The Wesleyan Connection

Wesleyan played Williams during the Homecoming football game Nov. 7 in Corwin Stadium.

More than 5,000 parents, alumni and friends came to campus Nov. 6-8 to celebrate Homecoming/Family Weekend. This year’s theme was “Come Home!” Event photos are posted on the HCFW website.

“Every year, I hear from alumni, parents and students that Homecoming/Family Weekend gets better and better,” says Gemma Fontanella Ebstein, associate vice president for external relations. “We had a terrific turnout this year and the energy was palpable across campus – in the WESeminars, athletic contests, department anniversary celebrations and other special gatherings throughout the weekend. This has become one of the highlights of the year for the Wesleyan community.”

The weekend began Friday, Nov. 6 with tours of campus, sessions for parents, department open houses, the Athletics Hall of Fame ceremony and dinner, an all-campus dinner, a concert by Eilen Jewell and the Sacred Shakers, a fall senior thesis dance concert and several WESeminars. Interactive and inspiring, WESeminars provide opportunities to revisit the classroom and attend presentations by scholars, pundits, and other experts in their fields.

The College of Letters and the College of Social Studies both held their 50th Anniversary celebrations.

Prometheus, Wesleyan's student fire-dancing group, performed on Foss Hill Nov. 6 during Homecoming/Family Weekend.

On Saturday, Nov. 7, campus guests attended the annual Where on Earth are We Going? Symposium, rowing instructions with Wesleyan’s crew team, a family swim, WESeminars on dance, study abroad projects, the history of Wesleyan, and international journalism.

Deana Hutson, director of events, estimates that 5,000 fans showed up for tailgating, the homecoming football game and the NESCAC men’s soccer semi-finals. The day wrapped up with several other athletic events, a community bike ride, the Dwight L. Greene Symposium, the Reed Labyrinth Opening and a concert with Amy Crawford ‘95.

A Fall Harvest Bruch and the Alumni Association Executive Committee meeting kicked off events on Sunday, Nov. 8. The day also included a legacy gathering and photo of current students posting with parents or grandparents that are Wesleyan alumni, a celebration of Western Art Music and a student A Capella Concert.

Alumni who are parents and grandparents of current first-year students gathered on Denison Terrace for a legacy photograph Nov. 8.

Gabriela De Golia ‘13 spent the event-filled weekend with her parents, Jim De Golia and Terri Hanagan of San Francisco; her uncle, Jose Hanagan of Reno, Nevada; and her brother, Nicolas, who goes to high school in France. Together, the family saw the Wesleyan screening of Matt Tyrnauer ‘91 Valentino: The Last Emperor, attended the Labyrinth opening in honor of Joe and Kit Reed, the Amy Crawford concert on Saturday night,  a panel discussion on how parents can help students achieve academic success, a lecture on the role of public opinion in foreign policy, the Homecoming football, soccer and ice hockey games and swimming meet. In addition, Hanagan P’13 worked as a parent volunteer at Usdan University Center.

“It was a wonderful opportunity to meet many other parents, a great many of them new (as I am) to Wesleyan,” Hanagan says. “I also met many of Gabriela’s new friends and colleagues, which was especially important to me. It gave me a great sense of comfort to see that she has so many kind, fun and intelligent new friends.”

Homecoming/Family Weekend was Nov. 6-8.

President Michael Roth also led a Sunday morning address to parents. He laid out his near and long term views for enhancing the overall student and academic experience at Wesleyan, making a strong case for the benefits of the entire Wesleyan experience and the need to provide increased financial aid to those strong candidates for admission whose ability to become members the student body would be prevented due to lack of financial means.

“As a person who has seen firsthand the benefits that my children have gained from being routine exposure to diversity on virtually all levels and all types, I found particularly attractive his passion for increasing the geographic and other diversity of the student body and for more effectively removing financial barriers to attending Wes,” De Golia P’ 13 says.

Kate Wetherhead ’98 currently stars in the off-Broadway musical Ordinary Days with a score by Adam Gwon and directed by Mark Bruni. The show deals the lives and troubles of four young people living in New York City. In a positive review in The New York Times, Charles Isherwood says the show “captures with stinging clarity that uneasy moment in youth when doubts begin to cloud hopes for a future of unlimited possibility.”

Wetherhead plays an unhappy graduate student who has lost her thesis notebook, which is found by an aspiring artist (Jared Gertner), and the two eventually meet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In his review for the Associated Press, Michael Kuchwara says, “Wetherhead has a quirky, offbeat stage presence perfectly suited for this aggressively neurotic young woman, a person quick to form opinions and not shy about expressing them either.”

The other half of the show deals with a couple, played by Hunter Foster and Lisa Brescia, who problems mount when they decide to move in with each other.

