Author and Journalist David Finkel Delivers Kalamazoo College Commencement Address June 14

Graduation caps tossed in the airDavid Finkel, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author of “The Good Soldiers” and “Thank You for Your Service,” will deliver the commencement address to the Kalamazoo College graduating class of 2015 on Sunday June 14 at 1:00 p.m. on the campus Quad, located at 1200 Academy St. in Kalamazoo.

Finkel will also receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the College. Asia Liza Morales ’15 will address her fellow graduates in the role of senior speaker. Attorney, author, and LGBTQ activist Urvashi Vaid, will receive an Honorary Doctor of Law degree from the College.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Finkel
David Finkel

Kalamazoo College commencement is free and open to the public. Parking will be in high demand, so allow extra time. The College sets up about 3,000 folding chairs on the campus Quad and guests are invited to bring a lawn chair or blanket to stretch out on the grass. In case of rain, Anderson Athletic Center (1015 Academy St.) is the alternate site. Unfortunately, the gym can only accommodate the graduates, a few of their family members, and K administrators and faculty. K uses a special ticketing process for those seats.

For those unable to attend, K Commencement will be live-streamed via the Web.

David Finkel was the summer common reading author for the class of 2015 prior to their arrival at the College in fall 2011. He visited the K campus during students’ first-year orientation, giving a lecture and reading from “The Good Soldiers,” his bestselling account of a U.S. Army infantry unit during the Iraq War “surge.” The book earned the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and was named best book of 2009 by the New York Times.

Per K tradition, Finkel returns to deliver the commencement address to the same class of students he met in 2011.

Urvashi Vaid
Urvashi Vaid

Urvashi Vaid is director of the Engaging Tradition Project at the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School. Her most recent book is “Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics.” She was executive director of the Arcus Foundation from 2005 to 2010 and was instrumental in creating the vision for what is now Kalamazoo College’s Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership. Ms. Vaid received her bachelor’s degree from Vassar College and her law degree from Northeastern University Law School.

Asia Morales has pursued a major in biology with an interest in environmental studies while at K. She has been a Peer Leader, President’s Ambassador, StuComm representative, and a member of multiple civic engagement programs and student organizations, including S3A (Sexual Safety & Support Alliance), which educates, advocates, and provides support for victims of sexual assault. A Posse Scholar from Los Angeles, Asia studied abroad in Spain.

Student speaker Asia Morales
Asia Morales ’15

Finkel’s most recent book, the critically acclaimed “Thank You for Your Service,” chronicles the challenges faced by American soldiers and their families in war’s aftermath. Among its many awards, the book was named a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Award in nonfiction and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. It was named one of the best nonfiction books of 2013 by Publishers Weekly, one of the top 10 books of the year by The Washington Post, and best nonfiction book of 2013 by Kirkus Reviews.

An editor and writer for The Washington Post, Finkel has reported from Africa, Asia, Central America, Europe, and across the United States, and has covered wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He received the MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 2012 for “his long-form newswriting that has transformed readers’ understanding of military service and sacrifice.”

Finkel won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for “his ambitious, clear-eyed case study of the United States government’s attempt to bring democracy to Yemen.” He received his B.A. degree from University of Florida in 1977.

NINE PARTS OF DESIRE in the Dungeon Theatre

Eight students rehearse for "Nine Parts of Desire"
The cast of NINE PARTS OF DESIRE (l-r): standing — Aliera Morasch (Mullaya), Anita Ghans (The Doctor) Anya Opshinsky (Lalal), Isabela Agosa (Umm Ghada); seated — Jasmine Khin (Nanna), Grace Gilmore (Huda), Cheynne Harvey (Amal), and Abby Fraser (Iraqi Girl)

When Nine Parts of Desire premiered in New York City in the early 2000s, Gloria Steinem wrote, “The female half of Iraq has come to America.” It is with this philosophy in mind that Festival Playhouse of Kalamazoo College presents Heather Raffo’s play about the lives and stories of nine women, all of whom have a relationship to the physical, spiritual, and emotional spaces of modern Iraq. The play opens Thursday, April 30, at 7:30 p.m. and runs Friday and Saturday, May 1 and 2, at 8 p.m. The final performance occurs Sunday, May 3, at 2 p.m. All performances occur in the Dungeon Theatre in the Light Fine Arts Building on Kalamazoo College’s campus.

