Max Cherem ’04, assistant professor of philosophy, has been appointed as the Marlene Crandell Francis Assistant Professor of Philosophy beginning July 1, 2015 and running through June 30, 2018. This endowed chair is designated for “an entry-level teacher-scholar with demonstrated achievement and exceptional promise.”
Max is a K graduate, class of 2004, and was a Fulbright Fellow in Nepal the following year. He began his tenure track appointment at K in 2011 and completed his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2012. His paper “Refugee Rights: Against an Expanded Refugee Definition and Unilateral Protection Elsewhere Policies,” was recently accepted for publication in the highly regarded Journal of Political Philosophy.
Max was one of four persons in the country honored with the prestigious Humanities Writ Large Visiting Faculty Fellowship for the 2015-16 academic year. He will spend the year at Duke University working in the philosophy department and in the Kenan Institute for Ethics. His work focuses on the ethical challenges created by “externalized” state border controls: policies that try to prevent migrant arrival by projecting or outsourcing a nation’s authority over migration beyond its regular territorial borders. While he is at Duke, Max will work on two research projects about the due process standards appropriate for refugee status adjudications and the ethical issues raised by partnerships that delegate or coordinate authority. He also plans on volunteering with the refugee community in Durham area so as to learn about resettlement from their perspective. At K, Max’s teaching and research focuses on social and political philosophy, ethics and biomedical ethics, critical social theory, and philosophy of law.
Marlene Crandell Francis ’58
Marlene Crandell Francis graduated from K in 1958 with a B.A. in English. She earned an M.A. in that subject from the University of Akron and taught there for 20 years. Returning to Michigan, she earned a Ph.D. in higher education administration at the University of Michigan. Marlene joined the Kalamazoo College board of trustees in 1980 and served on its executive committee and as secretary of the board before being elected an emerita trustee in 1998. She is the author of “A Fellowship in Learning: Kalamazoo College, 1833 – 2008,” published on the 175th anniversary of the College’s founding. Marlene and her husband, Arthur, live in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Lisa Ludwinski ’06 with a Sister Pie creation (Photo by Sylvia Rector, Detroit Free Press)
Lisa Ludwinski ’06 has opened Sister Pie, a bakery and coffee shop at 8066 Kercheval in Detroit’s West Village neighborhood. Lisa was the winner of Comerica Bank’s 2014 Hatch Detroit development grant meant to champion and support independent retail businesses in Detroit through funding, exposure, education, and mentoring. A $50,000 Hatch award allowed her to build out the new bakery complete with double convection ovens that help her create Buckwheat Chocolate Chip cookies, Salted Maple pies, savory hand pies, and more.
“I like whimsical things,” she told a Detroit Free Press reporter. “I come up with flavor combinations in my sleep and I try them in the kitchen the next day.” She also said she uses high-fat French butter, unbleached all-purpose and whole-grain flours, and locally sourced fruits and berries in season.
Lisa is a Detroit Mercy High School grad who earned a B.A. degree in Theatre Arts from K.
Lisa Ludwinski ’06 wins $50,000 Hatch Detroit award in 2014.
The New Yorker magazine has accepted for publication a poem by Kalamazoo College Writer-in-Residence Diane Seuss ’78. The poem is expected to appear in the fall. Many other good things happening relative to Di’s writing.
Her third book of poems, Four-Legged Girl, comes out in early October from Graywolf Press, arguably the best poetry press in the country
She also recently finished a draft of her fourth collection, which will likely come out from Graywolf 2018. “It’s a departure for me–titled Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl–and all based on the aesthetics of early still life painting,” wrote Di. “I’ll be revising that manuscript this summer and working on some new stuff. Poems from Two Dead Peacocks are forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and (yes) the New Yorker. I also have new poems coming out in Blackbird this spring and various other magazines.”
Di had a residency last summer at Hedgebrook, a retreat space for women writers on Whidbey Island off the coast of Washington State in Puget Sound. There she wrote a good portion of Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl. This summer she will be in residency at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire this coming summer to continue working on the fourth collection and generate new material for what she hopes “will be something like a memoir,” she wrote. “I believe MacDowell is the oldest artists residency in the country. It has hosted James Baldwin, Thornton Wilder, Leonard Bernstein, Willa Cather, Audre Lorde, and many more contemporary artists. I’m excited to be in a space where there are visual artists, musicians, and writers all in our own studios making new work.”
