Sleep over break? Think again!
While students in the 1960s through the 1980s had the “J-term” option to fill the break between fall and spring semesters on campus, today’s enterprising students and faculty find an array of ways to keep their minds and spirits sharp. Here are a few examples from this past January.

With the help of Bill Lyons ’75 (right), students framed a house in Pittsboro, N.C., for Habitat for Humanity during the winter break.

    Colgate’s annual Day in the Life program matched 135 students with alumni for a glimpse of jobs in architecture, conservation, education, entertainment, finance, medicine, retail, and other fields. Placements were arranged across the United States and Canada, plus in Bolivia, Dubai, and Germany. (For a personal account by Carlie Lindower ’14, see the “Live and Learn” sidebar on pg. 15.)
    In a stand-alone 0.5-credit course, 10 students studied microeconomics in Bangladesh with Jay Mandle, W. Bradford Wiley Professor of economics, and Joan D. Mandle, associate professor of sociology and anthropology emerita. Through lectures and field trips, the group observed the work of BRAC, a development organization dedicated to alleviating poverty by empowering the impoverished to bring about change in their own lives.
    Competitive-speaking students did Colgate proud around the world, starting with the debate team, which competed at the World Universities Debate Championship in Manila, Philippines.         
    Economics professor Ed Fogarty led a group of nine students to Wroclaw, Poland, for EuroSim, where they played the roles of the political leaders of the European Union’s member states. This year’s exercise was to discuss, debate, and draft an EU policy for policing, supporting, and protecting refugees from foreign conflict zones.
    Colgate’s Model United Nations team earned the Best Large Delegation Award at the Harvard National Model United Nations Latin America conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
    The Center for Outreach, Volunteerism, and Education (COVE) mounted three service trips, including a return to the village of Neyba, Dominican Republic, where work continued on building latrines and painting murals with members of the community. Closer to home, one group built homes in Pittsboro, N.C., with Habitat for Humanity while another assisted with disaster relief in Tuscaloosa, Ala.
    And, finally, with an eye toward eventually offsetting the carbon footprint of all this world travel, Colgate’s sustainability coordinator John Pumilio traveled with professors Ellen Kraly and Ian Helfant and student Sonya Falcone ’12 to the Patagonia Sur Nature Reserve in Chile, where the Colgate forest is planted. Together, they explored opportunities for faculty-student research, service learning, extended study trips, and other academic partnerships between Patagonia Sur and Colgate.

Faculty travel to India to enhance core
Twenty-seven Colgate professors voyaged more than 8,000 miles to embark on an academic expedition to India in early January. For two weeks, the group, representing many different disciplines, traveled throughout the nation to further their global understanding and enrich the courses that they teach in Colgate’s Liberal Arts Core Curriculum. The trip was funded in part by a $100,000 Andrew A. Mellon Foundation new-president’s grant awarded to President Jeffrey Herbst.

Colgate professors step up in Amber, India, during an academic expedition designed to enhance their teaching in the core curriculum. Photo by Christopher Henke

    Led by Eliza Kent, associate professor of religion, and Padma Kaimal, associate professor of art and art history and Asian studies, the program immersed participants in India’s culture, history, and environment.
    The professors shared their daily experiences in a blog called Reflections from India. Jenna Reinbold, assistant professor of religion, wrote about the Matrimandir, a huge golden sphere located in Auroville that has spiritual significance. A visit to the Delhi Handicrafts Museum was fodder for a post by Elizabeth Marlowe, assistant professor of art and art history. And Christopher Henke, associate professor of sociology, wrote about his amazement of the Jantar Mantar, a “garden” of architectural astronomical instruments. Henke also took numerous photos on the trip, documenting everything from visits to well-known sites like the Taj Mahal to intimate moments such as a scene at a dargah (shrine) where an exorcism was being performed.
    “This trip, involving ten percent of our faculty, represents a significant investment in Colgate’s core curriculum, and also in our colleagues who bring it to life,” said President Herbst who, upon joining Colgate in 2010, had vowed to strengthen the university’s global perspective and invited professors to propose ways to accomplish that goal. “Colgate can be transformed by experiences such as this one, and serve as a model within higher education.”
    The trip garnered media attention, including a USA Today piece titled “Studying abroad not just for students.”
    At press time, the blog, which also features videos from the trip, had almost 28,000 page views. Check it out at http://colgate-india-core.blogspot.com.

