Commencement Speaker - Charlayne Hunter-Gault / Commencement Highlights / Highlights / Snapshot - Grad Student Lounge / Campaign News / Gilgut Chair / Chuck Close / Home / Summer Table of Contents
Joining Governor Paul Celluci, President William Bulger, and Chancellor David Scott in addressing our June graduates were student speaker Jean Marie Maranville `98, an engineering major from Tewksbury; George J. Mitchell, the former U.S. senator from Maine who negotiated last spring's peace agreement in Northern Ireland; and broadcast journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who delivered the principal address. Excerpts from that speech follow.
"I GREET YOU THIS MORNING with one of the salutations from South Africa's eleven official language groups: Sanibona!
"And if you feel so inclined, you may answer me with Yebo! Sawubona.
"And if you care at all about how I feel, you could add: Njani?
"Let me now offer my congratulations to the members of the class of 1998 and to all of those who helped you get here. I would linger on this a bit longer, given what it usually takes to get to this moment! But I have been told to keep this short and sweet, pithy and brief, and after the two weeks I've just had in war-torn and starving Southern Sudan, I am more than happy to try and oblige. I need some sleep!
"I am also more than happy, indeed downright excited, to have this opportunity to join you as a member of the class of 1998 and to share my excitement about the world you are about to move into a world I hope you are looking forward to navigating with confidence and joy. I want to depart from the journalistic tendency to titillate you with tales that make your skin crawl and hair stand on end or that feed what is believed to be a lust for lust. Instead, I want to borrow an old line to describe these new times, and talk about them as days of `miracles and wonder.'
"Now some of you are thinking, `But she just said she spent the last seven days in war-torn Southern Sudan. Where is the miracle, where is the wonder in that?' And indeed, there is not much there at the moment to celebrate. A fifteen-year civil war combined with a recent famine has claimed many lives and may yet claim many more. Many of them are babies whose mothers cannot sustain them because the mother's only food is the leaves from trees and grass.
"I was recently at a feeding center set up by the U.N. in a near-barren area that was once a village. As I stood in the middle of the outdoor compound, I noticed at least three mothers sitting on blankets on the earthen floor, nursing two babies at a time. When I asked the nurse about this, she informed me they were twins. Was it just an odd coincidence that there were three sets of twins here, I asked. The nurse said no, there were many twins in the Dinka culture. What was there about Dinkas that led them to have so many twins, I wanted to know.
"The nurse smiled an almost beatific smile and said softly, `We lose so many of our people, I guess it's God's way of helping us get them back.' Hers was the face of hope. These are the days of miracle and wonder.
"A short time before that, I had been in Rwanda, where genocidal slaughter of more than a half million of the minority Tutsis has left many horrors, not least thousands of children living in households headed by other children.
I met some of these children at a church service. Like me, some were visitors and were asked to introduce themselves to the congregation. Rwandans are basically interior people, not given to venting emotions. They rarely talk about the genocide. But a few alluded to it, if only obliquely. Now and then, one would sing a hymn that they said was of particular comfort.
"I had not planned to speak, but the pastor insisted that the visitor from a long way off say something. I was almost overwhelmed by the moment, wondering, as I headed to the front of the church, what on earth would I say that would have any meaning for young people who had suffered in such a unique way. And so I said just that. I told them that there was no way that I could begin to understand what they had just lived through.
"But then I shared with them a little of the history of the American South, telling them about the system that was designed to keep a whole race of people subjugated. I told them that many died. And I briefly shared with them the kind of armor that the values of the people of my village created that helped sustain me as long as need be, but also gave me what I needed to join the multitude of students who one day rose up against that system and destroyed it.
"And as I told them a little about the civil rights movement in America and the successes it had, I told them a little about the values that fuel those success. That even as I resisted my grandmother's entreaties to learn the Twenty-third Psalm I would rather have been out climbing trees learn it I did. Thus when I entered the University of Georgia as its first black woman student and was confronted with a mob throwing bricks and threatening to kill me, I was wrapped in the armor my grandmother passed down: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.