Di writes brief nonfiction as well as poetry. She recently learned she won Quarter After Eight magazine’s Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest, and she will have another piece of nonfiction published in Brevity in the fall.
Breathless yet? Not Di. This month she will moderate a panel at the Associated Writing Programs National Conference in Minneapolis. The panel includes Di, poet Adrian Blevins, fiction/nonfiction writer Claire Evans, and fiction writer Bonnie Jo Campbell. It’s called “Hick Lit: Women Writing from the Circumference.”
Di will read her work at Sarah Lawrence College in June, and at Colby College in the fall.
Why would a vegetarian defend beef? Nicolette Hahn Niman ’89, environmental lawyer, rancher, food activist, and vegetarian, does just that in her controversial new book, Defending Beef: The Case for Sustainable Meat Production, The Manifesto of an Environmental Lawyer and Vegetarian Turned Cattle Rancher, published by Chelsea Green in October 2014. Hahn Niman returns to the Kalamazoo College campus on April 27 (7 p.m., Stetson Chapel) for a talk and discussion on sustainable food production and farm animal welfare. The event is free and open to the public.
Hahn Niman’s first book, Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms (William Morrow, 2009), paves the path to her current work. Porkchop is an exposé of what ails BigAg, or big agriculture, the factory farms that Hahn Niman points out as major polluters across the planet, contributing to climate change, to the detriment of everyone’s health. It is also her love story, as vegetarian meets cattle rancher, Bill Niman, joining forces in marriage and business.
Defending Beef takes a further step. As Hahn Niman began her new life on the Bolinas, California, cattle ranch (the Nimans also raise heritage turkeys), she found herself drawn deeper and deeper into the lifestyle and the business. If at first she merely stood nearby and held out the tools for her husband to do his work, Hahn Niman gradually found herself in love with ranch life and fully involved with it. Her research into all things beef led her to write her manifesto.
“Environmentalists and health advocates have long blamed beef and cattle ranching, but it’s just not that simple,” she says.
With meticulous research, Hahn Niman addresses every concern commonly associated with beef: health issues, climate change, water supply, biodiversity, overgrazing, world hunger, the morality of eating meat.
“Meat, especially red meat, has been perceived as elitist,” she says. “It’s a strange way to view beef when about a billion of the world’s poorest people are dependent on livestock.”
Beef, Hahn Niman argues, can in fact play an important role in ending world hunger, even while helping to restore a balanced climate. She has presented her perspective in numerous articles in New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Huffington Post, CHOW, and countless others, frequently stirring up dust. She is a frequent speaker at various food and farming events and conferences.
Hahn Niman majored in biology and French at Kalamazoo College and went on to earn her law degree, cum laude, from the University of Michigan in 1993. She served two terms on the Kalamazoo City Commission, worked as an attorney for the National Wildlife Federation, and later became senior attorney for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental organization where she was in charge of the organization’s campaign to reform the concentrated livestock and poultry industry.
“We’ve been told that beef isn’t good for us for decades,” Hahn Niman says. “But in fact, beef consumption is down 22 percent over the past three decades, saturated animal fat consumption is down 21 percent over the past century , while diabetes and cardiovascular disease have gone up. The perception that we are eating more red meat and animal fat is simply not correct.”
The culprits, Niman points out, are sugar, especially high-fructose corn syrup, and grain-based foods. Our consumption of sweeteners has spiked. While the great majority, around 70 percent, of heart attack victims have low cholesterol levels, usually associated with eating meat, many of these people are consuming much higher levels of sugar and processed foods.
“We’ve shifted how and what we eat,” Hahn Niman says. “We are eating a lot more fast food and processed food, and these are foods that are high in sugar and salt, another additive, and the body can’t metabolize these ingredients at these elevated levels. We’ve even changed how we eat—on the run, standing up, rather than at the dinner table. We need to reexamine how we eat in this country and get back to whole foods.”
In Defending Beef, Hahn Niman compares the grass-based, traditional family farm to the industrialized factory farms today. Family farms have not been able to compete, and many have bankrupted while factory farms continue to consolidate and grow ever larger. Not only are we losing a simpler, cleaner way of life, she writes, but with it we are losing the values of the traditional farmer and rancher. That includes sitting down at the dinner table in shared meals and conversation.
