Colgate Magazine Summer 2025

LASTING LEGACIES

The

of

look

The Marine commissioning ceremony for Matthew H. “Hobie” Jamison ’25, on the Merrill House porch, May 17. Jamison is from Vail, Colo., and he majored in peace and conflict studies as well as English. He’s now a second lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps, where he will become a pilot after flight school. “Colgate allowed me to work hard, prove myself, and set the conditions to overcome challenges of life and succeed despite them,” he says.

Read this issue and all previous issues at colgate.edu/magazine.

Janet

SUMMER 2025

Elizabeth (Ferrigno) ’83 DeWolfe used her detective skills

Cover:

Professor

Two Colgate

Carrie Keating is one of six professors retiring this year. See pg. 24 for more.

by

Mark DiOrio

Carrie Keating, Steven Kepnes, Bob McVaugh, Alice Nakhimovsky, Chris Nevison, and Dan Schult 24

Careers That Soak Up the

Counseling That Clicks

Samreen

VP for University Communications

Daniel DeVries

Director of University Publications

Aleta Mayne

Assistant Director, University

Publications

Mary Donofrio

Assoc. VP for University Communications

Mark Walden

Senior Art Director

Karen Luciani

University Photographer

Mark DiOrio

Communications Specialist

Kathy Jipson

Contributors: Kelli Ariel, web manager; Stephanie DeVries, communications specialist, centers and institutes; Jordan Doroshenko, dir., athletic communications; Bernie Freytag, sr. art dir.; Garrett Mutz, sr. designer; Brian Ness, sr. multimedia producer; Kristin Putman, sr. social media strategist; Rodrigo Santiago, athletics communications manager; Amber Springer, web content specialist; Rebecca Taurisano, asst. dir., advancement communications

Printed and mailed from Lane Press in South Burlington, Vt.

Colgate Magazine Volume LIV Number 3

Colgate Magazine is a publication of Colgate University. Online: colgate.edu/magazine Email: magazine@colgate.edu Telephone: 315-228-7407

Change of Address: Alumni Records Clerk, Colgate University, 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, NY 13346-1398 Email: alumnirecords@colgate.edu Telephone: 315-228-7453

Opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by the University, the publishers, or the editors. Colgate University does not discriminate in its programs and activities because of race, color, sex, pregnancy, religion, creed, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, physical or mental disability, age, marital status, sexual orientation, veteran or military status, predisposing genetic characteristics, domestic violence victim status, or any other protected category under applicable local, state, or federal law. For inquiries regarding the University’s non-discrimination policies, contact Renee Madison, Title IX coordinator and vice president for equity and inclusion, 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, NY 13346; 315-228-7014.

President’s Message

The Challenges Facing Higher Education

The following is a summary of the presentation President Brian W. Casey offered to alumni at “The Hour With the President” during reunion weekend.

Before becoming a college president, I studied the history of U.S. higher education. Decades of personal experience and research tell me that there has never been a more fluid, dangerous, and unsettled time for American colleges and universities than now. Meanwhile, Colgate, itself, is experiencing growth and vitality. Given these conflicting contexts, a question naturally follows. Namely, how should the University respond to current circumstances?

I. Changing Demographics and the End of the Financial Model

Two decisions by the U.S. government in the mid- to late-20th century fundamentally altered American higher education. First, at the beginning of World War II, the federal government turned to the nation’s universities to conduct the basic research necessary for victory. That decision encouraged American universities to enroll more students (especially graduate students) and build new research facilities. Research efforts eventually moved beyond defense, into pharmaceuticals and much more. The booming university research era had begun.

Second, there was a baby boom after the war, and many of those children eventually wished to go to college. America was wealthier, and the government agreed to provide low-interest loans to anyone interested in attending an accredited institution. Student populations boomed, with concomitant growth in the size of the faculty and the size of campuses themselves.

