Campus Panorama

News
[Artifacts]
While digging post-holes for new campus signs, workers discovered artifacts from the College's past. These included pieces of what may be the earliest Mount Holyoke china, an iron pulley, an oblong metal tool, and a ladies' hair decoration.

Granting Our Requests

Three recent grants totaling $1.5 million will support MHC's biological sciences program, provide more classrooms with advanced computer visualization and computation capabilities, and fund administrative restructuring.
A $900,000 grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Undergraduate Biological Sciences Program will support development of laboratories in which students will learn about biological phenomena and then design experiments to test hypotheses. General-purpose workstations will be built for use by students for independent research as well as in science courses. HHMI support will fund laboratory equipment for workstations, equip a computer laboratory for teaching and research in molecular modeling, and renovate existing teaching laboratories.
The W. M. Keck Foundation of Los Angeles has granted the College $350,000 to provide advanced computer equipment for classrooms and laboratories. This will allow MHC to advance to the next stage of classroom technology, changing the nature of the learning experience across the curriculum. Specifically, the grant will help us outfit several small seminar-style classrooms with computer tools for presentation and student work, make excellent visualization and computation tools available in "cluster" laboratories, add top-quality media facilities in several more classrooms, and upgrade desktop computers for some professors.
The College has also received $250,000 to support administrative restructuring projects. Part of the grant will provide consulting and training connected with reorganizing the library and computing and information systems. The grant will also cover consulting services and training to streamline financial processes after the College buys new computer hardware and financial software this summer. The grant was received from the Davis Educational Foundation, established by Stanton and Elisabeth Davis after his retirement as chairman of Shaw's Supermarkets, Inc.

The crew team in action

Grabbing the Lyons' Share of Athletic Success

Mount Holyoke's athletic teams appeared in the winners' circle in a variety of sports this year. The crew team won the Founder's Plate at the Mount Holyoke Regatta--the oldest continuing regatta for women in the country--and swept every event at the Seven Sisters Championship. At the National Collegiate Rowing Championships, the first and second varsity boats finished sixth and fourth, respectively, among Division III schools.
Golfers Kirtana Biddapa '97 and Elizabeth Cunningham '99 qualified for the NCAA Golf Championship. By the last round, Cunningham had even knocked six strokes off her career low of 88 to shoot an impressive 82.
Amanda Salb '99 and Nickawanna Shaw '96 qualified for the NCAA Outdoor Track and Field Championships, and Shaw also qualified for the Indoor Nationals. Individuals broke seven school track and field records, and Carrie Turban '97 was named NEW 8 Athlete of the Year, marking the second consecutive year an MHC woman garnered this honor. Ten students earned All-ECAC (Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference) honors.
In softball, senior Bridget Gunn finished third nationally in Division III softball with a batting average of .592. Gunn's performances in the field and at bat earned her several honors: NEW 8 Athlete of the Week, NEW 8 All-Conference, and ECAC All-Star nominee. Teammate Ala Trzepacz was the league's defensive leader for most of the season.
The coming year will bring more high-level sports action. In 1997, MHC will host the Intercollegiate Horse Show Association Nationals, the NEW 8 Basketball Championship, the NEW 8 Swimming Championship, and the NEW 8 Track and Field Championship.

Donna Shalala, U.S. secretary of health and human services, predicts that one of MHC's May graduates will become America's first female president.
Donna Shalala, U.S. secretary of health and human services, did a little recruiting as she delivered the commencement address. At the May 26 ceremony, Shalala told the graduating class, "I am here recruiting for America's future. I am here looking for the first woman president of the United States.... I have brought along my political crystal ball, and I'm ready to make a prediction about the future. I predict a woman of your generation--specifically a member of the Mount Holyoke class of 1996--will win the presidency." A total of 462 bachelor of arts degrees, five master of arts degrees, two master of arts in teaching degrees, sixteen certificates for international students, and two Frances Perkins Fellows certificates of achievement were presented at the ceremony.
A week before conferring honorary degrees on others at MHC's commencement, President Creighton received one herself at Smith College's graduation exercises, proving 'tis better to give and receive. Playwright Wendy Wasserstein '71 also received an honorary degree from Smith that day.

