there’s a time for reevaluation, too. Omphaloskepsis, Goergen says, “basically means, looking inward, seeing where your navel is taking you. And saying, is my navel taking me in the direction I want to go, or do I have to do something to improve my position in life?”

Bob Goergen ’60

Horatio Alger Class of 2014

BS, physics, cum laude

MBA, finance, University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business

University of Rochester trustee, 1982–present; chair, 1991–2003

Current Job: Founder and executive chairman, Blyth Inc. Past: principal partner, McKinsey & Company; managing general partner, Sprout Group (venture capital division) at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette; senior account executive, McCann-Erickson.

Philanthropic Highlights: University support totaling more than $30 million for undergraduate programs, the Institute for Data Science, the Goergen Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, renovation of the renamed Robert B. Goergen Athletic Center, and the creation of the Robert B. Goergen Hall for Biomedical Engineering and Optics. Goergen also endowed the Goergen Entrepreneurial Management Program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and is a donor to numerous organizations that support educational opportunities for underprivileged young people.

Ed Hajim ’58

President, Diker Management LLC

TEAM LEADER: Hajim, who began life as a “one-man team,” discovered his interest in working with people while a student at Rochester. He has led Rochester’s Board of Trustees since 2008. (Photo: Shannon Taggart for Rochester Review)

> Disadvantages can become advantages.

Looking back at his own life, Hajim likes to cite Malcolm Gladwell’s book David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. In it, Gladwell demonstrates the ways in which disadvantages can become advantages.

“If you have nobody, what do you develop? Self-reliance,” says Hajim. “If you have no means, you try to get means. All of a sudden these disadvantages as a child become advantages.”

Hajim says, candidly, that he’s really not sure how he overcame his circumstances. Part of it, he insists, was luck. “I look back at the places where I could have fallen off the cliff and never gotten back. Little things just turned in the right direction.” A big part of it was work and determination. “I was very driven,” he says, describing his work ethic when he was a youth.

When Hajim reached high school, he was lucky to be part of a community that allowed him to see greater possibilities ahead. At Roosevelt High School in Yonkers, New York, he recalls girlfriends and friends on the basketball court who were college bound. And the director of the orphanage he called home at the time was also a source of encouragement. “He had the mentality that everybody should go to college,” Hajim recalls.

By the time Hajim got to Rochester on a Naval ROTC scholarship, he had, by many measures “made it.” But being at a private college was a strange and unfamiliar experience for him, as it can be for many students from poor and working class backgrounds today.

“My first year was a very difficult social adjustment,” he says. “I was excited about what I was doing. But it was very hard because I was very different from everybody else.” But he’d developed a special skill from all the instability in his youth. He was used to figuring out how to adjust to new environments. “I had survived so much,” he says. “I wasn’t going to fail in this next adventure.”

> The best way to build an organization is to help people exceed their own goals.

Although he never lost his love for science and engineering, Hajim says that at Rochester, and later in the Navy, he found a new passion having to do more with people. “I found that I became fascinated with how to make organizations work, and how to assist people to accomplish more than they believed they could,” he says. He enrolled in Harvard Business School, where he had the chance to study organizations in a formal way. The goals of people who work in investment management are often assumed to be purely financial. But for Hajim, the fun is in the process—in creating the conditions to reach those goals. It’s an attitude he believes contributed significantly to his early success in investment management and later, to his ability to create winning teams at both E. F. Hutton and Lehman Brothers. “After getting my dream job as the chairman and CEO of a small investment bank, I really got a chance to put my strategy to work,” he says. “Over 14 years, I helped the firm to grow 10-fold in people and more in revenues and profits, at the same time that the industry lost half of the companies of similar size.” Hajim used a similar approach in the nonprofit sector. He became chair of the board of trustees at a local day school and president of the Harvard Business School alumni association. In the latter position, Hajim helped found the “Entrepreneurs Tool Kit,” which was used to develop several new initiatives for alumni. “My job as the chairman of the Board of Trustees at our University has been so rewarding,” he says, “since Meliora, ‘ever better,’ is what I’ve always believed in.”

> Define your “Four P’s”—passions, principles, partners, and plans.

When Hajim meets with his scholarship students, he says, “I give them a methodology that I hope will help them better plan their lives.” He calls it “the Four P’s.” “I tell them, ‘Find your passion(s), find your principles, find your partners, and finally, find your plans and your dreams.’”

“The University gives them a chance to test their passions and principles, and to understand how they will evolve. I push them to seek what really excites them, what makes them leap out of bed in the morning.” He believes in the saying, “If you love your work, you will never work.” He wants them to have as many experiences as they can, so they can test all or as many of the Four P’s as possible.

“It takes time and plenty of trials and errors to find your calling and to find out who you really are,” he says. Hajim encourages his scholarship students to change their majors if their interests are taking them in another direction. “I continue to use the Four P’s myself, and my involvement at the University has fulfilled one of my major plans, which was to find a way to give underprivileged students the same chance that I was given,” he says. He adds that one of his own principles is gratitude. “I feel I owe a great deal to so many people. I’ve long ceased to be a ‘one-man team.’ ”

Ed Hajim ’58

Horatio Alger Class of 2015

BS, chemical engineering

MBA, Harvard Business School

University of Rochester trustee, 1988–present; chair, 2008–present

Current Job: President, Diker Management LLC. Past: chairman and CEO, MLH Capital; chairman and CEO, ING Aeltus Group and ING Furman Selz Asset Management; cochairman for the Americas, ING Barings; senior manager at Lehman Brothers and E. F. Hutton.

Philanthropic Highlights: More than $30 million in University support for scholarships and the endowment of the Edmund A. Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences. Hajim has also granted scholarships to students at Harvard Business School, the University of Vermont, the University of Denver, Westchester Community College, the Brunswick School, and Middlesex School; and supported health services, arts, culture, conservation, preservation, and recreation on Nantucket Island.

Bringing University History to Life

A new online history project gives voice to Rochester’s past.

ave you ever wanted to peek behind the scenes of University history? Hear the voices of one-time leaders and alumni who experienced a very different Rochester?

The River Campus Libraries, collaborating with the other campuses, have launched a new project designed to let you do just that. The Living History Project was formally established in 2013, at the suggestion of President Joel Seligman. It’s an effort to make existing oral histories, recorded beginning in the 1960s, easily accessible and to add to them with new interviews.

The site complements the new book about University history, Our Work Is But Begun: A History of the University of Rochester, 1850–2005, by Janice Bullard Pieterse (University of Rochester Press, 2014). While the book offers a formal account of the institution, the living history project “adds a diverse mix of people who can flesh out the history of the University,” says Mary Ann Mavrinac, vice provost and the Andrew H. and Janet Dayton Neilly Dean of River Campus Libraries.

“It’s very individual, very personal,” says Melissa Mead, the John M. and Barbara Keil University Archivist and Rochester Collections Librarian. “A University is made up of its people—and oftentimes it’s how we best respond to our history.”