Making the classics contemporary
Professor Robert Garland has been taking students back in time — to ancient Greece — using his computer. Garland, the Roy D. and Margaret B. Wooster Professor of the classics, has been recording lectures with his MacBook’s video camera and a microphone for Udemy, a website that enables anyone to take and build courses online. Garland’s Ancient Greek Religion course will be part of Udemy’s new initiative called the Faculty Project, which features professors at top institutions including Stanford University, Dartmouth College, and Duke University.
    “I think of them more as chats,” Garland told Inside Higher Ed, an online news site covering higher education. Garland has been delivering some of his lectures in the second person — as if instructing a time-traveling tourist in ancient Greece how to pray or how to please the gods, for example.
    Udemy’s Faculty Project courses include a number of undergraduate humanities electives; Garland and the other participating professors are developing mini-versions of the courses they might teach on their home campuses. Although there are no homework assignments or credit, Garland said he would be open to corresponding with students who take his Greek religion course as long as it doesn’t interfere with his Colgate workload.
    “I was particularly impressed by the fact that anyone can take the course for free,” Garland said. “I’ve long come to believe that the humanities have an obligation to society as a whole and that we can’t necessarily expect students to study subjects like the classics. I saw the offer to work with Udemy as an opportunity to reach and serve a wider audience.”

Colgate represents at Model African Union
“Today, we have the unique honor of representing four African nations. No other college is representing four nations.” With those words, Brian Gitau ’10 summarized how Colgate has become a force to be reckoned with at the National Model African Union Conference. Gitau, who commented on how much Colgate’s Model African Union has grown since he was a student, addressed alumni and students at dinner before this year’s conference in February at Howard University in Washington, D.C.


Lwam Stefanos ’14 (standing, second from left) participates in an unmoderated caucus at the 2012 National Model African Union Conference in Washington, D.C., in February. Photo by TNA Production

    The three-day academic exercise was the culmination of ALST 290, Model African Union, a half-credit course in which students familiarize themselves with the structure of the African Union as well as the economic, social, and political-security issues facing African countries. For the first time in conference history, more than 30 U.S. colleges and universities represented every state in the African Union (which comprises all African states except Morocco).
    To gather insight on the countries we were representing in advance, we visited our respective embassies, accompanied by our advisers — professors Mary Moran, Max Rayneard, and Tsega Etefa — and Peju Oyeyemi, the Africana and Latin American Studies Program’s assistant. During the embassy visits, diplomats explained how foreign policy works in their countries and what framework is used, to help us prepare.
     While acting like heads of state, students formulated, presented, and defended proposals that would not only further the interests of the nation they were representing, but also would result in tangible, lasting benefits for the entire African Union. In this learning-by-doing approach, students developed a deeper understanding of African issues while functioning within a cooperative learning environment as they worked with their fellow delegates to accomplish shared goals.
    Each Colgate delegate made a meaningful contribution. Lwam Stefanos ’14 won both the Outstanding Delegation Award and Committee Leadership Award in Executive Council for representing Ethiopia. Tinofara Majoni ’13 received honorable mention in the category Outstanding Chair Award.
    Throughout the experience, Moran had emphasized that the “MAU is great because it not only provides students with knowledge of fundamentals of international diplomacy, but also an understanding of African people and their culture.”
    I realized the truth of her words toward the end of the conference, while I was talking with a student named Zuberi, from Congo. He talked at length about the trials his family endured during the Rwandan genocide and the Great War of Africa — history that I had read about, but that he had experienced personally. As he talked about the nations of Africa not as a world apart, but rather as an essential part of our interconnected world, I realized how much the 21st century will be shaped by what happens in Africa.
— Javed Narejo ’14

Ammerman and Fuller receive Picker Science grants
In March, classics professor Rebecca Ammerman and biology professor Randy Fuller were awarded Picker Interdisciplinary Science Institute grants supporting interdisciplinary approaches to learning through innovative research. The grants bring together professors with complementary expertise to open new areas of study and to tackle existing problems in creative new ways.