Getting around campus has never been easier, thanks to a comprehensive sign project. Some three dozen signs--including two large ones in wrought iron frames along Route 116--were installed in the spring. Many more forest green aluminum placards with white lettering will go up over the next year.
At its May meeting, the board of trustees passed a balanced $83.9 million budget for fiscal year 1996-97; welcomed Joan Shapiro Green '66, president of BT Brokerage Corporation, as a new trustee; continued discussions about admissions, financial aid, and its own internal structure; and adopted a mechanism for routine assessment of the president.
Faculty expertise is showcased in a new section of the College's World Wide Web site. At http://www.mtholyoke.edu/offices/comm/profile/ you'll find profiles of Douglas Amy (politics), President Creighton, John Fox (complex organizations), Martha Godchaux (geology), Mark McMenamin (geology), and Thomas Millette (geography). More are in the works.
The inauguration of Joanne V. Creighton brought a wave of local and regional media stories about the new president and participating literary luminaries--including Joyce Carol Oates, Suzan-Lori Parks '85, and Wendy Wasserstein '71. Coverage included stories in the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, the Union News, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, and local and Boston TV and radio stations. In addition, the Associated Press filed a national wire story on the event and President Creighton's inaugural address. The rush of press activity continued with a May 8 New York Times profile of the College and its new president.
That story was followed the next day in USA Today by a full, photo-laden Mother's Day feature on Frances Perkins scholar Jan Field and her undergraduate daughter, Carrianna Field '97. Under the headline "Big Mom on Campus," the two Chelsea, Vermont, natives discussed what it's like to be mother and daughter students at Mount Holyoke. Also featured was Mary Fanelli, a Frances Perkins scholar who graduated last year and now works in the Office of Communications.
The Ellen and Thomas Reese Psychology and Education Building was named in May to honor two eminent psychologists and former MHC faculty members. Ellen Reese '48, Norma Cutts Dafoe Professor Emeritus of Psychology, was named among the one hundred most important women psychologists in history, and has been part of the MHC community for fifty-two years. Her late husband, Thomas W. Reese, taught at MHC for more than thirty years and was chair of the Department of Psychology and Education when the building was erected in 1966.
Study of the "silver screen" got a green light in May, as a new minor in film studies was approved by the faculty. Currently, students can choose from sixteen courses in ten departments and programs to build their minors.
More than three dozen MHC students, alumnae, faculty, and staff now have personal home pages on the College's World Wide Web site. The cyber-offerings range from a single illustration to elaborate sites featuring information on everything from geophysics and original poetry to bioethics and a quote of the week. You can find them all at: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/dir/homepages/complete.shtml.
Jewish chaplain Devorah Jacobson joined former President Jimmy Carter and hundreds of other Habitat for Humanity volunteers to build ten homes in Hungary this summer. Carter and his wife Rosalynn banged nails and painted alongside other volunteers, while lending a celebrity air to the effort. Active with Habitat since 1986, Jacobson has developed skills in roofing, framing, and landscaping on projects from South Dakota to Winnipeg.
Lane Zachary '75, a literary agent at Boston's Zachary Shuster Agency, handled the recent six-figure sale of the manuscript of what is believed to be Louisa May Alcott's first novel. The Inheritance, written in 1849 when Alcott was eighteen, "tells the tumultuous tale of Edith, a poor orphaned Italian girl adopted by a wealthy English family," according to a Boston Globe article. Zachary is no stranger to Alcott's work. In 1994, she negotiated the $1.5 million sale of another recently discovered Alcott novel, A Long Fatal Love Chase.
The Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science is prominently featured in Models That Work: Case Studies in Effective Undergraduate Mathematics Programs, a report published by the Mathematical Association of America. The report commends the department for "the level of curricular reform and experimentation being carried out by a very active faculty" and is applauded for its tradition in predoctoral training.
Campus Achievers: Marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the MHC anthropology major, thirty-seven Five College students presented papers at a conference on "Anthropology Challenging Boundaries." The setting duplicated a professional academic conference, and boosted students' skills in public speaking.
Six Frances Perkins Scholars attended the first national summit on ethics and meaning, held in Washington, DC. Five other students went to the capital for a national conference on student community service.
During the lazy, hazy days of summer, MHC faculty were busy researching topics ranging from how age and amnesia disrupt memory to how composer Charles Ives's compositions reflected his interest in baseball. Professors also lectured in Germany, consulted for the World Bank in the Republic of Georgia, and studied sponges in Belize; finished a biography of Thomas Jefferson and designed an all-female production of King Lear; and wrote a multimedia guide to statistics, among other projects.