Paul Burgett ’68E, ’76E (PhD)—vice president, senior advisor to the president, and University dean—has conducted several of the recent interviews. “I believe it is important to our understanding of the history to include the spoken words of those who have had the lived experience at the University, including faculty, alums, friends, trustees,” he says. “Each has his or her own unique story, which taken in aggregate, with the stories of others, provides an exciting and informed human quilt about the University of Rochester.”

The effort “will go on and on and on as there are more people who will share their experiences as staff, faculty, and alumni,” Mavrinac says. “We’re talking not solely to the luminaries, but to everyone—a long-standing staff member, or someone who came here as a student after World War II. It adds such a rich tapestry to the history of the University, which is typically more formal.”

Inclusiveness is critical, says Burgett, a member of the project’s advisory board. “It’s important that our subject pool be representative of the great diversity in the University, so knowing the experiences of women, of people of color, of the young, of the old, of the disabled, of the international population. . . . The challenge, of course, is in there being time and resources enough to do all of these things, because those who are involved have so much on their plates. If we had an army of 20 interviewers, that would be great. But we don’t. So we do as much as we can.”

An anonymous donor has given funds to provide for hiring a researcher and the cost of travel, of transferring recordings to digital formats, and of creating transcripts.

Former University archivist Nancy Ehrich Martin ’65, ’94 (MA) has worked both as an interviewer and an annotator of interviews. “There is a huge amount of closeness to the history of the University that you can’t get any other way. You have the person’s voice and their personality—it’s a prism through which you see the University at that time. The people interviewed in the ’70s were sometimes remembering things in the 1910s, the 1920s—and it truly was a different world.”

Hear the Voices

The recordings from which these excerpts were drawn can be heard by visiting the Living History Project at http://livinghistory.lib.rochester.edu.

‘As My First Insurrection . . .’

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

Eleanor Garbutt Gilbert (1898–1984) was a member of the Class of 1919. She was interviewed in 1978 by Helen Ancona Bergeson ’38. When she entered the University in 1915, she says, the students came from a radius of 20 miles and “we were most provincial and conservative. And Miss Munro, our dean”—Annette Munro, dean of women from 1910 to 1930—“attempted to keep us that way.”

We had fine professors. Except for the few who didn’t accept the fact that young women were allowed at the University of Rochester. I remember how we loved Dr. Gale even if we weren’t so fond of his subject, Math I. Dr. Kirk was inspiring in economics and sociology. Oh yes, I have a personal story about that subject. Miss Munro checked our schedules individually. She crossed out my sociology. Too sophisticated for me, I guess. And wrote “Spanish I” instead. As my first insurrection, I crossed out her “Spanish I” and again wrote in “Sociology,” which went undetected.

Psychology and education courses were rather deadly but they were required for school teaching and we had to have them. Oh, this time was of great excitement for two young teachers who were coming here from Harvard. Professor Perkins and Packard were excellent teachers and much beloved.

Well, since there was a war on, 1918, the surgical dressing room, Red Cross knitting on Alexander Street, the Home Nursing Course at Genesee Hospital all had much more meaning for us than did Latin and math.

We did have lots of fun. Dancing at noon to the jazz band made up of four of our classmates. There was a good theater at the Lyceum—a Shakespearean comedy came from New York for four days every year. And we would stand in the long gallery line. One afternoon, we spent the afternoon and evening there with our sandwich bags.

A Hospital: ‘A Complex Social Institution’

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John Romano (1908–1994) founded the Department of Psychiatry, where he held the title of Distinguished Professor and was chair for 25 years. Romano, together with Rochester colleague George Engel, developed the biopsychosocial model of medicine, which places health and health care in biological, psychological, and social contexts. He was interviewed by Jack End ’40E around 1971.

I’ve once defined the teaching hospital as one of the consciences of the medical profession. Wherever you have a set in which the questions which are asked must be answered, you have the equivalent of a conscience. And this is the sum and substance of a teaching hospital: that whatever is done, there is a special kind of accountability. One must be accountable. One must be accountable not only to the patient, but also to the student. That if a measure is undertaken or not undertaken, there must be explicit reasons as stated for that action or inaction.

So a teaching hospital, different from any other hospital, is a hospital where certain standards are kept high in terms of the need to explain, to justify the conduct which has been taken.

Now a teaching hospital is always a more complex institution. A hospital in itself—any kind of a hospital—is a very complex social institution. And at times it seems to be almost a Tower of Babel, because of the many different kinds of persons, particularly today when there are increasing numbers of persons per patient, for example, involved in patient care.

Studies have been undertaken indicating how long a chart was and how many people saw a patient, let’s say a middle-aged woman with heart disease, some 40 or 50 years ago as compared to today. Today, many, many more people see that same type of patient, many more notes are written, and there are many more paraprofessional persons involved.

So today, the hospital is an extremely complex social institution with many persons of very different backgrounds, at times appeared—they appear dissonant to each other, and it requires a degree of courage and tolerance and fortitude to help people understand something of the ventures they have in common in patient care and in teaching the young and in pursuing new knowledge.

‘Just Go to It’

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William Warfield (1920–2002) was a member of the Eastman School of Music’s Class of 1942, and returned in 1947 for graduate work. He became a world-renowned concert baritone. In 1992, he was interviewed by Ruth Watanabe ’52E (PhD), the longtime librarian of the Sibley Music Library, and John Braund ’53, ’61W (Mas) of alumni relations. Here he tells of his dilemma—and of his conversation with school director Howard Hanson—over going to New York City to audition for a role in the musical Call Me Mister while working on his master’s degree.

I went down and auditioned for it, and they offered me right then a tour of the road company, which meant that I would have to leave school and couldn’t finish the master’s degree. So, I came back and I had a talk with Dr. Hanson about it, he said, “Bill, why don’t you do this . . . go on it, you can always come back and finish your master’s degree but this might be your entree into the career, and just go on and do that and see how that all works, and if you then find you want to come back and finish the master’s degree, you can, and if things start working out for you, well, you won’t need a master’s degree to perform anyhow, so just go to it.”

Well, it just so happens that he predicted that. By the time I came out that year later, I decided to stay in New York and just see where this was all going to take me. That’s when I got with the American Theater Wing and started grooming for my debut. I did a few night club stints, I was at cocktail lounges where I sat and played and sang for myself. As a matter of fact, it was at a night club stint that I met the gentleman who actually sponsored my Town Hall debut in 1950.

‘The Girls Felt That Building Belonged to Them’

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Ruth Merrill (1894–1980) directed the Prince Street Campus’s Cutler Union from 1933 until 1954. That year, she was named dean of women when the men’s and women’s campuses merged. She spoke with Jack End ’40E around 1971. Here she reminisces about when the men who weren’t involved in the naval program came to the women’s campus during World War II.