The grass-based farm should become the basis for a food revolution, Hahn Niman says. With industrialized factory farming come huge numbers of closely confined animals, and with that, crowding, disease, and lower (sometimes inhumane) standards of life. A corporation cannot care for a living animal in the same way that farmers and ranchers living alongside their animals can. The economics of the modern food industry, Hahn Niman states, require more and more processing. And while processed meat can indeed lead to health problems, unprocessed red meat, especially grass-fed, can contribute to good health.
“I believe strongly in good animal husbandry,” says Hahn Niman. “It ensures that life is worth living for that animal, but it also creates healthier food for us. Research shows that stress hormones affect the flavor and quality of meat. [On our ranch], we are there when the calves are born, we care for them and raise them, and we accompany them to the very end. Yes, it is difficult, but that’s why Bill, my husband, is present at the slaughterhouse, which reassures the animal, and making sure that we give our animals the respect they deserve. We have total oversight of the entire process and that’s why we have such confidence in the quality of our meat.”
On the Nimans’ BN Ranch, cattle are grass-fed only, grazing on approximately 1,000 acres of open pasture from the first to the last day of their lives. No chemical fertilizers, no pesticides or herbicides are used on the ranch, although the beef is not certified organic, primarily due to the prohibitive costs and burdensome processes required for certification. The Nimans supply their premium quality beef to high-end restaurants and specialty retailers.
“From the health standpoint, grass-fed beef has higher levels of omega-3s and other nutrients,” Hahn Niman says. “No weird additives or hormones.”
But then there is the health of the planet. Many environmentalists and vegetarians have argued against overgrazing, which disables land that might be used to grow more crops. They further contend that keeping livestock contributes to the carbon emissions and methane gases that lead to climate change. Hahn Niman disagrees.
Carbon dioxide, she notes, makes up the majority of agriculture-related greenhouse emissions. Keeping livestock on pasture, however, contributes little to such emissions because emissions come mostly from farm machinery and manufacture of agricultural chemicals, not animals. Absent the practice of crowding large numbers of animals together—which requires manure lagoons and has encouraged deforestation in order to clear areas for growing soy and livestock feed crops—animals actually contribute to sustainable living. Methane emissions from manure are minimal on traditional farms, where manure is not liquefied and quantities of manure, properly balanced with the amount of land, are worked back into the soil, enriching it.
The primary climate argument against cattle is enteric methane, in other words methane from their digestive processes. But Hahn Niman points out that U.S. Environmental Protection Agency official figures show the entire greenhouse gas emissions of cattle (for both dairy and beef) are around 2 percent of all U.S. emissions. “Two percent is not something to be ignored, but it’s manageable,” says Hahn Niman. “Agricultural colleges around the world are studying enteric emissions and have already discovered several ecological ways to significantly reduce them.”
“With well-managed grazing, cattle contribute to soil quality,” she says. “We’ve heard about overgrazing for years, but cattle actually stimulate the growth of plants with their pruning. Their hooves press seeds into the ground. Research shows that where cattle are allowed to graze, biodiversity improves and carbon sequestration (taking carbon out of the atmosphere and returning it to the soil) is enhanced. Soil feeds many forms of life, starting with microorganisms, and there are countless positive downstream effects.”
Whereas growing crops destroys natural habitat and the wildlife living on it, grazing cattle is often the best use of land unsuitable for growing crops.
“For many of the poor in the world, keeping livestock is their most important food source,” Niman says.
Niman also addresses diminishing water supplies and how much of that goes for livestock (less than you might think), the need for a national food policy (we have a policy for most everything else), and why being a meat-eater is a morally legitimate choice (as long as the meat comes from sustainable farming practices).
As for being a vegetarian, Niman says it is a personal choice. “If you are choosing vegetarianism because of health concerns or concern for the environment, well, then your reasons are poorly grounded.”
It’s been spoken by millions seeking inspiration and solace, just twenty-six words that form the backbone of many 12-step programs, including Alcoholics Anonymous. It was chosen by World Almanac as one of the “10 Most Memorable American Quotes” of the 20th Century:
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
So when Fred Shapiro, a law librarian at Yale University, called into question the authorship of the Serenity Prayer it caused a bit of a stir. Sarah Guzy ’10 found herself playing an important role in Shapiro’s quest to find who actually wrote one of the world’s most recognizable prayers.