"Even now, I told them, when confronted with a society that still finds it difficult to yield its privilege and keep its promise, I keep on moving to take my place, wrapped in the armor hammered to perfection by my extended family everyone in the whole little village I grew up in my disenfranchised black neighbors, my ill-equipped teachers in the segregated schools and in the churches. When they, the people of my village, couldn't give us first-class citizenship, they labored to give us a first-class sense of ourselves.
"And then I told the young Tutsis about the song we used to sing during our protest marches. And I invited them to sing along with me. Most spoke no English, but there was a translator for my words. And as I sang, `Ain't gonna let nobody turn me `roun',' I could see them singing the words, and that emboldened me. I then sang, `Ain't gonna let no genocide turn me `roun.' And they sang it with gusto...The face of hope in these days of miracle and wonder.
"My `journey to the horizons in search of people,' to borrow from Zora Neal Hurston, has been such a magnificent journey of discovery. If I were younger, and knew what I know now, I think I might have wanted to grow up to be Margaret Mead instead of Brenda Starr. And so I implore you, who have already been exposed through this magnificent cathedral of learning to the best that the world has offered down through the ages, to go into the world in search of your new neighbors and find out why it is important that you meet them and they meet you. You have the gifts of your knowledge, culture, and values to share, and so do they. And if we embrace rather than fear or fight the culture of others, in addition to being the educators, communicators, economists, nurses, scientists, and all the other professions that you now represent, you will also become architects of a new, twenty-first-century world that we all will want to live in.
"With that, may I say once again how happy I am to be one of your people. I hope to see you in the world during these days of miracle and wonder.
"Ngibonga Kakhulu! Thank you very much!"
UNDER BRIGHT SUN and clear blue skies, 4,172 undergrads received degrees in nearly 100 majors during the school's 128th Commencement Sunday morning, May 24, in Alumni Stakium. A day earlier, more than half of the Graduate School's 1,300 master's and doctoral degree recipients, and some 3,500 friends and family members, attended commencement exercises at the Mullins Center.
Cures Through Clones: Parkinson's disease has been successfully treated in rats by UMass researchers using fetal brain cells taken from cloned cows. In a recent article in Nature Medicine, JAMES ROBL, STEVEN STICE, and JOSE CIBELLI of veterinary and animal sciences say adaptations of their techniques could prove useful in treating Huntington's disease, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, Lou Gehrig's disease, and other conditions involving loss of cell function.
Totally UMass genius
the MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" was awarded in June to UMass professor NANCY FOLBRE '79G, a economist whose research centers on "caring labor." The MacArthur fellowships - unrestricted, not-strings-attached awards, $280,000 over a five-year period in Folbre's case-have been awarded to 531 people since 1981, six of them Umass faculty or alumni. The seventh is both: Folbre calls herself a "totally UMass person, a graduate of, as well as a teacher in the best heterodox economics department in the country."
Cow talk: In the May 22 issue of Science , these same researchers describe the techniques that enabled them to produce six cloned, transgenic calves on a ranch in Texas last winter. Three of the cloned steers, GEORGE, CHARLIE, and ALFRED, traveled from their native state and arrived in good health on campus in May. They will be permanent members of the campus teaching herd.
Whale's end: Working elbow-to-elbow with fisheries and wildlife and New England Aquarium colleagues, UMass scientists JIN MENG, a member of the biology faculty, and KATE DOYLE , collection manager for mammals, salvaged the skeleton of a humpback whale spotted off Wellfleet and towed to Truro in early May. "It's important to accept responsibility for collecting and curating zoological specimens whenever possible," says Professor WILLIAM E. BEMIS , director of zoological collections, "for there is no guarantee that such opportunities will occur again."