This terracotta figurine, possibly representing Persephone or Demeter, is from a large assemblage of artifacts excavated at a complex of kilns at Metaponto, a Greek city-site in southern Italy, where classics professor Rebecca Ammerman conducts research. Ammerman and biology professor Randy Fuller both recently received Picker Interdisciplinary Science Institute grants. Photo by Cesare Raho
    Ammerman and Ioannis Iliopoulos (University of Patras, Greece) are teaming up with other archaeologists, geologists, and material scientists from the United States and Europe to undertake an integrated study of the ceramic technology of a large collection of artifacts and a complex of kilns at Metaponto, a Greek city-site in southern Italy, that date from the 4th to the 1st c. BCE. Together, they will analyze the exploitation of natural resources, the processing of materials, the kilns’ structure and function, as well as the industrial organization and material exchange of the artifacts.
    Fuller will collaborate with a team of ecologists, biogeochemists, and hydrologists from Cornell University, the U.S. Geological Survey, and SUNY-ESF to analyze whole-ecosystem restoration through liming of acidified tributary streams in the Honnedaga Lake Basin in the Adirondack Mountains. The 770-acre lake in the southwestern region of the Adirondack Mountains supports one of seven remaining heritage, or original genetic, strains of brook trout designated by New York State.
    Colgate students will be involved as research assistants on both Ammerman’s and Fuller’s projects.
    Colgate’s Picker Interdisciplinary Science Institute seeks to foster the creation of new knowledge that is obtainable only through the development of sustained interdisciplinary research. The institute supports internal and external collaborations among faculty who bring expertise from different disciplines to bear on current and emerging scientific problems that remain intractable to the methods used within a single discipline.

Kraly appointed editor of immigration journal
The Center for Migration Studies has appointed geography professor Ellen Percy Kraly as editor of the International Migration Review, a social science journal in the immigration field.
    Kraly, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of geography, specializes in demography and population geography, international migration and refugees, ethnic and racial studies, medical geography, environmental issues, and social research methods.
    As editor of the journal, she will be working with an editorial advisory board consisting of many of the leading scholars in the immigration field. The Center for Migration Studies is a New York–based educational institute devoted to the study of migration, promotion of understanding between immigrants and receiving communities, and public policies that safeguard the dignity and rights of migrants, refugees, and newcomers. The peer-reviewed journal is its flagship publication and is published quarterly.
    “This is an opportunity to engage migration and security policy issues and analysis with an international community of scholars and practitioners — experiences I am eager to share with my Colgate colleagues and students,” Kraly said.

Seeking greener pastures
There are two groups who emigrate in search of greener grass: people who are happy and optimistic, and those who are dissatisfied and in search of a better life. In research recently reported in Foreign Policy, Colgate economics professor Nicole Simpson and her colleague Linnea Polgreen from the University of Iowa correlated national happiness scores with emigration rates in various countries. Their findings form a U-shaped curve: the countries with the highest national happiness scores and the countries with the lowest happiness scores have the highest emigration rates. Those who are in the middle tend to stay put.



    Simpson and Polgreen compared the emigration rates of 58 countries with their national happiness scores from the World Values Survey. Colombia — with the highest rate of average happiness — and Albania — with the lowest average happiness — had the highest emigration rates. Ranking 16th out of 58 in terms of average happiness, the United States sits on the upswing of the U-curve.
    “I started working on this topic because, at the time, nobody had considered such a link,” Simpson said. “Given that current models of migration cannot fully explain observed flows of international migrants, there must be other factors that are affecting the decision to migrate. By under-standing the happiness-migration relationship, we may then be able to isolate some of the driving forces behind migration, which has important policy implications.”
    The findings — originally published in the Journal of Happiness Studies (Volume 12, Issue 5) — have generated attention in both academic circles and the press. “I think we must be on to something,” said Simpson, who has since been asked to write a chapter on the topic for the forthcoming International Handbook on the Economics of Migration. Additionally, one of her students is using the data on a related project that will analyze how migrant flows affect the happiness of the natives in the host (i.e., destination) country.

