Higher Education for Higher Education Educators Madeline Carnevale, director of desktop technologies, has been selected to attend the Frye Institute, an intensive, two-week, residential program held in June at Emory University. The institute offers opportunities for extensive interaction among higher education leaders from diverse backgrounds, simultaneously enriching participants' experiences and shaping a new generation of campus leaders who will motivate, inspire, and manifest the ability to move higher education into the next century. Following the two-week session, participants conduct a yearlong practicum to explore, within their own institutional environment, the issues and questions raised during the institute. The results of the practicum are shared by participants in a short seminar the following year. There were more than 400 applicants and nominees for the program's fifty slots. The institute is named in honor of Billy E. Frye, chancellor and former provost of Emory University, member of the board of the Council on Library and Information Resources, and a distinguished leader in higher education. It is supported by a grant from the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation and is sponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources, Emory University.

Cutting-Edge Conference Susan Perry, director of library, information and technology services, has been tapped by the Mellon Foundation to help orchestrate a March conference here that will bring together academic and technology leaders from leading liberal arts colleges from New England and the mid-Atlantic states to discuss how to tackle a wide variety of important issues relating to higher education and the information revolution. She is working with Clara Yu, director of the Mellon Middlebury Center for Educational Technology, on this project. The Mellon Foundation is now exploring the idea of developing, with the assistance of a number of selective colleges, regional technology centers to help institutions address numerous challenges on the technological frontier. Among these: how can colleges hire and retain technologically adept staff members, manage growing costs of technological change, serve the changing pedagogical needs of faculty, and meet the needs of students for exposure and training to new tools and methods. Perry has played an ongoing role in helping Mellon shape thinking about these issues.

Eventful Sabbatical Stephen Jones, associate professor of Russian and Eurasian studies, is in the midst of a fruitful and peripatetic sabbatical. In June and July, he taught at the American University in Armenia for six weeks. In September, he took a group from the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., to the Caucasus (Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan) to investigate textiles. This spring finds Jones at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, for one semester to complete a book on the first republic in Georgia (1918–21). In the fall, he will be in Georgia with an International Research Exchange Board grant (part of the IARO scholarship program, or Individual Advanced Research Opportunities) to complete a project on democracy building in the Georgian Republic over the last decade.

Speaking of Latin America Professor of Latin American studies Lowell Gudmundson participated in the Conference on Latin American history of the American Historical Association, held in Boston in early January. He was one of four members of a roundtable hosted by the Central American Studies Committee on the topic “Central American Historiography: Current Trends, Problems, and Prospects.” In addition, he chaired and commented on a panel, organized with Katherine Bliss (one of four paper presenters), of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, history department, titled “Kicking the State Out of the Bedroom: Approaches to the Study of Sexual Violence in Early Twentieth-Century Latin America.”

Informing the Media Beverly Daniel Tatum, dean of the College, and Andrea Ayvazian, dean of religious life, led a two-day workshop with representatives of major news outlets, including the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, and the Miami Herald, as part of the annual James K. Batten lecture and workshop series hosted by the Newspaper Association of America. The series was held in Saint Petersburg, Florida, January 21–23, and this year's theme was “The National Silence on Race: The Role of the Media.”

In Memoriam Frank A. Jarek, who worked as a carpenter at the College between 1970 and 1988, died at the age of eighty on January 7. He is survived by his wife of fifty-one years, Sophie T. (Ziomek) Jarek, and his daughter, the Rev. Dr. Susan F. Jarek-Glidden.

What's new with you? Send news for “New & Notable” to Janet Tobin, Office of Communications, or email jtobin@mtholyoke.edu.