Category: Alumni Lectures and K Talks

Life with K

James Baldwin’s Blues Sensibility

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Looking forward for transcendence requires looking back with honesty. Essential to both: story sharing. Call that a blues sensibility. In November 1960 James Baldwin delivers a lecture in Stetson Chapel. Decades later the story of Baldwin’s visit inspires a timely story gathering. The voices are members of the Kalamazoo community recalling their experiences during the civil rights movement. The story gatherers are K students. That gathering effort—also known as “building the archive”—was a collaboration between Professor of English Bruce Mills’ senior seminar on James Baldwin and the Society for History and Racial Equity (SHARE), a local nonprofit organization founded by Donna Odom ’67. This K-Talk by those collaborators is fascinating, in part, because it’s far less lecture than it is story sharing, including, among others, stories from or about Harold Phillips, Walter Hall, Paul Collins, Robert Stavig, and, of course, James Baldwin. Mills and Odom and the other participants in this singular event show the power of storytelling to connect and celebrate diversity and to unite diverse individuals in the acts of imagining and then making a future that includes us all. The work’s neither quick nor easy, and needs that blues sensibility.

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The Arc From “Being Here” to “Making ‘Here’ Home”

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More black people, indigenous people, and people of color are choosing to attend K as students and work at K as faculty and staff. That’s progress in diversity, or “being here.” More progress is required in equity and inclusion, or “making ‘here’ home” for all. Home is deep and complicated. K is shaping itself into a space conducive to in-and-out-of-the-box ideas and actions that extend the arc from “being here” to “making ‘here’ home,” a place that every member of the K community considers to be their own. In this K-Talk, four members of the community describe the multitude of projects—a hard work as urgent as it is painstaking—that constitutes the march to extend the arc. These four educator-activists are D’Angelo Bailey ’05, Karen Isble (Advancement), Regina Stevens-Truss (Chemistry), and Rhiki Swinton (Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership). What they describe is eye-opening (in terms of need and effect) and inspiring. And a good start.

Mead the Bløm

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Allergic to gluten?!! What’s a brewer to do? Make mead and cider, decided Lauren Bloom ’07 and her partner, Matt Ritchey. They pulled up stakes from their successful, Chicago-based brewery and headed east (to Ann Arbor) to open Bløm, a cidery and session meadery. Lauren shares their fascinating mead-making story in this virtual tour. Meads (technically, honey wines) are a diverse lot, more so given the creative fermentations of Matt and Lauren. Their meads might feature hops, rhubarb, ginger, currant, even sumac—all Michigan-sourced, as are the fundamentals of mead and cider—honey and apples, respectively. Yeast makes mead from honey, so a good mead means keeping yeast happy, a task that can take a macabre and cannibalistic turn. Lauren will explain.


Read: “If You Seek a Pleasant Michigan Brew, Look About You” by Jeff Palmer ’76, LuxEsto
Watch: PBS Tastemakers featuring Bløm Meadworks

The Traitor’s Wife: An Innocent? or a Co-Conspirator?

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That question is crucial, says Professor of History Charlene Boyer-Lewis ’87, to a deeper understanding of the American revolutionary war era, a time of instability for much more than politics. Exactly what role did Margaret Shippen Arnold—wife of notorious traitor Benedict Arnold—play in the plot to deliver West Point to the British Army? Turns out a very active one, notwithstanding the many decades of her presumed innocence. A role active enough to be worthy of a post-war annuity of 500 pounds—for espionage services rendered at great personal risk. Boyer-Lewis contends that a revision of Margaret’s role from the margin of this spy story to its center more accurately illuminates the cultural upheaval that was part of the revolutionary era, a tumult that included a fluidity of identity that was eroding the rigidity and constraint of weakening gender roles. Like Margaret, many women of the era were strong actors who made political choices separate of their husbands. Margaret’s story shows the war transpired in households as much as on battlefields. The spy plot’s crisis of exposure reveals a capable woman who, in a “performance without faking,” exploits a gendered thinking that her leading role in the story is in the very process of revolutionizing.

WATCH the Smithsonian Channel’s episode of American Hidden Stories: Mrs. Benedict Arnold, featuring Dr. Boyer Lewis.
LISTEN to the podcast: Another Badly Behaving Woman featuring Dr. Boyer Lewis.

