Rochester Review

March–April 2016, Volume 78, No. 4

Editor

Scott Hauser

Associate Editors

Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

Kathleen McGarvey

Contributors

Valerie Alhart, Adam Fenster, Peter Iglinski, Jim Mandelaro, Bob Marcotte, Melissa Mead, Mark Michaud, Sara Miller, Dennis O’Donnell, Leslie Orr, Monique Patenaude, Scott Sabocheck, Leonor Sierra, and Brandon Vick

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E-mail: rochrev@rochester.edu www.rochester.edu/pr/Review

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

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

ISSN: 0035-7421

Copyright © 2016 University of Rochester

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

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Rochester Review:

Contents

Celebrating Our Faculty

Stereotypes and Free Speech

Vision of Virtual Reality

Watery Wonders

Powerful Polymer

Debate Goes Varsity

Devoted to Debate

Taking a ‘Look’ at Historical Hoaxes

Ask the Archivist

Reasonable Fools

Chemical Exposure Affects Babies’ Vaccine Response

Global Rochester

Hammer and Songs

A New Director Leads Education Abroad

Buzzer-beater Goes Viral

Squash Team Finishes as National Runner-up

Diver Wins First UAA Title

Yellowjackets Tune Up for Penn Relays

Are We Alone?

Lives in Letters

Seeing ‘Sewords’

‘My Dear Henry . . .’

Princes of the Palestra

Personal Definition: Michael Coleman ’92

Team Center: Chris Fite ’92

Court Presence: John Kelly ’92

High Expectations: Rodney Morrison ’91, ’92 (MS)

Team Leader: Erik Rausch ’90, ’97W (MS)

‘Fine Art of Folding Air’

Living Texts

Kitchen Venture

In the News

Thomas Pryor ’40: A Step-Grandparent and Alumnus who Embodied Meliora

Alice Denham ’50 (MA): A Charismatic Fixture of Literary New York

Books & Recordings

Looking Ahead to the Final Stretch

♥ to ♥

Celebrating Our Faculty

By Joel Seligman

SIGNATURE SUPPORT: David Primo, Susan McDaniel, Robert Novy-Marx, and Gretchen Birbeck are among the professors appointed to 100 endowed positions that were created through the support of alumni and University friends to The Meliora Challenge campaign. (Photo: University Communications)

Our faculty are the University’s greatest resource. Their teaching, their research, their continuity represent the human heart of the University of Rochester. Our faculty are the catalyst of innovation and discovery, the compass that guides student learning.

Few aspects of our Meliora Challenge campaign have been as inspiring as the recollections of our alumni of how much University faculty meant to them.

I write in celebration. We have received a commitment to create the 100th endowed professorship of our Campaign, nearly doubling the 107 created in the first 155 years of our University. This is especially remarkable to have achieved in fewer than 11 years.

Our first endowed professorship dates to 1887 when Don Alonzo Watson, a cofounder of the company that became Western Union, endowed the Watson professorship at the University, with Martin Brewer Anderson, the University’s first president, as the inaugural holder.

In The Meliora Challenge, among many other endowed professorships, we have established the Ani and Mark Gabrellian Professorship, with political scientist David Primo as the inaugural holder. University Trustee Ani Gabrellian ’84 and her husband, Mark ’79, created the professorship based on the belief that the challenges facing society today and in the future would increasingly require analytical and problem-solving approaches that transcend individual disciplines. Professor Primo is the author of several works, including his award-winning Rules and Restraint: Government Spending and the Design of Institutions. Professor Primo’s work has had a significant impact on governmental policy and implementation.

Susan McDaniel is the Dr. Laurie Sands Distinguished Professor of Families and Health in the Departments of Family Medicine and Psychiatry. The Sands Family Foundation funded this professorship to support a recognized leader in family medicine who promotes the health of individuals and families through clinical service, training, and research. In 2016, Dr. McDaniel was named the president of the American Psychological Association and is dedicated to transforming health care by integrating behavioral health into clinical medicine.

Robert Novy-Marx is the Lori and Alan S. Zekelman Professor of Business Administration. Professor Novy-Marx is well known for his research on value and quality investing. His work has demonstrated that most state pension funds rely on excessively optimistic scenarios when determining their ability to meet future obligations, resulting in a net shortfall of some $3 trillion rather than the $1 trillion that had previously been thought to be the shortfall. This is a recalculation that has profound implications for state finance.

Gretchen Birbeck is the Edward A. and Alma Vollertsen Rykenboer Professor in Neurology. She also holds an adjunct faculty position with the University of Zambia. Since 1994, Dr. Birbeck has provided clinical care and conducted cerebral malaria research and neuro–HIV clinical trials in sub-Saharan Africa, where she serves as the director for Chikankata’s Epilepsy Care Team in Zambia’s rural Southern Province. Her work has made it possible for more than 3,000 patients with epilepsy to receive treatment they otherwise would not have received and to change national policy that potentially could help thousands of others. She is also helping to shed light on how malaria—often considered a disease of the developing world which is not given adequate resources and attention—can become fatal.

As long as the University of Rochester exists, such endowed professorships will continue to honor our faculty and our donors. It is notable, for example, as Medical Center CEO Mark Taubman likes to recall, that physicist Stephen Hawking long held the same endowed Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge that close to 300 years earlier Sir Isaac Newton had held.

Endowed professorships often provide pivotal funds to strengthen outstanding scholarship or stimulate new fields. We have today 1,311 tenured faculty. They deserve our approbation. What distinguishes Rochester and other outstanding research universities is the combination of stellar teaching, commitment to our community, and research that can transform lives. Few sources of support are more critical than those that give faculty the time and means to create transforming ideas. The intellectual breakthroughs that we have helped achieve in fields as variegated as cancer research, financial economics, or creative literature often were achieved over years of unwavering support.

With The Meliora Challenge campaign we have made important steps in recognizing some of our outstanding faculty. As we near the conclusion of the Campaign, I remain more determined than ever to continue to work with our wonderful alumni and friends to establish more support for our faculty. They are the linchpin of our enduring success.

Stereotypes and Free Speech

When I saw the article on video games (“Play Nation,” January-February), I immediately turned to it. Imagine how disappointed I was when I read the phrase “if you’re over 40.” That’s a sweeping generalization to make about the people who play video games. As a Rochester grad from 1987, I turned 50 last year. Some of my best friends play video games, and they are older than I am.

Yes, it’s probably right to say a lot of teenage boys play the games, but there is a wide demographic out there that isn’t 15 and male. One of the games I play is Second Life, and many of the players are adults.

Elizabeth Granda ’87

Poughkeepsie, New York

I was shocked and offended by your article “Play Nation.” You quoted Kedar Shashidhar ’15, ’16 (KEY) as describing [an idea for] a character who is “a typical kind of disgruntled, middle-aged, white male protagonist.” Would you have quoted him if he had described “a typical kind of disgruntled, 20-something, (fill in any other ethnicity) female protagonist?”

I am amazed that you would allow such a comment in an issue that has an excellent article about bringing racial harmony to campus (”Commission Assesses Race and Diversity”). Racism and ethnic isolation are wrong regardless of the color of the victims’ skin. For the first time in 30 years, I am embarrassed to say I am a UR graduate.

Dante D’Amato ’85

Bedford, New Hampshire

I’d like to ask President Seligman and his commission (“Commission Assesses Race and Diversity”) to use caution when trying to curb hate speech at the University, lest they restrict free speech as well.

Two years ago, Brandeis University offered an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a women’s rights activist and critic of Islam, and then rescinded it. This fall, a University of Missouri journalism professor demanded that a journalist covering a race-related protest be removed from the scene. Recently, a survey noted that 40 percent of millennials would restrict free speech in order to censure offensive comments.

As the president’s commission considers blocking the social media application Yik Yak from the University’s wifi network—and as I read the story on Martin Luther King weekend—I dare to opine that if Reverend King had to choose between curbing hate speech and honoring free speech, he’d choose the latter.

David Skonieczki ’71

Hampton, New Hampshire

Editor’s note: In a response to the commission’s interim report, President and CEO Joel Seligman rejected calls to make Yik Yak inaccessible through the University’s wifi network. Condemning statements that threaten violence as having “no place on our campus,” he charged University leaders with taking steps to change the tone of the anonymous posts “to move toward the elimination or virtual elimination of any further hateful and threatening messages communicated through Yik Yak.” He also asked that the University work with the app’s developers and the county district attorney’s office to monitor, identify, and respond to posts that rise to the level of criminal conduct. The commission is expected to finalize a report later this spring.

The item on the renovated Interfaith Chapel (“Place of Many Faiths,” November-December) concluded with the sentence “A hearing loop was also installed to improve sound quality for the hearing impaired.”

The term “hearing impaired” is a negative euphemism. The proper term is “deaf and hard-of-hearing,” a less judgmental, more neutral term. We would like to see “hearing-impaired” deleted from all official publications, communications, and media.

Matthew Moore

Rochester

The author is the president of the organization We the Deaf People.

Liberal Arts Inspiration

Thank you so much for the insightful comments of Dr. [Yvonne] Hsaio-Fan Sada ’01, ’05M (MD) (“Importance of Being a Well-Read Physician,” Master Class, January-February). I brought a copy to the family medicine residency where I precept, hoping to inspire other physicians to do the same. She captured the essence and value of a liberal arts education beautifully, in addition to highlighting the importance of being a fully engaged person in order to be an excellent physician.

Karen Beckman ’89M (MD)

Fayetteville, New York

In the Deep End

In the article “Do We Have to Swim?” (Ask the Archivist, January-February), the archivist surmises that “the swim test seems to have ended in 1971.” Actually, it was before that. As a Gilbert Hall freshman in 1965, I had to report twice per week, at 8 a.m. no less, to that cold, intimidating expanse of water for lessons with Coach Bloom.

We were told that we would be required to float, tread water in the deep end for an ungodly period of time, and then swim the length of the pool if we were to graduate. As I clung to the side of the pool, I knew it was hopeless.

“Raise your hips,” they said. “I am,” I replied, as I sank like a stone. “Breathe,” they said. “I can’t,” I burbled, as I sank like a stone.

I never would have graduated if not for the campus unrest of 1968. We took over the Ad Building, demanding changes in curricula and other such. The swimming requirement was gone by 1969. I graduated, stayed on for a MA, and went into teaching. Whew!

Ysidore (Ray) Perez ’71, ’74 (MA)

Rochester

The Horizon Widens

‘WOLF TRAP’: Internationally regarded for his work to analyze extraterrestrial environments, biology professor Wolf Vishniac also participated in a program to interest area high schoolers in college. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

The article on the Wide Horizons program (Ask the Archivist, November-December 2015) omitted the fact that Wayne County schools of Marion, Sodus, Wayne, and Williamson also participated from the 1958–59 to the 1968–69 school years.

Like Ms. [Nancy] Salzer ’73 (MA) (who posed the original question) I too attended Wide Horizons in the early ’60s. Six students from each of the four schools (I from Marion) met at Williamson High School for eight sessions from October to May. The meetings began with a lecture from a Rochester professor followed by a dinner and then a round circle for discussion. We each wore a name badge in our school colors with the requirement not to sit next to anyone from our school.

I particularly remember Dr. [Wolf] Vishniac’s lecture concerning the search for life on other planets as well as that of Dr. Francis Horler on “Education in the Shrinking World.” With regard to the “shrinking” or small world, Dr. Horler became one of my professors when I returned to UR for a master’s degree in science education. This degree led to a career in high school chemistry teaching as well a 34-year (and continuing) stint as instructor for Chemistry 100: Preparation for College Chemistry during the summer sessions at Rochester.

In this small world, you never know where early connections may lead.

Thank you for the high quality of Rochester Review, particularly the articles that take a look back to the University as we saw it several decades ago.

David Crane ’69W (MA)

Penfield, New York

The Yells of Yesteryear

The letter in the January-February issue on the 1962 class yell triggered a memory of the 1962 class song:

(To the tune of “Anchors Aweigh”)

One-nine-six-two to you

Loyal will be

Throughout our college days

Beside the Genesee-ee-ee-ee,

Our class will lead them all

At the U of R!

Pep, drive, and friendliness

Will show the rest that we’re the best by far!

Pretty bad, isn’t it?

During Freshman Week all the girls were loaded into buses and taken to a camp for a few nights. There, we got to know each other, put on skits and played games, and wrote this song. We returned to campus to find that the boys had written the class yell in our absence.

At the time I had no idea where this camp was located. But in 1982, I was back in Rochester with a husband and two children. Our younger son’s best friend was going to a 4-H camp for a week and we signed our son up, too. I drove him to Camp Wyomoco (for WYOming and MOnroe COunties) and there it was—the same little cabins in the woods, the same bunk beds, the same dining hall. Memories flooded in. Did other classes experience this camp, too?

Joanne Worosz Mitchell ’62

Rochester

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.

STUDENT ENTREPRENEURS

Vision of Virtual Reality

(Photo: Adam Fenster)

BODY BY DESIGN: Lucian Copeland ’16, an electrical and computer engineering major from Northfield, Massachusetts, models a prototype of a virtual reality suit that he and other members of the student group Nullspace VR are developing. Designed to mimic the sensation of touch to areas of the wearer’s torso, the prototype is a low-cost, upper-body haptic feedback system that integrates with virtual reality goggles and other VR systems. Copeland and members of the team have set up a lab at High Tech Rochester, a University-affiliated start-up incubator, to hone their ideas.

CANCER RESEARCH

Watery Wonders

(Photo: Adam Fenster)

TADPOLE TALES: The transparent skin of tadpoles from a species of frogs native to sub-Saharan Africa is providing researchers around the world with an unusual window into the genomics and immunology of cancer. Home to the Xenopus Research Center—named for the African clawed frog, or Xenopus laevis—the Medical Center provides materials, training, and specimens to researchers across the globe as a way to better understand how tumors grow and how biological systems react to cancerous cells.

CHEMICAL ENGINEERING

Powerful Polymer

(Photo: Adam Fenster)

MEMORY MAKER: A multiple-exposure photo demonstrates the movement of a material that reverts to its original shape when exposed to body heat. Developed by Mitch Anthamatten, an associate professor of chemical engineering, and graduate student Yuan Meng, the new type of shape-memory polymer can lift 1,000 times its weight and is expected to have important applications in medicine and other fields.

STUDENT LIFE

Debate Goes Varsity

An academic team with needs like those of varsity athletics finds a new “home.”

By Kathleen McGarvey

GAME ON: Debate Union team members (back row) Daniel Bamfo ’19, Margeaux Kelly ’19, Daniel Gomez ’17, Kitra Moeny ’19, Gazi Mahir Ahmed Naven ’19, and (front row) Courtney Otto ’19, Miriam Kohn ’17, Anne Cheng ’17, and Emoni Tedder ’17 take the floor of the Palestra. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

It’s arguable that no University group is more steeped in history than the Debate Union.

“There’s a joke that the debate team was founded in the morning, and then the University was founded in the afternoon—so the debate team has existed a morning longer than the University,” says Brady Fletcher ’08 (MA), director of forensics.

Whatever its origin, the team has existed in many forms—sometimes competing intramurally, sometimes intercollegiately; sometimes taking on other teams one on one, or, as today, competing in tournaments. But recently, it’s made an unusual change, moving under the aegis of the Department of Athletics and Recreation.

It sounds peculiar, on its face. But the move makes sense, says George VanderZwaag, who, with the team’s move in 2014, became director of athletics and recreation and academic teams.

