faculty

Professor John Fink Honored by the Mathematical Association of America’s Michigan Chapter

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Professor John Fink
John Fink, Ph.D., is Rosemary K. Brown Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at K.

K Professor John Fink, Ph.D. has received the 2014 Distinguished Service Award from the Michigan Section of the Mathematical Association of America “for the many contributions he has made to his institution [Kalamazoo College!], to our [MAA Michigan] Section, and to the larger mathematical community for many years,” sayeth the citation. Fink is K’s Rosemary K. Brown Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science. A longtime member and past governor of the MAA Michigan section, he was honored with the Section’s Distinguished Teacher Award in 2001. In 1989, he co-founded the Michigan All-Stars team of high school mathematics students, serving as the team coach in national competitions for 17 years. He served as Department of Mathematics and Computer Science chair at K for 10 years. This spring, he was recognized with Kalamazoo College’s Florence J. Lucasse Lectureship Award for Excellence in Teaching. He delivered his acceptance lecture May 6 in the Mandelle Hall’s Olmsted Room to a standing-room only audience of students, faculty, staff, family, friends, and fellow math aficionados. Congrats, Professor Fink. If dedication, love, and talent count for anything, you really add up!

Get a Taste of Andy Mozina’s “Quality Snacks” in MLive Book Review and May 14 Reading

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Book cover of 'Quality Snacks'Kalamazoo Gazette/MLive Book Reviewer Yvonne Zipp reviewed “Quality Snacks,” a new collection of short stories by Kalamazoo College Professor of English Andy Mozina. “Mozina’s characters come to wry, melancholy insights that don’t help them improve their lives, but endear them to readers,” she says.

Mozina will read from his new book and sign copies on May 14 at the Hicks Center Banquet Room at K from 6 to 8 p.m.

He’ll be part of “More in an Evening,” a celebration of four Kalamazoo College faculty authors, hosted by the K Bookstore. Mozina will be joined by Professor of English Bruce Mills, who will read from his 2014 memoir about his family’s journey with autism, “An Archaeology of Yearning”; Professor of English, Emerita Gail Griffin, who will read from her book, “The Events of October: Murder-Suicide on a Small Campus”; and Professor of Physical Education and Head Coach of Volleyball Jeanne Hess, who will read from her 2013 book, “Sportuality: Finding Joy in the Games.”

The event is free and open to the public.

The George Acker Endowed Scholarship

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Teacher and coach George Acker
George Acker, teacher and coach

On the occasion of its annual Founders Day ceremony (celebrating 181 years of operation) Kalamazoo College announced the George Acker Endowed Scholarship. The scholarship will support juniors or seniors who best exemplify the qualities and character of Coach Acker, including an exceptional work ethic, leadership, a commitment to involvement in campus activities, and a high standard of integrity. Preference will be given to students who are (like Coach Acker was) the first in his family to attend college.

Acker served as a coach and professor at Kalamazoo College for 35 years (1958-93) and was inducted into the Kalamazoo College Athletic Hall of Fame in 1998. He coached men’s tennis teams to seven NCAA Division III championships while winning 35 consecutive MIAA championships. His tennis teams were 573-231 overall and an incredible 209-1 in conference play.

Acker was as true a “liberal arts coach” as they come. He served as head coach of the Hornet wrestling (1960-74) and cross-country (1985-88) teams. He also was line coach for the Hornet football team from 1959-69, helping guide Rolla Anderson’s squads to back-to-back MIAA championships in 1962 and 1963. He served as the College’s athletic trainer and director of the intramural sports program at different times during his career.

Most of all, he loved teaching. “Nothing has given me as much pleasure as teaching the students in my theory and activities classes,” said Acker in 1985, when he accepted the Florence J. Lucasse Award for Excellence in Teaching, the faculty’s highest honor. “Teaching and coaching are very similar, so that I feel that when I’m coaching a sport it is an extension of my teaching.” Many persons, including this author, knew “Coach” as “Teacher,” and as profoundly as the athletes he instructed, they, too, were touched by his compassion and his ability to bring out their best. Coach Acker died on July 20, 2011, of complications surrounding the stroke he suffered several days earlier.

Four in an Evening

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Three covers of books writte by K-connected authorsThe Kalamazoo College Bookstore will host an author event featuring readings by four writers with strong K connections. Gail Griffin (professor emerita of English) joins fellow English department faculty members Bruce Mills and Andy Mozina and Professor of Physical Education (and women’s volleyball coach) Jeanne Hess on Wednesday, May 14, from 6 PM to 8 PM in the Hicks Center Banquet Room. The four will read from current works that include Gail’s The Events of October, a compelling account of the murder-suicide on K’s campus in 1999; Bruce’s memoir An Archaeology of Yearning, a chronicle of family relationships (particularly with his son, Jacob) and the role of art (particularly storytelling) as a way to fulfill human yearning for contact between people whose ways of knowing may differ; Andy’s new collection of short stories, Quality Snacks, which will be fresh off the presses for the May event; and Jeanne’s Sportuality, an examination of the intersection of sports and spirituality. The event will allow ample time for Q&A. Books will be available for purchase; the authors will gladly sign them; and refreshments will be served. All are invited; let’s move the number four more toward four hundred.