The play strives to celebrate the lives and identities of these women by complicating the archetypal portrayal of their country and its citizens. Each character seems to walk on a knife’s edge between contrasts—freedom and containment, tenacity and docility, knowledge and naivety, danger and desire—and each character tells a story of how these tensions have dictated her life.

None of Raffo’s characters are oppressed in a simple, two-dimensional way. Each woman approaches the world differently, and their stories and struggles are distinctly their own. What connects the women to each other and to the audience is far deeper than a shared experience of time and place. It is love–the negotiation and exploration of its many manifestations–that makes the piece cohesive and universal. In the play, one character muses, “It is the same, anywhere you live. if you love like an Iraqi woman. If you love like you can’t breathe.”

Festival Playhouse of Kalamazoo College invites you to come bear witness to these stories of struggle and triumph. In post-911 America, where ignorance and discrimination, and even hatred, often stand in the way of human connection, it is essential that we open our hearts, our ears, and our to these stories. In the words of Raffo herself, “Come. Now you sign the witness book.”

Tickets are $5 for students, $10 for seniors 65 and older, and $15 for other adults. Please call 269.337.7333 or visit the Festival Playhouse website for more information.

Text by Jane Huffman ’15. Photo by Emily Salswedel ’16.

Adding Voice to VISIONS

Six faculty and staff members representing the VISIONS + Voices Planning Committee
The VISIONS + Voices Planning Committee includes (l-r)—Eric Wimbley, director of security; Mia Henry, executive director of the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership; Jacob Lemon, area coordinator for residence life; Kyle Schultz, circulation supervisor for Upjohn Library; Laura Wilson, associate director for the Kalamazoo College Fund; and Jane Hoinville, prospect research analyst for College advancement.

A committee of six faculty and staff members is offering a three-part multicultural training titled “VISIONS + Voices,” which is open to all Kalamazoo College employees.

The sessions build upon diversity training offered in previous years to faculty and staff through the “VISIONS” program. According to members of the planning committee, attendees felt that program provided helpful resources but lacked a platform for sharing personal experiences. “VISIONS + Voices” augments the original training.

“We felt we could extend some of the conversations we had. We wanted to explore these conversations in more depth,” said Jacob Lemon, residential life area coordinator and member of the “VISIONS + Voices” planning committee.

A Diversity and Inclusion Mini-Grant made the planning committee’s vision a reality.

“We felt it [the grant] was a good fit for the follow-up work we were doing,” said Mia Henry, committee member and executive director of the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership.

Three supplemental sessions are offered: “Microaggressions,” “Monoculture, Pluralism, and Multiculturalism,” and “Marginalization on Campus.”

The first session (microaggressions) took place on April 8. About 40 staff and faculty members attended, just short of the 50 person cap.

The major take-away from the first session was attendees’ openness and willing to develop support groups, according to committee member Kyle Schulz, circulation supervisor for Upjohn Library.

“It’s clear that there is a thirst for faculty and staff to connect with one another and learn,” said Henry.

Two more opportunities remain for interested community members to attend. The session on “Monoculture, Pluralism, and Multiculturalism” will be offered on Thursday, May 7, and the session regarding “Marginalization on Campus” will take place Friday, June 19. Both sessions occur from 8:15- a.m. to 10 a.m. at the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership.

Interested faculty and staff may register online.

Text and photo by Matthew Muñoz ’14

Where’s the Beef?

Kalamazoo College alumna Nicolette Hahn Niman
Nicolette Hahn Niman

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.”

Text by Zinta Aistars; Photo by Mitch Tobias

Commitment, Heart and Soul

Four Michigan Campus Compact Award winners with Teresa Denton and Alison Geist
Several of the 2015 Michigan Campus Compact Award winners are flanked by their Center for Civic Engagement mentors and collaborators Teresa Denton (far left) and Alison Geist (far right). The students are (l-r) Jasmine An, Hannah Bogard, Mele Makalo, and Rose Tobin.