I have never seen such unhappy young men as when they first arrived. And I’ve never seen happier ones before they left. They were most helpful and I think they thoroughly enjoyed being on the campus. They took part in student government, they took part in religious activities, they took part in most everything; they were extremely helpful young men and it was possible to set aside a room for their own use so they felt they had some privacy and had a chance to get well acquainted with one another, and as those years developed I enjoyed them thoroughly and I think they enjoyed the campus.

I think that was an outstanding period which could’ve been an extremely difficult period on the campus. I think that when a dormitory came into Cutler Union, that was a change, that we all had to make some adjustments. I remember that many times when the girls were looking over the balcony at events that were going on in the first floor and they had to be shooed back to their dormitory. But on the whole, they were very considerate and helpful.

I think the pride that the women took in their building I’m not certain has ever been developed as far as buildings are concerned on the River Campus. I think the girls felt that building belonged to them, and they wanted to take care of it and they wanted it to be the very best building possible. I never had any problems with what nowadays we call vandalism. During Freshman Week I always talked with the freshmen. I always took them on a tour around the building and I pointed out the little interesting things. I pointed out how the dandelion had been used in the light fixtures, how it had been used in the andirons, how it had been used in many and surprising places around the building. And many the time have I heard a girl showing a stranger around the building and pointing out all these little special things.

A ‘Close Personal Connection’

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Dexter Perkins (1889–1984) came to the University as an assistant professor of history in 1914. He became chair of the department and was an expert on the Monroe Doctrine. He was interviewed by Jack End ’40E in 1971, and here conjectures about the future of the University—after first demurring that a historian “always tells you about it after it’s happened.”

I should think it would be bright. I think there are problems ahead for all the universities, of course, as a matter of fact . . . but it seems to me that we have been moving along sound lines and that the reputation of the University has been growing. I see no reason to be otherwise than optimistic except as the whole story of education is going to be complex as time goes on. The difficulties that exist in American education today come from the enormous volume of students and faculty. And this is not a criticism of any individual institution but what [there] is likely to be less of, what I think of sentimentally, is the close personal connection between the student and teacher that was possible when I came to Rochester. This again is a question of the situation, and not a comment on personalities.

In Our Midst

Meredith Dank ’99 has uncovered some surprising truths about the illegal sex trade—and policymakers are starting to take note.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

IN THEIR FOOTSTEPS: Dank stands on a pier jutting out from Hudson River Park in Manhattan. Dank has conducted extensive field work around the pier, which is known as a site where sex trafficking and other aspects of the illegal commercial sex economy of New York City thrive. (Photo: Shannon Taggart for Rochester Review)

For two years, from 2010 and 2012, Meredith Dank ’99 traversed the United States, visiting police departments, prisons, and social service agencies. She met with pimps, sex workers, local law enforcement officers, and federal investigators.

She was on a quest to shed light on one of the most shrouded areas of modern American life. Just how much money is generated by the illegal sex economy in the United States? What are its business practices? And to what extent does it overlap with the most coercive forms of commercial sex known as sex trafficking or sex slavery?

A senior researcher at the Urban Institute, Dank was working on her biggest project yet at the Washington, D.C., think tank. She arrived at the institute in 2009, fresh out of the doctoral program in criminology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Since then, Dank, an expert on labor as well as sex trafficking, had been part of multiple studies on these subjects, as well as on juvenile justice reform and teen dating violence.

This time, however, she was in the lead. She’d won a grant from the National Institute of Justice, a division within the Justice Department, to estimate the size of the unlawful commercial sex economy in the United States. The institute had heard over and over again from law enforcement and policymakers about the need to know just how large a beast they confronted. Whether the need was for financial information or numbers of participants, the call for research proposals didn’t say. “It was a very vague solicitation,” Dank recalls. “We overdelivered.”

In a final report released in March 2014, Dank and her team, including an economist, a mathematician, and multiple researchers at the Urban Institute, produced estimates of the profits generated by all forms of illegal commercial sex activities in seven cities across the United States. Critics were disappointed that Dank hadn’t produced a national estimate. Others praised the study for its methodology and declared its estimates the most reliable yet. Predictably, a media flurry ensued, egged on by the Urban Institute’s own release, “The Hustle,” a summary of the report, illustrated with a chart of glaring red bubbles showing dollar totals. Nearly $40 million in Denver. Nearly $300 million in Atlanta. And five more cities generating profits somewhere in between.

On the evening the report was released, Dank appeared on the PBS NewsHour to discuss what else the report had revealed. Not satisfied simply to deliver figures, Dank had delved into the practices of the industry. She portrayed a sophisticated economy built on well-established norms in the areas of marketing and recruitment, online and in-person communications, employee policies and incentives, price structures, and special deals with legal businesses such as hotels, rental car services, and cell phone companies.

“There have been some other studies of the underground commercial sex economy in the past,” says John Picarelli, a program manager and specialist on organized crime, trafficking, and terrorism at the National Institute of Justice. “But this is one of the more advanced and detailed ones to arise in recent years.”

The media frenzy quickly dissipated. But the implications of the study will play out over the course of years, say other researchers studying the sex trade and sex trafficking.

“We’ve had a lot of studies that have looked at a city, or that have looked at commercial sex work from the perspective of individuals who are prostituted,” says Amy Farrell, associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at Northeastern University. “This is really one of the first studies that comprehensively examined the commercial sex economy from a variety of different angles at once.”

One might assume that the business known as the world’s oldest profession would operate in similar fashion, regardless of the locality. But Dank revealed some significant variations that could prove helpful to law enforcement as they work toward greater collaboration across regions and nationally. For example, she found significant overlap between sex and drug traffickers in some cities, but not others; variations in the ethnic make-up and countries of origin of facilitators and sex workers in “niche market” brothels and massage parlors depending on the city.

She was able to sketch out some well-worn sex trafficking circuits; reveal details of how money exchanges hands; show how online social networks bleed easily into recruitment, taking prostitution beyond urban enclaves and into the suburbs.

Bill Woolf, a 30-year veteran detective with the Fairfax County, Virginia, Police Department, joined with Dank in calling the study “a blueprint that can help inform strategic resource allocations, intervention, and prevention efforts.”

Dank grew up in northern New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Like many teenagers, she was drawn to crime dramas. Among her favorites was the television series Twin Peaks and the blockbuster thriller Silence of the Lambs, both cultural milestones of the early 1990s.

She harbored no dreams in her adolescence of a career either investigating or reporting on crime. In school, her main interest was languages. “I’d studied both Spanish and French,” she says. “Picking up languages was something I did really well.” When she got to Rochester, she decided to study Japanese.

“Japan was pretty much at the height of the economic bubble at that point. I thought Japanese would be a really good language to learn.” She spent a year studying abroad in Japan, and when she returned, wrote a senior honors thesis on bullying in Japan, an early instance of what she calls her lifelong interest in victimization.