SLEEPWALKERS Author to Lecture at Kalamazoo College

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Book cover for "The Sleepwalkers"Kalamazoo College’s 2014 Edward Moritz Lecture in in History features one of the world’s most distinguished historians, Professor Christopher Clark, Cambridge University, United Kingdom. The title of his talk, “The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914,” is the same as his recent book, an authoritative chronicle that draws on new research and traces the paths to World War I in a minute-by-minute narrative of events. 2014 is the centenary of what David Barclay describes as “the primal catastrophe of modern history from which subsequent, even greater catastrophes emerged.” He also notes that Clark’s book has been widely hailed as the most important publication on World War I in many years. “The German edition has been on the top of that country’s non-fiction bestseller list for many weeks,” says Barclay,the Margaret and Roger Scholten Professor of International Studies at Kalamazoo College as well as the executive director of the German Studies Association.

New York Times book reviewer Harold Evans called Clark’s book a masterpiece. In his review (“On the Brink,” May 5, 2013) Evans wrote: “The brilliance of Clark’s far-reaching history is that we are able to discern how the past was genuinely prologue. The participants were conditioned to keep walking along a precipitous escarpment, sure of their own moral compass, but unknowingly impelled by a complex interaction of deep-rooted cultures, patriotism and paranoia, sediments of history and folk memory, ambition and intrigue. They were, in Clark’s term, ’sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world.’ In conception, steely scholarship and piercing insights, his book is a masterpiece.”

Clark’s lecture occurs Wednesday, April 9, at 7 PM in the Mandelle Hall Olmsted Room. It is free and open to the public. The Moritz Lecture is made possible by a generous donation from a local family. It honors the legacy of the late Professor Edward Moritz, who taught history at Kalamazoo College from 1955 to 1988 and served as department chair for many years.

Mud-Luscious and Puddle-Wonderful

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Young boy in rain gear splashes in puddles
Jack in Puddle (Robert Murphy). http://www.flickr.com/photos/imurphy/22752012/ Creative commons license

Spring means puddles and puddles mean children and children mean the hard work of play, a.k.a. some pretty cool voyages to some wild new worlds, all within a puddle. To prepare her latest blog post (which could easily double as an homage to e.e. cummings) Associate Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan watched hours of YouTube videos of infants and toddlers interacting with the puddle-wonderful universe of early spring snow-melt or rain’s footprints. She culled them down to a list of eight favorites and shared the list on the Psychology Today website. Those favorites include: Boy Meets First Puddle; Puddle Splashing in Cape Breton; Athena Splashing in Puddles; Charlie Discovers Puddles; Freya’s First Puddle; What if You Encounter a Mud Puddle When You’re Driving Your John Deere Tractor?; Little Girl in Pink Snowsuit Discovers Ice for the First Time; and A Kid, A Dog, and a Puddle–and there’s a lot of learning going on in each, for both the subjects and the viewer. For the latter, Siu-Lan writes comments about the psychological “goings-on” in each encounter. These include phenomena studied by the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (circular reactions and sensorimotor intelligence) and other concepts such as joint attention episode, self efficacy, interactional synchrony, and linkage between joy and academic success.

“As I sifted through scores of videos of infants and children stomping and splashing in puddles, I was reminded that play is a child’s work,” Siu-Lan wrote. “The foundations of everything a child needs to learn across the domains–cognitive, emotional, and social–are learned through play. This is so beautifully illustrated in a moment of curiosity, discovery, and joy of a child, evoked by a small pool of water left after the rain.”

Siu-Lan blogs regularly for Psychology Today under the rubric “What Shapes Film? Elements of the Cinematic Experience and More.”

Like Lit? Come to K …

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Dean of Kalamazoo area poets Con Hilberry
Con Hilberry, dean of Kalamazoo area poets, during a recent reading and celebration of his latest collection of poetry in the College’s Olmsted Room. Photo by Ly Nguyen ’14.

