Time with Hubble
Astronomy professor Jeff Bary and collaborator Tracy Beck of the Space Telescope Science Institute were awarded 12 orbits, or about 9 hours’ worth of highly coveted observing time, on the Hubble Space Telescope, to collect data for their investigations into the formation of binary stars that might eventually host their own planetary systems.
    As Bary described it, “The time on Hubble is oversubscribed by a factor of six to one, meaning that it is a highly competitive process to get time on it.”

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in orbit (photo courtesy of NASA)

    In January, he and Beck collected photographs of the gas and dust in the rings surrounding young — in astronomical terms, 1 million to 3 million years old — binary star systems. These rings of dust and gas are the building blocks of a planetary system potentially containing rocky planets like the Earth and gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, said Bary. The clarity of the images from the Hubble will be of enormous value to Bary and Beck as they study in great detail the interactions between the forming of binary stars and nearby dust and gas that might be evolving into a planetary system.
    To put it into layman’s terms, Bary uses a Star Wars reference: “Luke Skywalker’s home planet, Tatooine, is a great example of a planetary system with two host stars. In the movie, they show two suns setting on the horizon at dusk. That kind of planetary system is exactly the type of system we are studying. Only, we are observing it in the midst of formation.”
    Bary and Beck were previously awarded time on the 8-meter Gemini North telescope in Hawaii for this research. The results from those observations, which concerned one of the star systems they are studying with the Hubble telescope, were published last summer in the Astrophysical Journal.
    “We found strong evidence for the interactions of potential planet-forming material in the near environment of the young stars,” said Bary.
    The duo is part of an international team of astronomers that also was awarded time on the new Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the telescope in the Chilean desert being built by a consortium of countries. “ALMA is the next big thing in astronomy. It will not be long before its discoveries start dominating the headlines concerning advances in the field of astronomy,” said Bary.
    But for now, the Hubble is as good as it gets. The telescope, which was launched in 1990 as a joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency, was recently in the news for sending back a photo that NASA said provided a glimpse into the farthest corners of the universe.
— Katie Rice ’13

Salman Rushdie speaks about religion, life in exile
British author Salman Rushdie, who is perhaps best known for the controversy over his novel The Satanic Verses, was the capstone speaker for Colgate’s Living Writers series. Addressing a standing-room–only crowd in Memorial Chapel on November 29, he spoke of religion, fanaticism, and censorship.


Salman Rushdie (photo by Andrew Daddio)

    With a tinge of black humor, Rushdie regaled the audience with stories about living in exile after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa (religious edict) calling for his death in 1988. Khomeini said that The Satanic Verses blasphemed against Muhammad and was offensive to Muslims. During this time, the police advised Rushdie to adopt a pseudonym, so he took the first names of his two favorite writers, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. Joseph Anton is Rushdie’s new memoir, from which the author read excerpts during his talk.
    “Life became a spy novel, in which there were armed men in the kitchen and I would be told about anonymous groups entering the country with lethal intentions,” he said of his years living under protective custody. Rushdie added that those who criticized what he emphasized is a work of fiction had never read it — a common problem, he said, with many books that have been banned throughout history.
    Earlier in the day, Rushdie attended the Living Writers course, which brings 10 authors to campus each fall for personalized classroom sessions and public readings. The 60 students in the English class were joined by participants of the LW Online program. The e-students (alumni, parents, and friends) took an online version of the class co-taught by professors Jane Pinchin and Jennifer Brice, who led interactive webcasts on the course material throughout the semester, complemented with a blog for continued discussion.
    As an alumnus, the online course was “a fantastic opportunity,” said Geoffrey Gold ’86. “It really opened a new world to writers writing about places and things that I didn’t have much familiarity with, which is one of the primary reasons this course in particular interested me.”
    Pinchin and Brice agreed that this year’s program and its international theme were a great success. “These offerings asked us all to move beyond boundaries and to look through lenses we were not accustomed to wearing,” Pinchin noted.

