davidsonjournal

Introducing: Chai Lu Bohannan ’14

admin — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 03:40:15 +0000

Chai Lu Bohannan ’14 was enveloped in red ribbons at a lake-side garden in Nanjing, China, last fall when she was photographed by classmate Daniel Van Note ’14. Visitors and tourists buy the ribbons, inscribe them with wishes for good luck and prosperity, and hang them in trees to catch the breeze. Bohannan and Van Note were among 14 Davidson students enrolled in the college’s first semester-long study abroad program in China. Associate Professor of Anthropology Fuji Lozada led the group, and taught courses in visual anthropology and contemporary Chinese society. A guest lecturer from Fudan University in Shanghai, which was the group’s home for most of the semester, taught a class in globalization, and students also took a Chinese language class. The itinerary included a 16-day excursion to Beijing, Xi’an, a rural area of the country, and Taiwan. This newest of Davidson’s study abroad programs will be offered every other year, with the next trip scheduled for fall 2014.

— Bill Giduz

How We Learn, How We Live & The Humanities Program at 50

admin — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 03:30:34 +0000

T o many Davidson alumni, it doubtless seems that Humes has ever been with us. But, no. The introduction to the inaugural Humanities syllabus, 1962 C.E., says, “The inauguration of a Humanities program at Davidson College was the direct result of official action taken by the Board of Trustees, administration, and faculty of the college. The program has grown out of the following convictions:

that the modern educative process has been too concerned with training the specialist rather than educating the whole man;
that even undergraduate liberal arts education has been tempted to multiply courses beyond necessity and to over departmentalize;
that excessive use of the analytic method has contributed to an unnecessary fragmentation of knowledge;
that synthesis can and should accompany analysis, even at the freshman and sophomore levels;
that the past, present, and future are inextricably intertwined; and
that the life and achievements of Western man can and should be seen in meaningful patterns.”

The core concerns here are as vital and fitting to Davidson’s steadfast-and evolving- liberal arts mission today as ever.

At the time of last fall’s $45 million gift from The Duke Endowment for projects to foster a greater synthesis of “thought leadership” on campus, President Carol Quillen said: “The Davidson experience is characterized by three opportunities-students doing original work, exploring connections between how they learn and how they live, and investigating connections across the arts and sciences.”

Franny Goffinet ’13,
Melbourne, Fla., senior English
major pondering a gig teaching
English in Russia next year, or as an assistant steward on a Caribbean
sailing ship
Unlike many first-year students,
Franny Goffinet ’13 was undaunted
by the infamous Humes reading
load: “I’m an English major.”
“Humes seems to be guided by
the idea, ‘Know where you’re from,’
which for me, broadly defined, is
Western civilization,” says Goffinet.
If a texts feel inaccessible at first,
that’s just part of the process,
says Goffinet.
“You have to interrogate these
works until you understand or
sympathize with something,”
saysGoffinet.
Small-group discussion helped:
“Discussion is pretty much just
asking questions. Why is Abelard
attracted to Heloise? It’s just practice.
Asking questions.”
Writing, a credited curricular
focus in Humanities, presented its
own learning curve.
“In high school, I was used to
essays that I could just free-associate
to the word limit and get an A,” says
Goffinet. At the end of freshman
year at Davidson, by contrast, her
Humes section leader, Professor of
Classics Jeanne Neumann, returned
a paper with the pointed thought that
it had deserved a C-, but she gave it
a C and an admonition,
“You’re notthinking.”
As a senior, Goffinet says: “I
wasn’t finding the gaps between what
I knew and didn’t know, and going
into the areas I didn’t know. I didn’t
know how to ask questions, probably.
Now, I do.”

Humes has been and remains central to those opportunities, ever developing in students what its founders called a “habit of connecting.”

In the Beginning

It was the late, great Professor of Religion Daniel Durham “Colossus of” Rhodes ’38 who guided the genesis of the Humanities program, having returned to his alma mater from Southwestern at Memphis expressly for the purpose. Also present at the creation were Professor of Philosophy George Abernethy, Professor of English Dick Cole, Professor of Greek George Labban, Professor of History John McGeachy and Associate Professor of Bible Max Polley.

Polley, Labban and Cole, as well as Professor Emeritus of Religion Sam Maloney who directed the second-year program, live now at The Pines at Davidson retirement community.

“The faculty worked harder than the students!” Labban recalls.

“The really hard thing was deciding what needed to be included,” Polley says. He notes that the initial proposal passed the faculty by one vote. “People said, ‘If they’re crazy enough to do this sort of thing, then let ‘em try it. I just wanted to do something besides teaching three sections of Old Testament every semester.It’s boring.”