When she graduated, she found a job tracking steel purchases for a Tokyo-based commodities trading firm. “It was so boring,” she told Bloomberg Businessweek, “I can’t even really remember what I did.”

After a brief stint working for a record label, she decided to apply to the doctoral program in criminology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, which she passed daily on her route to work. Recalling her affinity for crime drama, she describes the move as “a gut reaction.”

“It wasn’t something I really researched. I knew I wanted to stay in New York. It was a CUNY school, and I knew I wouldn’t go into too much debt.”

She was accepted, and entered the program in the fall of 2003. It was just a few years after passage of the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, a landmark law that acknowledged the existence of modern forms of slavery, within the United States, and classified trafficking as a federal crime. The problem of trafficking had been receiving more media attention, and in January 2004, the New York Times Magazine published a cover story by Peter Landesman called “The Girls Next Door.” Dank remembers the article as a turning point.

It told a harrowing tale of sexual slavery, in which four teenage girls, all immigrants, lived in bondage, serving clients back-to-back, taking breaks only for an occasional trip to the corner store. What shocked many readers, including Dank, was how brazenly transparent the operation seemed. And yet, run out of a nondescript house on an unremarkable street in the bedroom community of Plainfield, New Jersey, the business had carried on while almost no one had thought that anything was amiss. “I guess I grew up somewhat sheltered,” she says. “Just the fact that this was going on here in the United States, in particular. It just kind of sparked something in me.”

For a young doctoral student like Dank, trying to pinpoint a focus for her future research, the timing of the article couldn’t have been more opportune. “In reality, little has been done to document sex trafficking in this country,” wrote Landesman.

In the weeks and months after the publication of Landesman’s article, criticisms arose. Despite having called attention to the lack of information on sex trafficking in the United States, Landesman proceeded to publish numbers that critics called unreliable. One Boston Globe reporter wondered if the entire piece had been “exaggerated.” The critics only underscored the problem Landesman had already identified: no one knew much of anything about sex trafficking in the United States.

As the controversy played out, Dank began working with the chairman of John Jay’s anthropology department, Ric Curtis, on a study of commercial sexual exploitation of children in New York City. Curtis had just won a grant from the National Institute of Justice and Dank became the project’s manager. She’d found her dissertation topic—and her calling.

The months ahead would be wrenching—“emotionally, mentally, physically,” she says, recalling the project. The aim was to determine just how many children and adolescents were trading sex in New York City. Working with social service agencies, Dank and Curtis tapped into the network of youths trading sex by offering coupons, redeemable for cash, in return for anonymously participating in the project. “I spent a year-and-a-half interviewing young people in New York City about their experiences in engaging in the commercial sex trade,” Dank says. “What they go through just to survive really opened my eyes up, and I knew that this was something that I wanted to continue to focus on.”

It would be her first foray into the kind of controversy she says she’s continued to encounter. When she and Curtis had completed the study and published their conclusions, law enforcement officers as well as victims advocates were shocked, and not altogether pleased, according to a lengthy article about the research that appeared in the Village Voice newspaper in 2011. From their sample of 200 youth sex workers, they extrapolated an estimate of 4,000 children and adolescents trading sex citywide. They found that about 45 percent of the population were boys; that 90 percent worked independently, without the involvement of a pimp; that 90 percent were also native-born American citizens; and that 95 percent said they sold sex as a way to support themselves.

“The typical narrative was that there are these little girls who are being lured into this by traffickers and pimps,” Dank says. “We came out and said, ‘Listen, a lot of the young people who are engaging in this are doing it for survival. There isn’t necessarily this third party exploiter who’s forcing or coercing them into doing this. Many of them are doing it because they’ve been kicked out of their homes, they’ve run away, they’re being abused. Or even if they’re with their families, their families can’t afford to put food on the table,’” Dank says. Poverty, the study showed, was the problem. “I can’t tell you how many times kids have said that they literally have nothing to eat.”

Law enforcement and advocacy groups alike “had built all of this support around one narrative,” she says. The Village Voice reported that Dank’s and Curtis’s study had failed to make much traction outside the Justice Department—and charged that advocacy groups were invested in a narrative that had proven potent in attracting media attention and funding.

THE STROLL: While much sex work is now facilitated online, Danks says meet-ups still occur in plain sight, on streets like this one, in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. (Photo: Shannon Taggart for Rochester Review)

The narrative certainly is potent. It has united lawmakers who can agree on virtually nothing else. And Dank, too, knows its power. It’s what drew her into a career dedicated to researching trafficking.

“We know what to do when someone’s doing bad. We can find them, we can arrest them, we can prosecute them, and put them in prison,” she says. But when kids sell their bodies to survive, policymakers have had fewer clear responses.

Dank’s March 2014 study went well beyond the scope of trafficking. Formally titled “Estimating the Size and Structure of the Underground Commercial Sex Economy in Eight Major U.S. Cities,” the report considered all forms of prostitution as well as child pornography. Child pornography was taken out of the commercial equation, however, when Dank discovered that images appeared to be overwhelmingly traded for free.

According to Farrell, some of the most illuminating aspects of the study concerned structure rather than size. “Some of the most valuable work out of that study is the qualitative work,” she says. “The hundreds of hours that Meredith spent, along with her junior colleagues, interviewing—particularly individuals who are facilitators of commercial sex—from that we learned a lot about those networks.”

Farrell says Dank has a gift for getting people to talk about difficult subjects. “She has no pomp about her,” says Farrell, who’s conducted interviews with Dank in the past.

“I think it helps a little bit that I look a lot younger than I am,” says Dank. She’s been mistaken for a student—“even though I say right off the bat that I’m not,” she says. “I actually heard a couple of people say they were helping a student with her paper for class.”

It’s also the case that most pimps who are tied up in the criminal justice system, and most sex workers, aren’t used to being asked about their lives in the neutral way that Dank, as a social scientist, does. Or to being approached as human beings to whom you’d extend the usual courtesies. “We made sure, when they walked into the room, to smile,” Dank says. “What I heard particularly from people I interviewed in prison is that they hadn’t seen somebody smile at them in a really long time.”

Drawing on interviews that lasted as long as 90 minutes each, Dank produced a 300-plus-page social science study with some unusually rich and nuanced portraits of the people involved in the sex trade. And as in her 2008 study of New York City’s child sex workers, she found her subjects didn’t necessarily conform to prevailing stereotypes.

Among the most surprising and controversial findings was that few pimps seemed to use physical force against their employees. One might assume many of those pimps were simply lying, were they not so detailed and forthcoming in their descriptions of the various forms of psychological manipulation they relied on to recruit, maintain, and get the most they could out of their employees. The lengthy chapter in which Dank detailed these techniques muddied the waters for advocates of sex workers who tend toward two poles: those who view all sex workers as victims of exploitation and those who see all adult sex workers as active agents.