In many ways, the team—with a significant budget and an intensive travel schedule—is more akin to a varsity team than it is to other student clubs.

“We’re not saying debate is part of athletics. It’s not. But it’s part of my portfolio,” VanderZwaag says.

The move, he recalls, started with a basic question posed by Richard Feldman, dean of the College: “Is there more that we could do for teams that compete intercollegiately, but whom we don’t think of in the same way that we do varsity teams?”

There are two worlds within athletics: varsity and club sports. While clubs’ funding comes largely from students paying dues and performing other kinds of fund raising, varsity teams receive extensive support from the Department of Athletics and Recreation.

“We fund their travel, we pay for their equipment, we provide facility access and other things that are critical to their functioning,” VanderZwaag says. “We hire professional coaches, we supervise those coaches, and we set standards for their performance. Our goal is to provide programs and facilities of a high quality that are attractive to the very best students around the country.”

While other academic teams operate as club sports do, the Debate Union—like varsity sports teams—receives funding from the College budget, has professional coaches, and travels extensively.

“We were really running debate as a varsity program without the kind of oversight that we’d normally provide for varsity programs,” says VanderZwaag.

“In its own way, [debate] is a competition,” says Arthur Miller ’56, ’08 (Honorary), a stalwart alumnus of the team. “It’s a mental competition. It’s you against an opponent, and it’s judged, so you can make the argument that that’s where it belongs.”

Fletcher, who became coach last year but who has a long history with the team, says the new arrangement is working well.

“The new relationship has served what we do in a really constructive way,” he says. This year, the team is taking 18 trips to compete in 20 competitions. “It’s a big operation,” he says. “And now we have great support staff and infrastructure in athletics. This is what they do. They book travel, they find creative solutions, and they troubleshoot when problems come up—all of the logistical things that previously we just had to deal with on our own.”

Miriam Kohn ’17, a linguistics major from Portland, Oregon, is the team’s vice president. She calls the move “a positive change. We see more resources, and we can travel with more people to more destinations.”

Team members compete around the country and, increasingly, the world. Last year, destinations included Alaska and Serbia, as well as Hungary. This spring, they’ll be going back to Budapest and to the Netherlands. Such travel is made possible in part with the aid of Miller and Martin Messinger ’49, both longtime benefactors of debate at Rochester who are providing endowed support for the team.

While the team competes energetically, its hallmark is its openness.

“First among our values is that we want to be an open, accessible place to any student who wants to have experience in competitive debate,” says Fletcher. “We think debate has enormous pedagogical value, and—unlike other debate teams with more rigid barriers or standards for being a member—we want to be there for you if you want to debate.”

That dedication to a welcoming environment complicates the comparison of the Debate Union to a varsity team for the simple reason that “varsity” and “novice” are technical terms in debate—and Rochester’s team is committed to maintaining a novice focus.

Yet treating the Debate Union like a varsity team actually enhances the program’s ability to deliver the novice experience, Kohn points out.

“We want to be sure debate is not just for those who happen to have spare funds to travel,” she says.

Kohn competes in both of the main forms of debate, forms that are in some ways comparable to a sprint and a marathon: British Parliamentary debate, which allots competitors just 15 minutes to prepare their arguments; and policy debate, in which competitors extensively research and debate one topic over the course of an entire season.

Kohn says she comes from a family of “loud, strong-willed, self-confident people, for better or worse. I grew up with spirited discussions around the dinner table.”

She began debate in high school, and when she arrived at Rochester, saw a flyer for the team and thought, “Why not?”

While the move to the athletics department is working well, VanderZwaag says he wouldn’t expect to see the structure replicated at other institutions.

“It’s a product of who we are and our circumstances,” he says. “It just seemed to make sense here.”

STUDENT SUPPORT

Devoted to Debate

DEBATE DUO: Martin Messinger ’49 (top) helped revive the debate program, with Arthur Miller ’56 as one of the early students, embarking both of them on a lifelong commitment to the program. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

Arthur Miller ’56, ’08 (Honorary) describes his undergraduate self as a “shrinking violet, sort of a social misfit.”

He hasn’t done much shrinking in a while. A professor of law for 55 years, Miller has argued several times before the United States Supreme Court, as well as in every U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. For two decades, he was the on-air legal editor for ABC’s Good Morning America and for nearly a decade hosted Miller’s Court, a mock-trial program.

“My whole life is speech,” he says.

He gives the credit to his time on Rochester’s debate team. “It was transformative,” he says. “It changed my life.” From an introvert, he became someone “having at least the capacity to be extroverted in the context of debate.”

It was Martin Messinger ’49 who helped him discover “this other personality.”

Messinger himself took up debate in an effort to aid friend Clark Barrett ’50.

Barrett’s father was a prominent attorney in Buffalo, Messinger remembers, and he wanted his son to follow him into practicing law.

“But Clark had a stutter, and he came to me and said, ‘I have to learn to deal with my stutter—and if we had a debate team, I could get the practice I need.’ ”

And so they revived Rochester’s team—and sparked Messinger’s interest in debating. It’s never waned.

After Messinger graduated and began work at Merrill Lynch, he came back to campus as the debate coach. Miller was one of his first two debaters.

Today, Messinger and Miller are still building the program, through a fund that Messinger created and Miller has since matched. The fund now stands at $1.5 million.

In addition to debate, Messinger, a life trustee, has supported programs and initiatives across the University. Miller, who holds the title of University Professor at New York University School of Law, annually hosts a public affairs forum called “Miller’s Court” during Meliora Weekend. He also established an endowed professorship in history.

Barrett died in 2004.

As a coach Messinger emphasized that the team needed to be competitive, but still open to everyone. He worked with a wide cross-section of students, representing diverse personalities and ambitions. But they found commonality in debate: “We were filling needs in a lot of different ways,” he says.

The team has stayed true to its roots, Messinger says, and he takes particular satisfaction today in the large number of international students who are involved.

“Language is not a barrier when you make it not a barrier,” he says.

Skillful speaking is an inner strength to be marshalled and used “in whatever setting you’re in,” says Miller. Debaters learn to organize their thoughts, present them persuasively, and be unafraid to do so in a public arena. “It’s recognizing there’s something in being two people, a private person and a public person,” he says.

But debate teaches more than just speaking. To respond effectively to another’s argument requires absorbing it and using it in later portions of the dialogue.

“That’s true of teaching, and appellate advocacy, and it’s sure as hell true of debate,” says Miller. “You’ve got to learn to speak, but you’ve also got to be able to listen.”

—Kathleen McGarvey

Taking a ‘Look’ at Historical Hoaxes

Art historian Joan Saab examines the relationship between seeing and believing.

MOON DWELLERS: A famous 1830s press hoax involved reports of bat-like people and other fanciful creatures supposedly seen on the moon by an astronomer. (Photo: Library of Congress)

“I saw it with my own eyes.”

It’s an often expressed guarantor of truth. But Joan Saab, an associate professor of art history and visual and cultural studies, suggests that assumptions about seeing and truth require a little more scrutiny.

During the mid-19th century, a series of grand hoaxes captured the American imagination: the Great Moon Hoax, the Cardiff Giant, and the fantastical creatures of P. T. Barnum.

“I’m interested in this moment in the 19th century when people are willing to suspend disbelief and see things—and even though they know they’re not true, to believe for that moment that they are,” she says.

In the summer of 1835, the New York Sun published a series of six articles describing the supposed discovery of life on the moon by famed astronomer Sir John Herschel. The inhabitants included winged people—a combination of humans and bats—unicorns, and other creatures.

Some people always knew the stories were a hoax, and most knew before the series finished.

“But it didn’t matter,” Saab says. People were captivated by the story, and the hoax was picked up by papers around the world. “And that’s what I think was interesting. It continued to resonate.”

Saab explores the hoaxes in a book that she is writing, Making Sense of What We See. It’s one volume in a multivolume series that’s part of what she calls a “new type of history that engages all of the senses.”

Through examples that run a historical continuum from the Florentine Codex—a 16th-century manuscript describing the conquest of Mexico and Moctezuma’s defeat by Cortés—to the Rodney King video, Saab examines the correlation between seeing and knowledge.

POPULAR FICTIONS: Purported “discoveries”—such as P. T. Barnum’s “Feejee Mermaid” (below) and the Cardiff Giant, which was unearthed at a New York farm—remained popular attractions long after being exposed as hoaxes. (Photo: Courtesy of the New York State Historical Association Library, Cooperstown, New York, Cardiff Giant Collection)

Almost 30 years after the Great Moon Hoax, another trick was pulled off in Cardiff, New York, when men digging a well on the farm of William Newell unearthed a 10-foot-tall “petrified man.”

The “man” was in reality a sculpture that was created and placed there by a tobacconist from New York named George Hull, who got the idea after an argument with a Methodist preacher about taking the Bible literally.

After the giant went on display in Syracuse, purchased for nearly $40,000 by a group of businessmen, a paleontologist showed why it was a fake, and Hull confessed. But it remained a popular attraction.

(Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Circus entrepreneur Barnum tried unsuccessfully to lease the giant, and so built a replica, which became even more popular.

Today, the original giant is on display at the Farmer’s Museum in Cooperstown, New York.

Barnum exhibited other fantastical creatures, such as the “Feejee Mermaid,” actually “a monkey carcass with a fish tail sewn to the back of it,” says Saab.

Hoaxes—especially ones that relied on direct observation, like the giant, or new technologies such as the telescope, like the moon hoax—played a part in reconfiguring knowledge and establishing new boundaries for discernible truth, Saab says.

“I’m not arguing that they actually were duped. I’m saying that there’s something happening in this negotiation between seeing and believing that’s not as easy as we think it is.”

—Kathleen McGarvey

The Nazerian Humanities Lectures

Joan Saab was selected to discuss her research on hoaxes as the inaugural presenter in the Hagop and Artemis Nazerian Humanities Lectures at the Humanities Center this spring. Established by University Trustee Ani Gabrellian ’84 and her husband, Mark Gabrellian ’79, in tribute to her parents, the lectures will be given annually by a member of the Rochester faculty and will rotate at least once every four years between Rochester and New York City. The series honors the Nazerians’ belief in the benefits of a humanistic education.

ASK THE ARCHIVIST

Which Class? Which Yearbook?

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

CLASS WORK: Linocuts by Ralph Avery, then the president of the Rochester Art Club, were among the illustrations featured in the 1936 edition of the Interpres, the issue that was published when Philip Payne ’36 (below) was a junior. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

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

My father graduated from Rochester in 1936. I have been gathering information about his years there. My resource materials include Interpres issues, YouTube videos, books, vintage postcards, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle online, and family memorabilia.

1) Why was the Interpres presented by the junior class, rather than the senior class, in the 1930s?

2) Is there an explanation why classes didn’t line up with a particular yearbook? For example, in the 1934 Interpres (my father’s sophomore year), his class appears in the “Frosh” section. Also, the 1937 Interpres includes the Class of 1936 after graduation. (Class of 1936 was in the 1936 issue as seniors.)

These old yearbooks are great. The artwork and photography are special. The sponsor sections in the back provide glimpses into the city of Rochester in the ’30s. I would enjoy any interesting tidbits about the Interpres you may have to share.

—Pat Payne, daughter of the late Philip Payne ’36

The front page of the April 19, 1935, Campus newspaper announced that 700 copies of the 1936 Interpres are “now being distributed free to members of the student body from the yearbook’s offices in Todd Union.”

It was not just in the 1930s that the yearbook was the work of the junior class; this was the case beginning in 1878; from 1858 to 1877 it was the work of the “Secret Societies” (aka fraternities). Originally entitled Interpres Universitatis, the publication hoped to be “a translator, an interpreter of the movements of college life, and of the students themselves.”

Its pages have highlighted the academic, Hellenic, athletic, and sophomoric; parodied faculty (1876) and been parodied (as “Inturps” in UGH, 1960); logged famous visitors, and marked campus turmoil (1969).

As many modern readers note, the publishing schedule causes all manner of confusion for us today, starting with the fact that the featured student portraits are members of the junior class—identified as juniors as they were at the time of publication. The Class of 1977 was the first to name their photograph section “Seniors”—appropriately so, since the books weren’t ready until September 1976, the fall of their senior year.

As freshmen (aka “Frosh”), your father and his classmates would have arrived too late to be included in the yearbook of 1933. In the 1937 edition, published on the last day of classes in May 1936, his class is listed as “Seniors.”

Occasionally photographic prints were pasted in each copy, but it was not until 1890 that halftone reproductions of photographs appeared; prior to that time, separate photo albums of the students were created. While serving in the Civil War, Samuel Porter, Class of 1864, wrote his father in June 1863, asking him to be sure to purchase the set of photographs of his classmates.

The Class of 1881 failed to publish, perhaps due to lack of resources; according to a 50th anniversary history, the advertising (sponsors) section was expanded the following year.

The advent of “coeds” saw the women students represented, minimally, in the yearbook. In 1910, they began issuing an annual of their own, the Croceus. The Classes of 1942 allied for the Interpres-Croceus, 14 years before the Campus and Tower-Times merged as the Campus-Times.

The 1936 edition is particularly beautiful. Printed with blue accents on each page, four chalk manner lithographs of the River Campus act as a visual preface, and dramatic linocuts divide the sections. The artwork was created by Ralph Avery (1907–76), at the time serving as president of the Rochester Art Club.

Designing the covers and interiors provided an opportunity for professional and amateur artists alike. Julia Robinson contributed drawings for the 1891 yearbook, edited by her brother Charles. The sketches of James Havens were used in his Class of 1922 yearbook. Although illness would prevent Havens from finishing his degree, he would become a professional artist, and his work has been featured in exhibitions at the Memorial Art Gallery and elsewhere.

Not to be outdone, students at the Eastman School of Music and the School of Nursing have also issued yearbooks (Score and Meliora).

The Interpres through 1980 can be found online, along with the Croceus, at rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/yearbooks.

Need History?

Do you have a question about University history? Email it to rochrev@rochester.edu. Please put “Ask the Archivist” in the subject line.

You Say ‘Interpreze,’ I Say ‘Interpress,’ or Maybe ‘Interps’

While the name of the yearbook is commonly pronounced “Inter-press,” the pronunciation has varied from “Interpreeze” (Dorothy Dennis, Class of 1908) to “Interps” (Doris Braund Kerber ’49) to its current incarnation.

Reasonable Fools

How did court fools fare in the Age of Enlightenment?

By Kathleen McGarvey

NO FOOLING: European court fools were complex figures, says historian Dorinda Outram: sources of mirth, tellers of truth, and victims of extraordinary cruelty by the nobles they entertained. (Photo: Heritage Image Partnership, Ltd./Alamy Stock Photo)

Every April 1, the 18th-century townspeople of Dresden, in the German state of Saxony, would have an egg fight with a man called Joseph Fröhlich.

It was April Fool’s Day in the truest sense. Fröhlich was the court fool to the Elector of Saxony. A miller by trade, he became a wandering conjuror before being taken up by the elector as a juggler and fool.

His fame wasn’t confined to the court. He was immortalized in portrait busts and on the porcelain that was being manufactured on a large scale, for the first time, in Saxony.

Ordinary people were interested in him “because he was one of them,” says Dorinda Outram, the Gladys I. and Franklin W. Clark Professor of History. A specialist in 18th- and 19th-century European history, Outram is at work on a book about the history of fools in the so-called “Age of Reason.”