Chris Hedges brings Destruction to Colgate
If you believe that the outcome of the 2012 elections could have changed anything fundamental about America, Chris Hedges ’79, P’12 thinks you’re wrong.
    As a journalist and writer, Hedges spent two decades living and working in war zones. He has seen combat in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Sudan, Yemen, Algeria, Turkey, Iraq, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Retired from a long career as a war correspondent, he has turned his focus on a kind of domestic violence.
    Hedges’s book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt tells the story of what he calls America’s sacrifice zones — locations where industry has destroyed the environment and ruined lives while harvesting the resources it needs to build profit. He asserts that elected officials from both parties are either complicit or feckless, and that there is currently no popular movement that can stand in the way of powerful corporations.
    For his book, Hedges selected several sites where the consequences of exploitation are in the highest relief — including Gary, W. Va., where coal companies use explosives to remove mountain peaks that separate miners from the seam. After layers of earth have been blasted away, machines can easily scoop out coal, but the damage to the environment can be read in the scarred terrain, local cancer rates, and an alarming trend of climate change that scientists trace back to the burning of fossil fuels.
    “There’s a kind of insanity to it where, as the planet begins to disintegrate, you use more violent methods to extract profit from it,” Hedges said when he visited campus October 22.
    Astronomy professor Jeff Bary, who teaches Core Scientific Perspectives: Galileo, the Church, and the Scientific Endeavor, began reading Days of Destruction when he heard that it included a profile of Gary, just down the road from his hometown of Welch,
W. Va. When Bary saw Hedges’s description and correlated the coal industry’s condemnation of climate science with the Vatican’s treatment of Galileo, he knew that he had to bring the alumnus to campus to speak to students.
    “It has a political bent to it that I hadn’t imagined for this class,” Bary said, “until I started to think hard about how the arguments I’ve seen trotted out — both for and against mountaintop removal — play into what I’m trying to get at in the Galileo course.”
    Bary reached out to a colleague, anthropology professor Nancy Ries of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program, to cosponsor Hedges’s visit. “There’s an interesting parallel process,” Ries explained. “In recent years, PCON has focused more attention on the conflicts inherent in resource and energy extraction, both locally and transnationally.”
    During his talk, Hedges traced the political and corporate antecedents of America’s environmental crisis, then he talked about the present state of affairs and the future, should these shadows remain unaltered. In addition to mountaintop removal in West Virginia, he spoke about other “sacrifice zones,” like South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, where he said the victims of America’s internal colonization have the second-lowest life expectancy in the Western hemisphere — just 47 years for males. And Camden, N.J., once the home of RCA and Campbell Soup Co., is being recycled from the inside out — barges stand ready to take scrap metal, gutted from the city’s dilapidated buildings, to China and India.
    “I wanted to go into these sacrifice zones,” Hedges said, “because what happens to them becomes the template for what’s going to happen to the rest of us.” The only answer Hedges can see is massive civil disobedience. Elections are not going to change anything, he said; the people must pour into the streets.

Unpacking Nietzsche
Two members of Colgate’s philosophy department, Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick, have collaborated to publish an important book about one of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s most difficult writings, Beyond Good and Evil. Their chosen title, The Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, captures exactly their scholarly purpose: to show it as a work of philosophical morality and anthropology.
    Clark and Dudrick’s book, explicating what is possibly Nietzsche’s most important work, has been long awaited among philosophers as a follow-up to Clark’s highly influential Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, also published by Cambridge University Press. That earlier text sought to dispel certain mistaken ideas about Nietzsche’s concept of truth; for one, it rejected with exacting argument the claims of relativism as the correct understanding of Nietzsche’s doctrine of “perspectivism.” Similarly, this new book critically examines and explains a difficult and complex work, while relating its insights both to a broader understanding of Nietzsche’s other work as well as to philosophical thought and self-understanding more generally.
    The authors’ meticulous care and respect for the reader (and the writer) are reflected throughout the book’s many arguments and thoughts. Most notably, their principal purpose is to understand and explain Nietzsche’s central metaphor: “the magnificent tension of the spirit” as relating the soul’s “will to truth” to its “will to value.” They explore how Nietzsche uses the notion of the “soul” to explain a person’s “political” ordering and control of diverse, often incompatible, physical and psychological drives, thus accounting for the distinctive power of the human will.
    A most important way of reading and understanding this book is to experience it as a genuine philosophical engagement. As in a vibrant liberal arts class, the authors take us into a series of philosophical confrontations — dialectical challenges that engage our thoughts about our actions and motives, our drives and will, as vital and determined human beings. Through Clark and Dudrick, Nietzsche induces us to confront his “exoteric nuggets” — his suggestively probing and provocative remarks — uncovering through logical analysis a series of profound thoughts. The reader is provoked into serious thought by the challenge (if not threat) of unsettling, troubling, and often never-confronted basic truths about ourselves.
    These fresh insights serve the reader to gain a fresh understanding of the deepest springs of our actions.
— Jerry Balmuth, Harry Emerson Fosdick Professor of philosophy and religion emeritus            

