campus Archives - Page 2 of 12

Soil and Light

Posted on June 30, 2016March 23, 2022

Every graduating senior contains a multitude of stories. Commencement celebrates them. And Commencement day adds more. Like this one from proud father Rich Frishman (a Seattle-area based photographer), who cultivated a special gift for his son Gabe Frishman (class of 2016) and Gabe’s friends and academic advisor. The photo is the face plate of a card designed by Rich, and the story behind it we share below in Rich’s own words.

“From our first visit, when Gabe was selecting which college would best challenge him, we have been struck by the beauty of K’s compact quad, rolling idyllically down from Stetson, and all the energy it contained. As the heart of the campus, it seems to symbolize the nurturing environment of Kalamazoo College. The towering white oaks and lush grass transform a simple rectangle bounded by concrete and brick into a welcoming meeting place full of life. The trees became symbols, living embodiments of this special place and process; of growth and strength and transformation.

Watching my son Gabe and his friends joyfully embracing each other on the quad, then hurling themselves with complete abandon into the pillow-like piles of gathered autumn leaves, inspired this botanical experiment. Gabe, my wife Brenda and I began collecting acorns on the lower end of the quad (between Hoben, Hicks and Upton) on October 26, 2012, our inaugural Family Weekend. The acorns were most abundant that year. We eagerly gathered a couple dozen freshly fallen seeds, thinking that it would be sweet to have living tokens of Gabe’s new home at our old home. It was when planting them back on Whidbey Island that I thought they’d be a great gift to give to Gabe’s friends and classmates upon graduation. My sentimental notion was evolving.

Had I been successful that first year, I would have needed a moving truck to bring the seedlings back to Kalamazoo in 2016, but Mother Nature was wise. None of those acorns seemed to germinate. Perhaps they’d been eaten by our own squirrels, or the seeds suffocated in transit, or they needed a harder freeze to activate.

By the time of our second Family Weekend I had spent endless hours studying the horticultural requirements for successful white oak acorn germination. My hypothesis was that the weather in the Maritime Northwest was too temperate for seeds that thrived in Midwest winters. So I tried refrigerating our next harvest of Kzoo quad acorns, storing them just above freezing for two months, then planting them in the early spring.
Mother Nature got a good laugh out of that experiment. Out of another dozen acorns, none seemed to survive. Apparently that theory was not ready for publication.

With Gabe in Budapest for study abroad in 2014, we had no Kzoo acorns to plant.

Our final Family Weekend, around Halloween 2015, yielded a moderate number of healthy acorns, all gathered from the same eastern end of the quad. The squirrels seemed more corpulent and the available seed stock harder to find, but we all searched. When I got these back to Whidbey, I took a minimalist approach, planting each acorn in a one-gallon pot. Thinking perhaps my first year’s failure might have been attributable to predation, I built cages to keep them safe from squirrels, chipmunks, deer and rabbits.

Eureka! Despite our very mild winter, shoots began to break the soil in March. By the time we were finalizing our Kalamazoo Commencement plans, we had nearly a score of foot-tall white oak seedlings. I decided I would drive a dozen of them from Seattle to Kalamazoo so we could give them to Gabe’s friends as living tokens of their four years at K.

Men plan and God laughs, they say. And men plant and chipmunks grin. Nature did get one more giggle before I reached Kalamazoo. When Brenda and I stopped in Chicago, I placed our dozen seedlings in a sunny spot protected from the deer that roamed the neighborhood. Some wily chipmunks smelled a feast and eviscerated half the crop from their pots, so we were left with just six to give as gifts. Gabe carefully distributed those few to his brilliant advisor, Professor John Dugas, and five other friends.

Our garden still has six authentic Kalamazoo Quad white oak seedlings, now in two-gallon pots, awaiting final placement. One I know will grow by our house, a reminder of a time and place we hold dear. One will follow Gabe wherever he lands, a symbol of where he was launched.

The choice of tree was completely dictated by heritage. If Kalamazoo’s quad was dotted with Mountain Ash, I would have planted whatever Mountain Ash seeds I could gather. The seeds had to come from the quad because they serve as a totem of the school and the educational quest. Acorns gathered elsewhere would not suffice.