After an arduous planning period in the summer of 1962, the college paid these Humes pioneers’ way to “take it to the mountain” for a weekend retreat at Highlands, N.C. Come Sunday morning, the story goes, Cole asked, “Are we going to go to church?” To which Rhodes responded, “We’re not here to go to church. We’re here to decide what goes in the Humanities program, and we’re not leaving until it’s done.”

The professors drove down the mountain with a full syllabus.

Was Humes to be a Great Books course with history, or a history survey with some Great Books? Well, yes, no, and that depends. Many variations of that question and others like it have provided the liveliest points of Humes conversation for 50 years. The general approach has been to create a broad sweep of what can be termed “Western civilization,” and then to allow course content to evolve year-to-year.

In 1962, the broad sweep turned out to be deep, also-so much so that the whole gang of 102 inaugural Humes students, not to mention their professors, nearly burned out en masse from sheer reading. Polley recalls one day telling students to skip their homework, to take the day off and “go play golf or something.” The tradition of regular syllabi adjustments commenced that day.

Living in Conversation

Kathy Gratto Revell ’85,
arts fundraising professional
for Alvin Ailey American
Dance Theater, Miami City
Ballet, and other arts groups
“Being in the Humanities program
broadened our view of the world
around us,” says Kathy Gratto Revell
’85. “It taught us that the world is a
lot closer together than we thought.”
She and husband Keith ’85 live in
South Florida.
“We have lots of friends from
many religions and nationalities.
That’s one of the reasons we like it
here,” says Gratto Revell (who, full
disclosure, often sat next to this correspondent in Humes lectures in
fall trimester 1981).
“When I came to Davidson, I
thought I’d be pre-med, and Humes
was a way to get a lot of requirements
out of the way. Then, I found
out I really enjoyed the literary work
especially, and I became an English
major. I think Humes made me
a better writer.
“I do remember staying up late at
night to get through all the reading,”
she says.
“It wasn’t so much the things that
I studied as it was the connections
I was able to make between them
across genres,” says Gratto Revell,
who went on to earn a master’s
degree in art history. “All those roots
were laid in Humanities.”

It’s not always easy being Humes. Balancing into and out of seismic shifts in the academic calendar, while sailing forth steadfastly in the ever-trending winds of higher education; running gauntlets of barbed internal faculty memos of self-searching; weathering departmental budget realignments while surviving enrollment fluctuations; and always examining and reexamining itself in what Professor of Political Science Brian Shaw termed a “persistent identity crisis”—through it all, Humes has ultimately thrived.

The basic question of canonicity has always been central, perennially rearing its head to snap at the syllabus: “Why is that in there?”

Case in point: a cursory scan of the current first-year syllabus reveals salient features Gilgamesh, Genesis, Homer, Aeschylus, Thucydides, Plato, Ovid, Corinthians, Mark, Thomas, Augustine, the Qur’an, Charlemagne, Crusades, Dante, and the Black Death.

Why those topics and not others?

“Any canon, by definition, excludes voices, it silences voices, it looks at things from one particular point of view,” says Burkhard Henke, E. Craig Wall, Jr. Distinguished Professor and Chair of Humanities and professor and chair of German Studies. “You have to know the canon before you can debunk it.”

Hansford Epes ’61, professor emeritus of German and of Humanities, makes the point that all courses, involve a selection of material. He sums up with characteristic pith: “We choose to do Humanities like this. We also choose to say it is not an exhaustive treatment. A course like Humes must live in conversation.”

Particular conversations arising from that broader one can be fascinating, too, Henke says, often as much for faculty as for students. “You profit from different bodies of knowledge and different questions that people ask of texts, events and people,” Henke says. “At its best, there is frantic email traffic before each class. Sometimes it’s just pure gold!”

Cultures and Civilizations

In the mid-90s, Humes leaders saw that, once again, change was necessary for continuity. They began looking for a way “not to eliminate the old program, but a new way to think about it to attract new faculty,” recalls James B. Duke Professor of International Studies and Professor and Chair of History Jonathan Berkey.

John Douglas, M.D. ’74,
Chief Medical Officer,
National Center for HI V/AI DS,
Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB
Prevention, Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention
By the time John Douglas got to
Davidson Humanities as a freshman,
he recalls, the Old Testament already
seemed to him, well, old news.
“Then I had Dr. Rhodes for my
first trimester of Humes,” Douglas
says, “and suddenly I was studying
the Old Testament in a way that I
had never done before. Seeing it in
the light of the history and literature
of the period was a strong
memory to me.”
He recalls an exercise with Professor
of English Tony Abbott, in which he
wrote an essay in the style of Michel
de Montaigne. “It was like acting on
paper,” says Douglas. “It was a great
way to learn the material.”
“Public health is where the strands
of thinking and synthesis have come
together in my career,” he says. “The
need to do interdisciplinary thinking
is as important to me now as my scientific training.”
A few years ago, he was involved
in reporting on an unethical research
study involving Americans in
Guatemala in the late 1940s, a pre-conformed-consent era of war and
imperialism. Douglas’ report made
it to the desk of President Obama
and resulted in a public
apology to Guatemala.
“That work didn’t involve Plato
and Aquinas, but it did involve some
sort of historical context and ethics
and politics of the era. Could I have
done that work as well if I hadn’t
taken Humanities?”