Eight Kalamazoo College seniors–each of them Civic Engagement Scholars in K’s Center for Civic Engagement–will receive Michigan Campus Compact (MiCC) Awards for their dedication to community service. Kacey Cook and Mele Makalo earned the MiCC Commitment to Service Award, recognizes up to two students per member campus in the state of Michigan for either the breadth or depth of their community involvement or service experiences. Only 31 students in the state will receive this award.

Jasmine An, Hannah Bogard, Alejandra Castillo, Katherine Rapin, Andrea Satchwell, and Rose Tobin will receive the Heart and Soul Award, “given to students to recognize their time, effort, and personal commitment to their communities through service. “We are thrilled that our remarkable students are receiving these awards,” said Alison Geist, director of the Center for Civic Engagement. “We are even more thrilled that we have had the honor to work closely with them.” The eight will be feted at an awards brunch in East Lansing on April 18. MiCC promotes the education and commitment of Michigan college students to be civically engaged citizens, through creating and expanding academic, co-curricular and campus-wide opportunities for community service, service-learning and civic engagement.

The Iconography of Justice

Arcus Center for Social Justice LeadershipDesigned by world renowned architect and MacArthur Fellow Jeanne Gang, the architecture that houses Kalamazoo College’s Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership has inspired rave reviews by many. Perhaps no work better explicates the iconography of the space than the video that was commissioned by Studio Gang Architects and produced by Dave Burk. The piece features many persons from Kalamazoo College, including President Eileen B. Wilson Oyelaran and Trustee Jon Stryker ’82, whose gift made the building possible. Convening on behalf of social justice often has taken place in small and out-of-the-way spaces designed for other purposes. The Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College brings these discussions up from the basement, so to speak, and squarely into public consciousness.

The Arcus Center works to develop emerging leaders and sustain existing leaders in the fields of human rights and social justice. As a learning environment and meeting space, it brings together students, faculty, visiting scholars, social justice leaders, and members of the public for conversation and activities aimed at creating a more just world. We invite you to take the seven minutes to view this short film. Together, the space and the people who experience animate, and the film shows how.

Kalamazoo College President Announces Retirement

Eileen B. Wilson-Oyelaran and Charlotte HallPresident Eileen B. Wilson-Oyelaran today announced her retirement from Kalamazoo College, effective June 30, 2016. She made the announcement at the College’s spring term all-campus gathering, a meeting of faculty and staff.

President Wilson-Oyelaran was unanimously elected the 17th president of Kalamazoo College by the board of trustees on December 11, 2004. She began her duties in July of 2005. Prior to the presidency of K she served as vice president and dean of the college of Salem Academy and College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

A native of Los Angeles, President Wilson-Oyelaran earned her undergraduate degree (sociology) from Pomona College, a liberal arts school in Claremont, California. She studied abroad in England as an undergraduate, and used a postgraduate fellowship to study in Africa (Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania) for 16 months.

Eileen B. Wilson-OyelaranShe returned to the U.S. to earn a master’s degree and Ph.D. in child development and early childhood education (Claremont Graduate University) and then taught in the departments of education and psychology at the University of Ife in Nigeria for 14 years. She married Olasope (Sope) Oyelaran in 1980, and they have four children—Doyin, Oyinda, Salewa, and Yinka.

The family moved to the United States in 1988. President Wilson-Oyelaran taught or served in administrative leadership positions at North Carolina Wesleyan College and Winston-Salem State University prior to joining the faculty of Salem College.

At K she led the development of a 10-year strategic plan for the college that, among other priorities, focused on the re-imagination and integration of the elements of K’s internationally renowned curriculum, the K-Plan. “We’re helping students integrate and reflect on the building blocks they use to construct their own unique K-Plans,” said President Wilson-Oyelaran: classroom explorations in the liberal arts, study abroad, career internships and networking opportunities, civic engagement, social justice leadership, and the capstone experience that is the senior individualized project. “Those elements, alone and in concert, enhance the four years that students spend at Kalamazoo College and will enhance students’ lives for years to come,” added President Wilson-Oyelaran.

Other curricular improvements during her tenure include revised graduation requirements, implementation of the Shared Passages Seminar Series (which helps students reflect upon and integrate their academic and experiential opportunities), three new academic majors (business, women and gender studies, and critical ethnic studies), two new intercollegiate sports (men’s and women’s lacrosse), the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership, and new career and professional development programs such as the Guilds of Kalamazoo College.