Blowing Away the Competition: Two UMass student groups won first place at the Collegiate Jazz Festival at Villanova University in March. The "Art Gecko" Sextet took best combo honors, and the Jazz Ensemble I swept all the big band awards. Meanwhile, the ensemble's recording Pay the Fiddler made the 1997 Blue Chip Awards in Jazz Educator's Journal, and featured saxophonist NATE CHILDERS `97 was named best jazz soloist at the Twenty-first annual Downbeat Student Music Awards . . . Prize-winning Mellon: English major JAMIE FUMO received a 1998 Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies, for which "the funding is generous and the competition fierce," according to Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts Lee Edwards. The $14,000 stipend toward a first year of doctoral study was awarded to just ninety-seven students nationwide.
Top Dogs
Much of the UMass administration is made up of scholars-in-mufti: gifted academics who dress up every day in deference to their leadership roles. Some recent accomplishments reflecting this happy fact:
- $200,000 Center for International Education research grant, BARBARA B. BURN, associate provost for international programs.
-Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences; member, National Reading Panel; CORA B. MARRETT, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs.
-Medallion, Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations; Award of Excellence in Medical Communication, New England chapter of American Medical Writers; Award for Contributions to Multicultural Affairs, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association; CHARLENA SEYMOUR, dean of graduate studies.
-Visiting Scholar, American Association of Higher Education, MARY DEANE SORCINELLI, associate provost for faculty development.
...In other top-doggery, the search for a new dean of nursing has resulted in the hiring of EILEEN BRESLIN, former chair of the department of nursing at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. An on a soberer note, THOMAS B. ROBINSON, vice chancellor for student affairs since 1992, has resigned to become vice president for student services at Purdue.
Helping professions: Educationally disadvantaged students in Amherst, Northampton, and Holyoke will get some of the support they need to stay in school from the UMass Talent Search program, which has received a federal grant of nearly $1 million over the next four years. . . Historically disadvantaged South African campuses will be aided by a consortium of American universities that UMass has been invited to join. The $21.9 million, USAID-funded effort, coordinated by the United Negro College Fund, is led on campus by MZAMO MANGALISO of SOM . . . The new UMass Ph.D. program in Afro-American studies is proving increasingly successful in attracting black males, though the statistics for black men attending college nationwide are discouraging, says Afro-American studies professor ROBERT PAUL WOLFF. The two-year-old program is one of only three in the country, and the only one in the Northeast.
From madman to Big Man on Campus: After the Minutemen basketball team lost in the NCAA tournament, Coach BRUISER FLINT put things in perspective. "Coaching is not about wins and losses," he said. "Coaching is about watching young people develop." Case in point: TYRONE WEEKS `97, the Proposition 48 athlete who arrived five years ago with a hard-luck past and is leaving with a degree and a year of additional work in Afro-American studies. The coach expressed his delight at seeing Weeks develop from "a madman" to a BMOC. For his part, Weeks says the coach, "was my father figure when I needed one. I grew from a boy into a man at UMass."
Star turns: Campus astronomers have discovered a rare molecule within the dense, gaseous clouds where new stars form in interstellar space. Professor WILLIAM IRVINE , two of his students, and colleagues in Sweden and Japan reported finding ethylene oxide in three interstellar clouds thousands of light-years away in the Milky Way galaxy . . .Called on by NASA to explain what may be the first image of a planet outside our solar system, astronomy professor STEPHEN STROM joined a panel of five scientists at a press conference in Washington in May. Strom's research is in star formation; the apparent planet, detected by the Hubble Space Telescope, lies at the end of a filament of light suggesting that it originated in the vicinity of a pair of newly forming stars in the Taurus constellation . . .Computer chips for deep-space probes are the focus of NASA -funded research that will give ISRAEL KOREN of the electrical and computer engineering faculty a role in the design of unmanned space vehicles set to launch in 2001.
Sweeping change: Custodial services spent several months last spring using brain power, elbow grease, and a specialized computer program to solve a complex equation: how to accomplish with 160 employees the work of 267. Beginning in July, workers embarked on a schedule that trims the frequency of some tasks to emphasize higher priority ones and creates a "relief staff" to fill in for workers sick or on vacation. The goal is for high-priority areas such as washrooms and classrooms to receive the most attention, says assistant director for custodial service RON LENOIS.