The graduation card was a last-minute creative exercise. I wanted to offer a context and explanation for why Gabe’s gift was significant. I consider the Kalamazoo experience a gift that empowers its students to grow from humble soil into the light.

Gabe is passionate about learning. His hobbies have long been thinking, reading, and questioning…along with cycling, camping and rockhounding.

When it came to selecting a school, he sought a small liberal arts college where he would be challenged academically and supported emotionally, where he could build relationships with faculty and friends. His interests in international affairs, politics, philosophy and the environment were part of what lead him to select Kalamazoo College.

Gabe’s plans for his future are still evolving. He’s considering taking some time to work in his field of study, political science, possibly through a non-profit or NGO or outreach program like the Peace Corps. Gabe anticipates eventually returning to school to get a Ph.D. or J.D., but first he wants to better understand precisely where he wants to focus his energies.”

The inside of Rich’s graduation card reads: WE CELEBRATE YOUR GRADUATION FROM K, AND THE DEDICATION IT REPRESENTS. THIS WHITE OAK SEEDLING IS FROM AN ACORN FALLEN FROM ONE OF THE MANY BEAUTIFUL TREES THAT LINE KALAMAZOO’S QUAD. IT IS A SYMBOL OF A TIME AND A PLACE FOREVER DEAR TO OUR HEARTS. WE HOPE YOU WILL GROW LIKE THESE TREES, FULL OF STRENGTH AND POWER AND LIFE’S MAJESTY.

PUI Paragon

Posted on June 20, 2016July 17, 2024

Laura Furge, the Roger F. and Harriet G. Varney Professor of Chemistry, is a feature profile in a recent ASBMB Today, the professional development magazine of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. The article, titled “Working at a PUI,” focuses on the demands and rewards faculty face at “primarily undergraduate institutions.” Turns out rewards and demands may be so intertwined they’re indistinguishable. For example, Furge’s academic wheelhouse is biochemistry, and yet she also teaches classes in organic chemistry and general chemistry and even a first-year writing seminar on cancer. The latter has become one of her favorite classes, a case in point of the demand-and-reward hybrid. Furge also notes that at PUIs the professor is the inter-generational “continuity of knowledge.” That vital function requires patience and broader skills on the part of the professor (demand) and makes a PUI professor-investigator-mentor like Furge the progenitor of generations of chemists and chemistry educators–think of Sarah in the Book of Genesis or Celeste in Edward P. Jones’ novel The Known World. That latter reference underscores another for Furge’s great strengths (one the PUI article misses): a fierce commitment to the liberal arts. The Known World was Kalamazoo College’s Summer Common Reading choice in 2007. Furge sits on the committee that selects these works. She also will begin her duties as associate provost at Kalamazoo College beginning July 1.

Distant Mirror

Posted on June 7, 2016March 23, 2022

The Men's Dorm before a fire. Bowen Hall is in the background at left — 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.

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 — 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 — 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.

Street Improvements Meeting

Posted on April 14, 2016March 23, 2022

Street changes are coming to areas close to campus, and you have a chance to express questions and concerns. The public is invited to participate in a public open house to help determine future improvements within the downtown Kalamazoo Planning and Environmental Linkages (PEL) study area. The open house occurs from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Wednesday, April 20, at the Metro Transit Center (530 N. Rose Street).

The Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) will be using the PEL process to determine future improvements within the downtown Kalamazoo study area: Stadium Drive between Howard Street and Michigan Avenue; Michigan Avenue between Stadium Drive and Kalamazoo Avenue; Kalamazoo Avenue between Douglas Avenue and Harrison Street; Michikal Street between Michigan Avenue and Kalamazoo Avenue; Riverview Drive between Harrison Street and Gull Road; and Douglas Avenue between West Main Street and Kalamazoo Avenue.

The PEL process is a planning tool used to streamline the project development process. It is an approach to transportation decision-making that helps the community consider environmental, historical, cultural, and feasibility issues early in the transportation planning process.

Residents and business owners are encouraged to attend and share ideas, suggestions and concerns as part of the planning process.