While digging post-holes for new campus signs, workers discovered artifacts from the College's past. These included pieces of what may be the earliest Mount Holyoke china, an iron pulley, an oblong metal tool, and a ladies' hair decoration.		Granting Our Requests Three recent grants totaling $1.5 million will support MHC's biological sciences program, provide more classrooms with advanced computer visualization and computation capabilities, and fund administrative restructuring. A $900,000 grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Undergraduate Biological Sciences Program will support development of laboratories in which students will learn about biological phenomena and then design experiments to test hypotheses. General-purpose workstations will be built for use by students for independent research as well as in science courses. HHMI support will fund laboratory equipment for workstations, equip a computer laboratory for teaching and research in molecular modeling, and renovate existing teaching laboratories. The W. M. Keck Foundation of Los Angeles has granted the College $350,000 to provide advanced computer equipment for classrooms and laboratories. This will allow MHC to advance to the next stage of classroom technology, changing the nature of the learning experience across the curriculum. Specifically, the grant will help us outfit several small seminar-style classrooms with computer tools for presentation and student work, make excellent visualization and computation tools available in "cluster" laboratories, add top-quality media facilities in several more classrooms, and upgrade desktop computers for some professors. The College has also received $250,000 to support administrative restructuring projects. Part of the grant will provide consulting and training connected with reorganizing the library and computing and information systems. The grant will also cover consulting services and training to streamline financial processes after the College buys new computer hardware and financial software this summer. The grant was received from the Davis Educational Foundation, established by Stanton and Elisabeth Davis after his retirement as chairman of Shaw's Supermarkets, Inc.
The crew team in action		Grabbing the Lyons' Share of Athletic Success Mount Holyoke's athletic teams appeared in the winners' circle in a variety of sports this year. The crew team won the Founder's Plate at the Mount Holyoke Regatta--the oldest continuing regatta for women in the country--and swept every event at the Seven Sisters Championship. At the National Collegiate Rowing Championships, the first and second varsity boats finished sixth and fourth, respectively, among Division III schools. Golfers Kirtana Biddapa '97 and Elizabeth Cunningham '99 qualified for the NCAA Golf Championship. By the last round, Cunningham had even knocked six strokes off her career low of 88 to shoot an impressive 82. Amanda Salb '99 and Nickawanna Shaw '96 qualified for the NCAA Outdoor Track and Field Championships, and Shaw also qualified for the Indoor Nationals. Individuals broke seven school track and field records, and Carrie Turban '97 was named NEW 8 Athlete of the Year, marking the second consecutive year an MHC woman garnered this honor. Ten students earned All-ECAC (Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference) honors. In softball, senior Bridget Gunn finished third nationally in Division III softball with a batting average of .592. Gunn's performances in the field and at bat earned her several honors: NEW 8 Athlete of the Week, NEW 8 All-Conference, and ECAC All-Star nominee. Teammate Ala Trzepacz was the league's defensive leader for most of the season. The coming year will bring more high-level sports action. In 1997, MHC will host the Intercollegiate Horse Show Association Nationals, the NEW 8 Basketball Championship, the NEW 8 Swimming Championship, and the NEW 8 Track and Field Championship.
Donna Shalala, U.S. secretary of health and human services, predicts that one of MHC's May graduates will become America's first female president.		Donna Shalala, U.S. secretary of health and human services, did a little recruiting as she delivered the commencement address. At the May 26 ceremony, Shalala told the graduating class, "I am here recruiting for America's future. I am here looking for the first woman president of the United States.... I have brought along my political crystal ball, and I'm ready to make a prediction about the future. I predict a woman of your generation--specifically a member of the Mount Holyoke class of 1996--will win the presidency." A total of 462 bachelor of arts degrees, five master of arts degrees, two master of arts in teaching degrees, sixteen certificates for international students, and two Frances Perkins Fellows certificates of achievement were presented at the ceremony. A week before conferring honorary degrees on others at MHC's commencement, President Creighton received one herself at Smith College's graduation exercises, proving 'tis better to give and receive. Playwright Wendy Wasserstein '71 also received an honorary degree from Smith that day.