Berkey and Dana Professor of German Studies and Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies Scott Denham sought support from the administration and money from the National Endowment for the Humanities to form a faculty reading workshop. It centered on texts from outside the traditional Western canon, and explored new ways of delving into the texts and the cultural questions they raised.

The result was Cultures and Civilizations, a one-year course that could be viewed as an alternative sibling program to Humes.

Facetiously nicknamed “Inhumanities” during its formative time, Cultures and Civilizations incorporated larger sections of 25-30 students team-taught by two professors. The curriculum was organized around themes and global civilizations and common fault lines, often drawing on a “call-and-response” pairing of related texts to evoke connections. As in Humes, negotiations among professors about what books to read in a given semester served as a source of academic creation.

“What happens when I throw Junot Diaz on top of Howard’s End and Zadie Smith?” Denham asks by way of example.

While differing in form and content from Humes, Cultures and Civilizations remains true to several markers of its progenitor course, notably as a “W” (for “writing”) course credit, “to provide students with a strong foundation in rhetoric, analysis and research skills.”

Continuity and Change, All Over Again

For five decades Humes, also now a “W” course, has been challenging students to hone their research, analytic and rhetorical skills via reading, writing and lively discourse.

“Don’t let the passage (being studied) set the agenda for your paper,” Associate Professor of Religion Anne Blue Wills tells her students. “Don’t tell yourself, ‘I can’t say that!’ Yes, you can, you just have to back it up! You are the agent. I know it’s a challenge to take up that control, but that’s why you all are here. What is your interpretive claim? Get in there and claim it! Use those SAT / ACT high verbal scores. Unleash them!”

And of course, any good liberal arts professor will want to throw his or her students a little off balance now and then, on principle.

In a Humes discussion on monasticism and martyrdom, Professor of History Vivien Dietz expertly deploys a well-timed bit of relatively mundane data—that the notion of purgatory is not found in the New Testament—to the nearly audible effect of religious assumptions crumbling.

Professor and Chair of Education Rick Gay took the Humes message all the way from Hance Auditorium to the op-ed pages of the Charlotte Observer. Gay won the Feb. 8 caption contest for a Kevin Siers cartoon depicting Gov. Pat McCrory dressed as a professor and standing in front of a chalkboard with a hole blown through it to represent McCrory’s recent comments about the liberal arts. Gay’s winner: “Oh, the Humanities!”

Rachel Andoga ’07,
Faculty Associate, Arizona State
University
On the 10th anniversary of her
freshman year as a Cornwell Scholar
at Davidson, Rachel Andoga ’07 finds
herself teaching English to freshmen
at Arizona State University, where she
recently completed her M.F.A. in creative writing.
Cultures and Civilizations was formative for Andoga.
“Having my freshman year span the
globe that didn’t really focus on things I
had read in high school, at
least in clips, was
wonderful,” she says. “I was a freshman
who was nervous about
everything constantly,
and I remember going to the bookstore
and pulling the Qur’an off the shelf
and realizing the book was ‘backwards’!
Epic of Gilgamesh? No, but Sundiata:
An Epic of Old Mali, yes, and Arabesque,
and Wide Sargasso Sea, and A Passage
to India…. Reading iconic cultural
texts from around the world gave her an
exceptional view during her fellowship
teaching English in
Singapore as a master’s
candidate. Being in Professor of
English Suzanne Churchill’s “W” section
gave her an exceptional view of her
English major—to the tune of 11 more
classes with Churchill in the
years that followed.
“Cultures and Civs gave me a key
to access a lot of literature that I’ve
encountered in the years since,” says
Andoga. “I do think it cracked my world
open a little more thoroughly than if I
had taken a longer way around. I am a
more conscientious citizen of the world
for having had
that particular experience
at that time in my life.
“I tell my students all the time that
my W professor changed my life. And
I may or may not do that for them, but
I’ll be damned if I’m not going to try.”

It is worth noting that, since 1962, Humes lectures have been held in the Chambers’ Dome Room, known as Hance Auditorium following thorough renovations and upgrades at the turn of the century.

The same, yet different.