In 2008, Shapiro published a story in Yale’s alumni magazine. He argued that Reinhold Niebuhr, a towering American theologian who is widely credited with authoring the prayer, may not actually have written it. Shapiro cited newspaper articles and a book in which versions of the prayer (written by women) were seen as far back as 1936. Niebuhr’s daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, had written a book in 2003 in which she said her father was the original author of the prayer, first using it in 1943.
In the years that followed his article Shapiro spent more time investigating the prayer’s origin. That’s where Guzy, a graduate student studying religion at Harvard University’s Divinity School and staffer at the school’s famous Schlesinger Library, entered the exploration. Shapiro needed someone to look through the diaries of Winnifred Crane Wygal, who knew Niebuhr and had a version of the prayer attributed to her in a 1933 Santa Cruz Sentinel newspaper article.
“I wasn’t sure what was going to happen,” Guzy says, adding she spent 20 hours going through the diaries. “I was worried there would be nothing to shed light on the prayer’s provenance, but there was something. In fact the diaries were the key to answering the question. The toughest part? Trying to read Wygal’s handwriting.”
Shapiro wrote of Guzy’s findings: “Schlesinger’s staffer, Sarah Guzy, struck gold when she read Wygal’s diary entry for Oct. 31, 1932. Wygal wrote there: ‘R.N. says that ‘moral will plus imagination are the two elements of which faith is compounded. The victorious man in the day of crisis is the man who has the serenity to accept what he cannot help and the courage to change what must be altered.’”
Although not a mirror image of the prayer we know today, the basic elements were there, according to Shapiro. Niebuhr was the author after all, he wrote.
“I was really surprised about the buzz,” Guzy says. “Being in divinity school, it’s nice of him to mention me. I wasn’t expecting that.”
Shapiro recanted his doubts about Niebuhr in a story that spread widely, winding up in the Washington Post, Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Huffington Post, among others. Guzy’s efforts were cited in each of those stories.
And what of Sarah Guzy’s “provenance,” so to speak. If it wasn’t for one of her K professors, Guzy might never have been asked to go through those diaries.
An art history and religion double major at the College, Guzy’s academic trajectory was altered profoundly when she began taking classes with Assistant Professor of Religion Shreena Gandhi.
“She brought interesting frameworks of racial and gender issues to class. It was the first time I had really encountered them,” Guzy says. “It was so exciting, so different than other religion classes. I really connected with her. I never intended to study religion, but I loved the classes. K encourages that exploration.”
Guzy studied abroad in Bonn, Germany, and after graduation spent a year in Costa Rica, working in international education, an endeavor helped along by her work at the College’s Center for International Programs. When she returned home, she wondered what she should do next. Gandhi offered some advice.
“I said, ‘Why not look at Harvard?’” says Gandhi, who earned her master’s degree in religion there. “Sarah had the interest and the intellect. Her experience and her writing and ideas are what got her in.”
Guzy’s time in the Schlesinger Library has been nothing short of inspiring, she says. The library, home of the nation’s largest collection of documents and materials detailing women’s lives and contributions to American society, is a treasure trove of letters, telegrams, diaries, books, objects and plenty of interesting people.
In her time there, she has unpacked Julia Child’s silver soup ladle and soup tureen from Tiffany, scanned letters from Sigmund Freud, ate birthday cake with Judy Chicago, chatted-up Gayle Rubin, and read from the original papers of Adrienne Rich, a poet she first encountered at K. She even received a scan order for a telegram written by a K professor in the 1970s, she says.
Guzy applied to K “because the college had a funny name,” she says, and was included in the book: “Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About Colleges.”
A native of Evanston, Ill., she came to K with her mom, almost on a whim. They just showed up–no campus tour scheduled, no professors or admissions officials lined up to talk with. A few K students approached the two and asked if they needed directions, then wound up taking them on a two-hour tour of the College, Guzy says.
That friendly openness impressed her immediately.
“There are similar schools that look the same on paper. But at K the feeling on campus was markedly different,” she says. “I was sold the minute I stepped on campus.”
That inclusive spirit extended to many of her other professors, she says.
“There was an encouragement to connect with your professors,” she says. “We would go to dinner;I would dog sit for them. I still maintain a lot of relationships. The environment there fosters the ability for making meaningful bonds because the professors care about the students, not just their research.”