Beyond Colgate: up in the air and out on the street
Five hundred feet above the ground. A street corner in Harlem. These are just two of the many places “Beyond Colgate” where students found themselves this past fall. The program, jointly funded by the university and Colgate alumni, enables students to apply classroom material to situations and locations beyond campus boundaries. Each semester, about a dozen such trips are supported.
    Students in Professor Jeni McDermott’s Hydrology and Surficial Geology course viewed the topography of the central New York landscape via an aerial tour. McDermott wanted to show “how glaciers demolished all the pre-existing topography and left a flat landscape.”


Aerial view of the central New York landscape, as seen through the eyes of students of Geology 210: Hydrology and Surficial Geology (photo by Duy Trinh ’14)

    Molly Clinton ’13, one of McDermott’s students, said: “This experience definitely enriched my understanding of glacial landforms. From the air we could see the Finger Lakes and erosion along the coast of Lake Ontario.”
    Spencer Wallach ’15, another student to enjoy the flight, has since officially declared geology as his major.
    Jenna Reinbold, assistant professor of religion, took the 16 students in her first-year seminar to New York City to explore a contemporary church-state controversy — whether religious groups should be allowed to use public schools for their Sunday services. Her course is called Church, State, and Law in America.
    In collaboration with Tony Carnes, editor of the web magazine A Journey Through NYC Religions, the class attended a Bronx Household of Faith service, held in P.S.15. After the service, with Carnes’s staff and Chloe Nwangwu ’12 acting as guides, the students fanned out on the street and took what is possibly the first poll regarding the holding of worship services in public schools in New York City.
    For Madeline Allen ’16, interviewing people on the street took her “definitely beyond [my] comfort zone, but the results were surprising.”
    Reinbold said her students expected people on the street to be either indifferent on the issue or uninformed, but that was largely not the case. According to a recent blog post on A Journey Through NYC Religions, many of the interviewers were surprised at how the people in the street spoke vigorously and favorably about this issue.
    “There is a certain thrill when the students hear people talk about issues they’d talked about in class,” Reinbold said. “After engaging the public, they have a command of this information now.”
— Alicia Klepeis

