Olivia Cares ’16 and Christopher Monsour ’16 Photo by Anthony Dugal Photography
Congratulations to the inaugural winners of prizes awarded to two graduating Kalamazoo College seniors majoring in business based on achievement of select criteria established by the Rhoa family and administered by the faculty of K’s Department of Economics and Business.
The winner of The Robert and Karen Rhoa Prize in Business for 2016 is Olivia Cares ’16, a Dexter, Mich., native who majored in business and minored in French. Her Senior Individualized Project, or SIP, evaluated the contribution to the legal concept of crimes against humanity by the 1990s trials of René Bousquet, Paul Touvier and Maurice Papon, three French officials tried retroactively for their involvement with the Final Solution in Vichy France during World War II. Olivia will attend law school at the University of Michigan this fall.
The winner of The Robert and Karen Rhoa Prize for Outstanding Senior Individualized Project in Business for 2016 is Christopher Monsour ’16, a St. Clair Shores, Mich., native who majored in business at K. His SIP, titled “Measuring Value: Underwriting Distressed Real Estate,” is a direct reflection of his experience working at a real estate private equity firm during his junior year at K. His work there included an in-depth analysis of the traditional valuation theories and methodologies used in the real estate asset class that he then applied to the valuations of two differing properties located in Colorado and Michigan. Christopher has taken a job as an analyst for Bloomfield Capital, a real estate private equity firm located in Birmingham, Mich.
The Rhoa family are founders, owners and operators of Lake Michigan Mailers, Inc., a Kalamazoo-based company offering a complete menu of document creation, mail assembly, mail processing, presorting, data management, digital marketing, and distribution solutions to companies, schools, colleges and universities, health care providers, governmental entities and organizations throughout the world since 1977. David Rhoa ’90, president, is a K alumnus and a visiting instructor in K’s Department of Economics and Business.
Congrats, Olivia and Christopher! Thank you, Rhoa family!
Philip Bystrom ’13 is one of only 18 students to receive the Doris Duke International Clinical Research Fellowship, a very competitive and prestigious award usually given to medical students who have completed their third or fourth years. Phillip is in his third year at Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine (WMed) in Kalamazoo. He will forego his studies there for the 12 months of his fellowship, which he will spend in Kampala, Uganda, conducting clinical research centered around early detection of cryptococcal meningitis in HIV-positive patients in resource-limited areas.
The fellowship well aligns with his intent to become an infectious diseases specialist who helps people in underdeveloped regions. Bystrom was born in Sweden and lived most of his youth in Bangkok, Thailand. He matriculated to K from Bangkok and earned his degree in chemistry with minors in physics and mathematics. His K experiential education included study abroad in Quito, Ecuador, shadowing a surgeon at the Pramangkut Military Hospital in Bangkok, serving as a chemistry lab teaching assistant at K, and working as a research assistant at University of Michigan. At medical school Bystom has been a trauma care unit volunteer and an ER scribe at Bronson Methodist Hospital. Bystrom recently left for Uganda and will return to Kalamazoo in July of 2017 to resume his third year of study at WMed.
Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine is a collaborative effort between Western Michigan University, Borgess Hospital and Bronson hospital, all located in Kalamazoo.
Once a year Kalamazoo College alumni are invited to join other alums, K athletes, coaches and staff for a day of swinging clubs to benefit the Hornet Athletic Association. This year’s golf jamboree is set for Monday, June 27, at the Kalamazoo Country Club. You can register today for the chance to apply some serious stinging to those little pockmarked spheres.
The Men’s Dorm before the fire. Bowen Hall is in the background at left
Like its century-in-the-future counterpart, the class of ’16 (1916!) faced its share of campus crises scattered among the quotidian rhythm of challenge, disorientation, hard work, fun and growth. You can discover these similarities (and differences) from a display created by archivist Lisa Murphy ’98 and currently on exhibit in Upjohn Library.
The class of 1916 graduated 38 members (four with bachelor of science degrees, 34 with bachelor of arts degrees). The students matriculated in 1912. At that time all classes were held in Bowen Hall, located near what is today the east loading dock of the Hicks Center. Bowen housed the library as well. Male students lived in the appropriately (albeit unimaginatively) named “Men’s Dorm.” It was located near today’s Hoben Hall. Women students resided in “Ladies Hall,” located approximately in the center of a triangle whose vertices would one day be Stetson Chapel, Mandelle Hall and Dewing Hall. None of those three vertices existed then. And none of those 1916 landmarks (Bowen, Men’s Dorm, Ladies Hall) exist today.
Despite being 100 years apart, the academic calendar is roughly the same: mid-September to mid-June, though divided back then into two semesters rather than three trimesters. Fourteen faculty worked at K in 1916; three were women.
Ancestor to Day of Gracious Living?