Alternative transportation: In one of their annual educational rites of spring, engineering students launched the concrete canoe "Minute-maniac" on the Campus Pond in mid-April. Designed and built with the aid of an Alumni Association grant, the canoe was making its maiden voyage in preparation for a regional competition (in which, alas, they were edged out by the University of Rhode Island) sponsored by the American Society of Civil Engineering and Master Builders Technologies.
. . . Further afield, and by chalking up fuel efficiencies of 590 mpg, six UMass engineering students maintained their school's "first in the U.S." finish at the annual Collegiate Supermileage Vehicle Competition sponsored by the Society of Automotive Engineers in Michigan in June. UMass finished second overall among thirty-three competitors from throughout North America.
Chime on:
The original swinging bell and the ten tower chimes of Old Chapel were removed by giant crane June 19, lowered onto a truck, hauled to Pennsylvania for expert packing, and loaded onto a ship bound for Holland for restoration by one of the four facilities in the world that can complete such delicate repairs. "That's a lot of moving around for approximately 12,000 pounds of history," wrote ROB GALVIN '79 of the Campus Chronicle. The restored bells will be returned to a renovated belfry capable of both supporting their weight and protecting itself from the effects of extended vibration. Meanwhile, in Palm City, Pennsylvania, the clock faces are being restored; restoration of the clock mechanism itself will be done on campus, including replacement of the current electric mechanism with a restored pendulum. Physical Plan staffer DICK NATHHORST '79 is project manager for the nearly $1 million tower project.
Watch your mailbox: A totally redesigned and revitalizedCampus Connection, the newsletter of the UMass Alumni Association, makes its debut in September. Focusing closely on the ambitious work of the Association both on and off campus, the new publication will be sent to all alumni once a year, to members quarterly.
Singer TSIDII LE LOKA '95GC won the Outer Critics Circle Award for her performance in the Broadway production of The Lion King ("Lionizing Broadway," Performing Arts, Spring 1998). Le Loka also received a Tony Award nomination for her role in the musical, which scored six statuettes at the June 7 ceremony at Radio City Music Hall.
For the second year in a row, the UMass softball team coached by ELAINE SORTINO (Perfect play," Great Sport, Spring 1998) was eliminated from the College World Series without scoring a win. Winners of twenty-two straight games heading into the tournament, the Minutewomen were understandable bummed in its immediate aftermath. But "ime will heal all things," Sortino told the Daily Hampshire Gazette. "It always does."
And on hte football front, athletic director ROBERT MARCUM informed the Board of Trustees in April that the proposal to upgrade the football program to Division 1_A has not gained ground ("Like ham and eggs," Great Sport, Winter 1997). Nearly a year after discussions of the ramifications of such an upgrade spread across campus, Marcum said that the window of opportunity may have closed for the time being.
"We know the Buds, the Basses, the wine person," bartender Katherine Brannum assures me minutes after I've walked into the grad student lounge, sat down on a black stool at one end of the bar, and asked whether anyone drinks anymore.
The wine person?
"We have only one regular wine drinker," puts in manager Shibani Ghosh, who occupies another stool. A nutrition Ph.D. student, Ghosh is relaxing with a Coke after her shift. "Alcohol is very little of our business," she says in a neatly rounded Indian accent. The grad student lounge is a "semi-bar," licensed to sell only beer in bottles and wine. No hard liquor. "Which is fine with me," says Ghosh.
"We've never had a drunk in here," continues Katherine, who recently defended her dissertation in political science and is penning revisions on a manuscript in between serving the occasional patron. "If someone has three beers in a day, we're shocked."
"Mostly people come for the coffee, tea, sometimes beer, the soups," says Ghosh. "The carrot cake," she adds with a laugh. "A couple years ago, we had a lot of Germans coming in, and our carrot cake sales skyrocketed. So now we carry carrot cake."