Can a sex worker be called a victim if she doesn’t see herself as such? Who determines what counts as indoctrination? Is psychological manipulation a form of coercion?

None of these questions has a simple answer. “We found a lot of gray areas,” Dank says.

Dank acknowledges that she’s been “hit from both sides.”

“It’s a very difficult line she’s trying to walk,” says Farrell.

To the extent there’s been discontent with Dank’s study, it’s mostly been centered among the advocates of sex workers, who argued that she hadn’t interviewed enough sex workers and that the pimps she interviewed were all either facing charges or incarcerated. The Washington Post, for example, included a blog post from Maggie McNeill, a self-described retired call girl, who urged readers to imagine “a report on restaurants which treated the opinions of failed hot dog stand operators as the basis for broad statements about every kind of food business, from convenience stores to food trucks to McDonald’s to five-star restaurants.”

Dank argues that critics such as McNeill have misinterpreted her study. “We were very clear that this was not a prevalence study,” Dank says. In other words, the study did not attempt to draw statistical conclusions about the prevalence of any one aspect of the sex economy. Rather, the qualitative information presented in the report served the function of showing noteworthy trends, distinguishing among the sex economies of various cities, and highlighting exactly where the gaps in knowledge are. Dank notes that she chose sex workers who had worked in more than one city and who had been in the industry for long enough to yield important information about how the industry has changed, and continues to change, over time.

Dank acknowledges that for both ethical and practical reasons, she was not able to include pimps who had eluded law enforcement. She says it’s a genuine limitation. But, she adds, “in empirical research, limitations do not imply bias.”

Few social scientists purport to offer the final word. Often, the most successful studies are those that clarify further lines of questioning. Dank says there’s a lot left to learn. “When looking across [underground commercial sex economy] venues,” she wrote in her final report, “it appears the cases least likely to be investigated may also be those that are more organized, generate more money, are more likely to be run by foreign national groups, and have client bases that are the most closed ethnically or socioeconomically. . . . Findings from offender interviews suggest that the UCSE extends far beyond the cases investigated and prosecuted by law enforcement.”

But her study did attract immediate attention from lawmakers. In the months following its release, she appeared on Capitol Hill to be part of a panel discussion sponsored by the Senate Caucus to End Human Trafficking. She was invited to brief the Values Action Team, a group of senators with an interest in international human rights inspired by their Christian faith.

She also appeared at the Justice Department to present her findings to representatives from agencies including the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Council, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, and the State Department.

Many of the policy recommendations she offered in the report are priorities that nonprofits and law enforcement groups have previously advocated, or in some cases, had already begun to implement. Chief among those are campaigns to educate the public in how to identify potential trafficking victims; programs to educate kids on healthy relationships and how to avoid falling prey to some of the sophisticated recruitment tactics of pimps; and improved training for law enforcement officers who investigate and question people who are potentially involved in the sex trade. Dank’s study buttresses the case for those kinds of initiatives.

But in gauging the size and scale of the illegal sex economy, Dank has also shown, beyond reasonable doubt, that profits from the trade exceed those made in the illegal drug and weapons trades in many cities. As a result, she makes a solid case that law enforcement will need more resources to identify and prosecute sex traffickers, and more guidance from lawmakers about where the line is to be drawn between voluntary and coerced participation in the sex trade.

In the end, there may be only one major aspect of the illegal sex trade she leaves untouched. She’s often asked about buyers.

“There’s a whole movement to end demand. And I’ll be honest. I don’t really touch the demand issue,” she says. After a pause, she explains why. “When you ask [sex workers] what they need to get out, they don’t say, ‘Well, let’s arrest the people who are giving me money.’ It’s ‘How are you going to help me get housing? How are you going to help me get livable wage employment?’ ” The sex trade, she says, “has to do with so many failures with the structures of the communities and of society. And if we don’t address that, then we’re never going to properly address this issue.”

A City-by-City Comparison

Dank and her team chose eight cities as sites for their research based on a variety of factors. One of those factors was the availability of data on the illegal drug and weapons trade.

The data were important pieces in a complex system that Dank, working with Bilal Khan, professor of mathematics and computer science at John Jay College, used to derive estimates of profits from the illegal commercial sex trade. The data also had the advantage, of course, of helping reveal how profits in the sex trade have compared to profits made in the drug and weapons trade, for seven of the eight cities included in the study.

As it turned out, Kansas City, Missouri, supplied plentiful data on the drug and weapons trade, but was missing other data on which Khan and Dank needed to rely. It remained a source of qualitative data, however. —Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

Curating Curiosity

FULL-STEAM AHEAD: Beall and Brown design exhibits and programs that draw kids to engineering and computer science at the Museum of Science, Boston. (Photo: Aynsley Floyd/AP Images for Rochester Review)

Say you’re taking your daughter to a science museum. Do you expect she’ll be drawn to the engineering and computer science exhibits? She will if Lydia Beall ’02 has anything to do with it.

Beall is the newly appointed manager of the Tech Studio at the Museum of Science, Boston, a space under development that aims to introduce visitors—especially kids from age seven and up—to the fun of computer science. For the past dozen years, Beall has run the engineering design workshop at the museum.

“She’s really creating a new standard in science museums for science engagement,” says Paul Fontaine, vice president of education for the museum. “Lydia is an incredible inventor of original activities and environments for learning engineering.” Now the museum is looking to her to help them spark for visitors the same excitement about computer science and other technology.

“I think one of the challenges both of these fields are faced with is people think of them as being too complicated for younger kids, so we want kids to get this on their radar sooner rather than later,” says Beall.

And she is particularly focused on getting girls involved. “A lot of times if someone is lucky enough to take a computer science or engineering course before college, they do it in high school—and a lot of data shows that girls fall out of the math-science pipeline around fourth grade,” she says. “We’re trying to make sure girls know that engineering and computer science are things they can be successful in.”

The museum—which drew almost 1.5 million visitors last year—is doing that in part by making its engineering and computer science exhibits appealing to kids of all sorts, and emphasizing the fun and creativity involved in pursuits that are too often depicted as dry and precise. For Beall and colleague Christopher Brown ’09, an interactive software developer working on the museum’s Science Behind Pixar exhibition, opening in June, creativity is a key, if often overlooked, component of engineering and computer science.

The exhibition explores how Pixar Animation Studios merge computer science, technology, and math with artistry. Brown hopes it will encourage people to see just how creative technology fields can be.

“STEM”—science, technology, engineering, and math—“is everywhere, and I don’t think people realize that. It is in the music you listen to, the car you drive, the video games you play, the sports you cheer for, the movies you watch, the advertisements you look at, the buildings you live in, the phones you call, and the computer you type on,” says Brown. “Almost no meaningful product was built solely from one domain of knowledge. Most things require a team of artists, designers, engineers, scientists, mathematicians, and more.”