According to Murphy, freshmen and sophomores 100 years ago tended to do things as one group, juniors and seniors a second. As freshmen, the class of ’16 distinguished itself in the annual sophomore-versus-freshmen tug-of-war over Mirror Lake, a shallow mucky pond near Arcadia Creek and the Amtrak train tracks. According to a small Kalamazoo Gazette article (headline: FRESHMEN DRAG 15 CLASSMEN THROUGH CHILLY LAKE WATERS), the first-years made short work of the sophomores and pulled them across the entire pond.
Back then juniors and seniors enjoyed an annual picnic at West Lake. The class of ’16 had a chance to attend a senior-only picnic at Gull Lake (see photo, with President Stetson on the far right). Perhaps these events are ancestors to the Day of Gracious Living, which the class of 2016 experienced annually for four years.
Students confined to the Men’s Dorm take some air
All classes endure challenges. The graduates of 1916 faced smallpox and a serious dorm fire during their four years. In early April of 1913 a junior named Ernest Piper was diagnosed with smallpox. The Gazette headline read: SMALLPOX APPEARS AT COLLEGE “DORM” WEDNESDAY EVENING: Dr. Stetson Orders All Students to be Vaccinated at Once: Glee Club Members Are Scared. Piper had been on a recent trip with the Glee Club. For a few days, the College was “campused,” which meant students stayed in their rooms with the exception of their vaccination appointments. A doctor’s written verification of vaccination (and antibody production) was required to resume classes and other activities. One such verification is on display in the library, with two dates (April 3 and April 30) corresponding (respectively) to vaccination and efficacy (presence of antibodies presumably).
President Stetson took some heat for not banishing Piper to an infectious diseases sanatorium. None existed in Kalamazoo, and the closest one outside the city Stetson considered deplorable. So he stood his ground. It turned out Piper’s was a mild case, as was the only other case, that of a faculty member. The incident occurred before the age of antibiotics and less than four years prior to the influenza pandemics of 1918-19, which killed an estimated 675,000 Americans. Infectious disease was fearsome.
In the class’s senior year, on March 17, 1916, the Kalamazoo College Oratorical Association of Kalamazoo sponsored a debate between K and Hope College. The topic: “That Congress should adopt a literary test as a further means of restricting European immigration.” K had to argue the affirmative; Hope the negative. The debate occurred of St. Patrick’s Day. No record of who won.
The Men’s Dorm the morning after the fire
Coincidentally, that very night, a midnight blaze destroyed the fourth floor of the Men’s Dorm. All 48 residents of the building made it out; those on the lower floors had some time to salvage belongings, but the students on the third and fourth floors were fortunate to escape with their lives. In a scene right out of Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman movie, the bell from the dorm’s tower fell through the floors, narrowly missing one student who had just fled his room. Wrote The Index (March 21, 1916): “A very narrow escape was experienced by Paul Butler when the old bell, which had hung in the tower for more than fifty years and is well known to every alumnus, crashed through the roof and down to the third floor. Butler had just left his room when the mass of metal tore an opening in the floor over which he had recently passed.” Eat your heart out, Tim Burton…though, perhaps, the proximity of place and timing were embellished in the telling.
What’s certain is that local neighbors volunteered to house the newly homeless students, providing clothing and book replacements as well. Lots of homework, even some assignments not due for months, were claimed to have been lost in the blaze.
The night of St. Patrick’s Day was bitter cold. You can see the frozen ice from the water used to douse the flames in the after-photo of the before-and-after sequence. The College declared the fourth floor a loss, and refurbished the building as a three-story structure.
No matter what it may have seemed, not all about the four years was crisis–the same as with the class of 2016. The 1916 baseball team won the conference championship, as would its future descendant 100 years later. The basketball team placed first as well. And 1916 was the year the Kalamazoo College Student Senate formed. Ironically, 100 years later, 2015-16 was the College’s first year since 1916 without a student government.
EDITOR’S NOTE (May 24): “The Stories They Tell” won the Kalamazoo Film Society’s “Palm d’Mitten” Award for best local film. And the documentary won second place for best feature film at this weekend’s NxMW Film Festival in Kalamazoo! Pictured (below) at the award ceremony are (l-r): Zac Clark ’14 (Production Assistant), Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan (Co-Authorship Project Creator), Visiting Instructor of Art Danny Kim (Director), Matt Hamel (Photographer/Animator), Michelle Hamel (Videographer) and Dhera Strauss (Videographer). CONGRATULATIONS!