“But the Age of Reason was often accompanied by irrational goings-on,” she says. And fools were “on the cusp of all the contradictions in the Enlightenment: animal and human, old and new, court and people, and reason and unreason.”

By the 1700s, court fools had died out in England and France. But in the German states, they were still going strong—and did right up until the time of the French Revolution.

Why they declined is a matter of speculation. “I think it may be something very fundamental changed in the spirit of the times. I hate using words like that, but I can’t see any other way of getting there,” says Outram.

Usually lower-class, and almost always men, court fools played tricks and had tricks played on them. And when the fool was the butt of the joke, the tricks could involve physical pain and public humiliation. In his 1789 autobiography, Leben und Ereignisse, or Life and Events, court fool Peter Prosch describes undergoing a public enema and being set aflame, among other abuses. “There’s violence and sadism, but that’s 18th-century humor. It’s what they thought was funny, though we now think it’s shocking and terrible.”

While court fools endured real agonies, they also brandished real power.

Court fools had a function that made them the envy of others: unfettered access to the king as he dined.

“They’re there to entertain the court, and they do so by having what’s known as a right to approach the royal table and have unlimited conversation with the king that can go anywhere,” Outram says. “It was called Narrenfreiheit, or ‘fool’s freedom.’ ”

That freedom gave him importance and made possible one of his other roles: truth telling.

It came with risks. A misplaced comment could land a fool in prison or worse.

Truth telling, then as now, was perhaps best meted out in small doses.

“It was always held in reserve,” she says. “Someone who was speaking truth all the time would be given short shrift and kicked out. There’s a line along which you can see them walking.”

Chemical Exposure Affects Babies’ Vaccine Response

VACCINE VARIATION: Rochester research indicates that exposure to environmental pollutants may interfere with the effectiveness of some vaccines in prompting a strong immune response in children. (Photo: Adobe Stock)

A vaccine against tuberculosis was less effective among infants who were exposed early in life to toxic chemicals like the insecticide DDT and a family of chemical compounds known as PCBs. That’s according to a Rochester-led study published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives that may offer important insight into the connections between environmental pollutants and the human immune system.

Led by Todd Jusko, an assistant professor of environmental medicine and public health sciences, the study measured immune responses six months after a TB vaccine was administered to more than 500 mother-baby pairs living in eastern Slovakia, an area heavily contaminated by environmental pollutants.

Harmful chemicals were detected in more than 99 percent of the blood samples. Infants with the highest concentrations of PCBs and other chemicals tended to have the lowest antibodies for fighting TB while infants with exposures to both PCBs and a by-product of DDT showed the lowest vaccine antibody levels.

Once widely used in manufacturing and consumer products, PCBs were banned in the United States in 1979.

Although also banned in the United States, DDT is still used in some countries to control malaria spread by mosquitos. The chemicals and their by-products are among the world’s most persistent pollutants.

Nearly all people have detectable concentrations of PCBs in their blood, even those who live in nonindustrialized areas around the globe. —Leslie Orr

Study Details Source of Cognitive Problems Associated with MS

The question of why many patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) experience a slow and continuous cognitive decline may have new answers.

Rochester research published in the Journal of Neuroscience indicates that a subset of brain cells which are normally activated to fight infection, defend against assaults on the nervous system, and clean up debris from damaged cells may act too aggressively when triggered by the immune system in patients with MS.

In a study led by Matthew Bellizzi, an assistant professor in the Department of Neurology and the Center for Neural Development and Disease, and Harris Gelbard, a professor of neurology and director of the center, the team reported that the cells, known as microglia, release high levels of a molecule that destroys part of the system that brain cells use to communicate. That damage signals more microglia and other immune cells to rush to the scene of the injury, creating a chronic and self-perpetuating destructive cycle.

Researchers say the phenomenon is likely behind the cognitive decline that patients experience.

—Mark Michaud

Teens Are More Caring When They Feel Support

Are adolescents less concerned about others?

While a new study seems to confirm a decline in concern for others among children in middle school and early high school, engagement with others rebounds when teens feel supported by their social circle.

In a study published in the journal Developmental Psychology, Laura Wray-Lake, an assistant professor of psychology, and her colleagues reported that a sense of social responsibility varied in conjunction with perceptions of social support. In addition, the team reported they were able to predict changes in social responsibility over time.

Wray-Lake also found that over time, volunteering resulted in an increase in caring. The opposite was true, however, for substance use. An increase in substance use was related to lower social responsibility.

The study indicated that values of social responsibility decrease between the ages of 10 and 16, before leveling off in later adolescence. Race and socioeconomic status had no effect on students’ social responsibility.

—Monique Patenaude

Getting Intimately Acquainted with the Common Bed Bug

BYE-BYE, BEDFELLOWS? An effort to map the genome of the common bed bug may point researchers toward more effective ways to combat the insects, say Rochester scientists. (Photo: Graham Snodgrass/Armed Forces Pest Management Board)

With the resurgence of bed bugs, people around the world are getting more familiar with the creatures than they’d like. But John Werren, the Nathaniel and Helen Wisch Professor of Biology, and fellow researchers have really gotten up close and personal, successfully mapping the genome of Cimex lectularius to get a better understanding of its genetic makeup.

They’ve done it with an eye toward eradicating the parasite, which feeds on human and animal blood. The findings, by researchers from 36 institutions, were published in the journal Nature Communications.

While the genomes of many insects have been sequenced, Werren says the bed bug’s genetic makeup is particularly interesting “because it’s a human parasite, a major pest, and has a unique biology.” In his arm of the project, Werren discovered more than 800 possible instances of genes being transferred from bacteria within the bed bug to the insect’s chromosomes. Most transferred genes never become functional, but one exception—a gene from the Wolbachia bacteria—appears to be functional in male bed bugs. That may create a potential target for more effective pest control, he says, though much work remains to be done.

—Peter Iglinski

GLOBAL ROCHESTER

CAS 170

Smoothing the course for international students

ON THE TOWN: Students in CAS 170 visit Let’s Have Tea, a sculpture by Pepsy Kettavong showing Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony, near the Anthony Museum & House in Rochester. (Photo: Provided)

Life in a new country brings with it fresh opportunities and unfamiliar experiences—and usually, a sizeable dose of culture shock.

So five years ago, Molly Jolliff, associate director of the College Center for Advising Services, devised a program that’s now offered to all new international undergraduates in Arts, Sciences & Engineering: CAS 170, U.S. Life: Customs and Practices.

It’s specifically designed for first-year students from abroad as they adjust to life at Rochester. It supports them socially and academically by providing a place to learn about what they might find in the classroom and outside it, as well as to discuss their experiences.

Instructors, who come from departments across the College, include Marcy Kraus, dean of freshmen, Jon Ramsey, an immigration advisor in the International Services Office, and Ted Pagano, assistant director of the Center for Education Abroad.

The focus of the course is what Jolliff refers to as the “cultural iceberg.” Most of what we see when we visit another country is the small portion of the culture that’s “above the surface,” she says.

“You’re seeing how people dress, how they act, how they speak—and that’s usually how we make our judgments. But we ask the students to go deeper, to go underneath to the values and systems that are the really deep-rooted parts of culture. That’s a skill all people can use wherever they go in the world.”

Part of the course hews to what students want to know. High on that list is how to make small talk, how to make friends with Americans, and how to understand why Americans behave as they do.“We focus on what the American values can be that drive the behavior they’re seeing,” she says. Midway through, the course concentrates specifically on the phenomenon of culture shock and its psychological effects for students.

Says Lucas Avelar Pereira, from Belo Horizonte, Brazil, who took the course in the fall: “Everyone here is very much confident in their success, in their qualities, and in their potential, and coming from a less self-assured, more self-deprecating culture, this was initially a shock. CAS 170 helped me make sense of what was happening around me.”

The course also covers topics such as academic integrity and working with resources on campus. Richard Feldman, dean of the College, comes to the class every semester to talk about his own experiences as a student, and as a faculty member and dean.

Asking questions of a teacher, producing unique work, carrying out critical thinking and analysis—they’re cornerstones of university courses in the United States, but they may not be in the student’s home country, Jolliff says.

Field trips around campus, Rochester, and the region are another component of the class. “We want to create an atmosphere of going out to try new things and be incorporated into the community a little bit more. If they need a little boost to do that, we provide it,” she says.

A course like CAS 170 is “kind of rare” in international higher education, says Jolliff. There aren’t yet assessment mechanisms in place to measure the effect of the course on international students’ success. “Our retention numbers are good, but I can’t say it’s because of this,” she says. “Not yet. Right now, it’s anecdotal.”

Pereira, for one, found it helpful.

“I would say that what I liked best about it was the sense that everyone there was facing the same challenge, adapting to the same situation,” he says. “Of course, each of us came from a different corner in the world, but there were instances in which we all thought something American to be at least strange—chicken and waffles, for instance.”

—Kathleen McGarvey

Rochester and International Students

People

8,146 alumni living abroad

2,755 international students at Rochester in 2015

78 percentage increase in international students between 2010 and 2015

24.4 international students as a percentage of the University student body

118 non–U.S. countries represented by international students across the University in 2015

Early International Students

The first Rochester students born abroad were Ebenezer Nisbet, a native of Scotland, and William Peters Everett, from Canada, both members of the Class of 1853.

Simon Tuska, born in Hungary and a member of the Class of 1856, was the first student born in Continental Europe. He was also the University’s first Jewish student and the first student or alumnus to publish a book, A Stranger in the Synagogue (1854).

Theodore Thanbyah, Class of 1871, arrived from Burma and is believed to be the first Rochester student from Asia. He studied classical Greek and Latin. After graduating, he attended the Rochester Theological Society and then returned to Burma, where he lived for the rest of his life.

CLASS PROJECT

Hammer and Songs

Hajim School undergraduates pitch in to make custom carillon parts so that student musicians can continue to hit the high notes.

By Bob Marcotte

BRASS ATTACKS: Jim Alkins works with Ben Martell ’19 to mill brass replacement parts for a practice keyboard used to teach students how to play the University’s carillon. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Before student musicians are allowed to play the historic Hopeman Memorial Carillon in Rush Rhees Library, they first learn the ins and outs of the instrument on a practice keyboard in Spurrier Hall.

But like the instrument in the tower, which is scheduled to undergo renovations this summer, the practice carillon was custom-made 40 years ago and is showing its age. Several of the hammers that are needed to strike the high notes are worn out.

Where can a carillonneur go to get new parts for such a piece of history?

In this case, to mechanical engineering students Loudon Blake ’17 and Ben Martell ’19, who have volunteered to make new parts for their final projects in an introductory course on basic machine tools.

During the spring semester, they are spending time in the fabrication lab in Rettner Hall, learning to use lathes and other equipment to fashion replacement parts.

“If it helps students play the carillon better, then I’m glad to help out, because I love the sound it makes,” says Blake, a junior from Rochester.

As for Martell, a sophomore from Lexington, Massachusetts, “I just wanted to do something that would help people out, that will actually be used.”

That’s music to the ears of Jimmy Warlick, who manages musical performance programs in the Department of Music in the School of Arts & Sciences. Warlick hoped to find a shop on campus that could not only help replace the hammers, but also provide learning experiences for students.

Jim Alkins, a senior laboratory engineer who teaches the course, was happy to oblige. Students in his class have the option of fabricating something for their own use as a final project.

But he also encourages them to ask their professors if they can make something that, for example, might be used in a lab. “It gives them the additional experience of going out and dealing with a customer,” Alkins says.

“We’ve made parts for the Institute of Optics, and for the Baja and Solar Splash teams,” he says. The only charge is for any materials that have to be ordered special to complete a project.

Carillonneur Doris Aman, a music department instructor who also coordinates the University’s Carillon Society, says increasing numbers of students have taken an interest in learning to play the carillon in recent years.

This spring there are 13 beginning students—representing majors as diverse as optics, physics, music, history, and mechanical engineering—who use the practice carillon on a daily basis as part of Aman’s class and a course offered through the Eastman Community Music School.

As the replacement parts are fabricated—Warlick has also approached the University machine shop in Taylor Hall to produce replacement hammers—students are able to use the practice carillon. They just can’t hit the highest notes until the broken hammers are replaced.

Aman says that carillon students participate as much as possible in maintaining and repairing the practice carillon, under her supervision.

But she says “a hammer breaking is beyond our expertise, so we passed the broken hammers to the machine shop.”

Bob Marcotte writes about the Hajim School for University Communications.

A New Director Leads Education Abroad

The study abroad program has a new name and a new director.

Now known as Education Abroad, the program will be led by Tynelle Stewart, who became director in January. She also serves as assistant dean.

Stewart takes over from Jacqueline Levine ’80, ’84 (Mas), the program’s longtime leader, who has taken on a role with Advancement, working with alumni who have studied abroad.

Stewart was director of study abroad and fellowships at the Rochester Institute of Technology from 2007 until she began her new appointment.

In making the announcement, Richard Feldman, dean of the College, said Stewart will build on the strengths of Rochester’s program, expanding global opportunities for students.

At RIT, she was credited with increasing student participation 32 percent over five years.

About a third of undergraduates at Rochester study abroad, double the national average.

Organizations Work Together to Share the Performing Arts

School children in the Rochester City School District and their families are getting a special introduction to the cultural resources of the Eastman School of Music and other performing arts groups.

Rochester-area organizations announced an effort to provide 220 families with free tickets to a series of performances at Eastman, including a special appearance in January by Grammy Award–winning soprano Kathleen Battle. The initiative is a collaboration involving Eastman, the Rochester school district, the AVANGRID Foundation on behalf of Rochester Gas and Electric, the Rochester Area Community Foundation, and the Rochester Education Foundation.

In addition to tickets, the organizations are arranging transportation to three concerts in the 2015–16 season of Eastman Presents.

The first event was a concert, Underground Railroad: A Spiritual Journey, performed by Battle and pianist Joel Martin. Other events take place in March and April.

The collaboration is the latest initiative undertaken by Eastman to make the arts and music more accessible to city students and to other programs.

Other efforts include ROCmusic, a collaborative partnership among Eastman, the Eastman Community Music School, the Hochstein School of Music and Dance, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, the Rochester City School District, and the City of Rochester.

The program provides tuition-free, after-school music instruction at the David F. Gantt and Edgerton Recreation Centers.

The Eastman Community Music School is also home to Eastman Pathways, a program providing outstanding city district students with a scholarship to pursue music at Eastman.

Alfred University Names Mark Zupan President

Mark Zupan, former dean of the Simon Business School, will become the 14th president of Alfred University in July.

Currently the director of the Bradley Policy Center at Simon and the Olin Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Zupan led the school as dean for 10 years, stepping down in 2014.

Before arriving at Rochester, Zupan was dean and professor of economics at the University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management. His areas of expertise include industrial organization, regulation, and political economy.

Zupan succeeds Charles Edmondson, who has been president of Alfred University since 2000. Alfred’s board of trustees announced the appointment in February.

Founded in 1836 as one of the country’s first coeducational institutions, Alfred University is located in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains in New York.

Royal Astronomical Society Honors John Tarduno

Geophysicist John Tarduno has been recognized for his research by one of the world’s foremost academic societies.

The Royal Astronomical Society in London named Tarduno—a professor of geography and of physics and astronomy—as this year’s winner of the Price Medal, an honor awarded for “investigations of outstanding merit in solid-earth geophysics, oceanography, or planetary sciences.”