She adds, “There’s a sense of the importance of the student. Faculty (at K) are so much more approachable than even those at Harvard, many of whom are focused on their personal brand. It’s not like that at K–it’s about relationships.”
There’s also another source of her admiration for the College: the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership. While a student Guzy participated in the search for the center’s first executive director.
“I’m very proud of K. The (Arcus) center is an amazing thing,” she says. “It speaks to K’s commitment to giving voice to those not given voice in society generally and in institutions of higher education specifically.”
The College was also the place where Guzy was first broadly exposed to issues of inequality related to gender, socioeconomic status, race and sexuality, matters she learned about extensively in Gandhi’s classes. It’s no surprise, then, that Guzy’s academic research revolves around gender dynamics in colonialism, and how women exerted their influence in patriarchal societies, through witchcraft in Africa and Latin America, or voodoo in New Orleans.
“Sarah has always been an outspoken feminist, and outspoken on social justice issues broadly,” Gandhi says. “She’s interested in how things work. You start seeing inequity and oppression and begin to develop ideas on how to solve it. She always had that passion, and now it’s blossoming in her. I’m super proud of her.”
As for the future, Guzy says she has no plans to pursue additional academic endeavors after earning her master’s degree. She wants to get to work.
“There’s a huge trend in sending students abroad, but with not a lot of preparation and training to be culturally sensitive,” she says. “The more attuned to other cultures you are, the more the student gets out of the experience, and the more those in the host nation understand us as well.”
Text by Chris Killian. Photo courtesy of Sara Guzy.
Kalamazoo College alumna Morowa Yejidé ’92 is a nominee for a 2015 NAACP Image Award to be awarded Friday, February 6, in Los Angeles. She is nominated in the category of Outstanding Literary Debut Work for her first novel Time of the Locust, described as a deeply imaginative journey into the heart and mind of an extraordinary boy that explores the themes of a mother’s devotion, a father’s punishment, and the power of love.
Time of the Locust (hardcover, 256 pages, Atria Books) is also included in Simon & Schuster’s Freshman Year Reading Catalog for 2014-2015, and was a finalist for the 2012 PEN/Bellwether Prize for socially engaged fiction.
The story revolves around Sephiri, a 7-year-old autistic boy who can draw scientifically accurate renderings of prehistoric locusts but never speaks, smiles, or makes eye contact.
Dara Morowa Yejide Madzimoyo is an accomplished writer whose short stories have appeared in the Istanbul Review, Ascent Aspirations Magazine, Underground Voices, Adirondack Review, and other publications. Her story “Tokyo Chocolate” was nominated in 2009 for a Pushcart Prize and was anthologized in the Best of the Willesden Herald Stories.
Morowa earned her B.A. degree from K in international area studies and her M.F.A. degree in creative writing from Wilkes University, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., where she received the Norris Church Mailer Scholarship.
She is a research faculty member at Georgia Institute of Technology and an adjunct faculty member at the University of Maryland. Now based in Washington, D.C., Morowa and her husband have three sons.
Recently, she was selected as “Independent Alum of the Day” by the Michigan College’s Alliance, a collective of 15 independent colleges and universities located throughout Michigan.
The Honorable Gerald Rosen ’73, Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, will deliver the 2015 William Weber Lecture in Social Science at 8 p.m. on Thursday, February 5. The lecture is free and open to the public and will take place in the Mandelle Hall Olmsted Room on Kalamazoo College’s campus. The lecture is titled “Detroit Bankruptcy: Lessons Learned” and will draw from Rosen’s experience as chief judicial administrator for the Detroit bankruptcy case, the largest municipal bankruptcy case in U.S. history.
At K, Rosen earned his bachelor’s degree in political science. He was the first K student to study abroad in Sweden (Stockholm), to which he returned in his senior year to complete his Senior Individualized Project, which focused on Swedish press coverage of the 1972 U.S. presidential election. He began his professional career as a legislative assistant to United States Senator Robert P. Griffin (R-Michigan), serving on Senator Griffin’s staff in Washington, D.C., from 1974 to 1979. During this time Rosen was involved in some of the most significant and challenging issues of the period. He also was attending the George Washington University Law School at night, and he obtained his J.D. degree in May 1979. (Today he is a member of the law school’s board of advisors).