… would be the advice of an article by Anna Clark titled “Kalamazoo quietly emerging as a literary hot spot” that appeared in the Detroit Free Press and Lansing State Journal. Of course, K stands for Kalamazoo (the city) but certainly includes Kalamazoo College. The article quotes Bonnie Jo Campbell (author of American Salvage and Once Upon a River, among others) extensively, and Campbell has taught creative writing at K, and she has served as the College’s 2012 Summer Common Reading author. Literary prizes abound for Kalamazoo-area-related authors (Campbell has been a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award; David Small is a National Book Award finalist for his graphic memoir Stitches (and a former faculty member in K’s art department); and Western Michigan University’s Jaimy Gordon is the 2010 National Book Award Winner (Lord of Misrule). Kalamazoo College connections abound, as well. Campbell was a frequent member of  a Monday night poetry class taught by Professor Emeritus of English and poet Con Hilberry (11 books, including, most recently, the highly acclaimed Until the Full Moon Has its Say). Campbell’s poems have appeared in Encore Magazine. Other former students of Con include published poets (and Kalamazoo residents and alumnae) Susan (Blackwell) Ramsey ’72 (A Mind Like This) and Gail (McMurray) Martin ’74 (Begin Empty Handed and The Hourglass Heart). Kalamazoo College Writer in Residence (and Kalamazoo resident and alumna) Diane Seuss ’78 will soon publish Four Legged Girl, which follows her two previous volumes of poetry (It Blows You Hollow and Wolf Lake White Gown Blown Open). Fiction writer and Professor of English Andy Mozina has published The Women Were Leaving the Men, and his new collection of short stories, Quality Snacks, is forthcoming. Professor of English Bruce Mills is currently on sabbatical promoting his new memoir An Archeology of Yearning. Mozina and Mills both reside in Kalamazoo. Professor Emeritus of English Gail Griffin (another Kalamazoo resident) is using her retirement to work on her next work. She is the author of the breathtaking “The Events of October”: Murder-Suicide on a Small Campus. Gail is also a published poet, and she has written a number of essay collections, including Calling: Essays on Teaching in the Mother Tongue and Season of the Witch: Border Lines, Marginal Notes. Yes, Kalamazoo College is the right place for literature. There may be no other place where it’s likely to go better.

Tenure and Class Dean Appointments

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Four outstanding Kalamazoo College teachers were awarded tenure and promoted to the rank of associate professor. The four individuals, and their departments, are: Dennis Frost (Ph.D., Columbia University), history and East Asian studies; Christine Hahn (Ph.D., University of Chicago), art and art history; Autumn Hostetter (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison), psychology; and Babli Sinha (Ph.D., University of Chicago), English and media studies. Frost, who is the Wen Chao Chen Associate Professor of East Asian Social Sciences, will serve as Dean of the Sophomore Class. Hostetter will serve as Dean of the Junior Class. Features on these four will appear in upcoming issues of the College’s publications.

Art Professor Honored for Civic Engagement

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Associate Professor of Art Sarah Lindley receives an award
Associate Professor of Art Sarah Lindley received the Michigan Campus Compact Faculty/Staff Service Learning Award.

Michigan Campus Compact (MiCC) honored Associate Professor of Art Sarah Lindley with its biennial MiCC Faculty/Staff Community Service-Learning Award, the highest honor that MiCC bestows on faculty and staff in the state of Michigan.

Lindley has made outstanding contributions in service-learning, and she has inspired students to become involved in service-learning through modeling, influencing, and instruction. She was nominated by Alison Geist, director of the Mary Jane Underwood Stryker Center for Civic Engagement.

Since 2005 Lindley has taught at least one community-engaged arts course every year, and her students have completed multiple projects involving a wide variety of community partners and thousands of residents. Lindley has worked with the County Center for Health Equity, Kalamazoo Loaves & Fishes, Michigan Commission for the Blind, the YWCA, Education for the Arts, Fire Historical and Cultural Arts Collaborative, the Black Arts and Cultural Center, Ministry with Community, and Art Hop. She and her students have used arts as a vehicle for community and personal transformation, creating work that is useful, thoughtful, and inclusive. Lindley created the new Kalamazoo College Community Studio in the downtown Park Trades Center, and she has previously been honored with the Marcia Jackson Hunger Awareness Award by Kalamazoo Loaves & Fishes.

MiCC is a coalition of college and university presidents who are committed to fulfilling the public purpose of higher education. The organization helps students develop into engaged citizens by creating and expanding academic, co-curricular, and campus-wide opportunities for community service, service-learning, and civic engagement.

Headline and Lead Combine “Data,” “Value,” and Kalamazoo College

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Associate Provost Paul Sotherland
Associate Provost Paul Sotherland is an expert on K outcomes in the Collegiate Learning Assessment.

A Wall Street Journal article (“College Uses Test Data to Show Value,” by Douglas Belkin, February 20, 2014) describes K’s efforts to measure (and market) the gains its students experience in critical thinking and problem solving skills because of the K undergraduate learning experience.

The article notes that K leads a growing trend of colleges and universities becoming more transparent about sharing test data and other metrics to show the learning outcomes of a higher education. For his story Belkin interviewed Dean of Admission Eric Staab and Associate Provost Paul Sotherland as well  students and their parents for his article. The piece notes that K (Sotherland) shares data that documents the effect and value of a K education with parents and prospective students during campus visits.

Much of that data originates from the Collegiate Learning Assessment, currently the most reliable direct measure of students’ gains in critical thinking, analytical reasoning, writing, and problem solving as a result of particular undergraduate learning experiences. What distinguishes the CLA from other assessments is its focus on direct measures of learning rather than an aggregate of surrogate markers that include, for example (in some rankings), the size of an institution’s endowment or the number of alumni that provide annual gifts.