Activities in the museum are also influenced by the notion of STEAM, a recent twist on STEM that adds art to the mix. “It’s the new push, incorporating elements of design. And that’s important. If you’re designing a car, it has to look good or no one is going to buy it. It’s the human dimension of design,” says Beall.

Vital to drawing kids into engineering and computer science is designing accessible, engaging exhibitions, both say.

“We’re really cognizant about the language we use,” says Beall. “When we say we’re developing engineering projects, we don’t say ‘build,’ we say ‘create,’ because create is a word girls already relate to from art and design.”

The look of exhibition space is deliberate, too. “When you think of technology exhibits, they’re gray, blue, metallic, angular—we do orange, green, purple, rounded shapes. I have a lot of things that are pink, too. The boys are going to build no matter what. But it might bring girls over who were on the fence. And it’s a message to parents, too. If parents had a bad experience in math or science, they might be hesitant to take their daughters over.”

The Tech Studio is expected to open next year. For now, activities are on the floor, and Beall and colleagues are soliciting feedback. They’re looking into teaching both the hardware and software ends of computer science, including electronics and circuitry, subjects kids aren’t typically exposed to in elementary school.

“Lydia and Chris are bringing originality, energy, and creativity to both of their fields that’s transforming this museum—and the museum professionals who come to visit are really blown away by what they see these folks do,” says Fontaine. Months and even years go into developing exhibits that are engaging and intuitive, thanks to prototyping, iterative design, visitor feedback, and experimentation.

“It looks simple, but there’s a lot that happens behind the scenes—and that’s what Lydia and Chris do,” Fontaine says.

—Kathleen McGarvey

Engaging Girls

Lydia Beall shares these tips for encouraging girls’ interest in science and math:

Engage girls in play that fosters spatial learning. Traditional “girls’ ” toys—such as dolls, stuffed animals, and tea sets—develop social skills, while “boys’ ” toys encourage spatial learning. Both boys and girls can benefit from toys that develop social and spatial reasoning. Girls should be encouraged to play with blocks and building sets like Kapla blocks, K’Nex, and Legos. Research suggests that playing with construction sets can be an early indicator of students’ success in academic subjects like geometry and math.

Examine the messages your daughter receives about science and math. Often, I’ll overhear mothers say things like “I was bad at math, too” or “An engineering project? Let me get your dad.” Such statements may send a message to girls that certain fields are not for them.

Engage your daughter in practical applications of science and technology in your daily lives. Have your daughter help with a home repair, a computer update, fixing a broken toy, or assembling furniture. Point out the connections between what you’re doing and what scientists and engineers do—using specialized tools, taking measurements, repurposing a material in a creative way, etc.

Show that science is for girls. Check out books and biographies about women scientists and talk about research and new technologies being developed by women.

Encourage your daughter to experiment and take risks. Girls can often be discouraged if they don't “get” something right away. Scientists and engineers learn from mistakes and failures and rarely get something right on the first try. Being willing to experiment with a new idea builds problem-solving skills and fosters creative confidence.

Beall recommends the guide Science Can Take Her Places! Encouraging Your Daughter's Interests in Science, Math, and Technology by Sally Ride (Sally Ride Science), a resource that influenced her list.

LIVES

Pulling Teeth?

HONORED: Manhold, pictured with his wife, Kit, was recognized by Harvard School of Dental Medicine for his role as a reformer. (Photo: Steve Gilbert/Studioflex Productions)

Last summer, the Harvard School of Dental Medicine gave special recognition to John Manhold ’41, who returned to the school on the 70th anniversary of his graduation. Witness to a long stretch of the history of modern dentistry, Manhold shared many of his observations in an essay in the summer 2014 edition of the Harvard Dental Bulletin.

Manhold spent much of his career as a dental reformer. A pioneer in the now established subspecialty of psychosomatic, or biobehavioral, dentistry, he recalled early, skeptical reactions to his first studies.

He persevered, publishing a textbook, Introductory Psychosomatic Dentistry, in 1956. “Dentistry was hesitant to accept my studies, while medicine and psychiatry embraced them,” Manhold says. He later became a fellow in the Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine as well as president of the group.

After dental school, he returned to Rochester for a fellowship in pathology. He worked with the School of Medicine and Dentistry’s founding dean, George Whipple, briefly, before serving in World War II.

After the war, he taught at Tufts and then at Washington University. In the mid-1950s, he left St. Louis for New Jersey, to become one of the first faculty members at the new Seton Hall College of Medicine and Dentistry. For 31 years, he remained at the school, now the Rutgers School of Dental Medicine, helping establish and leading its pathology department and serving as dean.

At Rutgers, Manhold pressed for greater integration of dental and medical education. “Numerous physical problems provide early indicative symptomatology in the oral cavity. If a dental practitioner is alert and knowledgeable, he or she is in a prime position to discern a budding medical problem,” he says.

Dental and medical education have indeed grown more integrated over the years. Says Eli Eliav, director of the Eastman Institute for Oral Health, “The two professions use similar bases of knowledge and the separation between them is quickly shrinking.” Faculty and residents at the Eastman Institute work closely with multiple departments within the Medical Center.

Manhold says he’s “gratified” by the changes in modern dentistry. “Recognition by one’s peers always is most heartwarming,” he adds, “and even more so when you have been away from the profession for some time.”

—Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

A Small, Plastic Box that Could End Malaria

LEADING GLOBAL THINKER: Malaria, poverty, and underdevelopment are deeply intertwined, says Grimberg. Grimberg was named one of 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2014 by Foreign Policy magazine. (Photo: Jason Miller/AP Images for Rochester Review)

Brian Grimberg ’96 wants to end malaria. It’s a team effort, to be sure, but he says it can be done, and he hopes to play a major role.

It’s an ambitious goal. The World Health Organization estimates that in 2013, there were nearly 200 million cases of the illness worldwide, and well over half a million deaths, overwhelmingly among children under the age of five. That’s almost 50 percent fewer deaths than in 2000, suggesting that international efforts to prevent, treat, and control malaria outbreaks have made enormous headway. But as with many global health challenges, problems with the delivery of care have made further progress elusive.

Grimberg hopes that will change in the next decade. He’s an assistant professor of international health at Case Western Reserve University and an expert on the cell biology of malaria parasites. In the past couple of years, he’s been the principal investigator on a project that has led to the development of a handheld, rapid malaria detection device. Called the Rapid Assessment of Malaria, or RAM, it would allow someone with little specialized training to screen entire villages for the illness in a matter of hours. Last fall, Foreign Policy magazine named Grimberg one of 100 Leading Global Thinkers for 2014 in recognition of his work.

The RAM device presents a “unique opportunity,” say John Vulule, chief research officer at the Kenya Medical Research Institute in Nairobi, and a partner of Grimberg’s on the project. “With this device we can rapidly screen large populations in an inexpensive way, localizing the disease so as to focus treatment and control.”