Getting around campus has never been easier, thanks to a comprehensive sign project. Some three dozen signs--including two large ones in wrought iron frames along Route 116--were installed in the spring. Many more forest green aluminum placards with white lettering will go up over the next year. At its May meeting, the board of trustees passed a balanced $83.9 million budget for fiscal year 1996-97; welcomed Joan Shapiro Green '66, president of BT Brokerage Corporation, as a new trustee; continued discussions about admissions, financial aid, and its own internal structure; and adopted a mechanism for routine assessment of the president. Faculty expertise is showcased in a new section of the College's World Wide Web site. At http://www.mtholyoke.edu/offices/comm/profile/ you'll find profiles of Douglas Amy (politics), President Creighton, John Fox (complex organizations), Martha Godchaux (geology), Mark McMenamin (geology), and Thomas Millette (geography). More are in the works. The inauguration of Joanne V. Creighton brought a wave of local and regional media stories about the new president and participating literary luminaries--including Joyce Carol Oates, Suzan-Lori Parks '85, and Wendy Wasserstein '71. Coverage included stories in the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, the Union News, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, and local and Boston TV and radio stations. In addition, the Associated Press filed a national wire story on the event and President Creighton's inaugural address. The rush of press activity continued with a May 8 New York Times profile of the College and its new president. That story was followed the next day in USA Today by a full, photo-laden Mother's Day feature on Frances Perkins scholar Jan Field and her undergraduate daughter, Carrianna Field '97. Under the headline "Big Mom on Campus," the two Chelsea, Vermont, natives discussed what it's like to be mother and daughter students at Mount Holyoke. Also featured was Mary Fanelli, a Frances Perkins scholar who graduated last year and now works in the Office of Communications. The Ellen and Thomas Reese Psychology and Education Building was named in May to honor two eminent psychologists and former MHC faculty members. Ellen Reese '48, Norma Cutts Dafoe Professor Emeritus of Psychology, was named among the one hundred most important women psychologists in history, and has been part of the MHC community for fifty-two years. Her late husband, Thomas W. Reese, taught at MHC for more than thirty years and was chair of the Department of Psychology and Education when the building was erected in 1966.		Study of the "silver screen" got a green light in May, as a new minor in film studies was approved by the faculty. Currently, students can choose from sixteen courses in ten departments and programs to build their minors. More than three dozen MHC students, alumnae, faculty, and staff now have personal home pages on the College's World Wide Web site. The cyber-offerings range from a single illustration to elaborate sites featuring information on everything from geophysics and original poetry to bioethics and a quote of the week. You can find them all at: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/dir/homepages/complete.shtml. Jewish chaplain Devorah Jacobson joined former President Jimmy Carter and hundreds of other Habitat for Humanity volunteers to build ten homes in Hungary this summer. Carter and his wife Rosalynn banged nails and painted alongside other volunteers, while lending a celebrity air to the effort. Active with Habitat since 1986, Jacobson has developed skills in roofing, framing, and landscaping on projects from South Dakota to Winnipeg. Lane Zachary '75, a literary agent at Boston's Zachary Shuster Agency, handled the recent six-figure sale of the manuscript of what is believed to be Louisa May Alcott's first novel. The Inheritance, written in 1849 when Alcott was eighteen, "tells the tumultuous tale of Edith, a poor orphaned Italian girl adopted by a wealthy English family," according to a Boston Globe article. Zachary is no stranger to Alcott's work. In 1994, she negotiated the $1.5 million sale of another recently discovered Alcott novel, A Long Fatal Love Chase. The Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science is prominently featured in Models That Work: Case Studies in Effective Undergraduate Mathematics Programs, a report published by the Mathematical Association of America. The report commends the department for "the level of curricular reform and experimentation being carried out by a very active faculty" and is applauded for its tradition in predoctoral training. Campus Achievers: Marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the MHC anthropology major, thirty-seven Five College students presented papers at a conference on "Anthropology Challenging Boundaries." The setting duplicated a professional academic conference, and boosted students' skills in public speaking. Six Frances Perkins Scholars attended the first national summit on ethics and meaning, held in Washington, DC. Five other students went to the capital for a national conference on student community service. During the lazy, hazy days of summer, MHC faculty were busy researching topics ranging from how age and amnesia disrupt memory to how composer Charles Ives's compositions reflected his interest in baseball. Professors also lectured in Germany, consulted for the World Bank in the Republic of Georgia, and studied sponges in Belize; finished a biography of Thomas Jefferson and designed an all-female production of King Lear; and wrote a multimedia guide to statistics, among other projects.