When the Money Runs Out, There’s Love

Posted on April 4, 2016March 23, 2022

The root meaning of philanthropy is love of humankind, and it is philanthropy that will power the entire operation of Kalamazoo College from this April 6 to the end of the term. That day, Tuition Freedom Day, marks an important divide in the funding of the Kalamazoo College learning experience. In any given academic year, the costs of all that has transpired before Tuition Freedom Day were covered by tuition; what comes after is covered by gifts to Kalamazoo College.

Tuition covers about 76 percent of the costs of a K education, according to Laurel Palmer, director of the Kalamazoo College Fund. “Tuition Freedom Day is a symbolic day marking the point in the academic year when tuition stops paying for a student’s education and support from donors takes over.” Even more important, the day “is an annual gratitude event to celebrate K’s generous donors,” added Laurel. “Their gifts make a K education possible.” During Kalamazoo College’s last fiscal year, alumni, parents and friends of the College gave more than $2 million to the Kalamazoo College Fund.

On April 6, the College’s fifth annual Tuition Freedom Day, “our goal is to have students write 750 thank-you notes,” says Laurel, “which will be mailed to alumni, parents and friends who gave to the Kalamazoo College Fund in support of scholarships, faculty excellence and the College’s greatest needs.”

In Honor of Division III Athletes

Posted on April 1, 2016March 25, 2022

Next week (April 4-10) is national Division III Week, an opportunity to celebrate the impact of athletics and of student athletes on campus and in the surrounding community.

K will mark the celebration with several special events. Monday, April 4, is Donut Day. Support your favorite team and wear Kalamazoo College athletics gear to the Hicks Center between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. to receive a Sweetwater’s donut. Coaches will also be handing out athletics prizes for the first, 10th, 25th and 50th person to stop by the table.

On Local Restaurant Day (Wednesday, April 6) get special deals at the following local restaurants if you wear K athletic apparel. At Comensoli’s Italian Bistro (762 West Main Street) that apparel will allow you to deduct half the cost of appetizers from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. At Fazoli’s (4615 West Main Street) you can get a free entree with the purchase of another and two drinks. Roma’s (1401 South Drake Road) will give you free bread stick bites (until 7 p.m.) with the purchase of a large soda. Dine in and pick-up only; after all, they need to see that K athletic gear.

Friday is Faculty/Staff day, when former K athletes who are employees of the College will wear clothing that represents K and their sport. Hopefully we’ll see all of them at the “Why We Play” community reflection in Stetson Chapel at 11 a.m. (April 8), when K athletes and alumni talk about the impact of athletics on their lives.

Let’s go ’Zoo! If you don’t have K athletics apparel, borrow from a friend! We want to see as many people on campus in orange and black on Monday and Wednesday.

K Awarded Top Civic Engagement Honor

Posted on March 31, 2016March 23, 2022

Kalamazoo College is Michigan’s 2016 Engaged Campus of the Year! Michigan Campus Compact (MiCC) recently announced K’s selection for the honor by a team of national reviewers at MiCC’s Awards Gala, held at Michigan State University’s Kellogg Center in East Lansing.

K students, faculty, staff and community partners represent the College — K students, faculty, administrators and community partners represented the College at the 2016 Michigan Campus Compact awards ceremony in Lansing.

The Engaged Campus of the Year Award recognizes an institution of higher education for exemplary commitment to the education of students for civic and social responsibility; genuine and sustained investment in community relationships; and a commitment to service learning and civic engagement opportunities for students across all disciplines.

In particular, the award is a tribute to the work of the College’s Center for Civic Engagement. Through service-learning courses and student-led programs, the CCE has engaged more than 5,500 K students in long-term, reciprocal partnerships to foster academic learning, critical problem-solving, and a lifetime of civic engagement while strengthening the community. “The students have worked with thousands of community residents, some 50 different organizations, and in more than 30 different community-based courses,” says CCE director Alison Geist.

Mallory McClure Innovations in Community Impact — K senior Mallory McClure ’16 accepted the Innovations in Community Impact award for K’s Swim for Success program.