With these two decisions regarding research and enrollment financing, the federal government, in partnership with colleges and universities, created the strongest educational system the world has ever seen. Are we now at the end of this chapter in American education history? We are seeing a demographic decline in the number of 16- to 18-year-olds. We are seeing questions about the engagement of the federal government — about research and loans. So it is possible that an 80-plus-year period of massive investments in American higher education is coming to an end.

II. The Rapid Emergence of Artificial Intelligence

Two fundamental acts take place at universities.

First is the act of scholarship — creating new knowledge. Scholars go into laboratories, archives, and libraries, and they develop new ideas. They look at the world differently and develop new theories to explain our world. They next send these new ideas into the world. They publish their ideas in journals, and other

people look at them, poke at them, or build on them.

Second is the act of teaching. Ideas are passed on to generations of new students. The post-medieval university developed a model in which an expert enters a classroom and says, “I am going to tell you what you need to learn, and you are going to demonstrate to me that you learned it by writing essays, completing exams, and developing new ideas.”

AI would appear to replicate those two functions — not perfectly, but swiftly and conveniently. If you want new ideas, large language models promise, here are new ideas. If you want an answer to a question, you can have it in moments. This development is almost an existential moment for our work.

III. Speech

What happens with speech on the American campus is complicated. For the longest time, American universities told the world that they are places where all ideas are welcome; they are, it was always said, places of debate, academic freedom, and freedom of expression.

During the last several years, some people have begun to argue otherwise. According to these individuals, there isn’t a free flow of all ideas on a campus. Instead, these critics argue, an orthodoxy of acceptable ideas had emerged over the past several years. Then Oct. 7, 2023, happened. Many campuses lit up with protests and counter-protests, and a series of college presidents went in front of Congress. Congress asked these leaders, “What is happening? Tell us about how speech works on your campuses. How are you protecting the people on your campuses?”

These presidents of famous institutions seemed unable to answer the questions. Their responses seemed mannered. It appeared that speech on a campus was either thwarted, or it was harmful. To many, a fundamental promise of the American campus seemed to be broken.

IV. The New Athletics Landscape

There are few more powerful ways for members of the American public to engage with higher education than by cheering on college sports teams. Students who are in laboratories on Wednesday and classrooms on Thursday take to the field on Friday to represent their school, and there is an innocence about it, a joyfulness. We could not have created a better marketing system than to have created what we always thought of as “college sports.”

People forget this now, but for decades the NCAA tightly controlled this world and the way it was brought to the public. The NCAA once had a rule, for example, that no football team could be on a national broadcast more

I wonder if there is an opportunity for Colgate to look at what we are and decide that this moment affords us a chance to be better.

than twice a year. But that world has changed, and new television markets and new transfer rules have emerged.

In short, billions of dollars came into collegiate sports, so the system by which we restrict the movement of players, how often you can be on television, and more — all of that changes. People still consume American college sports, but it seems different now. Athletics, which is a way we brought American higher education to the public, has now been called into question.

V. Current Politics

Finally, it must be noted that we have a federal administration that is saying it does not like what is happening on American campuses. It has announced that it intends to create change by targeting the bottom line: Take away the research. Tax endowments. Block international enrollment. That goes right to the business model of our institutions.

The Way Forward

Given these five realities, how does Colgate move forward?

Option one, of course, is to hunker down, to hope the storm passes.

As bad as that option is, a second choice is even worse — and Colgate is surely tempted by this. We could tell ourselves that we are just fine as we are. The winds are currently blowing around us, so why not continue to do what we have always done? Tens of thousands of people apply every year to Colgate. We fill our classes, and two-thirds of our students can afford the full price of attendance. The campus looks great. We have a strong faculty, and we invest in their research.

But nothing dooms an institution into obscurity and irrelevance more swiftly than self-satisfaction.

When I look at the present context, I wonder if there is an opportunity for Colgate to look at what we are and decide that this moment affords us a chance to be better. Is there something big, bold, and ambitious that we can do? Those of us who steward Colgate today owe this University and the nation, itself, a commitment — a commitment to the transformation articulated in the Third-Century Plan.