Young receives Dayton peace award
An exhaustive seven-year project by Nigel Young, who was Cooley Professor of peace studies and director of the Peace Studies Program at Colgate from 1984 to 2004, has received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, in the Award for Scholarship category.
    The four-volume Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace: Global Conflict, Transformation, and Nonviolent Change (Oxford University Press, 2010) includes 850 entries and a foreward by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Bringing together 50 years of scholarship on peace studies, conflict mediation, and nonviolent alternatives to war, the encyclopedia charts the evolution of the interdisciplinary field and offers a comprehensive survey of the historical, political, theoretical, and philosophical issues relating to peace and conflict.
    The Dayton Literary Peace Prize is the only annual U.S. literary award recognizing the power of the written word to promote peace, social justice, and global understanding. The Award for Scholarship was created in 2011 specifically to “recognize the scholarship that went into the amazing collection of articles” in Young’s project, according to Sharon Rab, the founder of the prize.
    Journalist and author Nick Clooney, father of actor George Clooney, served as emcee at the award ceremony on November 13. Young was honored along with the other 2011 prize winners, Chang-Rae Lee (The Surrendered) and Wilbert Rideau (In the Place of Justice), and runners-up Maaza Mengiste (Beneath the Lion’s Gaze) and Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns).
    “Just like democracy and human rights, peace has to be constructed, not only in minds and hearts, but also institutionally; reliable works of reference are therefore as essential in the digital age as in the age of Johnson or Diderot,” said Young. “From Wikipedia to the Oxford English Dictionary, we will all continue to use reference works in all formats — and they are essential tools for peacemaking! But the OIEP in print and online is unique in the way it focuses on peace in a new and comprehensive format . . . it is already becoming a key presence for all those who are concerned with reducing destructive conflict and armed violence on our planet.”



Syllabus

HIST 306, History of Numbers in America
Dan Bouk, assistant professor of history
TTh 9:55–11:10 a.m., 432 Alumni Hall

Numbers — like the SAT, BMI, or credit ratings — have extraordinary power in modern society, but we seldom ask where they came from. Investigating the history of important numbers opens up new ways of thinking about how we allocate power, wealth, and risk in American society, as well as questions about how modern Americans use numbers to think about themselves and others. Through this course, students learn the methods of cultural historians: how to digest big and important books, understand scholarly articles, and wrestle meaning out of obscure primary sources. Along the way, they develop new conceptual tools for understanding U.S. history, the history of science, business, and the modern state, as well as a bit about Colgate’s own history.

On the reading list: Ann Fabian, Skull Collectors; Scott Sandage, Born Losers; Sarah Igo, The Averaged American; Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal”; Nick Cullather, “The Foreign Policy of the Calorie,” American Historical Review 112; and Howard Williams, A History of Colgate University 1819–1969

Exams: In lieu of a midterm, students answer individual exam questions at the beginning of every few course meetings; two papers; and a final project to be presented publicly.

The professor says: “The history of numbers offers a great opportunity to cross disciplinary lines. I come by my fascination with cross-disciplinary work honestly — my father was a physicist and my mother taught college English. I majored in computational mathematics, then went on to earn a PhD in history. I am writing a book about the centrality of life insurance companies to developing the infrastructure for collecting statistics about people in America.”

Live and learn



During the winter break, I was lucky enough to spend a day shadowing Crissy Shropshire ’92 (left), executive producer of Food Network advertisements. This opportunity was offered to me as part of Colgate’s Day in the Life program, which matches students with alumni who work in fields that the students are interested in learning more about. As a sophomore, I know I will soon have to choose a major that best suits my dream career in television and advertising, and Crissy gave me a taste of what such a career entails.

During my eventful day at Food Network, I went on a location scouting trip to Brooklyn to find a space to do interviews and videos for an upcoming advertisement. I also watched an editor facilitate small changes of sound bites almost instantly, as instructed by a producer. In addition, I was given a tour of the Food Network studios, including the famous test kitchen and the room where they tape most of their in-house cooking shows.

One of the producers I met during my visit told me that producers are like the conductor of an orchestra — they don’t play an instrument, but they make sure everyone else is playing and in tune. After watching Crissy field countless calls and e-mails from co-workers, tweak sound bites, and run from meeting to meeting, I understand how much effort, time, and creativity goes into every ad. I was so glad to have this opportunity to visit with such talented people and get a behind-the-scenes peek into what we see on television every day.

— Carlie Lindower ’14