New living-learning opportunity
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a $700,000 grant to Colgate for use over four years in order to support a new program called Mellon Sophomore Residential Seminars.
    The initiative will create a series of courses in which sophomores will apply to live and study together, meet regularly with the seminar professors and guest speakers in their residence hall, and participate in an academic travel experience. Each spring, the students will continue the dialogue in another course with their professor.
    The initial series will be offered in the fall 2013 semester. Beginning in fall 2014, at least four seminars will be offered every fall, and new courses will be added to the rotation each year.
    The first course options are: Existentialism, with Professor David Dudrick (philosophy), director of the program; Coffee and Cigarettes, with Professor Robert Nemes (history); and Jerusalem: City of Gods, with Professor Lesleigh Cushing (religion, Jewish studies).
    “I like the idea of students talking about the ideas they encounter in their courses over lunch or in their dorm rooms late at night,” said Cushing. “Really interesting conversations are bound to ensue.”
    “In Coffee and Cigarettes, we spend a lot of time discussing all aspects of these everyday goods, but their production remains far removed from the students’ (and my own) experience,” said Nemes, who has taught the course before. “A trip to Costa Rica (or someplace else in the ‘coffee belt’) in January will help us unravel this mystery and to appreciate the expertise, labor, capital, and geography that produce the coffee we drink.”
    Although Colgate has offered occasional courses with a living-learning dimension, the Mellon Sophomore Residential Seminars will impact up to 70 students a year with academic interests from across the curriculum. The weeklong travel experience in January, to be included at no additional cost to the students, is entirely new to the residential model.
    According to Douglas Hicks, dean of the faculty, the Mellon Sophomore Residential Seminars will build on the best of a residential liberal arts education. “It will deepen faculty-student mentoring and student-student social and intellectual engagement.”
    Of the particular focus on sophomores, Suzy Nelson, dean of the college, said: “Sophomore year is a critical time for students to solidify their college identities. This is when they develop the social and academic networks that will support them throughout their remaining college years and beyond.”
    “I think Colgate students yearn for a way to integrate their social and intellectual lives within a community,” said Dudrick, “and the seminars will provide a way to do just that.”

Fluorescent minerals light up faces at visualization lab
Hearing the “oohs” and “aahs” coming from school groups in the hallway after Ho Tung Visualization Lab shows, one might wonder what all the fuss is about. But even though the show has ended, there’s still wonder to behold, in a display of fluorescent minerals that beams a rainbow of bright pink, electric green, and radioactive orange.  


Outside the Ho Tung Visualization Lab, a school group enjoys the display of fluorescent minerals donated by Matt Shramko ’13 and his dad, Steven. (Photo by Andrew Daddio)

    Matt Shramko ’13 and his father, Steven, donated 70 of the minerals to Colgate, a natural evolution of their longtime interests in geology. “I’ve collected rocks since I was two years old because my dad has collected rocks for most of his life,” said Shramko, who is majoring in geology.
    Shramko’s father owns a business selling rocks and minerals, which is how they managed to amass such a large collection. They collected a few of the minerals that they donated, but most were bought at rock shows.
    “This is a great collection, and Colgate is lucky to have them,” said Professor William Peck, chair of the geology department. “School groups typically visit the Linsley Geology Museum on the second floor of the Ho Science Center and then the visualization lab, so getting to see the mineral exhibition after the show is icing on the cake.”
    “My dad and I noticed that Colgate didn’t really have any and we felt that we should fix that,” Shramko said.
    In addition to the fluorescent minerals, the Shramkos have donated about 15 other minerals to the university.
— Katie Rice ’13




Syllabus

ECON230: The Economics of Poverty in the U.S.
Nicole Simpson, associate professor of economics
TTh 9:55–11:10 a.m., 311 McGregory

Course description: This course discusses issues surrounding poverty with a particular emphasis on the central New York region. Students first analyze how poverty is measured, which includes studying unemployment, the minimum wage, income inequality, and economic immobility using economic theory and data analysis. Students next study various anti-poverty programs in the United States such as traditional welfare, the Earned Income Credit, food stamps, and Medicaid.

On the reading list:
The Economics of Poverty and Discrimination, Bradley Schiller
Nickel and Dimed, the 10th Anniversary Edition, Barbara Ehrenreich
Various policy reports and news articles

Unique assignments and activities: At least 10 hours of field work at a local nonprofit organization — the opportunities include the Hamilton Food Cupboard and the Madison County Department of Social Services, among others. Various site visits are also an integral part of the course.

The professor says: “Students will learn about poverty in the United States through the traditional way in the classroom; however, through the service-learning component, they get to see how local nonprofit organizations alleviate poverty in central New York. By working with local practitioners, students gain a real sense of the issues and the people and programs that exist to combat poverty. Given that many of the students are economics majors and have good quantitative skills, our community partners often put those skills to good use during the semester by having my students work on projects for their organizations.”