These moments in American higher education always provide the backdrop for one, two, or three institutions to decide that they are changing, that they are leading. This nation is hungry right now for someone to acknowledge that education is important. Having a liberally trained group of people go into the world with empathy and intelligence is important, and we are going to do it really well.

Curling up in a defensive crouch; declaring that the status quo is good enough — we will not give in to these impulses. We cannot.

— Brian W. Casey

Parental Pride

This is a thank you for the excellent Colgate Magazine, which I read from cover to cover because the quality is that good and the articles compelling. When I have finished devouring each page, I pass it along to my friend Ethel McGee, whose grandson is a Colgate junior. She loves it, too.

Marlene Spigner, mom of Joanne Spigner ’76

Notes on Colgate’s Architecture

The Colgate campus is beautiful and vastly improved since I graduated in 1974, but I wish your article in the spring issue (“Building Colgate,” p. 32) on notable campus buildings had included mention of some of the architectural disasters. When I arrived, the library facade had giant yellow Mondrian-like panels totally out of character with the campus. Paul Rudolph’s brutalist Dana Arts Center is a monument to architectural arrogance that, from its opening day, was barely usable for art, music, and theater. Dormitories with cinderblock walls are like prison cells. The Olin science building was another attempt at modernism that didn’t fit.

One architectural victory was saving the red stone old biology building that the administration wanted to tear down while I was a student. Now it hosts the philosophy department, although I always thought it should be the offices for student government, publications, and the radio station, right in the heart of daytime student traffic.

Brian Rooney ’74

loved reading up on so many great folks I had the privilege of interacting with at Colgate, some of whom I have the joy of being in Chicago with. I did not go to school with Andrew McCormick ’13 (p. 36), but read his piece and was very proud that he was in Brothers. I thought he had some really profound words about how Colgate formed him. I also enjoyed the short blurb on the alumnus at Lincoln’s nomination (Salmagundi, p. 112); the touching story of Professor Alexander Nakhimovsky (p. 88); the tribute to President Grabois (p. 110); Andrew Weinstein’s gorgeous art (p. 84), etc.! As a CUTV alum, I was also excited to see the very best of us: Jay Chandrasekhar’s (Class of ’90) name come up [in Alumni News]. I’ll finally close by saying how much I enjoyed Wendy Gruber ’87 Segal’s piece on her trip to Japan (p. 95). I went a few years ago in 2018 and was similarly amazed at the hospitality of the people, and I was glad I wasn’t the only one who had such a nice experience. Thanks again for another great issue.

Visit colgate.edu/president.

Go, ’gate!

I just wanted to say how amazing the 40 under 40 edition was. I

Henoch Fente Derbew ’07

To submit a letter to the editor, email us at magazine@colgate. edu. Letters may be edited for editorial style, length, clarity, and civility and must be relevant to Colgate Magazine’s editorial coverage. Generally, only one letter to the editor is published in Colgate Magazine by the same author in a calendar year. Letters do not represent the views of Colgate Magazine.

Voices

Memoir

Healing the Primal Wound

In her debut book, Janet Leef ’77 Sherlund explores the lasting psychological impact of adoption — and the enduring, human need to know one’s origins.

After submitting the manuscript for her memoir, Abandoned at Birth: Searching for the Arms That Once Held Me, Janet Leef ’77 Sherlund received a note from her editor.

Throughout the book, Sherlund uses the phrase “big black hole” to describe the mystery surrounding her birth parents, her heritage, and her identity. Could she find a synonym, the editor asked?

“I couldn’t,” Sherlund recalls. “There’s no other way to describe it.”

That “big black hole” — and what psychologist Nancy Verrier coined the “primal wound” of separation from one’s family of origin — had come to define Sherlund’s life. Despite being adopted into a loving family as a newborn, graduating from Colgate, going on to a successful career in nonprofit leadership, and raising two sons, Sherlund always felt an all-consuming pull toward finding her birth parents and understanding her identity.