Ordinary Days plays through Dec. 13 at the Roundabout Theater Company Black Box Theater, Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater, 111 West 46th Street, Manhattan, 212-719-1300. Tickets are $20.

In The Calculus of Friendship (Princeton University Press), Cornell University professor Steven Strogatz chronicles the moving story of the friendship he developed with his former high school math teacher, Don Joffray ’50, over 30 years through the exchange of letters between them. For a long time, their friendship revolved almost entirely on a shared love of calculus.

Joffray goes from the prime of his career to retirement, competes in whitewater kayaking at the international level, and loses a son. Strogatz matures from high school math whiz to Ivy League professor, has a failed marriage, and experiences the sudden death of a parent. Eventually they get to know each other better beyond the world of mathematics.

In the prologue, Strogatz writes: “Like calculus itself, this book is an exploration of change. It’s about the transformation that takes place in a student’s heart, as he and his teacher reverse roles, as they age, as they are buffeted by life itself.” Their shared love of calculus becomes “a constant while all around them is in flux.”

A video about the book is on YouTube.

In the Nov. 16 issue of The New Yorker, staff writer Ariel Levy ’96 looks at two new books: When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present (Little Brown) by Gail Collins, and You’ve Come a Long Way, Maybe: Sarah, Michelle, Hillary and the Shaping of the New American Woman (Palgrave) by Leslie Sanchez.

In her essay, titled “Lift and Separate,” Levy discusses not just the content of the two books but also considers how feminism is still so divisive. She discusses some of the triumphs and defeats of the feminist movement and some myths of the movement as well. For instance, Levy writes that “bra burning became the most durable and unsettling image of modern feminism,” but then continues: “So it may be worth noting that it never actually happened.”

Levy notes how activist feminists are often stereotyped and how women like Sarah Palin and Cindy McCain who describe themselves as “traditional” are far from traditional women. She recognizes how the feminist movement succeeded in getting women into the government and the private sector workforce. But she also comments that the “contours of mainstream feminism started to change accordingly. A politics of liberation was largely supplanted by a politics of identity.”

Near the end of her essay, Levy writes: “Feminism as an identity politics has enjoyed real victories. It matters that women serve on the Supreme Court, that they make decisions in business, government, academia, and the media. But a preoccupation with representation suggests that feminism has lost its larger ambitions. We’ve come a long way in the past forty years … The trouble is that the journey hasn’t always been in the intended direction. These days, we can only dream about a federal program insuring that women with school-age children have affordable child care.”

Book co-edited by Grant Brenner ’92

Grant Brenner ’92, Daniel Bush and Joshua Moses are co-editors of Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience: Integrating Care in Disaster Relief Work (Routledge), which explores the interface between spiritual and psychological care in the context of disaster recovery work, drawing upon recent disasters including the experiences of Sept. 11, 2001.

The book contains three sections structured around the cycle of disaster response and focusing on the relevant phase of disaster recovery work. In each section, selected spiritual and mental health topics are examined with contributions from spiritual care and mental health care providers. This is a useful reference volume for theory and an invaluable hands-on resource, which identifies and considers interdisciplinary collaborations, creative partnerships, gaps in care and necessary interdisciplinary work.

The book grew out of several conferences co-organized by two of the editors during the years following 9/11, and it represents the collective wisdom of many people who have worked diligently and often at great cost to themselves. The volume highlights the often overlooked partnership between spiritual and mental health caregivers, a partnership especially important in distressful situations involving trauma, disaster and terrorism.

Grant Brenner, MD, is in private practice in Manhattan and works as a psychiatrist, psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and consultant. He is on faculty at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology, where he is a chief psychiatric consultant and director of the Trauma Service; is assistant clinical professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Mount Sinai School of Medicine (adjunct); and teaches and supervises psychiatric residents in addition to other academic roles.

Daniel Pollitt ’43, University of North Carolina Kenan Professor Emeritus and longtime civil-liberties and civil-rights advocate, was awarded the Order of the Long Leaf Pine, one of the state’s highest honors, last summer.

Nominated for the award by state Sen. Floyd McKissick Jr., whose father, Floyd McKissick Sr., worked with Pollitt on a number of civil-rights issues, Pollitt was presented with the award by Sen. Ellie Kinnaird, with whom he was wed last April.

Bestowed for a lifetime of “integrity, learning and zeal,” the award recognizes his activism and commitment to the causes of social justice. In the 1950s, he served as defense council in a number of historic civil-liberty trials, including those of Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller before the House Un-American Activities Committee, helped lead a successful protest to integrate a downtown Chapel Hill theater in the 1960s, and continues to be active in his opposition to the death penalty.