The RAM looks simple enough: a small plastic box with some magnets, a laser, and a battery inside. It works on a simple principle as well.

Malaria is caused by a parasite that relies both on humans and certain types of mosquitos as its hosts. When a mosquito infected with the parasite bites a person, the person becomes infected as well.

Malaria parasites are filled with iron, which they ingest from their host’s hemoglobin. As a result, the parasites are highly magnetic. Using a simple drop of blood diluted with water, the RAM shines a laser on the sample. If malaria parasites are present, iron-rich hemozoin crystals align, blocking the amount of light that can shine through the sample. The device detects not only whether the parasites are present, but also the level of infection.

The RAM delivers results within minutes, which is critical, says Grimberg. “That’s really the whole benefit of this technology. A lot of people can be walking around with malaria but not know it. But they’re acting as carriers, transmitting the malaria to other people in their community.” Older adults often carry low levels of the infection, but don’t feel sick. This is partly because they’ve built up a level of resistance. But the parasite still lives close to the surface of the skin—close enough to infect a mosquito, which will then go on to bite and infect other people, often very young people, who have little to no resistance to the parasite, Grimberg explains.

Improved detection is a major area of research now. Current methods to control the disease include the use of herbicides, which present their own dangers, vaccines of varying effectiveness and availability, and testing performed at health clinics, at the initiative of individuals who suspect they may have contracted the disease. Not only do people often have to travel great distances to reach those clinics, but the tests require trained clinicians to administer them, as well as refrigeration, making them far more costly than a RAM test, which Grimberg estimates costs 20 cents per test, versus about 50 cents for rapid tests conducted at clinics. He also claims RAM tests have so far delivered more accurate results in one minute than have existing tests that take more than one hour to yield results.

The device is now in the clinical trial phase. Grimberg has already overseen a round of trials in Peru. “We learned a lot about how we needed to improve the device for field use by nursing staff,” he says. The RAM is built to be durable and waterproof, and Grimberg says his team has worked to make it even more so. Starting this year, he and Vulule are collaborating on a five-year, $2.25 million dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health to test the improved device in six villages across Kenya.

It’s been hard to keep the fight against malaria in the limelight. “More people die of malaria every three days than have ever died of Ebola,” Grimberg says. And malaria has global as well as local consequences. People who survive with malaria feel persistently sick. “When people feel sick all the time, it makes it hard to work, and for communities to grow and expand, and for countries to grow out of poverty.”

—Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

Books & Recordings

Books

Constructive Clinical Supervision in Counseling and Psychotherapy

By Douglas Guiffrida

Routledge, 2015

Guiffrida, associate professor of counseling and human development at the Warner School, offers a guide for clinical supervisors that incorporates multiple theoretical approaches to clinical work within a constructivist framework.

Rat Race Blues: The Musical Life of Gigi Gryce (Second Edition)

By Noal Cohen ’59 and Michael Fitzgerald

Current Research in Jazz, 2014

Cohen, a musician, jazz historian, and record collector, coauthors a revised, updated edition of the biography of saxophonist and composer Gigi Gryce. The book won an Award for Excellence from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections when it was first published in 2002 by Berkeley Hills Books.

Upstairs and Downstairs: British Costume Drama Television from the Forsyte Saga to Downton Abbey

Edited by James Leggott and Julie Taddeo ’87, ’97 (PhD)

Rowman & Littlefield, 2014

Taddeo and Leggott edit a collection of essays exploring major developments in the history of period dramas from the late 1960s to the present. Topics include the process of adaptation, the relationship between television in the United States and the United Kingdom, and the connection between period dramas and broader developments in television and popular culture. Taddeo teaches history at the University of Maryland and is associate editor of the Journal of Popular Television.

The Exquisite Birds of Ecuador

By Robert Mumford ’57

Laurel Hill Press, 2014

Nature photographer Mumford presents more than 300 color photographs taken during 16 trips to Ecuador over a seven-year period. In addition to tropical birds, the book includes images of wildflowers, reptiles, and mammals native to the nation known for its remarkable biodiversity.

Spy Night & Other Memories: A Collection of Stories from Dick and Renée

By Renée Richards ’59M (MD)

Keith Publications, 2014

Richards presents a collection of true stories from her life in medicine as an ophthalmologist, in sports as a tennis player, and in the public eye as the first athlete to play successfully in professional sports as a transsexual. The book includes prefaces by tennis player and sportscaster Mary Carillo and Keith Olbermann of ESPN.

Unlocking the Secrets of White Dwarf Stars

By Hugh Van Horn

Springer, 2015

Van Horn, professor emeritus of physics and astronomy at Rochester, tells the story of the growth in our understanding of white dwarf stars—the burnt-out cores of once bright, collapsed stars. Part popular science, part historical narrative, and part memoir, the book draws on Van Horn’s firsthand experience participating in key discoveries about white dwarf stars.

A String of Beads

By Thomas Perry ’74 (PhD)

Mysterious Press, 2014

Mystery novelist Perry presents his eighth Jane Whitefield thriller. Whitefield, a Native American guide who helps people in danger to disappear, returns as Jane MacKinnon, a suburban housewife, seeking escape from her past. Her quiet life is interrupted when a childhood friend is wanted for murder.

What’s that Sound? An Introduction to Rock and its History (Fourth Edition)

By John Covach and Andrew Flory

W. W. Norton & Co., 2015

Covach coauthors a new and revised edition to the popular textbook on the history of rock music. Covach is professor of music theory at the Eastman School, chair of the music department in the College, and director of the University’s Institute for Popular Music. Flory is assistant professor of music at Carleton College.

Climate Change Impacts on Ocean and Coastal Law: U.S. and International Perspectives

Edited by Randall Abate ’86

Oxford University Press, 2015

Abate, professor of law and director of the Center for International Law and Justice at Florida A&M University College of Law, explores legal responses to cases in which marine and coastal environments have been damaged as a result of climate change.

The Chorister: Evolution of Voice

By Jack Miller ’90M (MD)

Nicasio Press, 2014

Miller, a retired psychiatrist and San Francisco artist, presents 29 color illustrations accompanied by narrative verses.

Looking and Listening: Conversations between Modern Art and Music

By Brenda Leach ’89E (DMA)

Rowman & Littlefield, 2014

Leach pairs well-known visual art works with musical compositions from the 20th century, identifying their shared inspirations. Leach is visiting conductor and organist for the 2014–15 academic year at Lebanon Valley College.

Literary Concord Uncovered: Revealing Thoreau, Emerson, Alcott, Hawthorne, and Fuller

By Joseph Andrews ’63M (MD)

Xlibris, 2014

Andrews, a certified Concord, Massachusetts, tour guide with Concord Guides Walking Tours, explores major figures in the area’s literary history.

Lace Yarn Studio

By Carol Sulcoski ’87

Sterling Publishing, 2015

Sulcoski, a freelance writer and designer in the field of handknitting, presents her fourth book, a collection of patterns and technical information for handknitters.