Her search for answers began, in part, at Colgate. In an elective on early childhood development, the literature and fine arts major was stunned to learn about then-emerging research on the lasting psychological impact of separation from one’s birth parents. That feeling of being “identity-less,” her lifelong fear of abandonment, the deep ache she couldn’t name; Sherlund was learning there was scientific data validating all of it.

“I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m not alone, and I’m not crazy,’” she says.

She found some solace in writing, but it was only when her adoptive parents passed away that Sherlund considered sharing her work with a wider audience. “I was always conscious of not hurting them,” she says.

Published in May 2024 and excerpted below, Abandoned at Birth details Sherlund’s journey while also exploring the flaws within the adoption system at large.

“That need for familial connection, to understand our roots, to be part of a clan, is physical. It’s primal. You have to know who you are, and you have to know where you came from.”

Filed Away 2021

I drove to the adoption agency on an unusually warm November day — 65 degrees, with bright sun and pure blue skies. Most trees still held their leaves — the consequence of a warm, wet autumn — and the roadside glowed green and gold with only the occasional streak of orange. The radio blasted Springsteen, and I drummed the steering wheel, my mind wandering with the ease of familiar roads. The route took me through the town where my husband, Rick, and I had lived for 30 years and along roads I remembered from my childhood. Given my destination, the drive through my past was poetic. Snugged into my seat, sunlight curling around my shoulders, I was grateful for the opportunity that lay ahead — to read

excerpts of my adoption file from 1954.

Eleven years earlier, I took the same drive to the agency while searching for my birth parents. Such information hadn’t been offered to me then, but now, many years into a difficult journey, the compassionate social worker thought it might be helpful. While I had since discovered many facts about my adoption, I was looking for nuanced details. Did my mother ever hold me? Have I ever seen her face? Where was I between my birth and adoption? I hoped reading specifics would bring an aha moment of understanding and prayed for much-needed closure. Fortified by all I had learned over the past decade, I walked into the agency with a big smile, confident the pages I read today would be the Holy Grail, the final piece of the puzzle.

Gloria, the social worker, greeted me. We chatted as she guided me into a small, friendly conference room with stuffed animals nodding down from a bookshelf and easy chairs arranged for conversation. She sat across from me, holding some papers on her lap. “I saw the letter this agency sent you in 1977 when you wrote to request information.” I nodded, recalling the letter I had written 44 years earlier, just after college graduation. It asked about my ethnicity, what my birth parents looked like, why I was given up for adoption — anything they were allowed to tell me. The agency’s reply was breezy and carefully edited. They had privacy agreements to uphold, adoption laws to follow. “I thought it was awful that they didn’t tell you every nonidentifying fact from your file. This is your story, your life, and you’re entitled to know more.” She reached across and handed me what was a summary of interviews with my birth mother. “Take your time reading these. I’ll be in my office next door.” She slipped out and left me with the faded and discolored documents, some handwritten and some typed pages from 1954. The story of my beginning.

The old paper was covered with the soft dents of typewriter keys and a social worker’s neat, professional script. Some pages were stiff and crinkled, others limp. They all smelled musty. When I touched them, it was as if they could transport me back to the day I was born, to the story others knew, but I did not.

On the first yellowed page, Shirlie Anne Jones was listed as my “Unmarried Mother.” I was listed as her child, Linda Lee Jones, born on July 1, 1954.

My stomach whirled to see that name typed out on the official paper. I was once someone else with another name, another identity. Eleven single-spaced pages

described their interviews with Shirlie and noted how distant she was, how removed from the process. My birth mother first called the agency on July 7, seven days after my birth, during which time I remained in the hospital nursery, fed by rotating shift nurses. My mother never saw, fed, or cared for me in the hospital, a fact the agency noted as unusual. They offered her multiple opportunities to see me — a standard practice — but she declined each time, instead asking how soon she could sign the papers for my release. When the baffled social worker finally asked if I was even real to her, she replied, “Frankly, no.”