It was with continuity and change in mind that President Quillen delivered the inaugural Hansford M. Epes Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities last fall. Established in 2012, the lecture
series commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Humanities Program at Davidson College and honors Epes’ nearly five decades of service to the program.

The title of Quillen’s lecture: “The Uses of the Past and the Humanist Tradition.”

Watch President Quillen’s lecture video.

Visit the Humanities department blog.

Watch slideshow.

Senior Writer John Syme ’85 tried to drop Humes after one trimester in the fall of 1981. His freshman advisor, Max “The Ax” Polley, talked him out of it. For that Syme would eventually become, and today remains, extremely grateful.

The World in Our Hands

admin — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 03:28:49 +0000

The Dean Rusk International Studies program continues to grow and thrive. Including dual citizens and American citizens who came to Davidson from abroad, our international student population totaled 111 students from 46 countries in the 2011–12 academic year. Dean Rusk travel grants continue to provide one of Davidson’s most effective internationalization tools. Last year, the program made grants to 98 students totaling nearly $225,000. Most of these grants went to students who designed their own projects abroad. They posed the questions. They developed the research plans and the budgets. These projects give students the opportunity to develop the kind of independence and creativity that are hallmarks of a liberal arts education. Very few schools make this amount of financial support so generously available for independent undergraduate research abroad.

The writing and photography that you enjoy comes from our students. Much of what you see and read here is the product of the independent projects I just described. Think of yourself standing behind the camera that took William Myers’ photo in Vietnam. Picture yourself sitting with a notebook and pen, trying to capture what Catherine Schricker learned in just one day about healthcare in Ecuador—and about herself.

Chris Alexander, Ph.D.
John and Ruth McGee Director
Dean Rusk International Studies Program

Photo by Madeleine Dick-Godfrey ’12, Kenya 2011

Geoff Peitz ’12, Kenya
I have heard many statistics about the prevalence of AIDS in Africa, but today the situation became very real to me. I interacted with more HIV-positive people today than I probably have in my life. Part of the problem with the spread of HIV is the patients’ fear of admitting that they have the virus. One man lied to the medical officer today about the results of his HIV test. Another woman severely affected by AIDS had been hiding the fact from her family, putting her husband and children at great risk.

In situations like these, Dr. Jimmy provided not only physical treatment but also moral guidance for the scared patients. He encouraged the woman to tell her family so that they could create a support network to help her through the disease. A counselor, Vintor, was also present during the rounds. Dr. Jimmy instructed Vintor to come back later to help the patients be brave and to encourage them to tell their families. The need for counseling patients was not something that had occurred to me previously. Now I realize that a counselor can be nearly as important as a doctor or nurse in the treatment of serious diseases.

Caitlin Allen ’12, Jordan

At the end of the day, I realized that I hadn’t spoken (or understood) a word of Arabic and the Iraqi women and Mr. Abraham hadn’t spoken (or understood) a word of my English. But, as sport continues to demonstrate, you need no words to communicate. After the clinic, I explained to Jade that while I love working internationally, it will always be tough for me because I just don’t have the language skills. I seem to have some sort of language learning mental block. She said, “Well, you’re working internationally for a non-profit now.” Sometimes it takes a simple statement and pointing out the obvious for me to get it.

First off, in this situation, I don’t need language. Jade went on to tell me that after I had demonstrated a dribbling drill that involved running quickly and then slowing down and backing up and then speeding up, that she saw the women got it. I spoke completely in English and she said that they repeated exactly what I had said and demonstrated in Arabic—including the reason why you would ever use this skill. Pretty cool? In reality, however, language would be essential for a job like program director in Jordan, because there is a lot of organizing that goes on prior to the coaching. I also realize now that maybe I haven’t had the greatest experience with learning language, but if I found the perfect job in the perfect place and needed to learn a language, I could do it.

Photo by Haley Moretz ’12, Valparaíso, Chile 2011

Ali Farr ’12, Chile
Despite the occasional stumble in Spanish or failure to use the formal “usted” tense when talking to my interviewees, the interviews have gone very well! Lasting anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours, each interview has been unique, and every interviewee has been extremely helpful. In fact, almost all of them said at one point, “Funny you should ask—I just wrote a report about this for a project I’m working on. I’ll send it to you!’

It is moments like that when I know that the research I am doing here could not have been conducted via e-mail. In-person interviews create a conversation flow that is just not possible over the Internet. Moreover, all of these interviews have provided me with a broad contact base that will certainly be useful as I get further into my thesis research. It’s comforting to know that I have an e-mail address for each of my interviewees and I can simply e-mail them in the future if I have any doubts or new questions.