The scene at the grad student lounge, an inconspicuous retreat across the Campus Center concourse from the Blue Wall, is fabulously international, reflecting the demographics of the many science programs in the buildings nearby. Many of the patrons and staff are Indian, and there's currently a contingent of English guys coming for lunch, Ghosh says. Math, engineering, computer science, public health, and economics students and faculty create a steady flow of business.
Most people come at lunchtime, says Ghosh, but some stop in several times a day, to sit at one of the small black tables and get some work doneor not. Maybe they'll gaze at one of the paintings that often adorn the concrete walls, giving the place, according to Prasad, another bartender, the look of "an actual art-gallery cafe." Maybe they'll play the piano. They may bring in a cassette and ask Katherine to put it in the tape deck, as a Polish woman does this afternoon. If they've got the time to talk, they clearly feel welcomed to sit at the bar. During my visit, I hear fragments of conversations on subjects from Frank Sinatra to the ethics of working for Microsoft.
"Once a day isn't 'regular' around here," says Katherine with amused affection for the true loyalists. Sure enough, within a short time a number of people appear who count as regulars.
John's in for a coffee, as he is three or four times a day, he says. This visit he spends reading the New York Times, sometimes reading snippets aloud to Prasad. Meera, an undergrad, says she's been in about three times a day this year. Now a senior, she started visiting the grad lounge when she was a freshman, knowing it was a quiet place to work because her older brother came here. "I couldn't come as often while he was in school, because he didn't want me around at the same time he was here. But he graduated last year," she says with a smile.
Cris Pedregal-Martin may not officially count as a regular, since he's here only "four or five times a week." But he has two personal coffee mugs behind the bar, and that's good enough. "This is the only place where they both have an espresso machine and know how to use it," says this Argentinian American.
A woman wearing a sea-blue shift that floats down to her lime-green Keds takes a seat and orders a glass of wine. A polymer science graduate student, she identifies herself as "Leslie," with audible quote marks around the name and a level look that will brook no
discussion of her alias. Was she in earlier today?
"Yes, I was here in the morning. Then I came back for a beer. Now I'd like a piece of pie."
"What do you like about the place?" I ask.
"In the morning, it's the coffee; in the afternoon, it's their wonderful sandwiches and soups." She pauses. "It's the people, the ambience, the music; often someone plays the piano. We have ambience in spades here."- Deborah Klenotic
YOU KNOW WHAT THIS IS LIKE, don't you?" asked a beaming Hanlyn Davies, chair of the UMass art department, addressing an audience of 100 or so UMass alumni and friends gathered last April in the Manhattan studio of painter Chuck Close. "This is as though Monet had invited you all to join him for lunch in his gardens at Giverny."
And though the lucky celebrants beaming back at Davies were clad in sleek black or baggy denim, instead of nineteenth century linens, and though they'd been ferried down to Soho from the Museum of Modern Art in a fleet of assorted late-twentieth-century vehicles, instead of carriages and buggies, the analogy was right on the money. Because former painting faculty member Chuck Close who accepted an honorary doctorate from the university in 1995 and agreed to this unprecedented party in his studio to support Campaign UMass is a big deal, as big a deal now as Monet was in his day.
That was Close's familiar profile on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, in connection with the huge mid-career retrospective of his work that ran from February to May at MOMA. That was his work and life featured in articles and reviews in The New Yorker, Slate, Time, and virtually every other major magazine in the country. And, if you missed those, maybe you heard his rumbly-rich baritone supplying patient, humorous, and strikingly intelligent answers to the probing questions of Terry Gross on NPR's "Fresh Air."
The MOMA retrospective also inspired this "Chuck Close Celebration," organized by the art department and its institutional parent, the College of Humanities and Fine Arts. "I still can't believe I got invited," blurted one young alumna scarcely able to believe her good fortune. In the formal part of the evening, Davies and Chancellor David Scott would explain. In addition to paying homage to one of our most distinguished former faculty, the university hoped with this gathering to strengthen ties with its art, art history, and New York area alumni: ties crucial to building support for a new facility for the visual arts, an objective high on the Campaign UMass wish-list.