Throughout the paperwork, I’m referred to as “Shirlie Anne Jones’ daughter, Linda Lee,” and it catches me off guard each time. Being Shirlie Anne Jones’ daughter is entirely foreign to me, and the idea of my ever having been Linda Lee Jones is bizarre.

Toward the back of the file, a “Developmental Examination” page caught my eye. At that point, I was in a foster home run by Mrs. Person in Far Hills, N.J. A psychologist gave me a Gesell Developmental Scale test to assess my early abilities against normative data. At first, I read it with only passing interest because how much can you tell about a 5-weekold infant? But as I skimmed the report, something shifted. It described a very real baby, one I saw clearly in my mind’s eye. Someone I recognized as myself.

Linda Lee is an alert, happy, emotionally sensitive baby.... She has a relaxed grip on the rattle and gives a specific facial response to sound.... She smiles readily ... and gets quite excited when the examiner talks to her.

I could see myself holding the rattle, and the description of me smiling easily, being visually alert, and having a particular facial response was familiar. So were the comments about my being emotionally sensitive, enjoying interacting with the examiner, and making a good impression. I connected with this. I saw myself in that baby and recognized Linda Lee Jones as me.

I was born with traits I still have, and they came from Shirlie Anne Jones and my birth father. I am their blood. I came into this world as someone else before I was given a new identity by the people who adopted me and changed my name to Janet Lucile Leef.

A few sentences later, when I read, Linda Lee Jones was released by her mother on July 30, 1954, I became unglued. I was officially Linda Lee Jones when I was released, not a vague “Baby Girl Jones” waiting for an identity. I had a name and a heritage. I was Linda Lee Jones, relinquished by my mother — my legal and officially recognized

mother, Shirlie Anne Jones, who signed the release form. The social worker noted, “[Shirlie] again did not display any emotion, thanked me for all my help, and said she felt quite relieved.”

I couldn’t shake the image of little Linda Lee lying in the middle of a crib shaking the rattle for the examiner. She was a newborn alone in the world, sleeping temporarily in a foster home far away from where she started or would end up, waiting for an agency to nullify her heritage and assign her to strangers. My breath caught. I felt small and scared. I wanted to weep for that little lost baby, Linda Lee. For me

Suddenly, the room felt close. I pushed damp hair off my forehead and struggled for air. Shuffling the papers together, I stood, unsure my legs would hold me, and found Gloria in her office. “Thank you so much for letting me read this, Gloria. It really meant a lot to me.”

“I know it did.” She smiled with an understanding I didn’t yet have.

All I wanted now was to get home. I hurried out to the fading afternoon and sat in my car as I gathered my wits to drive into rush hour traffic. There was no looking at foliage color on the drive home or grooving to The Boss. I was melting into unfathomed sadness, sinking into my seat as grief gathered in my brain and dropped through my center like lead. It was excruciating and I didn’t know what to do with the intense emotion. It was primal. There was no language for what I felt. There had never been. It happened long ago before I could think in words. I called Rick but could barely speak. “I hurt so deeply” was the best I could do. He stayed on the phone with me for the rest of the drive home. We didn’t talk much, but it felt good to know he was there, listening and wishing he could ease my pain, waiting for my car to pull into the driveway so he could wrap his arms around me.

By the next morning, every part of me ached, it was difficult to breathe, and my brain was completely fogged. The hurt reverberated through me like the tolling of a large, low bell. In my mind’s eye, I saw myself lying in the crib, and I repeated the name over and over: Linda Lee Jones, Linda Lee Jones. Who was she? Who am I? Why didn’t my birth mother want me? All connections to my bloodline, my biological family, had been denied. The identity I now held had been randomly assigned through an agency.