For 20 years, Rosen has served as an adjunct professor of law for University of Michigan Law School, Wayne State University Law School, University of Detroit Law School, and Thomas M. Cooley Law School. Throughout the years he has presided over a number of high-profile, ground-breaking cases, including the first post-9/11 terrorism trial, an early partial-birth abortion case, and one of the first physician-assisted suicide cases. Nevertheless, he describes his work on the Detroit bankruptcy case as “the most challenging and rewarding experience of my professional career.”
Rosen is involved with several charitable and community organizations, including serving on the board of directors of Focus: HOPE and the Michigan Chapter of the Federalist Society. He has written and published articles for professional journals and the popular press on a wide range of issues, including civil procedure, evidence, due process, criminal law, labor law, and legal advertising, as well as numerous other topics. He is also a co-author of Federal Civil Trials and Evidence, Federal Employment Litigation, and Michigan Civil Trials and Evidence.
The William Weber Lecture in Government and Society was founded by Bill Weber, a 1939 graduate of Kalamazoo College. In addition to this lectureship, he established the William Weber Chair in Political Science at the College. Past lecturers in this series have included David Broder, Frances Moore Lappé, E. J. Dionne, Jeane Bethke Elshtain, William Greider, Ernesto Cortes, Jr., John Esposito, Benjamin Ginsberg, Frances Fox Piven, Spencer Overton, Tamara Draut, Van Jones, and Dr. Joan Mandelle.
Mary Corcoran and Martha Parfet hold the latter’s new book KEEP THE QUALITY UP.
Opening a door can change a life. In the life of Kalamazoo College graduate Mary Corcoran ’11, the door opened a closet. But the closet belonged to 89-year-old Martha Parfet, whose ancestors come from two of the most prominent families in Kalamazoo history: the Upjohns and the Gilmores. The collaboration between these two women (Parfet as writer; Corcoran as research and writing assistant) has resulted in the recent publication of a two-volume book about prominent local families and the story of the Kalamazoo community. The book is titled “Keep the Quality Up” (based on an Upjohn Company motto; Parfet’s grandfather, W.E. Upjohn, founded the pharmaceutical giant in 1886). The book went on sale this week at the Kalamazoo Nature Center, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, the Gilmore Car Museum, and Irving’s Marketplace (the former site of Gilmore Brothers Department Store). Sale proceeds will support the nature center, car museum, and KIA.
Parfet and Corcoran met when the later answered a K job posting. Over the years Parfet had become for her extended family the unofficial caretaker and curator of diaries, scrapbooks, photos, newspaper clippings, and business documents of two pioneer families that had settled in the area in the 1830s (Upjohns) and 1880s (Gilmores). The enterprises and achievements of these families helped shape much of the history of the city of Kalamazoo. Parfet wanted to make sure the story of these persons and their achievements lived on, so she decided to write a family and community history based on the information included in these family archives. She placed the ad–“Job helping older woman in Kalamazoo research husband’s family for two weeks.” Corcoran answered.
“When she opened her closet door for me the first day,” Corcoran said, “I became sold on becoming an archivist. The stories are in the documents. There was always something new.”
Corcoran is a researcher and project manager at Upjohn Ancestry. She earned her bachelor’s degree at K in English and studied abroad in Dublin, Ireland. Her study abroad program is kind of fitting; the Gilmore family originally immigrated from Ireland, the Upjohn family from England. Corcoran is working on a master’s degree in archives and archival information from the University of Michigan.
An interesting scenario played out several weeks ago in the president’s office at Kyorin University in Mitaka, Tokyo. Robin Sakamoto, the recently appointed dean of the Faculty of Foreign Studies, was sitting with the president and a few members of staff. Enter the secretary to serve tea.
“Of course she served the president first,” Sakamoto recalls, “and then she turned to serve another man in the room. Yet she suddenly stopped dead in her tracks, returned to the tray for a different tea cup, and then served me second instead.”
There can be a lot going on in Japan with one cup of tea. Despite being the second-highest in seniority in the room, Sakamoto is also a foreigner — an American — and a woman, so she understands fully the dilemma, undercurrents and significance of the secretary’s quiet decision.