(April 26) “The Stories They Tell,” a documentary film by Visiting Instructor of Art Danny Kim is an official selection of the 2016 North by Midwest Film Festival and will be shown in the Wellspring Dance Theater at the Epic Center (359 S. Kalamazoo Mall) on May 21 at 3:30 p.m. In this charming film, Kalamazoo College Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan partners every Kalamazoo College student in her “Developmental Psychology” class with a child at Woodward Elementary School to write children’s books together. The project’s concept has been expanded and continued through a partnership with the College’s Center for Civic Engagement. As the student (college and primary school) create these whimsical, amusing and surprising stories, the connections they make with each other have a lasting impact, not only in literacy and learning, but in understanding their pasts and futures. The film also screened at the Lake Erie Arts and Film Festival in Sandusky, Ohio, the East Lansing Film Festival in Michigan, and Reading FilmFEST in Reading, Pennsylvania. The tickets for the showing at the Wellspring Dance Theater are FREE but registration is required.
DI SEUSS NAMED one of two finalists for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry! A first in the history of Kalamazoo College to have one of her own so honored. Di is an alumna (class of 1978) and Di is our writer-in-residence and Di is an assistant professor of English. “Di is” is the roiling wellspring and outflow of her remarkable books, most particularly Four-Legged Girl, which the Pulitzer jurors describe as “A richly improvisational poetry collection that leads readers through a gallery of incisive and beguiling portraits and landscapes.”
I like to think of each Di’s books as a glimpse (part dark, part light, and both motion) of a journey into “Di Seuss named,” a good name for a vast, strange and absolutely singular land at the margins of the world.
Graywolf Press commissioned Di to write an essay on Myrtle Corbin, the four-legged girl and Di’s muse for part of her recent collection. You can see Myrtle–or a portion of her–on the cover of Di’s book. Di’s essay, writes her publisher, is “something dark, weird, and beautiful.” It calls forth the poet Emily Dickinson and (at least for me, albeit less explicitly) another hero, another “Di,” the photographer Diane Arbus.
“When born with two vaginas, what is a girl to do?” writes Di Seuss in her essay, “Wear white, collect plants by moonlight and construct an herbarium, become a recluse, write poems? Or take the other route: join the circus, become, as Myrtle did at thirteen, a live exhibit. Without the economic privilege a poetic genius freak like Dickinson was born into, the Four-Legged Girl went for the paycheck. She dressed all four of her appendages in striped socks and black boots and pulled up her skirt to reveal the four knots of her knees. She wore fringe and silk and a hair bow. Her bangs were plastered to her forehead in spit curls with whatever they used for styling gel in those days. Oh yeah. spit.”
Arbus once wrote, “Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot….There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks are born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”
Later in her remarkable essay about her remarkable book’s namesake, Di Seuss writes, “I believe my association with her predecessor paved the way. My first love was the taxidermied two-headed lamb in my little hometown museum. He was John the Baptist to Myrtle’s Jesus. In his two soft heads and four sweet eyes I discovered the vulnerability and genius of marginality, the burden and the gift of originality….I love and lust after Myrtle Corbin because she is queered and empowered by her idiosyncrasy…dizzied by the realization of her absolute singularity. I experience my own body as a spectacle, an exhibit, a performance, and a condition. My legs are exponential….
“Our whole guise,” echoes Arbus, “is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way but there’s a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you….I mean if you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic. You know it really is totally fantastic…. Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It’s what I’ve never seen before that I recognize.”
Di’s poems (and prose) take me to what I’ve never seen before.
If you happen to be in the Atlanta area this weekend you might want to make your way to Jasper, where the Episcopal Church of the Holy Family presents internationally acclaimed organist Calvert Johnson ’71 in an organ concert of works from the Middle East, featuring music by Baboukas, Hovhaness and Hakim.
Johnson is the Charles A. Dana Professor Emeritus of Music and College Organist Emeritus, Agnes Scott College, and Organist, First Presbyterian, Marietta, Georgia. At Agnes Scott, he taught courses in Sacred Music, Women in Music, Music before 1750, as well as organ and harpsichord lessons. Johnson earned the doctorate and master’s in organ performance at Northwestern University, where he studied with Karel Paukert.
At K, Johnson majored in music and studied abroad in Madrid, Spain. The concert occurs Sunday, April 17, at 3:30 p.m. It is the eighth in a season of free concerts. Holy Family is located at 202 Griffith Road in Jasper.
Tom Higgins ’92 returned to his alma mater in early April as part of a visit coordinated by the Kalamazoo Section of the American Chemical Society. Higgins talked about “How Undergraduate Research Experiences Can Change Students’ Lives.” He should know. Higgins and a number of collaborators have made great strides in cultivating future scientists by introducing undergraduate research experiences for students at two-year institutions. Known as STEM-ENGINES (Engaging the Next Generation in Exploring STEM), their research collaborative has enabled over 286 Chicago-area students, including many first-generation American citizens, to gain academic-year and summer research experience mentored by chemistry and biology faculty. Often these “diamonds in the rough” may not have envisioned research as a potential career path.