Lingering, wordless grief suspended in me like smoke. Pulling on an oversized sweater, I wrapped my hand around a cup of tea and looked out at the sky, my thoughts diffusing into the pale light. ●

SCENE

to Colgate during the COVID-19 pandemic was a “great and unique act of optimism and hope.”

Even When It Rains, They Shine

Although it was a weekend peppered with inopportune rain showers, Colgate’s 204th Commencement was celebrated by a community proud of the Class of 2025’s accomplishments. Working around the downpours and drizzle actually exemplified this class’s personality. After all, as President Brian W. Casey reminded them, even applying

During the baccalaureate service on May 18, he said, “There is something in you that is deeply optimistic and prepared for wonder…. Keep your sense of wonder. In my estimation, the way you do this is to slow down and look, to consider what is happening, and to accept the possibility of awe and gratitude.”

Commencement ceremony keynote speaker Julianne Smith, former U.S. Ambassador to NATO, expressed three hopes for the graduates. First, “At a time of considerable global uncertainty… I hope your plans

don’t go as planned,” she said.

“Each time those bestlaid plans go awry — as they sometimes do — you’re actually building an arsenal of important skills and traits that only come with experience, like adaptability, resilience, humility,

and crisis management. These are the traits that will define who you are as a leader, a colleague, or a member of a team, and shape how you will respond to sudden changes, failure, or a crisis.”

Smith’s second hope for the graduates was finding time for service. “The years I have spent serving at the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon have been the most rewarding of my career.”

For those not interested in governmental work, Smith suggested, “Volunteer for a cause close to your heart, join a local board, or mentor someone who’s a few years behind you. It’s about using your skills and energy to lift others up.”

Smith’s final exhortation, to “find ways to remain authentic to your true selves,” preceded the commencement exercises, during which 830 undergraduates were recognized for earning the BA degree and 6 graduate students were awarded a master of arts in teaching.

“Above all,” Smith said, “strive to be the leaders we need right now — leaders who listen with empathy, act with integrity, lift others up, and aren’t afraid to challenge the status quo. The world needs your voice, your vision, your commitment. I’m counting on you. We all are.”

— Rebecca Downing

Class of 2025

→ 830 undergraduates

→ 6 awarded an MAT; 4 with distinction

→ Valedictorian: Jackson Kustell of Barrington, R.I., summa cum laude, physics major; high honors in physics

→ Salutatorian: Paul Schulze of Austin, Texas, summa cum laude, mathematics and philosophy major; high honors in mathematics

→ 39 elected to Phi Beta Kappa

→ 162 summa cum laude

→ 295 magna cum laude

→ 152 cum laude

Media The Art of Storytelling

From Buffalo to Baghdad, Stephanie Ramos has seen it all — and she’s probably talked about it on your television. As an ABC News correspondent based in New York City, Ramos is at the heart of the TV news industry. In April she visited Colgate to discuss her path to success and offer advice to fellow storytellers.

Ramos spoke at the ALANA Cultural Center about the lessons she’s learned throughout her years on the job. As both a guest anchor for various shows — including Good Morning America and Nightline — and a researcher, Ramos shared how her work as a journalist has shaped her understanding of creativity.

“You don’t need endless freedom to be creative,” she said. “You need intention, purpose, focus, discipline, curiosity, and heart. Whether you’re painting, writing, composing, or reporting: Deadlines are not your enemy. Deadlines are important.”

Quotable

But, she argued, it’s not all about deadlines — it’s also about connection and authenticity, even under pressure.

“You’re not just in front of a camera, you’re building bridges of understanding. This is especially important when the stakes are really high,” she explains.

The secret to storytelling she argued, is compassion, as well as a commitment to the truth. “Every story is somebody’s life,” said Ramos. “In order to get the right story, the good story, it’s a matter of connecting with that person. When you learn to make those stories sing, that’s when you tell the truth.”

— Olivia Miller ’27

Dialogue

Free Speech in an Age of Rage

What sets the United States apart from other nations, argues attorney and legal scholar Jonathan Turley, is its commitment to free speech.