In nominating Tarduno for the medal, Carmala Garzione, chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, wrote that Tarduno’s work “changed the way that geologists teach about plate motions in introductory geology classes.” Among the findings of his research is evidence that islands and undersea mountains may be formed by moving hot spots—hot plumes from deep within the Earth—and that the Hawaiian islands were once 1,500 kilometers north of where they are today.

Widely recognized, Tarduno has earned honors including Guggenheim, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Geological Society of America fellowships. He has also won awards for his undergraduate teaching.

STILL LIFE: The papers of Joan Bondurant (on camel on left), a spy who became an activist for social justice, are available to scholars. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

Rush Rhees Library Makes Available Papers of a Spy Who Became Friends with Gandhi

In her formative years, Joan Bondurant dreamed of a music career. Instead, she became a spy.

Throughout World War II, the Kansas native worked as a research analyst for the Office of Strategic Services in India, translating intercepted Japanese messages and documents. Later, she befriended Mahatma Gandhi and embarked on a career of researching and teaching his philosophy of nonviolence. She wrote extensively about conflict and conflict resolution, and about Indian government and politics.

Now her papers, held by the River Campus Libraries, are available to scholars. The collection was given to the Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation in 2012 by her close friend and editor, Edna Cardish, with assistance from Allison Stokes, the former director of the Interfaith Chapel and the Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence.

The collection includes correspondence, lecture notes, manuscript drafts, home movies, and photos.

State Establishes Alzheimer’s Initiative at the Medical Center

The Medical Center will become home to a state-designated center focused on Alzheimer’s disease.

The Office for Aging Research and Health Services will receive $2.35 million over five years from the New York State Department of Health to establish a Finger Lakes Center for Excellence in Alzheimer’s Disease.

The project aims to create an accessible, integrated system from which patients and families across the Finger Lakes region can receive comprehensive care for Alzheimer’s. Specifically, the center will serve individuals from Chemung, Livingston, Monroe, Ontario, Orleans, Schuyler, Seneca, Steuben, Wayne, and Yates Counties.

The center will be led by Carol Podgorski, an associate professor of psychiatry, and will work closely with the Office for Aging Research and Health Services, which is directed by Yeates Conwell, a professor of geriatric psychiatry.

Dining Services Moves to Antibiotic-free Chicken

By the end of this year, all chicken served by University Dining Services on the River Campus and at the Eastman School of Music will be free of antibiotics, the University has announced.

Involving more than 278 tons of chicken each year, the change began this winter in some salad bars and grilling stations on the River Campus and is expected to be implemented in all dining options by June 2016.

Meliora Catering—part of University Dining Services—is also making the transition. Dining services at the Medical Center, including patient and visitor dining, as well as catering, also plan to switch to all antibiotic-free chicken before the end of 2016.

The practice of giving antibiotics to otherwise healthy poultry and other animals by many in the food-animal production industry has raised public health concerns about the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in livestock and in humans.

TOP PLAYS

Buzzer-beater Goes Viral

MAYHEM FOR MACK: Teammates mob Mack Montague ’17 after he made a three-point shot that completed a trick play to give Rochester a victory as time expired against Chicago. (Photo: Athletics and Recreation)

Two Rochester juniors who pulled off a basketball play on Super Bowl Sunday became a social media sensation and made ESPN’s Top 10 Plays of the Day (as No. 2).

To set the scene, Rochester trailed Chicago, 76–73, with six seconds left. With 2.7 seconds left, Sam Borst-Smith ’17 went to the foul line for two shots.

He made the first, then missed the second intentionally, throwing it off the front of the rim. He caught the rebound and passed the ball to the corner, where Mack Montague ’17 sank a three-pointer just before the buzzer for a 77–76 win.

The play went viral on social media, earning nearly 600,000 views within four days. It showed up overseas as well—in Australia, Germany, and France.

A Super Sunday, indeed.

—Dennis O’Donnell

HIGHLIGHTS

Squash Team Finishes as National Runner-up

KEY MATCH: Ryosei Kobayashi ’17 (right) picked up a key win as the Yellowjackets rallied to force Yale into a winner-takes-all final match for the squash national title. (Photo: Athletics and Recreation)

Although the Yellowjackets came heartbreakingly short of claiming their first squash national championship, the 2015–16 season was marked by historic milestones in arguably the best season ever for the program.

At the top of the list was a victory over defending national champion Trinity College in the semifinals of the College Squash Association’s Potter Cup.

That win knocked Trinity out of the title game for the first time in 19 years and guaranteed that the Yellowjackets would finish above their previous national best of third in 2009.

In the championship match against Yale University, the Yellowjackets battled from behind to force a 4–4 tie with only one point left to be decided. In the final set, Tomotaka Endo ’18 lost to Yale’s Kah Wah Cheong, sending the championship to New Haven.

The finish was a reversal of an earlier season matchup in which Rochester beat Yale 5–4 at the Lyman Squash and Racquetball Center. Going into the Potter Cup, the Yellowjackets were ranked fourth in the country. The team finished at 12–4, tying the program’s record for second-most victories in a season.

Heading into March, members of the squash team were scheduled to compete at CSA’s individual championships.

Basketball: The women’s team was set to host a four-team, first-round session of the NCAA tournament on the first weekend in March. Ranked No. 1 in the East region throughout February, the Yellowjackets finished second in the UAA (10–4). It was the team’s 13th 20-victory regular season (20–5). The men finished second to Emory in the UAA race (10–4) and were 17–8 overall, just missing an NCAA bid.

SWIMMING & DIVING

Diver Wins First UAA Title

Danielle Neu ’17 is first Yellowjacket to claim a conference diving crown in the women’s competition.

By Matthew Taylor

TOP FORM: Danielle Neu ’17 won the three-meter diving title at the UAA championships. (Photo: Athletics and Recreation)

Danielle Neu ’17 became Rochester’s first female diver to capture a University Athletic Association title, winning the three-meter board competition and qualifying for the NCAA regional diving championships.

She was joined at the championships by Max Adler ’18, who qualified with a fourth-place finish in the men’s one- meter competition.

The divers’ results were part of a strong showing by both the women’s and the men’s swimming and diving teams at the UAA conference championships, held in the Rochester suburb of Webster. The women finished in sixth place with a total of 673.5 points and the men finished seventh with a total of 689 points. Members of both teams broke school records and met NCAA provisional qualifying standards.

They include:

Alex Veech ’17 finished in second place in the 100-yard breaststroke with a time of 1:03.29, breaking her own school record of 1:04.16 and qualifying for the NCAAs.

Vicky Luan ’16 broke the 100-yard freestyle school record and tied for 10th with a time of 52.37 seconds. Jennifer Enos ’17 set a school record in the 1,650-yard freestyle, placing ninth with a time of 17:38.64. That broke her own school record set in 2013 by more than two seconds.

Gunnar Zemering ’18 broke his own school record in the 50-yard freestyle, with a finishing time of 20.62 seconds and also earning an NCAA time. He finished eighth in the 100-yard free. Elliot Schwinn ’19 had two provisional qualifying times, breaking his own school record in the 1,650-yard freestyle in 16:02.26 and besting a 27-year-old school record in the 400-yard individual medley with a time of 4:04.84.

Neu is Rochester’s first UAA champion since the 200-yard freestyle relay in 2009 and the Yellowjackets’ first individual champion since Karen Gromer ’07, ’10M (MPH) captured first place in the 200-yard butterfly in 2004. The first male diver to win a UAA title was Scott Richardson ’88, who won the one-meter board in 1988, the first year of the championship.

Taylor is a communications assistant in the Department of Athletics and Recreation.

TRACK & FIELD

Yellowjackets Tune Up for Penn Relays

Rochester expects to be well represented at historic track meet.

By Matthew Taylor

Members of the track and field teams are preparing to compete in one of the most famous meets in the world—the Penn Relays in Philadelphia.

Founded in 1895, the three-day event from April 28 to 30 at the University of Pennsylvania is considered the longest uninterrupted annual collegiate track meet in the country, and is expected to draw 22,000 athletes from around the world who qualify for the competition.

“We decided that we had some high-level athletes this year who would benefit from competing in a high-caliber meet such as this,” says Sam Albert ’01, ’02W (MS), the director of track and field and cross country at Rochester.

With the team coming off a successful indoor winter season, Albert says he expects up to 40 Yellowjackets—15 to 20 each from the men’s and women’s teams—to qualify.

The total depends on the entry standards, which will be published in mid-April.

As of the end of March, the team was scheduled to compete at St. John Fisher College that same weekend, so athletes who don’t compete at the Penn Relays will also be in action.

The trip to Philadelphia is supported by the Hale Fund for Competitive Excellence, which was created in 2012 in recognition of longtime track and field and cross country coach Timothy Hale, and has been supported by alumni and friends of the University.

Albert says competing among some of the best college track and field athletes in the country is an extraordinary experience.

“The Penn Relays meet is really just an additional special opportunity that we are able to offer some of our most elite athletes,” he says.

Taylor is a communications assistant in the Department of Athletics and Recreation.

Are We Alone?

Odds are, we aren’t the first advanced civilization in the universe, says a Rochester astrophysicist.

By Leonor Sierra with Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

1 IN A TRILLION TRILLION: We’re used to thinking that alien life is a remote possibility. But if the probability that another advanced civilization has existed at any time in the visible universe is any larger than this number, then humans are not the first or only such civilization. (Photo: J. Carpenter, T. H. Jarrett, and R. Hurt/Two Micron All Sky Survey, University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center of the California Institute of Technology)

Are humans unique and alone in the vast universe?

It’s a question humans have asked for millennia. But it hasn’t been until recently that there’s been any scientific framework in which to even begin to posit answers.

In the early 1960s, astrophysicist Frank Drake, now professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, developed an equation that could theoretically estimate the number of advanced civilizations existing in the Milky Way galaxy. Drake intended his equation to offer a guide for research. At the time, astrophysicists didn’t have nearly the knowledge it would actually take to come up with a value for the elusive N: the number of advanced civilizations (which Drake defined in practical terms as civilizations emitting detectable electromagnetic waves) that were likely to inhabit the galaxy.

Among the unknowns was the number of planets in the Milky Way. And as long as that was unknown, it would also remain unknown what percentage of such planets—or exoplanets, as they’re called—would likely have environments suitable for life.

Scientists have made enormous progress toward estimating both of those variables, thanks to NASA’s Kepler Mission and other advances in astronomy. The Kepler space observatory was launched in March 2009 with the goal of exploring the Milky Way’s planetary systems in order to find habitable planets. Using data from that mission, astrophysicists can now achieve reliable estimates for both those variables.

But roadblocks remain.

And in new research, Adam Frank, a professor of physics and astronomy at Rochester, and his coauthor Woodruff Sullivan of the University of Washington have advanced a means to overcome the obstacles.

“The question of whether advanced civilizations exist elsewhere in the universe has always been vexed with three large uncertainties in the Drake equation,” says Frank. “We’ve known for a long time approximately how many stars exist. We now know that roughly one-fifth of stars have planets in ‘habitable zones,’ where temperatures could support life as we know it.”

But the Drake equation requires an estimate for how often planets suitable for life actually develop life. Second, it requires an estimate for how often life evolves into intelligent life, and how often intelligent life develops into advanced civilization. And most troublesome of all, according to Frank, the Drake equation requires an estimate for how long advanced civilizations are likely to persist. “The fact that humans have had rudimentary technology for roughly 10,000 years doesn’t really tell us if other societies would last that long,” Frank says.

Frank and Sullivan respond to these dilemmas by posing a slightly different question. “Rather than asking, how many civilizations may exist now?” says Frank, “we ask, are we the only technological species that has ever arisen?”

By restating the question, Frank and Sullivan eliminate the need to know any information about civilization longevity. Frank calls the new question the “cosmic archaeological question”—how often in the history of the universe has life evolved to an advanced state?

Of course, that still leaves huge uncertainties in calculating the probability for advanced life to evolve on habitable planets. It’s here that Frank and Sullivan flip the question around. Rather than guessing at the odds of advanced life developing, they calculate the odds against it occurring. In other words, what are the odds that humanity, here on Earth, is the only advanced civilization ever to develop in the entire history of the observable universe?

“Of course, we have no idea how likely it is that an intelligent technological species will evolve on a given habitable planet,” says Frank. “But using our method, we can tell exactly how low that probability would have to be for us to be the only civilization the universe has produced.”

So how unlikely is it in a universe consisting of an estimated 10 billion trillion stars, or even among the Milky Way’s estimated 100 billion? Applying the new exoplanet data to the universe’s 2 • 10 to the 22nd power stars, Frank and Sullivan find that human civilization is unique in the cosmos only if the odds of a civilization developing on a habitable planet are less than about one in a trillion trillion, or one in 10 to the 24th power.

“One in a trillion trillion is incredibly small,” says Frank. “Think of it this way: before our result you’d be considered a pessimist if you imagined the probability of evolving a civilization on a habitable planet were one in a trillion. But according to our results, one chance in a trillion implies that what has happened here on Earth with humanity must have happened a trillion other times over cosmic history. A trillion other civilizations doesn’t sound so pessimistic.”

Frank cautions against dreams of extraterrestrial communication. “The universe is more than 13 billion years old. That means that even if there have been a thousand civilizations in our galaxy alone, if they live only as long as we have been around—roughly 10,000 years—then all of them are likely already extinct. And others won’t evolve until we are long gone.”

But that reality doesn’t diminish the profound scientific and philosophical significance of the new result.

“Given the vast distances between stars and the fixed speed of light, we might never really be able to have a conversation with another civilization anyway. If they were 50,000 light-years away, then every exchange would take 100,000 years to go back and forth. So from a fundamental perspective the question is, has it ever happened before? It’s not just, has it happened recently and nearby? Our result is the first time anyone has been able to set any empirical answer for that question. And it turns out that it’s pretty likely we are not the only time intelligence and civilization has evolved.”

Lives in Letters

Generations join forces to bring a digital archive of Victorian-era letters to life.

By Kathleen McGarvey

TREASURE TROVE: One of the most extensive collections of 19th-century American family letters known to exist, the William Henry Seward Papers include correspondence such as an 1834 letter from Seward to his wife, Frances. The back (above) shows the tears that wax seals sometimes made in the paper, adding to the challenge that transcribers face. But the family often saved the seals, which can hold the missing words. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Picture an attic groaning with papers saved over more than a century.

That’s the sight that greeted Glyndon Van Deusen ’25, a professor of history at Rochester from 1930 to 1962, when he was invited to the top floor of the Seward family home—once the house of leading 19th-century American politician and Secretary of State William Henry Seward—in Auburn, New York, in the 1940s.

“I shall never forget the sight that met my eyes in that attic,” he later wrote. “Great masses of material, largely letters to William Henry Seward, were there, some in trunks, boxes, and valises, some bound up in bundles, all covered with the dust of decades.”

And that wasn’t the end of it. Van Deusen—who was writing a biography of Seward’s friend and political ally Thurlow Weed— began to bring University librarian John Russell with him on his visits to Seward’s aged grandson, William Henry Seward III. Russell describes the papers he then encountered: “many trunks and boxes in the basement and attic of the house, and in storage rooms in the barn.”

Rochester vied with Yale and the Library of Congress for the papers; ultimately, Seward’s grandson chose Rochester as their home, and in 1951, at his death, the University’s Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation became the repository of the papers.