The K chemistry major cites his foreign study experience (Erlangen, Germany) as a source of insight and empathy into his own students’ discomfort in learning beyond their comfort zone. He sees community colleges as important part of the higher education landscape and his research demonstrates that small investments in a student can have a big payoff benefiting individuals, families, institutions, and communities.
Higgins is a program director in the National Science Foundation’s Division of Undergraduate Education, and he also serves as a professor at Harold Washington College, one of the City Colleges of Chicago.
He began teaching at Harold Washington in 1998 after completing his Ph.D. at Northwestern. He never thought he’d be there as long as he has been, but–as he told an audience of students and faculty from K, Western Michigan University and Kalamazoo Valley Community College– the atmosphere created by small class sizes made it hard to leave.
A workshop on human rights (April 14-16) at Kalamazoo College will offer the opportunity for some of the world’s leading scholars to discuss their work among themselves and an audience that includes students, faculty and the general public. The workshop is titled “Seventy Years After Nuremberg: Genocide and Human Rights in Comparative Perspective.”
“Seventy years after the end of the Second World War and the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials of 1945-46 is a particularly appropriate time to reflect on genocide and responses to genocide in the 20th and 21st centuries,” said workshop organizer David Barclay, the Margaret and Roger Scholten Professor of International Studies. “Although the study of genocide, the Holocaust, international human right and related issues has become an essential component of academic scholarship and civic education, the current anniversary of the first war-crimes trials after World War II offers important opportunities to reflect comparatively, and in a focused way, on these vital matters.”
The workshop begins on Thursday evening, April 14, with a keynote address by Daniel Chirot (University of Washington) titled “No End in Sight: Why Mass Political Murder Continues to Occur.” Friday morning’s session focuses on genocide prior to the Second World War (and before the invention of the word), locating the phenomenon of genocide in the larger context of global history from the 19th to the 21st centuries. The session includes new scholarship concerning the Armenian genocide and new work detailing colonialism and genocide in Africa. Friday afternoon features two sessions on recent discussions of the Holocaust.
The workshop will conclude on Saturday morning with a consideration of other examples of 20th-century genocide, responses to genocide, and genocide and the protection of international human rights. Public participation and discussion will be encouraged. The event occurs in the Mandelle Hall Olmsted Room and is free to the public. In addition to Chirot and Barclay, among the other scholars featured are Joseph Bangura, Kalamazoo College; Carter Dougherty ’92, Bloomberg News; John Dugas, Kalamazoo College; Hilary Earl, Nipissing University, Canada; Amy Elman, Kalamazoo College; Geoffrey J. Giles, University of Florida; Lesley Klaff Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom; Paul Gordon Lauren, University of Montana; Wendy Lower, Claremont McKenna College; Samuel Moyn, Harvard Law School; James Nafziger, Willamette University and American Society of Comparative Law; Raffael Scheck, Colby College; and Ronald Suny, University of Michigan.
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Join an evening of “Exploring Museum Careers with Kalamazoo College Alumni” on Thursday, April 21, at 7:30 p.m. in Dewing Hall Room 103. The discussion and Q&A comes from the inspiration of Professor Emerita of Art History Billie Fischer and Visiting Instructor of Art History Melanie Sympson. Sympson is teaching the spring term course “The Modern Art Museum,” and she has enlisted the three alumni panelists to visit her class in addition to sharing their stories with the general public. The alumni participants are John Cummins Steele ’83, Holly (Rarick) Witchey ’83, and Courtney Tompkins ’08. Each will speak about 10 minutes, sharing their from-there-to-here stories (where “there” is K and “here” is working in museums) and then take questions from the audience. The evening will be a true liberal arts fest, says Sympson, for museums are situated at the intersection of many disciplines. Steele is the director of conservation and conservator of sculpture and decorative arts at the Detroit Institute of Arts. He supervises conservation department staff in the examination, documentation, analysis, scientific research, conservation treatment, preservation, exhibition and interpretation of the DIA’s permanent collection. He earned his M.A. and certificate of advanced studies at Buffalo State College. At K he majored in history and earned a concentration in art history. He studied abroad in Erlangen, Germany.
Witchey is director of the Wade Project at the Western Reserve Historical Society. The Wade Project is a multi-year collaborative effort to create a model for studying individual family histories. She also teaches museum work related courses for Johns Hopkins University. Witchey earned her Ph.D. at Case Western Reserve University. At K she majored in political science and art history. She studied abroad in Muenster, Germany.
Tompkins is assistant to the program of research, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. CASVA is a research institute that fosters study of the production, use, and cultural meaning of art, artifacts, architecture, urbanism, photography, and film worldwide from prehistoric times to the present. Tompkins earned her M.A. at American University. At K she majored in art history, and she studied abroad in Rome, Italy.
Better than a “Night at the Museum” is an evening exploring museum careers with these three distinguished alums. The event is free and open to the public.