Turley, the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of

public interest law at George Washington University, led a discussion hosted by Colgate’s Center for Freedom and Western Civilization in April.

Turley has testified in multiple congressional proceedings, and his columns have appeared in publications including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal Additionally, he serves as a legal analyst for Fox News.

The First Amendment, he said, is “the most revolutionary thing we ever produced in this country.” But right now, he cautions, “rage is all around us,” threatening unity and providing “something of a license to say and do things that you would not ordinarily do.” “It’s addictive. It’s contagious,” he said. “If you agree with someone, their rage seems righteous, and if you don’t, it’s dangerous.”

The tension between rage and free speech, he added, is a delicate issue. “The greatest danger is not the speech itself — it’s when the government uses the rage in speech to limit it, curtail it, and arrest people who use it,” Turley argued. “We’re not defined by the rage. We’re defined by free speech, by the hope that with the help of free speech, we might be able to overcome the things we hate most about each other.”

Turley’s forthcoming book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, attempts to define and defend the American right to free speech.

— Olivia Miller ’27

“I don’t think we can emphasize enough that the richest country on Earth has such a high level of poverty. I think we have to work collectively to find ways to make sure federal, state, and local governments have the capability to make certain rule changes. Change is very difficult, but it is absolutely required, given where we are.”

—

Rajni Chawla, executive deputy commissioner of the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, spoke in a campus panel on the issues raised in Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, by America.

1

President Casey joined College Presidents for Civic Preparedness, a national consortium of 100+ college presidents who are upholding free expression on their campuses.

2

A gumball-style Poetry Machine dispensed haikus, odes, and more in Case Library during the genre’s nationally celebrated month of April.

3

Prof. Peter Balakian is publishing New York Trilogy, a long poem in three sections that moves between decades of life, in October.

4

Elsa O’Brien ’25, a classical studies and English double major from Alameda, Calif., who was SGA president, won the 1819 Award.

5

Colgate’s new women’s head basketball coach, Shannon Bush, joins the University after serving as associate head coach at Cornell.

6

At the 18th Golden ’Gates, hockey’s Hannah Murphy ’25 and lacrosse’s Rory Connor ’25 were named Athletes of the Year

7

Monica Crowley ’90 has been confirmed as U.S. assistant secretary of state and chief of protocol with the rank of ambassador.

8

Darryl Nirenberg ’81 has been named the next U.S. ambassador to Romania.

9

Sandra Hsu Hnin Mon ’12 is a recipient of the NIH Intramural AIDS Research Fellowship. 10

The University’s 13 Days of Green coincided with the 55th annual Earth Day this year.

11

A new, unified health records system will coordinate student care across the counseling center, Haven, Shaw Wellness, and Student Health Services.

12

WRCU marked its 75th anniversary at this year’s reunion.

13

From Texas to Tanzania, alumni clubs celebrated Colgate Day in June.

Academics Inclusion in Action

At the Hamilton Food Cupboard this spring, students teamed up with neurodivergent community members to unpack boxes, stock shelves, and arrange dinner bags for families. Their project was part of Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences Regina Conti’s Neurodiversity and Community Inclusion course, designed to build meaningful connections between students and neurodivergent community members.

“Very often, people who have developmental disabilities are the recipients of help or support,” says Adele Johnson ’27, a psychology major who helped design the Hamilton Food Cupboard project. “But our project provided a nice opportunity for them to be in the reverse role, of the person who’s providing support.”

Over the past four years, Conti has offered this course, distinguished for its blend of academic and experiential learning.

Prior to their projects, Conti’s students review the literature on neurodiversity and inclusion, familiarizing themselves with neurodiverse history and strategies for supporting a sense of belonging. The term neurodivergent refers to a set of identities and diagnoses (including autism spectrum disorder) that differ from what is considered typical neurological behavior, while neurotypical describes those without these neurocognitive differences.