Now an intergenerational team of “citizen archivists”—led by Thomas Slaughter, the Arthur R. Miller Professor of History, and with the wide-ranging support of librarians at the River Campus Libraries—is working to bring to light the extensive holding of family papers in the collection. Slaughter calls it “one of the best Victorian-era, intact family collections in the nation.”

The letters exchanged by family members are the focus of the Seward Family Digital Archive Project, now in its fourth year and supported by a grant from the Fred L. Emerson Foundation. A searchable public website is scheduled to launch in April, making available 20 years’ worth of letters, from 1822 to 1842, drawn from the collection and four related manuscript collections at the University, the Seward House Historic Museum in Auburn, and a small private collection held by a Seward descendent.

The William Henry Seward Papers is one of the largest manuscript collections that the library holds and among the most often cited. Seward, who lived from 1801 to 1872, was a trial attorney, a New York state senator (1831–1838), governor of New York (1838–1842), U.S. senator (1849–1860), and secretary of state (1860–1869). He was the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for president in 1860, only to be sidelined in favor of someone more moderate in his support of abolition: Abraham Lincoln. Today he is best remembered for his decision to purchase Alaska—at the time, called “Seward’s Folly.” He was also attacked in the assassination plot that killed Lincoln. The collection of Seward’s papers, both professional and personal, includes 230 linear feet of materials, 150,000 items, and 375,000 pages.

When librarians first organized the papers in the 1950s—in what must have been a near-Herculean effort—archivists assumed that historians’ interest would center on the papers that relate to government. Even when portions of the collection were microfilmed in the 1980s, attention was still given, almost exclusively, to the state papers.

“The family letters themselves were separated out of the general correspondence into three cabinets and not microfilmed along with the rest of the collection,” says Alison Reynolds, the William Henry Seward Project archivist in the special collections department. “There are also 31 boxes relating to family memorabilia, personal papers, and household finances, and those weren’t microfilmed at all. So even in 1981 when they did the microfilm, they still thought the family part wasn’t going to be as interesting or as frequently used.”

But since the collection arrived on campus in the mid-20th century, historical priorities have changed, with the emergence of social and cultural history and the growth of interest in family history, gender studies, and investigations of race and class.

There are 5,000 family letters, running to a total of 20,000 pages, says Slaughter. Household account books, diaries, travel journals, scrapbooks, and other items add another 5,000 pages.

AT WORK: Retired American history librarian Margaret Becket volunteers as a transcriber and annotator for the project. She calls the language of the letters “formal, even when they’re writing to their families. It’s not stiff, but it’s dignified.” (Photo: Adam Fenster)

The project involves making digital images of each page of the selected letters, and transcribing and annotating them. The completed digital archive will feature in the range of 25,000 digital images, including some of the Seward family’s photographs.

Carrying out the project is a three-pronged team. The first two groups in the team are students in Slaughter’s course related to the project, and student employees of the project, including both undergraduates and graduate students. They work in a room in the Digital Humanities Center that they’ve dubbed the “War Room,” and framed photos of team members’ faces, superimposed on 19th-century figures, flank the large computer monitors around the room.

Each fall semester, the students in Slaughter’s course, The Seward Family in Peace and War, learn the history of the influential and extended family and gain firsthand experience with digitization and documentary editing. Mary Ann Mavrinac, vice provost and Andrew H. and Janet Dayton Neilly Dean of River Campus Libraries, calls the Seward Family Papers Project “an embodiment of the River Campus Libraries’ future in working with students” as it equips them “with 21st-century digital media skills while giving them direct access to one of our most rare and unique collections.”

The third group is less expected: volunteers, including residents of the Highlands at Pittsford, a University-affiliated retirement community. Their participation is part of a pilot program to expand the project beyond the University and into the community. The residents of the Highlands, located in the Rochester suburb of Pittsford, bring a singular skill to the project, one not readily found in people in their late teens and 20s: an intimate familiarity with both letter writing and reading cursive handwriting.

Students in Slaughter’s course have typically struggled with the longhand they find in the letters. But the volunteers don’t.

No longer widely taught in schools, cursive writing isn’t second nature to undergraduates today. “A lot of them have no familiarity with it,” says volunteer and retired University librarian Margaret Becket, “and even the ones who did learn it in school don’t use it nearly as much, and don’t even see it very much.”

“We all had the Palmer Method,” says volunteer Lyn Nelson, who lives at the Highlands with her husband and describes herself as “an original Katharine Gibbs girl,” from the business school that, beginning in the Great Depression, trained women for careers in business, with instruction in typing, shorthand, and other office skills.

“It’s hard to believe that they don’t teach it anymore. It makes one feel sort of sad,” says Allan Anderson, a retired hospital administrator who, in a long and geographically varied career, held several positions at Highland Hospital and was an executive director of Strong Memorial Hospital from the late 1960s through the 1970s. Retired in 1996, he and his wife, Pauline, have lived at the Highlands since 2012.

Becket, Nelson, and Anderson all note that the ease of reading the writing varies with the penmanship. And archivist Alison Reynolds observes that 19th-century handwriting isn’t quite familiar cursive.

“It’s a lot more extravagant. They use a lot more loops, and there’s a letter that kind of looks like an ‘f’ but it’s a double ‘s’ [called a ‘long s’], and so that can be tricky as well. And n’s and u’s, or o’s and e’s—they all can get confusing. And it’s not as neat, because they weren’t using the high-quality pens we have, either.”

In fact, pen technology and handwriting methods get hands-on treatment in Slaughter’s course, where students try the kinds of pens that Seward family correspondents would have used. They also study handwriting primers and theory books that teach them proper posture, hand position, and letter formation.

“It gives you perspective,” says Demeara Torres ’18, a computer science major from New York City. “You realize this is what they had to do.” She took the course—which changes its thematic focus every year—last fall. But she has worked on the project since her first day of college, after meeting Slaughter during a scholarship interview when she was still in high school.

Handwriting is only part of what makes reading the letters challenging. The paper is thin, with writing from the other side bleeding through. The ink is sometimes thick and blotchy, and big blobs of ink fell from the pen onto the page; other times, the ink is faint and spidery. To economize on paper, letter writers would occasionally cover a page in script both horizontally and vertically. Sometimes several people would write parts of a letter, or one letter would contain different sections for different recipients. There were no envelopes; instead, correspondents would fold the paper so that part of the page became the outside. And sealing wax would tear words away when the letter was opened, sometimes leaving gaping holes in the letters—though the Sewards often saved the wax, which can still hold the missing words. Slaughter and his assistants digitize and transcribe those, too.

Creating a “documentary edition” according to the standards of the Association for Documentary Editing has “only ever been done with a stable staff of PhDs,” Slaughter says. But this project has a transient student staff, and now, a corps of volunteers, most of whom are new to the world of archives.

Most of the country’s major documentary editorial projects began in the 1950s, says Beth Luey, past president of the American Association for Documentary Editing and a former editor of the Adams Family Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society. They were research projects, and students weren’t involved. “But Tom Slaughter has demonstrated that you can do this. There are people in the editing community who thought that was true, but couldn’t prove it.”

Maintaining editorial standards requires careful coordination, and that’s built into the project, too. “The most important thing is transcribing accurately and annotating as fully as possible,” says Slaughter. Because students are constantly graduating and moving on, or completing the course, the students involved “are always just learning the history, the vocabulary, and the people,” he says.

Documented best practices are the key to maintaining continuity, so that students can train the students who will replace them, without ever meeting them. That pedagogy—guidelines, resources, syllabi, and student research—will be shared, along with the documents, on the digital archive.

Even a decade ago, annotation on such a scale would have been far more cumbersome, if possible at all. Online databases—newspapers, city directories, genealogical resources, and more—have allowed project workers to identify more than 4,000 people mentioned in the letters, along with an extensive list of Seward pets, from Brownie the canary to Snip the spaniel. The team has created a database of “Seward People and Places.” It aims to be comprehensive, identifying every person, place, and literary work mentioned in the letters.

Working on the project has “opened up a more technological aspect of history,” says Sarabeth Rambold ’18, a history and political science major from Manchester, Vermont. “You think of history as something that’s oriented in the past, but this is very driven toward the future. It’s an interesting combination.”

Rambold took the course in the fall of her freshman year, and then took a job with the project. This year she has been working with the volunteers at the Highlands, especially Anderson.

“I’d never have gotten to work with people so different from myself, age-wise, if I hadn’t started working here,” she says.

ACROSS GENERATIONS: Collaboration manager Lauren Davis (left), a history PhD student, and Sarabeth Rambold ’18 (middle) discuss transcriptions with volunteers Lyn Nelson and Allan Anderson at the Highlands at Pittsford, a University-affiliated senior community. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

So far, the students have mainly been helping the volunteers with technology.

While the technology learning curve for the volunteers has been steep, Lauren Davis is impressed with their determination. She’s the first-year history doctoral student who is managing the volunteer arm of the project. After earning her master’s degree, she taught history students for three years at Wayland Baptist University in her home state of Texas. She worked with students from their teens to their 60s.

“I became interested in what it brings to the table when you have intergenerational education,” she says.

While the volunteers are adept at reading handwriting, the students bring computer savvy. “It’s a balance,” says Davis.

As a little girl, volunteer Lyn Nelson remembers, she’d go to the library in the summertime and fill her bag with biographies. Now she finds a direct connection to history in the Sewards’ correspondence.

She transcribed a letter in which Seward describes seeing the Washington Monument, already standing 15 feet above the ground.

“I adore that!” says Nelson. “It just tickled me. It gave me shivers all over.”

She says that “the whole project gives me energy, delight, interest. I find it—how should I phrase this? I’m eager to get to it, and eager to learn from it, and it adds something, a new dimension, to my life.”

For volunteer Allan Anderson, who was raised on a farm in Chautaqua County, New York, it also resonates with an old dimension of his life. His deep familiarity with the western New York terrain where various Sewards and their friends lived and traveled is an asset to the project, says Davis. Anderson’s great-great-grandfather even purchased the family farm from the Holland Land Company, which once owned most of what is now western New York. Seward was an agent for the company—but the Anderson farm was not bought “from Mr. Seward, as far as I know,” he says with amusement.

Connections, though, are at the heart of the project—between people and across time and distance. The letters give students “a whole different sense of the kinds of connections that people made with, and through, their letters,” says retired librarian Margaret Becket.

In many ways, the Sewards—who even annotated the outside of letters—are an archivist’s dream, says Serenity Sutherland, a doctoral candidate in history, a 2014–16 Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Digital Humanities, and the project manager. “If you can imagine—a whole family that saves everything from 1776 to the 1880s. They saved everything.”

At the Seward House, home to many of the material objects they saved, “everything” includes ordinary household items, gifts from abroad, and telegrams and even bloody bed sheets from when Seward was stabbed by former Confederate soldier Lewis Powell as part of the Lincoln assassination plot. “When you combine these [objects] with the letters in which they’re mentioned—it’s just a really complete collection that I don’t think many other paper collections have,” says Sutherland.

And in their letters, the Sewards discuss some of the most vital political topics of their day, including abolition and women’s rights.

Seward used his governorship to bring reform to education, immigration, prisons, and law in New York. In 1850, the outspoken abolitionist gave his famous “higher law” speech, in which he declared that “. . . there is a higher law than the Constitution.” He and his wife, Frances, sheltered fugitive slaves in their Auburn home as part of the Underground Railroad and contributed financial backing to Frederick Douglass’s North Star newspaper, which Douglass published in Rochester.

But Frances was perhaps even more reform-minded than her husband, and the letters are a record of their exchanges. She raised funds for antislavery causes. She raised the niece of Harriet Tubman while Tubman worked for the Union Army as a nurse and a spy. She supported the Married Woman’s Property Act, a law passed in New York state in 1848. She was “very moral and religious,” says Sutherland. “She had a lot of strong beliefs—beliefs that, when they were younger, she believed he held, too. But when he became more involved in politics, William Henry Seward lost some of the ardor that he originally had for abolitionism—or at least, he tempered it with wanting to be a good politician, and to be successful.

“Frances never did. She was always strong in her belief that it was absolutely morally wrong for a nation that espoused freedom to be enslaving people, and she never wavered from that. So she would write intellectual arguments to William Henry, telling him why he was wrong for the speech that he made about promoting leniency for slaveholders, or something like that. She did a lot of negotiating in her letters.”

Daughter Fanny’s diaries and correspondence, alongside her library, which is conserved at the Seward House, provide an unparalleled glimpse into the life of a 19th-century American teenage girl. “Fanny’s ambitions to be a writer, her experiences in Washington, D.C., where she had friendships with a famous actress and with the children and spouses of the leading politicians of the day, and her firsthand experience of major historical events are documented only in our collection,” Slaughter says.

The project is beginning to expand beyond the family letters, to include not just items like diaries but also the correspondence of close friends.

“We’re finding that family stories aren’t always confined to the family members. A lot of family stories get told to close friends. And so we’re thinking that we have to have the papers of these friends [which are also held in Special Collections], too, in order to really tell the family story,” says Sutherland.

The stories were read with urgency at the time, and remain almost as compelling today.

“Receiving letters was so important to the family members,” she says. “They beg each other to write to them. They say, please write to me—I haven’t heard from you. Frances especially begs William Henry all the time to write to her. She’s saying, I haven’t gotten a letter from you in one week. You must be sick; I know you’re sick because you wouldn’t not write to me. They guilt each other into writing.”

But the fear was real. Before antibiotics, a sudden fever could take a healthy person away in the time between letters. “That was part of the function of letters: letting people who love you know that you’re still OK, because people could get sick so quickly, so unexpectedly,” Becket says.

Seward maintained a punishing travel schedule in the United States and abroad that kept him away from his family frequently and for long stretches. Their lives, in a very real sense, were lived through their letters. One letter from Fanny to her mother in 1864 runs to 26 pages, as she adds the happenings of day after day after day. Sutherland calls it a “mini-novella.”

And reading the letters is, in many ways, like reading a novel, says Becket. The dramas they describe—from arguments over a nation’s slaveholding to grief over a baby needlessly lost to smallpox to delight over the antics of squirrels, in a letter from an aunt to Seward’s youngest son—may be of interest to any reader, not just to historians of 19th-century America.

“You’re always getting surprises, and shifts in relationships,” Becket says.

“William Henry Seward was so famous, but when you read his letters, you see he’s just a normal person, dealing with normal family things,” says student Sarabeth Rambold. “I like how accessible it makes historic people.”

“To have this focus on the family papers puts [Seward] and his work in a context that we don’t have for very many other, even very important, Americans, and I think that’s the value of it,” Becket says. Through the letters, “we know more about people’s lives and how they got through each day. Their relationships, their priorities, can tell us so much more, not just about Seward but about people in his social class, and the value system of the whole culture.”

“We don’t usually think of historians as explorers, but they are,” says Luey. “It’s exciting to see things people haven’t seen before, or they’ve gotten wrong, or that you just see differently. We don’t get many chances to do that in our lives, and I think it’s important for someone to have the chance to do that at least once in college.

“There are a lot of ‘ah-ha’ moments” in learning, but usually they involve someone else’s discovery, she says.

“To have one that’s your very own is a treasure.”

The Seward Family Digital Archive is scheduled to go online on April 13, at sewardproject.org.

Seeing ‘Sewords’

The average undergraduate doesn’t talk a lot about “victuals” or “habiliments.” But for students contributing to the Seward Family Digital Archive, those are the kinds of words they encounter. To bridge the gap between the centuries, computer science major Demeara Torres ’18 has devised a database, called “Sewords,” that defines terms from the period that participants find in the letters.