Kalamazoo College also earned an MiCC Innovations in Community Impact award for its program Swim for Success (SFS). The Innovations Award recognizes creative and measurably effective approaches to community problem solving. SFS is a swimming program for local children that takes place on K’s campus three evenings a week. It is a partnership between K and the City of Kalamazoo led by Civic Engagement Scholars Kevin Ewing and Mallory McClure. More than 20 K students are involved as tutors or swim coaches in the program. Kevin and Mallory are both members of the college swim team and are also coaches in the SFS program. K students also provide tutoring onsite one hour before swimming lessons begin.

In addition, Susmitha Daggubati ’16 received MiCC’s 2016 Commitment to Service Award for students. The Commitment to Service Award recognizes outstanding students for their commitment to service. Students are chosen specifically for either the breadth or depth of their community involvement or their service experience(s) and the demonstration of meaningful reflection of those experiences.

Susmitha Daggubati Commitment To Service — K senior Susmitha Daggubati ’16 received the MCC’s 2016 “Commitment to Service” award.

Michigan Campus Compact is a coalition of college and university presidents who are committed to fulfilling the public purpose of higher education. The organization promotes the education and commitment of Michigan college students to be engaged citizens.

Happy 104th!

Posted on March 18, 2016October 7, 2022

A class reunion nametag shows Vivian Mitchell Prindl's K photo from 1931 — A class reunion nametag shows Vivian’s K photo from 1931 above a more recent photo taken around the time of her 104th birthday.

In response to a prompt (called “Truths”) in an old class reunion questionnaire Vivian Mitchell Prindl ’35 wrote: “One is lucky if she learns to accept what comes. Life is much more pleasant if one has a contented frame of mind.”

More pleasant, indeed, and perhaps much longer. Vivian celebrated her 104th birthday this year and is quite likely K’s oldest living alumna. She matriculated to K from Detroit in 1931, two years into the Great Depression. She ended up earning her bachelor’s degree from New York State University College at Plattsburg, but she always considered herself a member of K’s class of 1935. “I enjoyed Kalamazoo College very much,” she said in a recent interview with archivist Lisa Murphy ’98. “Lemuel F. Smith taught chemistry. He was a very genial person. If anybody was late they had to bring him a candy bar, so once a semester the entire class would come late and bring him a candy bar.”

She shared many other memories, some somber. In the questionnaire Vivian wrote, “Allan Hoben was president when I first attended K. I remember the sadness we all felt when we learned of his terminal illness. The last time he spoke at Chapel, every student attended.”

There were lighter moments. Dancing to records in the sun room of Trowbridge Hall was one she confided to Lisa. Vivian also shared fondness Professors Mulder (English), Harper (sociology) and Dunbar (history). “Professor Praeger [biology] was from County Down in Ireland,” said Vivian. “He felt like he knew me because my father was from County Antrim.”

Vivian had been to business college for a year before she came to K, and that paid off, literally, because she knew how to type. Campus jobs in the dining room (a wellspring for many students) paid 25 cents an hour. But because Vivian could type she was hired by the business office at 30 cents an hour. Everyone who lived on campus, even students who had scholarships, had to work, according to Vivian. It was the Depression. “We didn’t think about not having money because no one had money.” She remembers companies shut down, men out of work, and soup kitchens.

Weekend fun usually meant hikes or walks–things you could do that didn’t cost money. Like those extemporaneous dances in the Trowbridge sun room. “I danced with a boy I dated a couple of years,” said Vivian. And there was the “beau parlor” in Trowbridge. “If you were entertaining you could go to a small room as long as you kept the door open,” Vivian added. “These were the years before blue jeans, so we dressed up. If we were leaving campus to go downtown we were told to wear hat and gloves.”

Vivian also had a key part in the annual Christmas Carol Service. That event called for someone to play the Spirit of Christmas, and the red dress for the part was pretty tiny. “I was small enough to fit into it so I was chosen as the Spirit.”

Vivian married Frank Prindl, and they had two children. Vivian also enjoyed a long teaching career in schools in Kentucky, Michigan, Florida and in Bonn, Germany. After retirement she continued to teach on a volunteer basis. And she traveled widely, especially to England and Mexico, but she also has visited South America, Indonesia, the Philippines and Africa.

K in the early 1930s sounds like a very different place, and yet, Vivian’s life (still going strong) suggests that K cultivated curiosity, independence and a yen for travel and adventure then as much as now.