“Of course I wondered what was going on in her head, but just by being in my position now, I can see ripples like this that are starting to happen, assumptions that are being questioned. For a student to see me — for example, when someone announces, ‘Now the dean will speak’ — the young women in the audience can think, ‘Yes, I can do that too someday.’ ”
With her appointment last April at Kyorin University — the second foreign woman ever to be awarded a deanship in Japan — Sakamoto hopes to help improve both attitudes towards and regulations regarding gender equality and work/life balance throughout Japan, starting at Kyorin. As a dean of faculty, her time, she says, is now devoted to “a lot of learning by doing, a lot of networking at embassies or with the companies that employ our alumnae, a lot of meetings in Japanese at a level I have never heard before.”
Her favorite part of the day is when she teaches classes in intercultural communication.
“It is really important to keep a connection with the students,” she says, “because if they weren’t there, none of us would be there.”
Despite all the challenges, Sakamoto admits to feeling “hopeful” — maybe that tea cup really does signify a sea change. She enthusiastically explains the story behind Kyorin’s recently opened Women’s Research Center, which aims to support female researchers and their families. Judging by the fact that the Ministry of Education, Culture, Science, Sport and Technology (MEXT) has approved the university’s past five grant requests for new projects, the government seems to share Sakamoto’s feeling that Kyorin is on the right track.
“MEXT has given us the opportunity to establish a place where researchers, male or female, can bring their children while they are working,” Sakamoto explains. “If we can do this at the university level and then spread it out to other universities, this is how you can make change. Jan. 24th is the kick-off, so we are still in the early stages, but we are already canvassing the entire faculty: Do you have a newborn? Are you taking care of any elderly relatives? Do you need support as the man or as a working woman? We are really trying to look at this from the total perspective to make a difference in the researching community.”
Sakamoto’s story sounds like a shining example of feminine success in Japan, but it hasn’t been without its dark patches. The brush with gender inequality that left the deepest impression came 20 years ago, when Sakamoto already had five years of teaching under her belt. Sakamoto was a few months pregnant with her first child when she went to her principal at a local high school in Iwate Prefecture to share the good news and discuss her employment options. Turns out, there were none.
“I told my principal in February that I was pregnant, but that I would like to continue working and he simply said, ‘No. You’ll have to choose.’ ”
At the time, Sakamoto accepted his reason that as a foreign hire she would not qualify for a maternity replacement. She dutifully quit a month later, but, she says, “I was really disappointed afterwards — at myself for not being more assertive, and at the system because women just have to accept this.”
Sakamoto had envisioned a long career in teaching. Having majored in education at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, she had planned to teach in the U.S. after graduation. However, she says, “I had a less than spectacular student teaching experience and thought that if I taught a year or two overseas, that would give me confidence to return to a U.S. classroom setting.
“At that time, the U.S. was really looking to Japan for ideas to implement in education, and so I thought it would be a good match. I came on a special GLCA (Great Lakes College Association) program that was run through Earlham College and was a prelude to the JET Programme. It was based in Iwate due to a professor who had spent time there. I heard about it at my college career center since my college was also in the GLCA association.
“I had only planned on being here two years, but as I arrived in the end of July, that meant I would miss graduation. I had really gotten attached to my students by that second year and wanted to stay until March to see them graduate and was given special permission to do so. After that, I was asked if I wanted to teach at the municipal high school in nearby Morioka for another two-year contract. I jumped at the chance because by then I was really enjoying Japan. It was while I was teaching at the high school that I met my husband and we married.”
Sakamoto admits it was that rude awakening in the principal’s office when she was expecting her first child that fueled her drive to become a successful working mother in Japan. She switched to teaching part-time at the university level, and earned her master’s in intercultural relations — and later a doctorate in comparative and international development education — by finding low-residency programs, which meant she could complete most of the coursework at home in Iwate. She taught her father-in-law to change diapers while her husband took over the family business.
Of course it was difficult, she says. “Originally we had decided my husband would take care of the business and I would take care of the children in our three-generation household; we were going to do a really Japanese-style family,” Sakamoto says. “But as we both matured, it just didn’t fit in with our lifestyle anymore. Luckily we’ve been able to adapt, so it works now for both of us. I tried to be home as much as possible when the children were young, and luckily my father-in-law would be there when I was at the university. But it really wasn’t easy.”
The hardest part came once two of Sakamoto’s three children were in junior high school and, with her master’s degree complete, she felt ready for a more full-time position. This type of position proved hard to come by in Iwate, however. Instead, Sakamoto eventually worked at four of the “Tokyo Six” universities on weekdays, only coming home on the weekends.
