September
10,
2004
MHC
Newsmakers
Russian Rock Correspondent
Senior Lecturer in Russian Susan Scotto has a new beat: Russian
pop stars. The July 30 Moscow Times featured a long article by
Scotto looking at three rising Russian pop divas: “Girls
on Top: Three Young Singers with a Go-Getting Attitude are Taking
the Russian Pop Scene by Storm.”
Scotto based her piece on personal interviews with rising stars
Zemfira, Chicherina, and Vika Voronina. Here’s her description
of one of her subjects:
“If Yulia Savicheva were a punctuation mark, she’d be an exclamation
point. A pink exclamation point.
“This effervescent pop star, who started her career at the age of four
with interpretative dance at a concert by the rock group Agatha Christie, turned
17 this year. But sitting in a cafe last month, just before her performance at
the MUZ-TV Awards, she did not look a day over 15: petite, with long, straight
blond hair and freckles, bright pink sneakers and pale pink jeans beneath a pink
and white A-line minidress. Oh, yes, and pink sweatbands studded with chrome
stars on her wrists.”
In addition, Scotto has a number of other articles slated for publication: her
interview with the singer Zemfira will appear this fall in the New York Russian-language
newspaper Novoye Russkoye Slovo; and an article with her commentary on the three
singer-songwriters she spoke with for the Moscow Times story as well as excerpts
from the interviews will appear in the Russian version of Rolling Stone magazine.
On September 1, Scotto was also a featured guest on the live Russian-language
TV program Contact on the American Russian TV channel RTN. And, she’s
been asked to write a piece on the three for Russian Life magazine.
Paradise Found The Five College region is “a treasure chest, compact,
dense in its wealth, and quite simply fascinating by the inch or mile,” reported
the Philadelphia Inquirer in the travel section of its August 8 edition. In “Stop
Looking: Pioneer Valley Is About Perfect,” staff writer Denis Horgan
reports on the history, culture, and natural beauty to be found in the Connecticut
River valley. “The schools—Amherst, Smith, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke
colleges and the University of Massachusetts—attract youth and energy;
the wealth in gold and culture reaches out beyond the campus walls; the strength
and tradition combine to preserve deep pockets of natural and historical beauty
where grim commerce and strip malls might intrude otherwise,” Horgan
wrote. “As much as the surrounding countryside, the colleges are lovely.
None is more lovely, I submit confidentially, than glorious Mount Holyoke.
It is an oasis of quiet and peace in a sea of peace and quiet. Its grand architecture,
landscaping, and sense of culture high and deep rest quietly for those willing
to seek it out.” The article also appeared in the Portland, Maine, Press
Herald; the Hartford Courant; the Journal News of White Plains, New York; and
several other newspapers.
School of Rock An article in the August 6 edition of Science magazine that
details what scientists have learned from observations of the Martian surface
makes note of the contributions of Darby Dyar, professor of astronomy and geology
at Mount Holyoke. The article, “Rainbow of Martian Minerals Paints Picture
of Degradation,” noted that scientists are debating when and how changes
occurred in the red planet’s rocky surface. While the evidence collected
by the Martian rovers and the Mars Express orbiter indicates Mars was “a
salt-laden, often-corroded planet that had standing water early in its history,” writer
Richard Kerr noted, some scientists believe that it was not water, but centuries
of weather, that degraded rocks in the Martian soil. Dyar and two other spectroscopists
not on the rover team, Melissa Lane of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson,
Arizona, and Janice Bishop of NASA Ames, presented a paper that supports that
idea at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in March. “What the
rover team takes to be unaltered rock,” Kerr wrote, “Lane and her
colleagues see as alteration products formed well after a warm and wet Mars.” A
resolution of that question, and a greater understanding of how the Martian
surface came to be as it is, will probably require samples to be brought back
to Earth, another scientist told Kerr.
Broadening Horizons Mount Holyoke is among a number of colleges recommended
by the director of a program designed to help Native Americans gain entry into
highly selective colleges, an article in the August 1 edition of the New York
Times reported. In the article, Whitney Laughlin, the founder of the program,
College Horizons, counseled Brittney Babb, a Lower Brule Sioux from Vermillion,
South Dakota. “Ms. Babb had already expressed an interest in Dartmouth,
Georgetown, and Harvard, and Dr. Laughlin urged her also to consider Mount
Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Haverford, Carleton, Macalester, and Washington University
in St. Louis,” staff writer Sam Dillon reported. The article noted that
Native Americans are underrepresented at highly selective colleges, citing
in part “the cultural issues Indian students face at largely white universities” and
the schools’ need to understand those
difficulties.
Breaking Rank Andrea Ayvazian, chaplain and adviser to the Protestant community
at MHC, was quoted in the July 10 New York Times about a visit to campus by
Robert Fuller, the author of a book on “rankism”—the humiliations,
indignities, and abuses heaped upon “nobodies” by those of higher
rank. Quoted in “Tilting at Windbags: A Crusade Against Rank,” an
article about Fuller’s book Somebodies and Nobodies, Ayvazian recalled
that she was “surprised to see how mixed the audience was: students,
faculty members, administrators, staff members, and campus workers,” staff
writer Julie Salamon reported. “Bob’s analysis freed people who
considered themselves low in the heirarchy to tell their stories,” Ayvazian
told Salamon. “I saw this had struck a chord in unpredictable circles.”
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