Claire Ittner ’13, India
I circled the cathedral a few times, poking and sketching and trying doors. It is true, as almost every person I’ve encountered has told me—that I’ve come to Delhi in “the worst possible time of the year.” The heat is unbelievable, stupefying—almost absurd. But there is an advantage to being here in the summer—no one is around. The tourist spots are empty, the picture vantage points normally filled with grinning Japanese tourists are clear, and best of all—no one guards the doors. I took my fill of pictures at the National Museum, and today I scrambled to the top of the cathedral on a set of stairs that no one but myself and a family of birds had made use of in some time.

Photo by Lindsay Beck ’12, India, Summer 2011

Catherine Schricker ’14, Ecuador 2011
While I was working at the clinics in each barrio of Quito, I saw the community men and women itching for help. They were searching for any possible way to get aid for themselves and their children. With every vitamin, toothpaste, or squirt of lotion that was distributed, it could be seen how grateful the people were for what we could offer them. Being pre-dental, I was given the job of fluoride for two of our eight days of service.

Many of the children I was helping had no dental care knowledge whatsoever. Many mouths I saw were filled with cavities, holes, and degrading teeth. My small swipe of fluoride paste barely provided any strength to the already damaged teeth, yet the parents insisted that their children get the treatment. They didn’t know that brushing your teeth once or even twice a day would save them their teeth and be so much more beneficial than the fluoride treatment I was distributing. I was only supposed to give fluoride to the children, but I couldn’t hold back my small form of aid from the parents who continually repeated “Yo tambien! Yo tambien!” They appreciated any outreach from us students or the doctors.

What shocked me the most was all of this was so preventable. Yet there are not enough resources and education available to the people of Quito for them to be able to effectively help themselves. Thankfully, though, through these service brigades that provide help every two months, the community is slowly learning more and more about personal health and prevention methods.

I feel so privileged to have provided some sort of care to the people of Quito, in my small, non-medical professional way. The fluoride swab may have been water under the bridge, but in some aspect it gave people hope that they had a say in their health.

Mary Kemp Thornberry ’13, England
A brief walk through the streets of Cambridge will set your sense of orientation and time sorely out of sorts. As you lift your gaze from the busy shop fronts that occupy the lower halves of the city’s buildings to the original Tudor architecture painstakingly preserved above, the twenty-first century retreats into more remote corners of your consciousness. In the historical heart of Cambridge, where a three-minute walk might lead you around a church from the 11th century, down a street resting on the foundations of an original Roman road, and past a magnificent chapel commissioned by Henry VIII and later used by his daughter Elizabeth I to host parties and dance the Volta, history surges to the forefront of your attention with a vigor and immediacy further reinforced by the fresh scholarship constantly taking place within and around the university. To live and study for an extended duration in this enclave of centuries past bears with it the temptation to levitate above the mundane and often unsightly facts of the present day into the beautiful glass world of ideas.

Aniane Nguyenduy ’15, Mui Ne, Vietnam 2011

William Myers ’14, Vietnam
Chopsticks: a simple word. I didn’t think that it would be too difficult for a Vietnamese student to pronounce. They use them every day to eat. On Friday, I literally spent 45 minutes going around to each little boy in my classroom at the Tan Binh Shelter. They tried so hard, but the sounds involved in saying “chopsticks” were just too difficult. Yet it filled my heart with great pride and immense joy to see them smile, to see them try so hard to say one word. Seeing that desire in a child’s eyes is an experience unlike any other.

Watch Slideshow.

In the Service of King Content

admin — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 03:14:36 +0000

Liberal arts smarts, the creative brain, and the culture of advertising circa 2013
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
By John Syme

Britton Taylor ’98 came to Davidson “intrigued by the basic promise of a liberal arts education.”

A decade-and-a-half later, he is living the dream in Portland, Ore., as an award-winning advertising group strategy director at Wieden+Kennedy. A top job of his: the Old Spice “Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign with the sexy guy on the horse, which garnered the Grand Effie for effectiveness and the Grand Prix for film at Cannes Film Festival. Taylor is also proud of the success Old Spice has built in social media, as AdAge named Old Spice “The Most Viral Brand of the Year” in both 2010 and 2011.

“Not too shabby for a deodorant,” said Taylor, who is on Adweek’s 2012 list of “Top 20 Young Influentials Under 40.”

Taylor finds the ongoing explosion in advertising form and content as intriguing and promising as his liberal arts background. Or maybe because of it.

“If you’re not confused, you’re not doing something right, because you’re not curious enough,” he said in a wide-ranging, rapid-fire conversation by phone from Portland. “We just have to learn to be comfortable with the confusion!”

Taylor learned that kind of nimbleness and flexibility liberal arts style.