Going For It…and Staying With It

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Brooklyn (NY)-based entrepreneur Peter Rothstein ’14, the 2019 Kalamazoo College Young Alumni Award Winner, shares his higher-ed story of trading a stronger brand for a deeper connection. The latter (a.k.a. Kalamazoo College) provides support and develops confidence in ways so that both endure a lifetime. As co-founder of the spiced beverage company DONA, Peter has used that support and confidence to meet the daily unexpected challenges of growing a new business. Don’t miss this story, and stay to the end…it’s as unforgettable as it is inspirational.

 

Read more about Peter Rothstein ’14 and his selection in the 2019 edition of 30 Under 30, Forbes’ annual list of 600 young visionaries from 20 industries.

Are you interested in hosting a K Talk in your city? Fill out the Hornet Host Event Form.

Remembrance of Grace

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Even five-and-a-half decades after the class of 2019 experienced his spellbinding 12-minute commencement address, economist, teacher, author, and liberal arts advocate Kenneth G. Elzinga ’63 hopes those young women and men will, like him, be animated by a remembrance of great teachers. All Kalamazoo College graduates, he contends, share a wonderful heritage of the liberal arts, which is a gift to be cherished. And one expression of that reverence is humility. Do you know the name of the person who takes out your trash? A person with a liberal arts education should and is perhaps more likely to. Kalamazoo College and the liberal arts is a place and way of learning that extends grace—that unmerited favor, the “’Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’” And grace should inspire a life of love and servant leadership. This short speech captures the heritage, the hope, and the meaning of a K education: past, present, and future.​ Audio Button

 

K-Plan Game-Changers

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A game-changer is an idea whose advent and adoption shifts something in a “before-and-after” manner that could be described as tectonic. Think, for instance the asteroid that ended the age of dinosaurs. Or, says Michelle Fanroy ’88, think Kalamazoo College.

In her Homecoming 2018 lecture, “Game-Changers: Liberal Arts Traits That Make Organizations Great,” Fanroy—a worldwide expert in corporate leadership and mentorship development—describes the game-changer traits cultivated in students by their K-Plan experiences and the particular campus culture of Kalamazoo College. She explores an “all-star” foursome of K-Plan game-changer traits and even touches on five “honorable mentions.”

Are you interested in hosting a K Talk in your city? Fill out the Hornet Host Event Form.

The K-Plan Roots of Achievement and Fulfillment

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The Honorable Gerald E. Rosen ’73, retired federal judge and the chief mediator of the Detroit bankruptcy case in 2015, describes the vital role of the K-Plan to his career path and life. For Rosen, the liberal arts, K’s emphasis on off-campus experiences, and his participation in Hornet tennis inspired confidence, nurtured independence and initiative, and provided a network of mentors and opportunities—wellsprings he often taps as lawyer, judge, professor, public servant, and, most fundamentally, empathetic critical thinker.

Are you interested in hosting a K Talk in your city? Fill out the Hornet Host Event Form.

The Importance of Practicing Mindfulness in a World Becoming a Screen

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Classmates (2007) Karman Kent and Matt Thieleman share insights about the vital role of mindfulness (being conscious of what’s going on RIGHT NOW) to self-awareness, empathy and leadership; and, in turn, the importance of self-awareness, empathy and effective leadership to productive (and pleasing) work and a fulfilling life. Matt works with businesses; Karman with college students. Their connection underscores the relationship between Kalamazoo College networks and the collaborative ways vulnerable individuals (which includes us all) can make a difference in the world.

 

Do you want to hear more about mindfulness? Watch Matt Thieleman’s TEDx Talk from September 8, 2018 on Why the World Needs Mindful Leaders.

Are you interested in hosting a K Talk in your city? Fill out the Hornet Host Event Form.

Scholar’s Sweet Spot

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Applied anthropologist (and Professor of Anthropology) Kiran Cunningham ’83 designs and implements research that yields an immediately tangible result: people gain more control of the trajectories of their lives. Such work works best when it involves students at K and abroad. Welcome to the “scholar’s sweet spot,” those projects that lead to meaningful social change, integrate multiple strands of the scholarly self, connect to classroom teaching, allow for student involvement, and require collaboration with a diverse group of incredible colleagues. Cunningham’s work with Uganda’s Advocates Coalition for Development and Environment and with the city government of Kalamazoo has led to a collaboration of communities—as well as students—to help ensure that public policy works for people on two continents.Audio Button