President Wilson-Oyelaran helped envision and implement another key focus of the College’s strategic plan: building a campus community whose diversity reflects the world where K students will live and work. She acknowledged that much work remains to be done in order to create a learning environment that is equitable and inclusive for each member of K’s diverse learning community–the most diverse in its history. In this the 10th year of her tenure, 26 percent of K students identify as U.S. students of color. International students (degree-seeking and visiting) are nearly 10 percent of the student body. Fifteen percent of K students are the first in their families to attend college; and one in four comes from a family of modest income.

President Wilson-Oyelaran has reinvigorated campus spaces that students and employees use to solidify the sense of community that characterizes Kalamazoo College. Not since Presidents Hoben and Hicks has the physical campus made such extraordinary gains in beauty and utility. New spaces that have been renovated or erected during President Wilson-Oyelaran’s tenure include the Hicks Center, the athletic fields and field house, and the extraordinary work of architecture that houses the social justice center. In addition to these spaces, construction of a new fitness and wellness center will begin at the end of summer, and preliminary design of a new natatorium is complete.

Also, per the strategic plan, enrollment has grown to nearly 1,500 students (the 2017 goal specified by the plan), and the College has implemented an ambitious alumni engagement plan. President Wilson-Oyelaran also has led the most successful fund-raising campaign in the College’s history. That effort, called the Campaign for Kalamazoo College, is in its final stages, having raised $123 million of its $125 million goal.

Charlotte HallChair of the Board of Trustees Charlotte Hall ’66 said that the search for a new president would begin immediately. She noted that the search committee would include trustees, alumni, students, faculty, and staff. The 18th president of Kalamazoo College is expected to assume those duties on July 1, 2016.

That new president will have big shoes to fill. “Eileen, we are so grateful for all the ways you’ve helped prepare K for its future,” said Hall. “I know I speak for the entire K community, the Kalamazoo Community, and all the people you have touched throughout your time in higher education when I say we hope the best for you and Sope.”

President Wilson-Oyelaran cited the “singular honor” of serving at Kalamazoo College and shared her belief that, K, “the very best is yet to come.”

Her legacy here is truly a blessing for our entire community. More than a decade ago, when she was considering the decision to move from Salem Academy and College to Kalamazoo College, Eileen Wilson-Oyelaran was seeking some sort of sign to tip the scale. She found it when she learned that the great abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth had once met with kindred spirit Lucinda Hinsdale Stone (head of the female department at K, which was one of the first colleges in the country to provide higher education for women). “Ever since I was a child,” President Wilson-Oyelaran said in 2004, “Sojourner Truth has been an icon for me.”

Now, in turn, Kalamazoo College President Eileen B. Wilson-Oyelaran can be an icon for us.

Kalamazoo College Lecture Will Focus on the Holocaust

Professor Doris L. BergenThe 2015 Edward Moritz Lecture in History coincides with the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps and the end of World War II. The lecture will occur Thursday, April 16, at 7 p.m. in Dewing Hall Room 103. The event is free and open to the public. Professor Doris L. Bergen, Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto (and one of the world’s most distinguished scholars of the Holocaust), will speak on “Holocaust or Genocide? Uniqueness and Universality.”

Professor Bergen received her Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina, where she studied with Professor Gerhard Weinberg. Her research focuses on issues of religion, gender, and ethnicity in the Holocaust and World War II and comparatively in other cases of extreme violence. She has written many books including War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (2003). The recipient of many honors and awards, Professor Bergen is a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington , D.C.

The annual Edward Moritz Lecture pays tribute to the late Professor Edward Moritz, who taught British and European history at Kalamazoo College from 1955 to 1988 and served for many years as department chair.

K Goes Test Optional

Stetson Chapel towerAfter the current 2014-15 admission cycle, Kalamazoo College will no longer require ACT or SAT standardized test scores to be part of a prospective student’s application. The change will affect students applying for enrollment in fall 2016.

The change makes K part of a growing trend in higher education called “test optional” admission. More than 800 colleges and universities in the country admit students without regard to test scores, including a substantial number of highly-ranked national liberal arts colleges. Kalamazoo College would be the first elite liberal arts college in Michigan to join the movement.