“I treasure the eccentricity of this being a value-added vocabulary of 19- and 20-year-olds at the U of R,” says Thomas Slaughter, the principal investigator for the project and Arthur R. Miller Professor of History.

Torres has collected about 300 words as of this spring and is continuing to add more, with input from other team members. Although the feature won’t be part of the April launch of the project’s website, eventually readers will be able to hover their cursor over a word in the letters and see its 19th-century meanings pop up.

A Seword Sampler

Accoutrements: 1) dress; equipage; furniture for the body; appropriately military dress and arms; equipage for military service; 2) in common usage, an old or unusual dress

Collops: 1) a small slice of meat; a piece of flesh

Economy: 1) primarily the management, regulation, and government of a family or the concerns of a household; 2) the management of pecuniary concerns or the expenditure of money

Inculpate: 1) to blame; to accuse

Kneepan: 1) the round bone on the fore part of the knee (kneecap)

Lethean: 1) inducing forgetfulness or oblivion

Neuralgia: 1) a disease, the chief symptom of which is acute pain that seems to be seated in a nerve

—Kathleen McGarvey

‘My Dear Henry . . .’

SENDING NEWS: In this 1832 letter (transcribed below), Frances Seward tells her husband, William Henry, then in Albany, New York, about the family Christmas. He was almost always away for the holidays. (Photo: River campus Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

Thursday evening 27th

My Dear Henry. I intended to have wished you a merry Christmas on Teusday [sic] but was prevented by company and yesterday was prevented by headache. This evening I am quite alone and my head is more comfortable. Monday afternoon I went out to purchase the Christmas toys for the little boys stockings, it was cold and unpleasant and no slight inducement would have given me courage sufficient to venture out but the little boys are too nice to be disappointed and I could not trust Sarah’s taste in the selection of the articles in demand. I found Mrs Joseph Richardson at the toy shop engaged in selecting toys for her little girls who she said had still implicit faith in the visits of the Dutch Saint. I told her I almost regretted that the illusion was dispelled from the mind of Augustus but our friend Tracy’s arguments had partly convinced him and when he asked me soberly and earnestly to tell him was it so the truth was not to be disguised. I came home with a violent headache. After tea accompanied Clary to the New Church to hear Dr. Rudd preach a very flat sermon which was intended to be very sublime and impressive. The Church was full because it was Christmas eve and because an Episcopalian was to preach in the Presbyterian Church. I think they will all be satisfied with this experiment. We went at half past six and came home at half past eight!! I never heard the service so miserably read. During the sermon the Dr once lost his place or his notes altogether and there was a pause of about two minutes which seemed 20, in the middle of a sentence. I did not know but he had fallen in a fit for I had not ventured to raise my eyes during the [end of this page; continues on next page] performance. I wish I did not always feel myself obliged to blush for the sins of the whole world as well as my own. . . .

Princes of the Palestra

Win a national championship? That was ‘crazy talk’ to the 1990 Yellowjackets. Until their attention to detail paid off.

By Jim Mandelaro

WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS! Mark Foley ’93 and members of the men’s basketball team celebrated with fans after winning the Division III national championship in 1990, the first national title for the program. (Photo: Bill Norton)

The impossible dream was casually mentioned after a preseason practice in 1989.

“You know,” then Yellowjacket basketball coach Mike Neer ’88W (MS) told his wide-eyed band of 14 young men, “national champions get rings made for them.”

The players nearly laughed.

“We were so naive,” says Chris Fite ’92, the sophomore center from Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and the team’s leading scorer. The team’s annual early season test, the Chuck Resler Invitational at the Palestra, would be enough of a challenge.

“We weren’t sure if we could win the Chuck Resler tournament, let alone a national championship,” Fite says. “To be thinking that going into the season was crazy talk.”

As junior guard Greg Krohner ’91 told reporters at the time: “I thought I’d be on the moon before I got a ring.”

On St. Patrick’s Day, 1990, Krohner and Co. were over the moon with joy. A Rochester team built on defense and grit edged DePauw University of Indiana 43–42 in Springfield, Ohio, to win what remains the program’s only NCAA Division III title.

The impossible dream had come true.

NET VICTORY: Chris Johnson ’90 (left) drives against defenders from DePauw University on the way to the Yellowjackets’ national championship victory, sparking a celebration for then coach Mike Neer (right) and other members of the Yellowjacket team. (Photo: Bill Norton)

That milestone season remains the program’s signature achievement, putting Rochester on the map among Division III perennial contenders. It’s something that resonates strongly with student-athletes looking for more out of college athletics than just playing time.

Luke Flockerzi, the Yellowjackets’ head coach for the past six seasons, says the 1990 national title is a touchstone for the program.

“Being able to point to 10 Sweet-16 appearances, four Final Fours, and a national championship gives validity to our program and motivates our team,” Flockerzi says. “Each player wants to have those experiences for himself.”

More than a quarter-century later, the special character of the 1989–90 season continues to offer many team members important lessons in teamwork, camaraderie, and friendship.

“Besides the birth of my children, winning the national championship with my amazing teammates has been the most memorable experience of my life,” says former guard Lou Palkovics ’91, a longtime history teacher and high school basketball coach in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

“We just loved playing together,” says starting guard Chris Johnson ’90, a Seattle-based technology consultant for Microsoft. “No one ever complained about not getting the ball, not getting shots or not getting help on defense.”

Going into the 1989–90 season, Rochester had not been in national contention for close to a decade. The Yellowjackets were coming off a 17–10 finish the year before. Four starters had graduated and only two seniors remained. But there was instant chemistry.

“We had different personalities and skill sets,” says John Kelly ’92, a reserve guard and a former federal prosecutor now in private practice in Washington, D.C. “But our coaches molded us into a close-knit group of friends.”

The Yellowjackets continued to win, even after losing point guard Jimmy Jordan ’93 to a knee injury in the sixth game. It was point-guard-by-committee after that.

They didn’t realize how good they were.

“We got to be friendly with teams in our league because we’d eat with them after games,” says Michael Coleman ’92, a sophomore forward then and now a vice president of a national insurance company. “So many of them would say, ‘You guys don’t get it. Nobody can get a shot off against you!’ ”

The Yellowjackets were No. 1 in the country in field-goal percentage defense.

“Nobody shot 50 percent against us in a game,” Neer says. “Nobody.”

Rochester finished the season 21–5, then reeled off six wins in the NCAA tournament. That included a 62–57 second-round upset of Buffalo State, the fourth-ranked team in the nation but one that Rochester had beaten in a preseason scrimmage.

“This could be our destiny,” Adam Petrosky ’91 remembers thinking.

It was. The Yellowjackets won the lowest-scoring Division III final in history. Defense ruled, again.

They would knock on the championship door the next two years, losing a 1991 quarterfinal (in overtime) and the ’92 final. There also would be appearances in the 2002 Final Four and 2005 national championship.

Neer retired in 2010 after 34 seasons and 563 wins. One year later, he took over at Hobart College in Geneva, New York, and went 66–20 in three seasons before retiring again.

The 1989–90 Yellowjackets left with rings, wristwatches—and life lessons.

“Coach Neer always stressed ‘attention to detail,’ ” Coleman says. “It drove us nuts, and we’d imitate him behind his back: ‘Attention to detail! Attention to detail!’ ”

Coleman now cringes when he hears himself say that phrase to his daughters, employees, and the girls basketball teams he coaches.

“I disliked it so much when Coach Neer said it,” he says. “But it inspires me. It made me who I am today.”

Petrosky—who once called himself the “most irresponsible person on the team in terms of being on time”—found a different inspiration. He’s now a high school basketball coach, college counselor, and athletic director at an all-boys school in Pittsburgh.

Petrosky’s father was a constant at his son’s games, at home or on the road. He died in 2000, and the younger Petrosky sometimes watches the championship game just to see his dad celebrating on the court. “It’s one of the few video clips I have of him,” he says.

After his father died, Petrosky moved from Northern California to Pittsburgh to care for his ailing mother. The 1990 championship kept his spirits from sinking.

“During a period when I did not feel that great, the accomplishments reminded me that I was a national champion,” he says. “Something only a relatively small group of people in this entire world can say.”

During last October’s Meliora Weekend, 10 members of that team reunited for a 25th anniversary dinner hosted by Neer. When the players walked into the restaurant, they saw the same blue banner that had hung for years in the Palestra. The one with all their names listed in white.

Only now it served as a tablecloth over a long wooden table.

Fite laughs at the memory—and the irony.

“Attention to detail,” he says.

Jim Mandelaro writes about student affairs for University Communications.

Personal Definition

Michael Coleman ’92

BASKETBALL BROTHERS: “Yeah, we played basketball, but more than that, we grew into adults,” says Coleman, who was a sophomore when the Yellowjackets won the national championship and played on two teams that reached the quarter- and the semifinals. “We created a memory that binds us together forever.” (Photo: Heather Ainsworth/AP Photo for Rochester Review)

The tears were flowing for Michael Coleman.

It was March 1992, and the Rochester men’s basketball team had lost to Calvin College of Michigan in the NCAA Division III tournament championship.

Never mind that Rochester had won the national title two years earlier during Coleman’s sophomore year. This was his final collegiate game, and he was inconsolable.

“It was the most heart-wrenching thing that had happened to me,” the 6-foot-7 forward says. “It felt worse than winning felt good.”

Today, Coleman rarely thinks about that ’92 loss. He swears he can’t remember the names of some teammates. But ask him about the 1990 champions, and he’s a walking encyclopedia.

“It has completely changed in time,” he says. “I don’t dwell on ’92. I only think about how we won a national championship, and how close we were. We were brothers.”

Coleman lives outside of Endicott, New York, with his wife, Kristie, and five daughters. As vice president of IOA Northeast, he represents construction companies and owners who purchase insurance and surety bonds for large projects throughout the United States. He also coaches AAU basketball.

“I’m not just a sports coach but a life coach,” he says. “I’ve made plenty of mistakes in my life. I believe it’s how quickly you get up off the floor and hustle back on defense that defines the person you are.”

Coleman says the 1989–90 Yellowjackets hit it off immediately.

“Eleven of us lived on a top (dormitory) floor,” says the Hornell, New York, native, who roomed with star center Chris Fite. “We played cards—harmless games of spades and pitch. We partied together, went to concerts together, and even studied together. UR wasn’t a walk in the park for any of us.”

Coleman graduated in 1992 with a degree in public health. He planned to play professionally in Ireland, but the day before he was set to leave, the coach called and told him they were keeping another player instead. Coleman worked at Strong Memorial Hospital and took classes toward his master’s degree. He then worked for a small law firm in Rochester before moving into his current field in 2001.

His greatest takeaway from 1990 was the lifelong friendships he made.

“Yeah, we played basketball,” he says. “But more than that, we grew into adults together. And we created a memory of a lifetime that binds us together forever.”

The Palestra was their home court, but the Yellowjackets called it “the palace.” After all, they went 16–1 at home that year.

“We will never forget being the princes of our palace in 1990,” Coleman says.

Team Center

Chris Fite ’92

POWERFUL PROGRAM: Now the head coach at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, Fite originally set his sights on playing for a Division I program in college, but after visiting campus and meeting members of the Yellowjacket team, he pivoted: “From then on, Rochester was at the top of my list.” (Photo: Daniel Shanken/AP Images for Rochester Review)

It was 1988, and Chris Fite was adamant. The senior basketball star from Latrobe, Pennsylvania, would visit Rochester, but he would play at a Division I school.

That was a slam dunk.

“I was set on it,” the 6-foot-8 center says. “I wanted to play at the highest level and couldn’t be told differently. My high school coach told me I should at least visit Rochester. I said ‘I will, but I’m still going D1.’ ”

Fite visited the River Campus and fell in love. “I connected with the players, and the campus blew me away. From then on, Rochester was at the top of my list.”

The lanky kid with the soft touch chose Rochester over Division I schools Richmond, Lehigh, and Navy. In his sophomore year, he powered the Yellowjackets to a Division III national championship. He led the Yellowjackets in scoring (18.6 per game), rebounding (8.9), assists (87), and blocked shots (42) and was named Outstanding Player of the NCAA Division III tournament.

“I remember thinking, ‘How could this tall, skinny kid really be as good as everyone said?’ ” says former teammate Matt Parrinello ’93, who’s now a managing partner of the Parrinello Law Firm in Rochester. “I quickly found out how good he really was.”

Fite led Rochester back to the national championship game his senior year, but the Yellowjackets lost to Calvin College of Michigan. He was runner-up for NCAA Division III Player of the Year honors that year and remains the Yellowjackets’ all-time scorer (2,066) and shot blocker (179).

After graduating in 1992 with a degree in integrated sciences, Fite played professional basketball for 11 years in England, Australia, Germany, and Belgium. His wife, Susan, is a native of Liverpool, England, and they have a four-year-old daughter named Grace.

Fite’s mother was a teacher, and he expected to follow that path. “I thought I’d play professionally for a year or two before I got a real job,” he says with a laugh.

He has a real job now as men’s basketball coach at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, an NCAA Division II program. He took over the Raiders in 2010 after working as an assistant coach at Saint Vincent of Pennsylvania, Rochester, and Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

During seven seasons at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, he helped the team compile a 149–65 record and reach the NCAA tournament five straight seasons. Late in his third season at Shippensburg (2015–16), the Raiders were 19–8, tying the program’s record for third-most wins in a season.

Fite remains in contact with several Rochester teammates and is proud of their legacy.

“By the time we left,” he says, “recruits were coming to Rochester to win national championships. It wasn’t that way when guys like Mike Coleman and I got there.”

Court Presence

John Kelly ’92

FULL COURT: An off-season injury nearly derailed Kelly’s basketball career, but he was back on the court by his sophomore year. After graduation, he began a legal career that has included positions as a federal prosecutor and as an attorney in highly regarded private law firms in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Kevin Wolf/AP Images for Rochester Review)

John Kelly was destined for greatness on the court: in 1988, the point guard helped McQuaid Jesuit in Rochester win a state high school basketball championship. Two years later, he was part of a Yellowjacket squad that captured the NCAA Division III national title.

His career record over five high school and college seasons was 125–18—a phenomenal .874 winning percentage. “I think it was in spite of me rather than because of me,” he says modestly.

For the past 20 years, Kelly has shined in another court. After a successful career as a federal prosecutor with the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., he moved to the private sector seven years ago. In 2011, he was recruited to open, manage, and build the D.C. office of the Nashville-based law firm Bass, Berry & Sims, where he serves as managing partner and represents companies and executives in high-profile investigations and litigation with the Department of Justice and other enforcement agencies.

Kelly lives in Arlington, Virginia, with his wife, Sara, and their two daughters. “I think I’ve always realized how fortunate I’ve been,” he says.

His good luck took a break the summer before he enrolled at Rochester. While playing in an AAU basketball game, Kelly took a charge and felt his lower right leg snap. The injury was so devastating that his foot was torn from his ankle.

“I remember the doctor telling me, ‘There’s more to life than basketball,’ ” Kelly says. “He didn’t think I’d play again and said I might have a limp the rest of my life.”

Kelly underwent two surgeries, wore eight different casts, and was on crutches for six months. He spent his freshman season keeping statistics on the bench and working overtime in physical therapy.

He was given the green light his sophomore year and played in 18 games that championship season and 15 his junior year. He started all 31 games his senior season and averaged 8.9 points for a squad that lost the NCAA final.