The celebration began earlier in the afternoon, uptown at MOMA, with a tour of the exhibition: ninety pieces, mostly monumental heads, produced in the thirty years since Close left UMass. It took a high degree of focus to travel through those thirty years in two hours, following the evolution of the painter's style from the cool, smooth-surfaced monochromatic acrylics of the '60s and '70s, to the looser and more visibly gridded images of the '80s, to the current work: those explosive, incandescent, and joyously vibrating surfaces, celebrations in paint of his friends (including most of the prominent names in the contemporary art world), his family, and his own self.
The progression of his style is so logical, it was nearly impossible to recognize the place where it was interrupted for the surprisingly brief period eight months in 1988 that it took the painter to adapt to a new working system after a calamitous collapsed spinal artery left him paralyzed from the shoulders down. To do justice to the powerful work, one had to ignore the real live movie star we spotted in one gallery, and to resist spending too much time in another enjoying the doubletakes of non-UMass visitors catching sight of our own John Roy a member of the UMass painting faculty since 1965, and longtime friend of the artist standing there in the flesh in front of one of Close's four or five imposing representations of him.
Now, back in Close's enormous studio ninety feet long and probably twenty-five feet wide; all cool grey tiles and cool white walls, but rendered cosy and as incandescent as Close's current work this evening by this capacity crowd of UMass people the guests, mostly youngish former art majors, are doing some serious socializing.
Chatter and hugs as they greet old friends and former faculty. A bit of shyness as they approach the artist, stationed in his wheelchair at the easel end of the room. He shares gracious conversation with each guest, helping them over whatever bumps of social awkwardness his paralysis might engender by offering up his hands for clasping. Behind him, on the customized easel, is a work-in-progress, witness to his working style. A cluster of young artists crouches, acolyte-like, at the rolling cart that houses his brushes and knives and paint. A reedy young man in black turns over a tube and reads out, "phthalo green," in a hushed whisper, as though answering to himself an earlier question about how a certain dekooningesque hue was achieved.
After remarks by Davies and the Chancellor, it is John Roy who affectionately introduces Chuck Close to the gathering, letting us know, in no uncertain terms, that those of us who had not studied at UMass during those two short years of Close's tenure had missed out on some magnificent mentoring. Then it was time for Close to say something.
"Well," begins the artist in affable understatement, "I don't have any warm and fuzzy feelings about the place, UMass." (UMass people with a thirty-year memory, or a file of newspaper clippings from 1967, will know that Close quitted Amherst for the Big Apple after campus authorities bodily removed his controversial first solo show from the walls of the Student Union. This censorship, silly and patently short-sighted, led to a lawsuit, later dropped, by the artist water under the bridge, he says now with characteristic generosity.) But he makes it clear how great is his affection for the people that are UMass. Over time and distance "Amherst is further from New York than it looks on a map," he points out he has maintained deep friendships with former colleagues and students the most abiding of which is his marriage to his wife, Leslie, a former student and the mother of his two daughters. (And showing that thirty years after his departure from academe he can still make a chancellor wince, he cracks a joke about having been here in the days when faculty could still date students.)
All jokes aside, Chuck Close a monumental artist, a man who lives and works with a monumentally unforgiving physical condition has been monumentally forgiving, and generous, of both spirit and time, to his UMass friends and fans. And, thanks to him, the distance between New York and Amherst isn't anything like as far as it used to be.
-Elizabeth Pols
Constantine Gilgut '31, '34G, left, with Chancellor David K. Scott.
A DOUBLE ALUMNUS and long-time professor was honored on campus May 2 when the Constantine J. Gilgut Chair in Plant Biology was announced. Funded by a major gift from Gilgut's family, the endowment will support the directorship of the plant biology program; fund research; and support outstanding students, who will be known as Gilgut Fellows. A specialist in the control of diseases of potatoes, tobacco, vegetables, fruits, and other crops. Gilgut earned his doctorate from Harvard while working at the Waltham Experiment Station. He and his wife, Maria, live in Amherst.