At Davidson, he initially fared “extremely horribly” in chemistry, then found he could “read and write English exceptionally well” (after a “wake-up call” F on a paper courtesy of Elizabeth Mills). He wrote for the Davidsonian, helped lead the Union Board and the Artist Series the year Spalding Gray visited campus, read Ulysses straight through with Zoran Kuzmanovich’s Joyce and Nabakov class, wound up loving calculus with Robert Whitton, and interned during his senior year at Price McNabb Advertising in Charlotte.

“That piqued my interest,” Taylor said. “I was drawn to the personalities and characters, people who think differently, people who wouldn’t fare well in a typical office environment…goofballs and wackos.”

He became one himself by way of a postgraduate gig scooping horse poop at the Olde Towne Carriage Company in Charleston, S.C., alongside classmate David Aycock ’98, who was assigned to the “pee truck” (“Number One and Number Two,” they were) and a year teaching seventh-grade English (“Seventh-graders are just mean”). The latter experience led him to a career counselor for guidance, followed by a master’s degree from Virginia Commonwealth University’s Brandcenter, and on to Wieden+Kennedy.

So, what does a “group strategy director” do?

“It’s kind of like being the left side of the creative brain,” said Taylor. Creative briefs are his stock in trade, relating audience descriptions and messages desired by clients to the creative team. Then, they all gut out the flesh and bones of Super Bowl ads and viral videos that (hopefully) will have people hunched over the virtual water cooler that is the smart phone circa 2013.

“The great thing about marketing today is that there are so many platforms,” said Taylor.

He notes that one thing hasn’t changed: “The people who tell the best stories win.”

Read more about Britton.

Photo Courtesy of Britton Taylor

Viewfinder: Glad Rags

admin — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 03:13:25 +0000

Annie Temmink ’11, who double majored in art and math, spent her post-graduate year exploring fashion and textiles thanks to the Watson Fellowship she received senior year. In Indonesia, Japan, India, Uganda, and Tanzania, Temmink experienced clothing from the world’s most rural villages to high fashion in its largest cities. Her hands-on work spanned from preparation of organic homemade dyes to visiting mass brand-name producing factories. Now in the not-for-profit world, Temmink is an “upcycling expert” for Goodwill Industries, where she transforms repurposed clothing into new fashions, accessories, and art.

—Cathryn Westra

SNAP! Take the Floor

admin — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 03:12:26 +0000

The Duke Family Performance Hall (DFPH) got a “floor lift” over winter break that puts a gleam back in its style. The hall’s 6,000-square-foot fir stage endured a dozen years of stout service, but the wear and tear took a toll. “It looked like someone blasted it with a shotgun,” said DFPH Technical Director Jim Nash.

So the college replaced the floor during winter break with a more durable surface of white oak.
“The DFPH is a crucially important space,” Nash said. “This is where the community gathers for all our important events. The state of the floor really reflects the state of the college.”

It’s an especially important resource for student dancers, actors, and musicians. “For a lot of them, this is the finest stage on which they’ll ever perform,” Nash said. “We want it to be perfect for them.”

Davidsonians from throughout cyberspace kept up with the construction via the DFPH Facebook page, and dozens of people scavenged pieces of the old floor to repurpose for writing pens, a coffee table, and simple souvenir blocks.
Looking out over the new floor from stage left, Nash said he was completely satisfied with the results. “It rises to the quality of the room now,” he said. “We’re ready to go!”

Read the full web story.

Visit the DFPH Facebook page.

—Bill Giduz

Do It In The Dark

admin — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 02:55:35 +0000

Claire Naisby ’12, the college’s energy manager, graduated last year with an idea. She learned of a funding opportunity for sub-meters, available through the Jessie Ball duPont Fund, and she thought Davidson College was the perfect place to put those funds to good use.

Sub-metering allows building and facility managers to understand the specific energy use and performance of specific equipment, which allows for more in-depth evaluation and planning for the future. Without sub-meters, organizations are only able to see their comprehensive energy use in any given time period.
“I went to David Holthouser, director of facilities, and pitched the idea of creating a position at the college so I could work toward bringing this project to life,” said Naisby.

Davidson College was awarded the funds—$150,000 to be exact—and the project is well under way.
“We basically get one bill from Duke Energy each month,” she explained. “These new meters will allow us to see how much energy is being used in each residence hall. After we find cost savings and energy savings through this new approach to monitoring our energy use, we hope to expand to all buildings on campus.”

The sub-meters mean more than figuring out who’s spending what. A student competition will further encourage students in each residence hall to have the greatest energy savings each month. A current competition—Do It In The Dark—has taken place for the past six years using 15-year-old meters that exist on the residence halls, but these meters must be manually read and recorded, and some of them are broken. The new sub-meters can be read remotely and provide instantaneous analyses. Students can now see just how easy it is to be green.