After graduating in 1992, the political science major attended law school at the University at Buffalo, then spent a year working for a Rochester firm. He served as an assistant district attorney in his hometown from 1996–99, then joined the justice department as a federal prosecutor. Kelly was chief of staff and deputy director of the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, overseeing 94 offices nationwide.

He left the justice department in 2008 to join a large international firm in Washington and moved to Bass, Berry & Sims four years ago.

Kelly attributes much of his success to what he learned as a Yellowjacket.

“There was so much preparation in practice,” he says. “We’d go over things again and again and again. But when I was in a game, I’d know what all four teammates were supposed to be doing.”

It’s the same in the court of law.

“You have to anticipate all the things that could go wrong during a trial,” he says. “Because something always does.”

High Expectations

Rodney Morrison ’91, ’92W (MS)

PROVOST POSITION: At Stony Brook University–SUNY, Morrison works to make sure that the Long Island college recruits and retains excellent students, part of a career in higher education that began at Rochester, where, he says, the program’s emphasis on high expectations was a foundation for his approach to education. (Photo: Stephanie Diani/AP Images for Rochester Review)

Rodney Morrison says the euphoria of winning a national college basketball championship is indescribable, even more than a quarter century later.

But his biggest reward at Rochester had nothing to do with a round ball and everything to do with a round diamond.

“My highlight was marrying the love of my life, my college girlfriend, Albania Almanzar ’92,” the Philadelphia native says. “I’m not sure she attended a single basketball game.”

If true, Albania missed a great season. Morrison played in 16 games as a junior guard as Rochester won the 1990 NCAA Division III title. The 43–42 win over DePauw University of Indiana was Morrison’s last collegiate game.

“My grades weren’t where I wanted them to be, and I knew I wanted to go to graduate school,” says Morrison, the first member of his family to attend college. He hit the books instead of the hardwood his senior year, then earned his master’s degree from the Warner School of Education.

Today, he’s associate provost for enrollment and retention at Stony Brook University on Long Island, New York. His job entails making sure Stony Brook recruits and retains excellent students. The position follows admissions jobs at Rochester, the University of Pennsylvania, Mount St. Mary College in Newburgh, New York, and Rutgers University—with a stint as vice president at the now defunct financial services firm Lehman Brothers mixed in.

Morrison credits his success to hard work, something he says was part of the daily routine during Rochester’s championship season. “We battled and scrapped at practices,” he says. “It was ‘bring your lunch pail to practice and let’s battle for two hours.’ ”

Morrison wasn’t a starter but says that didn’t matter to head coach Mike Neer.

“His expectations were the same,” Morrison says. “He was tough, no nonsense. The bar was high for everybody, whether you played one minute or a lot of minutes.”

Morrison was recruited by then Rochester assistant coach (and now highly successful Villanova head coach) Jay Wright out of Germantown Academy in Philadelphia.

“He came to my school and said ‘You should think about UR,’ ” Morrison says. “The next day I went to the guidance office and looked it up. I didn’t even know where it was on the map.”

He ended up attending the University with three classmates “and had a blast.”

Most special of all, he met Albania. The two stayed together as she pursued her law degree from Brooklyn Law School and married in 1997. They live on Long Island with son Elijah and daughters Rachael and Zippy.

“Going to UR,” Morrison says, “was the greatest thing to ever happen to me.”

And not just because he cut down the net on March 17, 1990.

Team Leader

Erik Rausch ’90, ’97W (MS)

DEVELOPMENT & DRIVE: Rausch was named as the team’s sole captain before his senior year, an unusual move for the program at the time, but a recognition of his leadership as a player and his drive to help the Yellowjackets both on and off the court. (Photo: Norbert von der Groeben for Rochester Review)

As a leader in college advancement for 25 years, Erik Rausch has been part of some great teams.

“Our campaigns have raised valuable dollars to help support research on everything from cancer to stem cells,” says Rausch, a senior director of development at Stanford University’s medical center. “The impact of our donors has been transformative.”

Rausch’s first great team was the 1989–90 Yellowjacket basketball squad that won the NCAA Division III championship. “It was special then and it will always be special. It was the last game I ever played.”

Rausch was a 6-foot-4 forward out of Long Island Lutheran High. He averaged 8.3 points and 5.3 rebounds that special season. “There were probably other UR teams with as good or better talent,” he says. “We had talent and chemistry.”

Being able to play at all was a minor miracle: the summer before he enrolled at Rochester, Rausch was clearing trees at a summer camp and swung an axe so forcefully that it caromed off the tree and imbedded itself in his left shin. He was rushed to a hospital and spent the summer in a cast. But he was ready when his freshman season began and became an integral part of the team.

Rausch played in 24 games his junior year—but started none.

“There was a point when he came to my office and said ‘Coach, what can I do to earn more trust and get more time on the court?’ ” says former Yellowjackets coach Mike Neer. “Instead of saying ‘I’m unhappy,’ he put a positive spin on it. I wanted to leave my desk and hug him.”

Neer named Rausch the sole captain months before his senior season. “I never did it before and never did it since,’’ Neer says. “I wanted to reward his composure, and I needed his leadership.”

Rausch started all 32 games. He graduated in 1990 with dual degrees in history and political science and landed a job in the University’s alumni development office. That’s where he met Maura McGinnity ’87, ’96S (MBA), who had won an NCAA soccer title with the Yellowjackets.

“At some point, our colleagues started thinking we’d be a good match,” Rausch says. “Little did they know we’d been dating for a few months already.”

The two married in 1997, the year Erik took a development job at UC San Francisco. They live in Palo Alto, California, with their son, Aidan, and daughter, McKenna. Rausch moved to Stanford in 2004 and has led several major fundraising initiatives.

“The university is just a unique and exciting environment to work in,” he says.

He may be 3,000 miles away, but part of Rausch always will be at Rochester. It’s where he departed a national champion, where his career was launched, and where he met Maura (who also works in development at Stanford) and learned the skills that have made them successful today.

“In a way,” Rausch said, “I feel like I’ve never left college.”

PUBLIC ART

‘Fine Art of Folding Air’

(Photo: Adam Fenster)

BALLOON BY BALLOON: Artist Larry Moss ’92, ’97W (MS) is engulfed in his own five-story, 50-foot sculpture made from more than 40,000 compostable balloons. Working with his wife and artistic partner, Kelly Cheatle, Moss oversaw the installation of the sculpture, entitled Journey on the Genesee, in the Sibley Building atrium in downtown Rochester, where it was on display to the public this winter. The exhibit closed with a giant “popping party.” Moss calls his balloon art “airigami”—“the fine art of folding air.” The Office of Alumni Relations invited alumni, parents, and friends to take a sneak peek at the exhibit during a special session with Moss. The alumni guests learned how make balloon dogs, which made their way into the final exhibition as blades of grass.

Living Texts

AWARD-WINNING TRANSLATOR: Straumanis, photographed in a self-portrait above, helps bring world literature to English language readers as editorial director of Open Letter Books and an award-winning translator of Latvian literature. (Photo: Courtesy of Kaija Straumanis ’12 (MA) )

“A person lives in his language like a fish in water,” says Latvian writer Inga Ābele. “That’s why authors don’t know that much about their own work—because they live inside it. If an author wants to test the strength of her work—be it a novel, story, or play—it should be translated.”

Ābele’s 2008 novel, High Tide, has been tested multiple times. First translated into Italian and Swedish, it was translated into English in 2013 by Kaija Straumanis ’12 (MA), a graduate of Rochester’s literary translation program and editorial director at Open Letter Books. Housed in Dewey Hall, Open Letter is one of only a few publishers in the English-speaking world devoted to literature in translation.

In Straumanis’s hands, Ābele’s novel held up extraordinarily well. In December, the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages chose Straumanis’s translation, published by Open Letter, over 37 other translated works for the 2015 Best Translation into English award.

Ābele is unrestrained in her admiration for Straumanis’s work. “Kaija isn’t just a translator, [she’s] my coauthor,” she says. “She had her vision of how the text could continue to develop. When we translate, we also edit.”

Straumanis first translated the novel for her master’s thesis. “It’s just a very beautiful book,” she says of the original work. “It’s very poetic in certain ways, without being poetry. There’s a bare-bones emotionality to it. It’s spare without being minimalist.”

For Straumanis, translation involves capturing “the structure, the register, and the tonality” of a work. For High Tide, as in all her translations, she strove “to duplicate the experience that you get from reading the original.”

Straumanis was raised in Minnesota by Latvian parents. She grew up bilingual, speaking Latvian at home, and going to Latvian school and summer camp. Latvian culture is “very literary,” she says. Her home was full of novels, books of poetry, and plays. The language itself, she adds, “is very poetic, and it lends itself very well to poetry, song lyrics, literature, and things like that.”

Straumanis wasn’t entirely satisfied with the corpus of Latvian literature to which she was exposed in her supplemental schooling. One of the three Baltic republics, Latvia has spent most of its history under Polish, Swedish, Russian, and, later, Soviet rule. A history of occupation produced a rich body of nationalistic literature. Even some of the more recent Latvian literature, she says, continues to reflect that past. But not Ābele’s High Tide. “One of the reasons I loved the book so much is that it wasn’t heavy with the post-Soviet sensibility,” Straumanis says.

The novel is the story of a woman’s life, told in reverse chronological order. It examines choices and their consequences, allowing readers to see consequences before being introduced to the conditions and choices that produced them.

What makes the work especially challenging for translators is that each chapter is stylistically distinct. One chapter is a dialogue, another a monologue, another a letter, and so forth. “Ābele is also a poet and a playwright, so the book plays with those stylistic genres,” Straumanis says.

Straumanis, who travels to Latvia about once a year, met and came to know Ābele as she was completing work on her translation. “We clicked,” she says of their first meeting. “Now every time I go back to Latvia, I go and visit with her and her family.”

Just as Ābele does not have the final, or only, word on her own work, Straumanis knows—or certainly hopes—that her translation won’t be the one and only English rendition. “Fifty years down the line, someone may pick up my translation and say, ‘I think I would do it differently,’ and retranslate it,” she says. “Tastes will differ, language usage in English will differ. The text is a living thing. It moves on, and it moves on from one language to another.”

—Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

Kitchen Venture

PUCK’S RIGHT-HAND MAN: Yarkoni, pictured at the Pacific Design Center, home to Wolfgang Puck’s studio kitchen, is chief operating officer of the celebrity chef’s new online cooking school. (Photo: Gilles Mingasson/AP Images for Rochester Review)

Barry Yarkoni ’74 says he first learned to cook by watching Julia Child on television. He now hopes to play a role in inspiring many more new cooks as chief operating officer of the Wolfgang Puck Cooking School, the Los Angeles celebrity chef’s online venture that Yarkoni helped found and launch last fall.

“This is the most fun I’ve had since Gilbert basement,” says Yarkoni, an engineer-turned-executive, who was a resident advisor on the basement floor of Gilbert Hall when he led the residents in the founding of an ultra-local newspaper, The Gilbert Cockroach.

Yarkoni has been partnering with David Sculley, former CEO of Heinz, in multiple online ventures for the past several years. This latest one, however, is something of a dream job for Yarkoni.

“We have a small, collegial team,” he says of the core staff of five men and two women. “Everyone involved in this venture loves to cook. It’s unusual to be in a group that includes a bunch of men sitting around a table comparing recipes.”

Puck, whom Yarkoni met through Sculley, is the major partner in the operation, which is a separate entity from the chef’s Fine Dining Restaurants Company and product lines under Wolfgang Puck Worldwide. Yarkoni and Sculley are the other partners in the venture, which is “located” at WolfgangPuckCookingSchool.com.

The school has a different aim from most cooking shows on television, according to Yarkoni. “You might pick up a few things, but [cooking shows are] more entertainment than education,” he says. “Right from the get-go, we wanted to make this really educational. Wolfgang really loves to teach, and I think that’s been one of the secrets to his success.”

Yarkoni prepared the groundwork for a successful online business operation, according to Sculley. “Barry brings amazing business experience to this assignment, including automating every business process online,” he says. “So the company operates virtually with great efficiency.”

Yarkoni and Sculley worked for three years on the financial and legal issues to bring the project to fruition. They had a studio built just for the school, located in the Pacific Design Center, right next to one of Puck’s catering kitchens. “We have these awesome facilities 20 feet away, with walk-in refrigerators and freezers, and a huge industrial-scale dishwashing operation.”

Puck’s lessons, however, are designed to be accessible. No walk-in refrigerators or industrial dishwashers are required for participation. Indeed, Yarkoni hopes a few of his classmates will give the school a try. As a partner, he’s been able to establish special benefits for designated VIPs. Anybody can get a 14-day free trial to the subscription service. But Rochester alumni aren’t just anybody. “I set up the guest code ‘Meliora,’ ” Yarkoni says. “It gives you a month free, with no credit card required.”

—Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

In the News

BIG NIGHT: Eastman School of Music alumna Schneider won two Grammy Awards, while alumnus Ludwig (below) won the 11th Grammy of his career. (Photo: AP Images)

Schneider Shines at Grammys . . .

Jazz composer and bandleader Maria Schneider ’85E (MM) accepted two Grammys at the 58th Grammy Awards in Los Angeles in February.

Her 2015 CD The Thompson Fields (Artist Share), an exploration of her roots in rural southwestern Minnesota, took Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album. She also won Best Arrangement, Instruments and Vocals, for her arrangement of the late David Bowie’s “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime),” from his 2014 album Nothing Has Changed (Legacy Recordings). Schneider has won a total of six Grammys.

(Photo: AP Images)

. . . and Ludwig Captures His 11th Award

Recording engineer Bob Ludwig ’66E, ’01E (MM) picked up the 11th Grammy of his career for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical, for Alabama Shakes’s Sound & Color (ATO Records). Ludwig’s Grammys include three consecutive wins, from 2013 to 2015, in the prestigious Album of the Year category. Sound & Color was nominated for that award, but was edged out by Taylor Swift’s 1989.

College Alumnus an Inaugural Schwarzman Scholar

Jintian (Jay) Li ’12 is part of the 3.7 percent. That’s the percentage of more than 3,000 applicants worldwide to win a scholarship for a one-year master’s degree at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

The scholarship is funded by Stephen Schwarzman, chairman and CEO of the Blackstone Group, to prepare a new generation of global leaders who understand the history, culture, and economy of China. Beginning this summer, Schwarzman Scholars, who come from the United States, China, and 30 other nations, will live and study together at the newly constructed Schwarzman College, set on the Tsinghua campus.

Li, who is from Beijing, lives in New York City and works in international business development for the National Basketball Association. He earned a bachelor’s degree magna cum laude with a major in film and media studies and dual minors in business and psychology.

Eastman Grad is an MBE— Member of the British Empire

Catherine Jane Arlidge ’88E (MM) has been appointed a Member of the British Empire (MBE), an honor bestowed for distinguished service and contributions to the arts and sciences, public service, and charitable and welfare organizations.

Arlidge was honored for her service to music education. As part of her effort to connect young people with classical music, she works in schools, exploring creative music-making and composition through collaborations with teachers, actors, composers, visual artists, authors, and dancers.

A violinist with the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Arlidge is also a member of the Stringcredibles, a quartet of Birmingham Symphony musicians who work in schools and community settings to support instrumental learning. The group targets schools with high numbers of children who qualify for free meals and have limited access to live music. The Stringcredibles also bring performances to museums in areas of low engagement, drawing audiences across generations. In 2014, the quartet performed for more than 6,000 children and families and worked creating new compositions in projects with 500 children.

