November
5, 2004
MHC
Newsmakers
Multiple
Choice A Boston Globe article cited Mount Holyoke as one of a growing
number of colleges that allow applicants for admission to identify
themselves not by a single race or ethnicity, but by any combination
they choose. “Spurred by changes in the way the U.S. Census
handles people of multiple ethnic backgrounds, and lobbying by
students from such backgrounds, the days of ‘check one box’ appear
to be ending at many colleges,” Globe correspondent Scott
Jaschik wrote in “On Ethnicity, Thinking out of the Box” in
the October 10 edition. He cited Mount Holyoke as one college that
no longer limits its students to a single choice, and quotes an
MHC student: “‘If you are forced to pick a single category,
it’s like saying that one of your parents doesn’t exist.
It’s denying half of your self and that’s not right,’ said
Jamie C. Monzo, a senior at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley
whose father is Hispanic and whose mother is from a mix of Irish,
Scottish, and French families … Monzo, who spent last summer
doing research with a professor who studies biracial students,
says her own college allowed her to check multiple boxes, but she
was shocked and angry to find that many colleges still force students
to pick a single category.”
Film Buff Samba Gadjigo, professor of French,
was interviewed on National Public Radio’s All
Things Considered program about Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène and
his award-winning new film, Moolaadé. Gadjigo, Sembène’s
biographer and translator, told Colorado Public Radio’s
Howie Movshovitz that the conflict between men and women that
plays out in Moolaadé parallels the struggle between the
African continent and its European colonizers. “To colonize
is not just to take land from people of darker complexion or
flatter noses,” Gadjigo said. “It is also a contest
about who has the right to represent whom; therefore, art, the
teacher, cinema are all very, very important in the relationship
between colonizer and the colonized.” Moolaadé, which won the Un Certain Regarde prize at this year’s Cannes
Film Festival, tells the story of four young girls in an African
village who seek sanctuary to avoid circumcision, exploring the
tension between those who want to maintain traditional practices
and those who embrace Western ideas. Sembène visited the
campus on October 17 to screen the film, and spoke before a standing-room-only
crowd in Gamble Auditorium. The NPR story can be heard online
at www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4113411.
School Spirits The eerie blue spotlight was on MHC for a segment
of “Haunted Campuses,” a Travel Channel production
that premiered on October 24. The MHC segment told several of
the College’s many ghost stories, including the legend
of a portrait that supposedly drove a student to madness and
the infamous “ghost room” on the fourth floor of
Wilder Hall. Several members of the Mount Holyoke community talked
about the lore that has been handed down through the decades
and about life at MHC today. Other schools included in the “Haunted
Campuses” program were Notre Dame, Illinois State University,
the Ringling School of Art and Design, and Keene State College.
The program will be rebroadcast on December 18 at 9 pm and midnight.
Don’t watch it alone!
Doing Excellency Professor of history Joseph Ellis’s new
biography of George Washington, His Excellency
George Washington,
is garnering widespread notice in papers and other media outlets
throughout the country. A prolific, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian
whose past works have won acclaim, Ellis is now engaged in a
whirlwind media and reading blitz that is bringing him to National
Public Radio, Good Morning America, and many other television
and radio shows. On Tuesday, October 26, Ellis’s “absorbing” book
was reviewed by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times:
“Washington’s iconic status atop ‘the American version of Mount
Olympus,’ combined with his aloof personality, poses a distinct problem
for the biographer,” Kakutani noted. “He is ubiquitous, yet he is
the most remote of the founding fathers: the face on Mount Rushmore, the dollar
bill and the quarter; the omnipresent symbol of the nation’s birth; and
the ultimate father figure for the country. It’s a forbidding role, as
Mr. Ellis points out, that makes Washington susceptible to the most reflexive
Freudian impulses on the part of historians: on one hand, a desire to place him
on a patriarchal pedestal assembled from filial encomiums and dubious legends
(i.e., the old cherry tree fallacy); on the other, an Oedipal urge to dismiss
him as ‘the deadest, whitest male in American history.’
“As he did in his astute books on John Adams (Passionate
Sage) and Thomas
Jefferson (American Sphinx), Mr. Ellis gives us a succinct character study while
drawing on his extensive knowledge of Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary history
to strip away the accretions of myth and contemporary extemporizing that have
grown up around his subject.
“Mr. Ellis refuses to judge Washington by ‘our own superior standards
of political and racial justice’ but instead tries to show how Washington
was seen in his day. In doing so he gives us a visceral understanding of the
era in which the first president came of age, and he shows how Washington’s
thinking (about the war for independence, the shape of the infant nation and
the emerging role of the federal government) was shaped by his own experiences
as a young soldier in the French and Indian War and as a member of the Virginia
planter class. The resulting book yields an incisive portrait of the man, not
the marble statue.”
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