“Admission to K always has been — and will continue to be — very selective,” says Dean of Admission and Financial Aid Eric Staab. “Admission is determined by various factors that express a student’s qualities and abilities and likelihood to thrive at K,” he added.

According to Staab, these factors include high school grade point average, academic rigor of the high school curriculum, the application essay, participation in co-curricular activities, and letters of recommendation.

“Students may continue to submit test scores as additional information,” said Staab, “but for students applying to enroll at K in 2016, test scores will no longer impact the admission decision.”

Studies show that standardized test scores have little broad predictive value for undergraduate success. A two-year study by Kalamazoo College supports that finding. The study, completed by faculty and staff members serving on K’s Admission and Financial Aid Committee (AFAC), looked at data from the four classes that matriculated to K from 2009 through 2012 for correlations between academic performance at K and the admission factors, including standardized test scores.

According to Staab, high school GPA was the best and most consistent predictor of academic performance at K across race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic categories. Scores on standardized tests tend to correlate with family income and may say more about an applicant’s economic advantages — or disadvantages — than about academic potential.

“Given that studies have found a correlation between income and test scores, it seems unfair to use test scores in the admission process,” Staab said.

Staab said he and others at the College expect the test-optional change to have no effect on the quality of students who will constitute future incoming classes. The College will conduct follow-up research to measure the performance of the new test-optional approach, as well as its possible effects on first-year GPA, retention and graduation rate, areas of study, and “first destination” data (a.k.a. employment, graduate school, or other) after graduation.

Kalamazoo College Associate Professor of Biology Ann Fraser, who served as the AFAC study’s principal investigator, said “K’s research suggests that test scores were telling us very little regarding a student’s potential for success at K, and that high school GPA and curriculum rigor were predicting better and perhaps more fairly. We believe the change will attract students who may not do well on standardized tests but who tend to think outside the box. And that prospect can be very exciting for the College.”

Her colleagues on the Kalamazoo College faculty agreed. The test optional change was approved by a large majority of the College’s faculty in November 2014. K joins the growing ranks of test-optional colleges, including Bates, Beloit, Bowdoin, Denison, Earlham, Middlebury, and others. A list of test-optional colleges and links to studies and other information on the test-optional topic may be found at the National Center for Fair and Open Testing website.

 

Spring Break Update and Message From Kalamazoo College President Eileen Wilson-Oyelaran

Kalamazoo College President Eileen Wilson-Oyelaran
Kalamazoo College President Eileen Wilson-Oyelaran

Spring Break 2015 at Kalamazoo College begins Wed. March 18 at 12 noon. The following message was sent to all K students, faculty, and staff on Monday March 16…

Dear Members of the Campus Community:

As some of you prepare for Spring Break I wanted to provide an update to recent campus events and concerns.

The investigation into the identity of the persons who posted hate speech and a specific threat in the StuComm document continues. We are hopeful that the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety and the FBI can determine the perpetrator(s), and we are mindful that sufficient evidence to pinpoint with certainty the individual or individuals responsible may not be discoverable.

Throughout the week I have had an opportunity to talk with many of you regarding your thoughts on how effectively we have handled the most recent threats.  Your feedback has been extremely helpful, and the campus crisis management team will make changes in light of your comments and suggestions.

Many of you have also offered suggestions regarding the various ways K might move forward in light of the multifaceted reality of students who feel marginalized at K.  This will be difficult work and everyone on campus must play a part.

Very early in spring term I will outline the process—a process co-developed with a small group of students, faculty, and staff—that we will use to address the marginalization that some of our students experience. That process will allow us to get to work quickly and to enlist the minds and hearts and actions of everyone at the College in productive and creative ways. The work will be demanding, and some of the changes will be structural and fundamental. The work will yield actions, some of which we hope to implement very quickly.

I thank you and hope that each of you find some time for rest and reflection during the Spring Break. Several of you requested possible resources to consult.  I can think of none better than “In Their Own Words” (a report in the voices of K students from the K student focus groups of April and May 2013) and an article referenced in that report: “Talking About Race, Learning About Racism: The Application of Racial Identity Development Theory in the Classroom,” by Beverly Daniel Tatum.

At K, we share many things in common, and we differ from one another. Engaging fully with those truths, with compassion and empathy, will get us where we need to be as a larger community.

Eileen Wilson-Oyelaran