—Danielle Strickland

Read the complete web story.

Living as One with the World

admin — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 02:54:23 +0000

Jeff Mittelstadt ’99 becomes the college’s first director of sustainability
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

By Danielle Strickland

When Jeff Mittelstadt ’99 arrived as a freshman at Davidson College—moving “down South” from a Detroit suburb—he says he felt at home for the first time in his life. People opened up their homes and their lives to him. He felt like a part of a deeply-rooted family, not just a student at a school.

So when the opportunity arose for Mittelstadt to become Davidson’s first director of sustainability, he jumped at the chance, leaving his most recent home in Boston to return to his home in the South. This decision also re-introduced Mittelstadt and his wife, Natalie, to the world of long-distance marriage, but with each having a deep love for their work and a belief in improving the world around them—she’s a pediatric resident at Boston Children’s Hospital—it’s an arrangement that’s serving them well.

“This is the perfect job for me,” he said. “It’s the right place and the right work. I don’t ever want to be comfortable or complacent, and I know new students coming to campus each year will challenge me to stay on top of things and to be better myself. I don’t ever want to be a victim of cultural lock-in.”

Mittelstadt, who holds a master’s degree in environmental management from Duke and an M.B.A. and master’s degree in journalism and mass communication from UNC Chapel Hill, has ambitious plans for sustainability at Davidson, starting with identity creation. What does sustainability really mean, and why does it matter to Davidson?
“People always think of the environmental stuff,” he said. “But it’s about social equity, environmental integrity, and economic prosperity. It’s about how they drive each other, and it’s about learning to live as one with the world.”
Since his start date of November 14—also his birthday—he’s been spending a lot of time with the people on campus, listening, learning, and figuring out the best way to move forward.

“I’m meeting with students with all different interests. Students in the Food Club. Students passionate about social justice. Students who care about financial investments. They are all touched or helped by sustainability, and it’s about understanding the breadth of opportunity for us all to be involved.”

Mittelstadt’s non-Davidson world is entrenched in sustainability-related topics as well. He is the founder and president of a non-profit organization, Wildsides, which concentrates on human-wildlife conflict documentary and educational media. His most recent piece about whales will be screened at multiple 2013 Wildlife Conservation Film Festivals in Miami, Washington, D.C., and New York City.

Outside of running his non-profit organization, Mittelstadt’s previous work experience prepared him perfectly for overseeing the future of sustainability at Davidson College. For two years, he served as the vice president for sustainable manufacturing at the National Council for Advanced Manufacturing. Prior roles include sustainability management for Bank of America, program evaluation for the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Inspector General, and sustainability consulting in Chapel Hill.

Throughout his career, Mittelstadt has encouraged others to challenge his ideas, and he enjoys the challenges others bring to him. This approach is no different at Davidson. In fact, he wants even more of it.

“Some of the best advice I’ve ever received is to never take an answer as the answer,” he said. “Everything has opportunity. I want this campus and this community to question what I say and do. It will make my experience more enjoyable, and it will grow what’s possible here.”

Visit the Sustainability department.

Photo Credit: Bill Giduz

One Stop on the Journey to Freedom

admin — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 02:52:54 +0000

African-American soldiers faced racism at home while fighting to restore democracy in Europe during WWII.

Photographic exhibitions, written reflections, panel discussions, and film screenings commemorate Black History Month Celebration at Davidson.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
By Bill Giduz

Davidson College commemorated Black History Month with a focus on the influence of the civil rights movement both nationally and abroad. The Wearn Lecture by Angela Davis attracted a standing room-only crowd.
Davis’ name conjures up a time some older Americans would just as soon forget. The country was wracked by a succession of urban riots, slain leaders, police brutality, and violent anti-Vietnam War protests. Formerly quiet minority citizens marched through the streets demanding institution of newly legislated rights. The majority of them adhered to non-violence, but new organizations like the Black Panthers threatened to respond to police violence with violence of their own. It seemed that America was falling into chaos.

Davis, a scholar of German philosophy turned communist and Black Panther leader, became a strident, articulate voice for justice, speaking beneath an enormous Afro hair-do that seemed to taunt the establishment she sought to overthrow.

Four decades beyond those inflammatory times, Davis is still speaking for freedom, but with a gentler voice and to mostly sympathetic audiences.