Happy Birthday, Center for Civic Engagement

Posted on March 8, 2016March 23, 2022

The Mary Jane Underwood Stryker Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) turns 15 this year, and its hard to imagine better origins. It began as a joint brainstorming effort between students, faculty and several community partners with the intent on redefining what a liberal arts education was all about. Students were not just de facto city residents while they studied at K; they were community assets as well. Annually, about 600 K students participate in service-learning in some way with the CCE.

From work on sustainability issues to girl’s and women’s empowerment to health and economic equality to food justice, CCE programming engages students in work that promotes social justice, further pushing the College’s mission to create lifelong learners.

“For some of our students, it’s the first time they’ve witnessed first-hand a variety of ‘isms,’” says Alison Geist, CCE’s director. “We put students on the front lines of many societal issues in a way that sitting in a lecture or classroom just can’t.”

Susmitha Daggubati ’16 mentors a second-grader at Woodward Elementary School in Kalamazoo’s Stuart Neighborhood, adjacent to K’s campus. Daggubati, a senior majoring in chemistry and earning a concentration in biochemistry and molecular biology, is in her second year at Woodward and serves as a Civic Engagement Scholar, a kind of on-site leader who mentors other K students working at sites across the community, scheduling their shifts and organizing meetings to brainstorm programming ideas.

Daggubati moved with her family to the Kalamazoo area from their native India ten years ago. Still very much tied to her Indian roots, her time in service-learning has also given her a greater understanding of the complex social issues at play in American society “In many classes, we learn the theories about the roots of so many social problems,” she says. “But I am able to make those connections to the real world when I’m involved. It keeps me rooted in the realities of the world, and it has given me a greater understanding of American culture.”

Tom Thornburg is the managing attorney at Farmworker Legal Services, a non-profit agency based in Bangor, Mich., a small community about 25 miles west of Kalamazoo, in an agricultural area where hundreds of migrant workers flock each year to work in fields and orchards. His agency assists these workers – overwhelmingly Hispanic – with everything from language services to information on their legal rights to informing them of resources available to them. He’s been working with the CCE for almost a decade, and the K students who’ve come through his doors have become an invaluable resource.

“The students from K are some of the brightest, best-equipped and most professional volunteers we get,” Thornburg says. “They come here with a sense of enthusiasm to help, a sense of what to do, an autonomy. They’re excellent, right up there in many ways with the law students we have working here.”

Over the years, hundreds of the nearly 2,000 students Associate Professor of Psychology Karyn Boatwright has taught have participated in service-learning programs, in a diverse group of local agencies, from the Kalamazoo Public Schools to Planned Parenthood to Goodwill Industries.

Through more than 30 different courses at the College designed with community partners, faculty at K have engaged thousands of students, community residents and leaders to create opportunities for experiential learning and impact derived organically and intentionally from service-learning work.

Says Boatwright, “The CCE and their students consistently impress upon us the need for reflection to ensure that we are not only connecting the proverbial dots, but understanding the political and social connections between success and social factors. Civic engagement experiences improve the quality of learning for our students and strengthen our community.”

The College’s solid commitment to developing the next generation of leaders who are observant, lifelong learners intent on crafting solutions to problems plaguing a suffering world is stronger now than ever. Concludes Geist: “The founders of K were always interested in social justice, and our programming is a manifestation of that. It’s the idea that we should be creating a fellowship of learning, not just working in ivory towers tucked away from society.”

(Text by Chris Killian; photo by Keith Mumma)

One Down, 29 to Go

Posted on November 20, 2015March 23, 2022

The oxen were onsite, which means work began on a new pavilion that will be part of Kalamazoo College’s Lillian Anderson Arboretum. Oxen? Yes, the animals were used to haul 30 logs of red pine harvested from the “Arb,” the lumber from which will be used as material for the pavilion. Both material and mode of transport are consistent with the sustainable character of the pavilion, which will use solar energy, self-composting toilets and a human-powered water pump. The facility will provide learning space for both science and humanities classes. An article on the Arb and its improvements this winter will appear in the Spring 2016 issue of LuxEsto. (Photos by Randy Schau). Watch a brief video (by Susan Andress).