An article in the Carrboro Citizen, quotes him proclaiming his motto: “Constant skepticism is the hallmark of a democratic society.”

For further information, see  http://www.carrborocitizen.com/main/2009/08/06/pollitt-receives-long-leaf-pine-award/

Jerry Melillo ’65, a senior scientist at the U.S. Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., says in a study published in Science that the new generation of biofuels will actually emit more carbon dioxide, averaged over the first three decades of this century, than gasoline—although the fuels were meant to be a low-carbon alternative.

A Reuters report on the study noted that governments and private industry are spending billions of dollars on research into making fuels from wood and grass in the hopes of cutting carbon emissions while not competing with food, as corn-based biofuels do.

Melillo and his team found, however, that these advanced “cellulosic” biofuels will actually lead to higher carbon emissions. They contend that the land required to plant poplar trees and tropical grasses would displace farmland and therefore lead to more deforestation to create new crop farmland. Deforestation is a significant source of carbon emissions. Additionally, these biofuel crops require nitrogen fertilizer, which itself produces two greenhouse gasses.

Melillo notes that the paper is not meant to negate the place for cellulosic biofuels.

“It is not an obvious and easy win without thinking very carefully about the problem,” Melillo told Reuters. “We have to think very carefully about both short and long-term consequences.”

Majora Carter '88 delivered the keynote address at the Dwight L. Greene Symposium Nov. 7.

Majora Carter ’88 delivered the keynote address titled “Green the Ghetto and How Much It Won’t Cost Us” during the 17th Annual Dwight L. Greene Symposium Nov. 7 in Memorial Chapel.

Carter is the founder of Sustainable South Bronx and River Heroes, host of Eco-Heroes on Sundance Channel and The Promised Land on National Public Radio.

Carter founded and led Sustainable South Bronx from 2001 to 2008, and is currently president of her own economic development consulting group.

The well-received presentation was preceded by Wesleyan President Michael Roth’s announcement of the College of the Environment.

The symposium, held in honor of Dwight L. Greene ’70, began in 1993 as a memorial to his life and work as a professor of law, mentor and friend to many.

The symposium was sponsored by the Wesleyan Black Alumni Council, the Alumni of Color  Network and the Robert Schumann Lecture Series in the Environmental Studies Program.

Long-time Wesleyan supporter John Andrus '33 celebrated his 100th birthday Sept. 19 in Wayzata, Minn. Andrus, who donated several prints to the Davison Art Collection, received a Distinguished Alumnus Award from Wesleyan at his 50th Class Reunion in 1983. As an undergraduate, Andrus was a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, the Paint and Powder Club, and the Inter-fraternity Council. He majored in English and English literature. Andrus's granddaughter, Megan Haynes Kelly ’06, attended the celebration.

John Andrus gets a birthday hug from Edith Thorpe, a co-director of the Surdna Foundation in New York, N.Y. The Surdna Foundation, founded by the Andrus family, was created in memory of John Andrus's grandfather, John E. Andrus '1862. The John E. Andrus Center for Public Affairs, otherwise known as the Public Affairs Center or simply the PAC, is funded by the Surdna Foundation. John Andrus is chairman emeritus of the foundation, which provides support for the care of the sick and elderly, medical research, and higher education.

(Photos courtesy of Megan Kelly ‘06)

Bill Blakemore '65, an ABC News Correspondent, will speak on "The Many Psychologies of Global Warming," during a talk at 8 p.m. Nov. 3 in Memorial Chapel.

Four weeks before the nations meet in Copenhagen to try to avert the catastrophes that global warming may bring, ABC News Correspondent William Blakemore ’65 will identify many surprising psychological factors at play as people in all walks of life deal with the latest “hard news” on climate.

Blakemore will speak on “The Many Psychologies of Global Warming,” during a talk at 8 p.m. Nov. 3 in Memorial Chapel.

He’ll explore new definitions of sanity that may pertain, and give examples displaying different “psychologies, as well as manmade global warming’s place in “the long history of narcissistic insults to humanity itself.”

Two new time-line graphs of rapid and dangerous climate change will give fresh global context to the psychological challenges and experiences he has observed in the five years since he began focusing on global warming for ABC News.

Computer modelers trying to project the speed and severity of global warming’s advance often say that “the biggest unknown” in their equations is not data about ice or atmosphere, carbon or clouds, but “what the humans will do.” This talk probes that field and many states of mind already engaged.

The talk is sponsored by the Wasch Center for Retired Faculty, Department of Psychology, and the Robert Schumann Lecture Series in the Environmental Studies Program.

A follow-up discussion will be held at 4 p.m. Nov. 4 in the Wasch Center on Lawn Ave.