Speaking at Davidson, Davis acknowledged that time heals wounds. “History is a strange thing,” she said. “What at one point provoked horror from people now provokes applause in the 21st century.”
Her talk was an autobiographical review, peppered with examples of continuing injustice. She insisted that the work to relieve the plight of the poor, hungry, unemployed, sick, and uneducated is far from over.
She takes a broad view of the freedom movement today, insisting that all injustices are linked. “Civil rights are important, but we also must struggle for immigrant rights, the rights of prisoners, and marriage rights, and the right to health care, and affordable housing, and education,” she said. “Freedom is more expansive than just civil rights. Civil rights is just one stop on the journey to freedom.”

Davis works primarily these days to shed light on the “prison-industrial complex” wherein large corporations have a financial incentive to increase their inmate populations. She noted that the overwhelming majority of the 2.5 million people behind bars in the U.S. are people of color. “There are more black men in prison today than there were enslaved in 1850,” she said soberly. “That tells us we have a long way to go.”

She concluded with a call to action. “We confronted issues in the 1960s that should have been solved in the 1860s. What will happen when 2060 comes around? Will we be dealing with the same issues? People say, ‘if it takes that long, I’ll be dead.’ So what? Everyone dies. We have to learn how to imagine the future in terms that aren’t restricted to our own lifetimes.”

Commorating an Era
The celebration included a half-dozen other events organized by Assistant Professor of History Thomas Pegelow-Kaplan. Many occurred on the backdrop of an award-winning exhibit titled “The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GI’s and Germany” that stood in the Alvarez College Union Brown Atrium throughout the month.

The exhibition was created by Vassar College Professor of History Maria Höhn and Heidelberg Center for American Studies Associate Researcher Martin Klimke. Höhn visited Davidson to present the exhibition’s opening lecture.
Consisting of photographic prints, written reflections, and video clips, it described the role that African Americans played in extending the civil rights movement outside the U.S.—especially to West Germany. It chronicled the injustice many African American soldiers felt during World War II as they fought proudly to restore democracy to European countries, while still facing blatant racism in their home country. During the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s and 1970s, African American soldiers found sympathetic audiences primarily in Germany and France for their complaints about second-class citizenship, and soldiers and their European sympathizers staged massive protests.

Angela Davis was involved with many of them from 1965 to 1967 while she was in Germany studying philosophy.
African-American veterans were additionally celebrated during the month with a panel discussion that featured recollections of Ross Walker, an 88-year-old World War II African-American veteran from Charlotte who worked in supply depots. Germany’s Consul to the State of North Carolina, Kurt Waldthausen, attended the event and thanked Walker and all African- American veterans for ending the war.

The same gathering featured professor and lawyer Larry Little, former leader of the Winston-Salem chapter of the Black Panther Party. Little’s chilling insider’s testimony about harassment, imprisonment, and violence against African-American activists by FBI, police, and individual citizens painted a vivid picture of the price of freedom.

Black History Month also dealt with the civil rights movement on a local level, with a group of panelists sharing their personal accounts of the college and the town during a time of uncertainty and discord. Pegelow-Kaplan and Armfield Professor of English Brenda Flanagan introduced the panel. Leslie Brown ’68, one of Davidson’s first two African-American students, recalled it as a time on campus that was unclear but not unsafe. Professor Emeritus of English Tony Abbott talked about his involvement in the civil rights movement as a white faculty member. Other panelists were Joe Howell ’64, author of a book titled Civil Rights Journey, and President Emeritus John Kuykendall ’59.

Audience members were eager to learn more, and the panelists were ready to share. The question and answer portion of the event could very well have lasted all afternoon.

Finally, Black History Month included the screening of two films. In The Black Power Mix Tape 1967–1975, a Scandinavian film crew chronicled the manifestations and repercussions of the civil rights movement in America during that troubled decade, including coverage of and interviews with Angela Davis. The presentation 1967–72 Revolts in Film: Competing Representations in West Germany and the United States, also compared views of the civil rights movement at home and abroad.

Watch the Angela Davis Lecture.

Visit the Black Power Mix Tape

Read the Vassar study and exhibit details.

Photo Credit: Vassar College Digital Archive, Oral History Collection and Research Project

Difficult Dialogues

admin — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 02:49:37 +0000

Civil Rights Activist and scholar Angela Davis addressed a full house at the annual Wearn Lecture. Davis pointed to injustices perpetuated by the “prison industrial complex,” noting that there are more black men behind bars today than were enslaved in 1850.

— Lisa Patterson

Read more.

Photo credit: Cathryn Westra

davidsonjournal

Introducing: Chai Lu Bohannan ’14

How We Learn, How We Live & The Humanities Program at 50

The World in Our Hands

Cambridge, England, 2011

Thailand 2011

Ayacucho, Peru 2011

Philippines 2011

Zhanghjiajie, China 2011

Toubakouta, Senegal 2011

Karnak, Egypt 2011

Morocco 2011