Rogue Wave

By Jennifer Donnelly ’85

Disney-Hyperion, 2015

In the second book in Donnelly’s Waterfire Saga fantasy series, mermaids find courage and cunning in their hunt for talismans.

Surviving Lymphoma: A Patient’s Story

By Les Simon ’62

Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, 2015

Simon shares the story of his lymphoma diagnosis, treatment, and survival, in hopes of helping newly diagnosed patients to understand what to expect. The book is published online, with each chapter presented as a blog post, on the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s website at www.lls.org.

Taking the Stage: How Women Can Speak Up, Stand Out, and Succeed

By Judith Humphrey ’70 (MA)

Wiley, 2014

Humphrey provides a guide for women on how to communicate with confidence, regardless of their age, rank, or position. Humphrey is founder of the Humphrey Group, a Toronto-based consulting firm offering leadership and communication training for executives.

Moose Tracks on the Road to Heaven

By M. Reed McCall ’88

Teabury Books, 2015

In a book based loosely upon autobiographical events, McCall presents a story of “family, friendship, love, loss, and coming to terms with what it means to live when someone you love dies.” The book is set in the Adirondack Mountains and spans from the 1960s into the 21st century.

Spy, Interrupted: The Waiting Wife

By Tamraparni Dasu ’91 (PhD)

IndiaWrites, 2014

Dasu presents a romantic thriller in which “Jane Austen meets John le Carré.” Dasu, a research scientist, has published nonfiction as well as fiction, and is a translator of regional Indian fiction into English.

The Happiest People in the World

By Brock Clarke ’98 (PhD)

Algonquin Books, 2014

In Clarke’s fourth novel, a Danish cartoonist, threatened by terrorists and under CIA protection, forges a new life in a small upstate New York town as a high school guidance counselor. Clarke teaches creative writing at Bowdoin College.

A History of Christmas in Four Centuries at the Old Presbyterian Meeting House in Alexandria, Virginia

By Hugh Van Horn

Heritage Books, 2014

Van Horn, a member of the congregation of the Old Presbyterian Meeting House and professor emeritus of physics and astronomy at Rochester, explores changes in the way Christmas has been observed in the Presbyterian Church since the settlement period in North America.

Recordings

The Man

By Blues Union

The Jazz Project, 2014

Blues Union—featuring Jud Sherwood ’89 on drums, John Carswell on vocals, piano, and Hammond B3 organ, and Josh Cook on tenor saxophone—offers “a soulful blues groove album.” The recording is the third that Sherwood and Carswell have made on Sherwood’s Jazz Project label.

Brian Pareschi and the BP Express

By Brian Pareschi ’92

Brian Pareschi, 2015

New York City jazz trumpeter, composer, and arranger Pareschi performs a mix of originals and standards on his premier recording as leader of an ensemble. Other musicians in the BP Express include Matt Hong (alto sax), Mark Hynes (tenor sax), Carl Maraghi (baritone sax), Wayne Goodman (trombone), Jim Hershman (guitar), Adam Birnbaum (piano), Neal Caine (bass), and Andy Watson (drums).

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, author, or performer, a brief description, and a high-resolution cover image, 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.

Mentoring Matters

Dawn Davidson Drantch ’88 helps young women devise action plans.

Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

(Photo: David Cowles)

When I first started practicing law, there was a woman partner at the firm, and I ended up working exclusively with her. She was my teacher. She had my career in mind. She was teaching me for the long term. A few years later, she was appointed to a judgeship and left the firm. I learned a whole other side of how to be a lawyer from another partner. Having good mentors at the beginning of my career made a tremendous difference.

It used to bother me when people said there’s such a difference between how men and women are treated in the workplace. But I have to say that the more I mentor, the more I really do realize that there is a difference. Not everywhere. But I think, in general.

There’s research that’s shown that young women tend to be judged by what they’ve done, and men tend to be judged on their potential. I think that makes a big difference. Upper management looks at a young man and may think, “This kid has guts,” and might look at a young woman and think, “What has she done?”

My first involvement with formal mentoring was with a college student. I had the same mentee for two years. We’d meet for coffee or breakfast. I brought her to networking events, and showed her what life might be like after she graduated. I acted as a nonjudgmental ear. I’d ask her questions, but she was making her own decisions. It was a lot of listening.

At the Moxxie Foundation, I run a formal group-mentoring program. For two years, we meet every three weeks with our mentees, and we have a curriculum. We talk to them about writing a bio. Working on their elevator speech. Getting along with different personalities. Work/life integration. How to give successful presentations. How to negotiate with a new boss. In the second year, each session is devoted to one woman. She gets to talk about her future goals, and the whole group helps her come up with an action plan. They love it. They love having the focus on them, and having help with what to do next and how to get to where they want to be.

Intergenerational mentoring is incredibly valuable. I think there are things you only learn as you grow in the workforce. To have somebody who can shine a light on things you’ve never faced before is huge. Often mentors are in management, and to have someone who can shed light on how management works is very helpful.

There are challenges to intergenerational mentorship. For example, most mentors didn’t have electronic communication when we were growing up. It was all face-to-face, by phone, or by letter. Young women have a different approach to privacy. Mentors have to understand that. But then young women have to understand that there are certain things you might not want to put out there.

Part of the training that we do for the mentors is to say, these women are not your daughters, and you can’t give them the advice that you’d give your daughter. There are certain things that we just have to accept as mentors. Not necessarily as businesspeople, but as mentors.

What I do is mostly for women, but I wouldn’t hesitate to sponsor a young man. Why not? It’s just the right thing to do. A better workplace helps everybody.

Dawn Davidson Drantch ’88

Home: Wantagh, Long Island, New York Occupation: Attorney and in-house counsel, Alcott HR; member, board of directors of the Moxxie Mentoring Foundation; 2010 Moxxie Mentor of the Year.

On finding support at Rochester: “I don’t know that I really had mentors at Rochester, but I had a lot of support. I lost my father when I was a sophomore. It was devastating to me. I’m an only child. The way the University rallied around me is something I’ve never forgotten. The professors, the deans, my RA, my friends on the hall. I was far from home, and my mother was home alone, and there was always the question, should I go home? Everyone made it feel like, ‘We’re your community.’ That made it easier to go on, and to stay.”

STUDENT SPIRIT

Who ♥’s U of R?

(Photo: Adam Fenster)

SPIRITED GROUP: Jake Braniecki ’18, Yvette Igbokwe ’15, Darion Blalock ’15, and Niru Murali ’18 show their love for Rochester during Spirit Week 2015. Sponsored by the 2018 Class Council, the week features events and activities designed to celebrate student life on campus. As part of an activity organized by the Offices of Alumni Relations, Annual Giving, and Stewardship, during this year's “I ♥ Rochester Day” nearly 600 students also wrote thank-you notes to alumni, parents, friends, and other donors.