TRIBUTE

Thomas Pryor ’40: A Step-Grandparent and Alumnus who Embodied Meliora

FRESH FACE: Pryor, pictured as a freshman, considered Rochester pivotal in his personal as well as professional development. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

It was a typical wintery night in Rochester—bone-chillingly cold, and I was finishing up a game of squash when I remembered my stepgrandfather, Tom Pryor ’40, telling me about a plaque with his name on it somewhere in the Goergen Athletic Center. I had been a Rochester student and member of the club squash team for nearly three years and had never noticed it. When I found it, it would be the first and last time I would be able to see his plaque before his death last December.

Tom was born and raised in Rochester, and after graduating from the University, went on to earn an MBA from Harvard. He always told me that he credited Rochester for not only offering him an exceptional education, but also building him up to be the man he would become in his professional career and personal life. As an alumnus, he felt obligated to give back to the school. He served on the Trustees’ Council, and contributed toward the development of the Goergen Athletic Center.

He was not only a devoted alumnus; he was also a lovable, kind-hearted step-grandfather. As a kid, my family and I would travel down to Florida at least once a year to visit him and my biological grandmother in Key Biscayne. For hours, I would sit down and listen to Tom’s stories of his life both in and out of college. Even as a hyperactive kid, I would never have trouble sitting down with Tom to listen to his life’s experiences. He had many words of wisdom that he shared with me. There was one piece of advice that stuck with me the most: “Do the right thing if it fulfills yourself and feels like the right thing to do, not because you want to be acknowledged for it, or to impress others.”

Years later, I realize that Tom embodied Meliora—“Ever Better.” He gave back because he felt like it was the right thing to do. He didn’t care about being acknowledged for his contributions to the University, although he was very appreciative of it.

Every time I pass his plaque on the squash courts, I think about his words of wisdom, the lives that he touched, and the legacy he left behind for me to continue. I’ll love him always.

—Erik Chiodo ’17

Chiodo is copy editor of the Campus Times. Adapted and reprinted, with permission, from the essay “A Letter to My Grandfather,” which was published in the Campus Times, in print and online, on January 29, 2016.

TRIBUTE

Alice Denham ’50 (MA): A Charismatic Fixture of Literary New York

MODEL & WRITER: Denham had a dual career, noting in one instance that “sexy pictures” earned her more money than her feature stories. (Photo: Provided)

“I remembered when the UNC English Department helped me get a graduate scholarship at the University of Rochester,” Alice Denham ’50 (MA) wrote in her 2006 autobiography, Sleeping with Bad Boys. “Why not here at Chapel Hill?” she asked her favorite professor. “Because this college discriminates against women,” he allegedly replied.

Denham, who died in January at the age of 89, fulfilled many roles during her career. She’s best known as a writer and a model who frequented the literary salons as well as the bedrooms of New York’s literary elite throughout the 1950s.

She was also a gifted student of literature, both at North Carolina, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and at Rochester, where she completed a master’s thesis—a copy of which sits in the stacks of Rush Rhees Library—entitled “T. S. Eliot: His Theory and Practice of Poetic Drama.”

Denham recalled that she never had a woman professor at Chapel Hill. There weren’t many in the 1940s. At Rochester, she took courses with Bernard Schilling, George Curtiss, Wilbur Dunkel, and Kathrine Koller—not just a woman professor, but the chair of the English department.

Among the courses Denham completed were The History of Ideas (taught by Schilling); The English Novel (taught by Curtiss); and a course in 18th-century literature, also taught by Schilling, which she would have attended along with undergraduates in the honors program. She was granted her master’s degree on June 12, 1950, at the University’s Centennial Commencement.

Unlike prominent writers Galway Kinnell ’49 (MA) and Shirley Jackson (who was enrolled as an undergraduate from 1934 to 1936, but did not complete her degree), Denham does not appear to have had any writing published in the student literary journals. Her alumna file is slim. It includes an Alumni Office questionnaire in which she reports her August 1950 marriage to Samuel Lee Kutz ’50, and their subsequent divorce, granted 16 months later.

In January 1955, Denham wrote to Rochester Review with an item to be included in Class Notes: her short story “The Deal” had been published in Discovery #5. It was the same story that would be reprinted in the July 1956 issue of Playboy, in which she was also the centerfold. A newspaper clipping describes her Playboy appearance—“. . . Alice got a package deal for her pictures and her story”—and includes her comment: “The fact that they would pay more for some sexy pictures than for their featured story just about sets the tone of the magazine.”

She concluded her letter to Review by noting, “The REVIEW is becoming more interesting all the time!”

To an alumna who would go on to publish poetry and novels, and to serve as a founding member of the National Organization of Women, it seems fitting to return the compliment: throughout her long life, Alice Denham became more interesting all the time.

—Melissa Mead

Mead is the John M. and Barbara Keil University Archivist and Rochester Collections Librarian.

Books & Recordings

Books

Letter from a Young Poet

By Hyam Plutzik

Trinity College and the Estate of Hyam Plutzik, 2015

The late Plutzik, former John H. Deane Professor of Rhetoric and Poetry at Rochester and benefactor of the Plutzik Reading Series, offers a personal narrative of his formative years in a never-before-published work.

Keep Mothers and Babies Together: The Story of Dr. John Kennell

By Karen Olness and Carolyn Myers with Mary Hellerstein

Praeclarus Press, 2015

Medical doctor Olness and her coauthors present a life’s story of Olness’s longtime colleague, John Kennell ’44, ’46M (MD), the pediatrician and neonatologist whose studies on maternal and infant bonding persuaded hospitals to abandon the practice of separating mothers from their newborns in the hours following delivery. The book includes a foreword by Robert Haggerty, professor emeritus of pediatrics at Rochester.

Bridgehead: Eastman Kodak Company’s Covert Photoreconnaissance Film Processing Program

By Dick Sherwood ’56 et al

National Reconnaissance Office, 2014

Sherwood and five of his former colleagues at Eastman Kodak offer a firsthand account of the top-secret government operation at Kodak known as Bridgehead. Sherwood worked on the project in several roles, including as program manager, over a 21-year period. The project, which began in 1955 and continued until the late 1990s, was declassified in 2011.

High Tide

By Inga Ābele, translated from the Latvian by Kaija Straumanis ’12 (MA)

Open Letter Books, 2013

Straumanis offers an English translation of the 2008 psychological mystery novel by Latvian novelist Ābele. Straumanis’s translation won the 2015 Best Translation into English award from the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages.

Graphing Data with R: An Introduction

By John Jay Hilfiger ’70

O’Reilly Media, 2015

Hilfiger, a statistician, offers a guide to using the R language to create visualization tools to analyze complex data.

Infectious Madness: The Surprising Science of How We ‘Catch’ Mental Illness

By Harriet Washington ’76

Little, Brown & Co., 2015

Medical writer and ethicist Washington explores the latest research in new germ theory, which posits that some cases of Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, and other brain disorders may be caused by viruses, prions, or bacteria.

Radiant Skin from the Inside Out: The Holistic Dermatologist’s Guide to Healing Your Skin Naturally

By Allan Dattner ’66

Picture Health Press, 2015

Dattner, a holistic dermatologist practicing in Manhattan and New Rochelle, New York, shares advice on skin health.

Remediation in Rwanda: Grassroots Legal Forums

By Kristin Doughty

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016

Doughty, an assistant professor of anthropology at Rochester, explores the complex process by which Rwandans have attempted to forge an indigenous culture of law, in the aftermath of a brutal civil war.

The Endless Proverb Model of the Universe

By John Shipman ’69

Department of Household Sciences and Advanced Proverbs, 2015

Toronto conceptual artist Shipman presents a 281-page sentence, combining 10,000 proverbs “exploring meaning and purpose, order and disorder, despair and wonder.”

Everydata: The Misinformation Hidden in the Little Data You Consume Every Day

By John Johnson ’95

Bibliomotion, 2016

Johnson, president and CEO of Edgeworth Economics, offers a layperson’s guide to common statistical tricks as well as errors in data interpretation.

American Gold and Silver: U.S. Mint Collector and Investor Coins and Medals, Bicentennial to Date

By Dennis Tucker ’94

Whitman Publishing, 2015

Numismatist Tucker goes behind the scenes at mints in Philadelphia, Denver, San Francisco, and West Point, as well as the United States Treasury, in an illustrated history of American precious metal coinage.

The Perils of Thyself: The Spectacular Demise of Two Firms

By Mark Mozeson ’85S (MBA)

Mascot Books, 2015

In his first novel, business consultant Mozeson presents “two stories, intertwined and also parallel in the way the personal attributes of an organization’s leader seals an organization’s fate.”

The End of Public Schools: The Corporate Reform Agenda to Privatize Education

By David Hursh

Routledge, 2015

Hursh, a professor of teaching and curriculum at the Warner School, explores the increasing role of corporations and foundations in education reform, and the ways in which it has limited the participation of teachers and parents.

The New Reality for Suburban Schools: How Suburban Schools Are Struggling with Low-Income Students and Students of Color in Their Schools

By Jessica Shiller ’93

Peter Lang, 2015

Shiller, a professor in the instructional leadership and professional development department at Towson University, explores the phenomenon of “resegregation” in suburban districts with rising populations of low-income students and students of color.

Marketing Dictionary for the 21st Century

By Robert Bly ’79

Motivational Press, 2016

Bly offers an up-to-date dictionary of terms in the fast-changing field of marketing. A professional copywriter, Bly released three other books in 2015: Winning in Commercial Real Estate (Talia Jevan), The Big Book of Words You Should Know to Sound Smart (Adams Media), and The Marketing Plan Handbook, Second Edition (Entrepreneur Press).

African Art and Silicon Chips: A Life in Science and Art

By Jay Last ’51

Sierra Vista Books, 2015

Last, a longtime art collector who is best known as one of eight physicists whose work on silicon-based transistors led to the creation of Silicon Valley, offers a memoir.

Peril by Ponytail

By Nancy Cohen ’70, ’70N

Five Star Publishing, 2015

In the 12th novel in her Bad Hair Day mystery series, Cohen tells the story of a hairdresser’s honeymoon gone bad.

Pensionless: The 10-Step Solution for a Stress-Free Retirement

By Emily Brandon ’04

Adams Media, 2016

Brandon, a senior editor at U.S. News and World Report, offers a guide to improving your retirement finances and making the most of Social Security and Medicare.

50 Amazing Team Activities

By Jim Cain ’96 (PhD)

Teamwork & Teamplay Publishing, 2015

Cain, consultant and founder of Teamwork & Teamplay, presents more than 50 team-building activities from around the world, translated into 16 languages.

Recordings

Country Dances by Thomas Straight, 1779–1784

By the Birmingham Baroque Collective

Regency Dances, 2015

The Birmingham Baroque Collective, which includes keyboardist Micaela Gutierrez Schmitz ’02E (DMA), performs Regency-era English country dancing. The collective also recorded Twelve Cotillions by James Longman, 1768. Schmitz is the director of Early Music in the Vale, in Worcester, England.

The Lost Lady

By Donna Coleman ’86E (DMA)

CD Baby, 2015

In 21 solo piano tracks, Coleman explores the roots of ragtime and its revival in the 1960s.

Beam Me Up

By Shauli Einav ’08E (MM)

Berthold Records, 2016

Saxophonist, composer, and bandleader Einav introduces new jazz compositions inspired by the works of 20th-century classical composers such as Sergei Prokofiev and Arnold Schoenberg.

The Territory

By Darrell Grant ’84E

Portland Jazz Composers’ Ensemble, 2015

Grant presents a nine-movement composition reflecting on the natural and human history of the Portland, Oregon, region. Grant is a professor of music at Portland State University.

A Heightened Sense of Things

By J. C. Amitie ’91

MagnaFire Records, 2015

Austin, Texas, guitarist and keyboardist Amitie presents a compilation of 11 original rock instrumental tracks.

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.

Looking Ahead to the Final Stretch

Retirement planning is a job for the young, says journalist and retirement specialist Emily Brandon ’04.

Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

(Photo: David Cowles for Rochester Review)

I’ve been at U.S. News & World Report for 10 years, on the retirement beat the whole time. I started writing about retirement in my previous job, at Consumer Reports. I wrote about how to make decisions about your health care coverage, and it was right about the time Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit, which offers a variety of plans to choose among, was added to Medicare.

As someone relatively young when I started this beat, the most valuable thing I’ve learned is just how important it is to start saving early. It’s very difficult to save when you’re in your 20s. You have a lot of competing priorities and a limited salary. But if you can set aside even a small amount, just a few dollars a week, or have it withheld from your paycheck and placed into a 401(k), you’ll really thank yourself later on. You’ll get a tax break for your savings, and that small amount will accumulate to a very large amount by the time you’re ready to retire.

The shift from pensions to 401(k)s and IRAs represents a sea change in how people plan for retirement, and the planning is much harder without a pension. You need to fund these accounts yourself, manage them, control the fees that you pay in them, and also make sure that money lasts the rest of your life, even though you don’t know how long that will be.

A 401(k) has the benefit, often, of employer contributions as well as a tax break. But you need to watch out for penalties. 401(k)s have penalties if you withdraw money from the account too early, and a penalty as well if you don’t start taking money out of the account after age 70-and-a-half.

As you near retirement age, it’s particularly important to maximize your Social Security benefit and sign up for Medicare on time. For most people, Social Security is the only source of income that’s guaranteed to continue for the rest of their lives. Just a single extra year of work [past age 65] not only boosts the amount of your payments, but also gives you more time to accumulate retirement savings, and a shorter period of retirement to pay for. As for Medicare, if you don’t sign up when you’re first eligible to do so—just before you turn 65—you will likely end up paying higher premiums for the rest of your life.

Retirement doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing. More people are working past traditional retirement age both by choice and because they have to. Of those people, many are negotiating reduced work schedules, and a few companies even have formal, phased retirement programs. People are also moving into part-time jobs at places they enjoy, such as golf clubs, museums, or libraries.

People are also taking mini-retirements. People who feel overworked might need a significant vacation, perhaps a few months or even a year to rest and recharge. But after that, they might be ready to return to work in some other capacity. Some people also call it a trial retirement or an extended vacation.

Retirees are also ideal entrepreneurs. Often they’re people who have spent decades in a given industry, and so they know what innovations are needed better than anyone else. And they have the knowledge and the contacts and the logistical capabilities to pull it off.

Emily Brandon ’04

Home: Menlo Park, California

Senior editor for retirement, U.S. News & World Report; author of Pensionless: The 10-Step Solution for a Stress-Free Retirement (Adams Media, 2016)

Majors at Rochester: Brain and cognitive sciences; English

On the benefits of the retirement beat: “My parents are in their mid-60s, right at the age when they’ve had to make all kinds of decisions about Social Security and Medicare. For Medicare especially, it’s really important to sign up correctly, and very difficult to do it correctly. It’s been really great to be able to help them through the process.”

CELEBRATING ROCHESTER

♥ to ♥

(Photo: Adam Fenster)

HEARTFELT HIGHLIGHTS: Jared Wallis, Elena Sloman, and Lauren Eisenreich— all first-year master’s students at the Eastman School of Music—compare the images they took in a photo booth as part of this year’s “I ♥ Eastman Day.” The day featured events and activities designed to celebrate the school and to highlight appreciation for those who support its programs. Students in the College took part in similar events on the River Campus.