“I would get up Monday morning and cook breakfast, lunch and dinner, and then get on the shinkansen, go to Tokyo, work for the week, get back in time to pick up dinner at the station and get home in time for Friday night dinner.”
Sakamoto believes “no one should have to live away from their family for work,” yet it is an all-too-common practice in Japan, for both men and women.
Sakamoto’s family encouraged her in other ways, moving for one year to Minnesota while she completed her Ph.D. coursework and supporting her when she traveled to Uganda in 2006 as part of a joint program developing training programs for head teachers run by the University of Minnesota, Naruto University of Education in Tokushima Prefecture and Kampala’s Makerere University. She had earlier traveled to the Ukraine to help train young teachers.
It was during her time overseas that Sakamoto learned how powerful her influence could be. She recalls one example: “My kids were like, we don’t know what our mom does, but she is in Africa. Yet, a few years later, my eldest did her study-abroad in France and then she went to Morocco. And my second did her study abroad in Madagascar. So I think to myself, of the three kids, two of them have gone to Africa, and I think a large part of that is because when they were kids, that’s what mom did.
“Being a mother makes me a better educator,” Sakamoto continues. “Even with my relative success, I know I only see a certain level of sexism in Japan since I am a foreigner and already treated differently. Yes, there are opportunities for equality to happen in Japan but is it really happening consistently?
“And yes, we are seeing more fathers at the park with their children, but why aren’t we seeing more families? Parents are still trading off because the entire system in Japan does not support both partners working. If we are going to make this better we’ve got to do it together. We can’t just make it better for women and ignore the men, because they don’t like their lives either.”
Looking toward Kyorin’s 50th anniversary and the opening of its new Inokashira Campus in 2016, Sakamoto believes Japan can narrow the gender gap and achieve a better work/life balance for all.
“The president of our university’s wife is a researcher, and she was our first speaker when we opened our Women’s Research Center,” Sakamoto explains. “When she talked about how she could be successful as a researcher, he was right there, supporting her. That’s what you need — you really need the authentic buy-in. It’s not just someone’s picture in a pamphlet; I am not just a figurehead to these men — I am a colleague and they want to help me.”
Teach For America corps members, alumni, staff, and supporters gathered for a summit meeting in Washington, D.C.
Ten recent Kalamazoo College alumni joined the Teach For America (TFA) corps in 2014. That’s enough to again place the College on the top-20 list of small colleges and universities that supply the greatest number of alumni (on a per capita basis) to TFA. It’s the seventh year TFA has released its top-20 list and the third time K has been included.
The ten K alumni joined 10,600 other TFA corps members now teaching in 50 urban and rural regions across the country.
A member of the AmeriCorps national service network, Teach For America works in partnership with communities to expand educational opportunity for children facing the challenges of poverty. Founded in 1990, it recruits and develops outstanding individuals to commit to teach in high-need schools for two years and to become lifelong leaders in the movement to end educational inequity.
TFA admission is highly selective, with an acceptance rate of only 15 percent in 2014. Corps members have 3.4 GPA average.
“We are pleased but not surprised at the high ranking of Kalamazoo College among contributors of graduates to TFA,” said Joan Hawxhurst, director of K’s Center for Career and Professional Development.
“Given the many opportunities K students have for meaningful experiences in local public school classrooms, and the theoretical rigor with which they learn to approach social issues, it’s gratifying but not surprising that so many would gravitate toward TFA after graduation.”
The ten K alumni joined what TFA called the most diverse teaching corps in its 25-year history. Fully one-third of TFA’s new corps members are the first in their families to attend college, nearly half were Pell Grant recipients (a marker for students who come from families of limited financial means), and half identify as people of color.
Here are the ten K alumni who joined TFA in 2014 and the regions in which they teach: Darrin Camilleri ’14 (Detroit), Michael Francisco ’14 (Delaware), John Hogue ’03 (Cleveland), Matthew Munoz ’14 (New Jersey), Gisella Newbery ’14 (Chicago), Ayesha Popper ’14 (Las Vegas), Alexander Rigney ’13 (Detroit), Kaitlyn Steffenhagen ’14 (Milwaukee), Samantha Voss ’14 (Detroit), and Dayon Woodford ’14 (Milwaukee).