“Over time, the emphasis has shifted from just physical inclusion — living or having access to spaces that include non-disabled community members — to actually feeling a sense of belonging in those spaces and having meaningful relationships with the people who inhabit them,” says Conti. The first phase of her course examines the psychological and social experience of disability, particularly for individuals with autism and related neurodevelopmental conditions.

Once versed in this context, students then work in small teams to design and implement programs at local partner sites.

This year’s course consisted of 15 students who designed programs at five other locations: the Hamilton Public Library, the Hamilton Center for the Arts, the Palace Theater, Village Clay, and the Community Wellness Center.

These projects took varying forms: participants at Village Clay made custom tic-tac-toe boards based on their interests, such as clay sticks and pucks for hockey. At the Palace Theater, they learned how to play several instruments (including the guitar, xylophone, and drums) and wrote a song together.

Following each program, participants were interviewed by students running other groups to gauge satisfaction and feelings of inclusion.

Conti has been parsing through this data and has incorporated her students’ findings into her greater research as a social psychologist. An article she wrote based on this data — and its promises for neurodiverse inclusion — was recently accepted as part of a special issue of the Journal of Social Issues. The piece focused on intersectional approaches to understanding neurodiversity.

“Something that I’ve been interested in doing from the beginning is trying to get an idea of how these programs enhance experiences of social inclusion within organizations in this region,” she says. “Altogether, participants seem to appreciate the opportunity to bond with a group, develop their special interests, and feel the pride that comes with completing a project.”

— Tate Fonda ’25

From Syracuse Mayor to Colgate Professor

In fall 2019, after she’d concluded her eight-year term as the 53rd mayor of Syracuse, Stephanie Miner joined Colgate as the Charles Evans Hughes Visiting Chair of government and jurisprudence in the Department of Political Science. The city’s first female mayor, she is a graduate of Syracuse University with degrees in political science and newspaper journalism. She earned her JD from the University at Buffalo School of Law and served as a Syracuse common councilor for five years. Miner has authored a new book, Madam Mayor: Love and Loss in an American City (University Press of Kansas), and she appeared on a recent episode of the University’s podcast, 13. Here are snippets from the conversation:

“I was a practicing attorney in Syracuse, which is where my great-grandparents came after Ireland … the streets I walked on, the houses I saw, the places were places that they had been. I had a real connection to the community through my family and through this history. I saw [the city] going in a direction I thought I could change, so I ran [for mayor] initially to say, ‘I want to be part of the solution. I want to help it be welcoming to people like it once was to my ancestors.’”

“One of the things that really attracted me to local politics is you touch the issues that affect people’s daily lives. You have a real sense of helping people and being in a community. Also, with a city the size of Syracuse, you could implement ideas or policies,

check them in real time, and then fix them if they didn’t work.”

“Part of what I felt very proud of was my ability to attract a high caliber of person to work for the city of Syracuse. Together, we did innovative work in infrastructure and public education and policing, and, in many ways, also became a voice for small cities.”

“I teach two classes [at Colgate]. [One is] on state and local politics, which is really a class on federalism. I [also] teach a class called The View from the Mayor’s Desk, which is a deeper dive into housing, infrastructure, education, and free speech.”

“I started writing this book because I knew I’d always been interested in politics. Then I started and never thought I would finish… The students at Colgate were fantastic. They were interested in what I had to say and [would] talk to me both before and after [class] and at office hours about politics and local government. They wanted to hear lots of war stories. I thought, well, if they want to hear these war stories, then maybe other people do too.”

The students at Colgate were fantastic. They were interested in what I had to say and [would] talk to me both before and after [class] and at office hours about politics and local government.

“It’s been my honor to teach the students I’ve had at Colgate. They’ve been thoughtful, engaged, and want to learn. What I say to students who take my class is, think about ideas and think about how the other person thinks about something too. The best politicians I have ever seen are people who are able to almost viscerally understand both. They can hold different ideas at the same time so they can have their thoughts about how a problem should be solved, but they can also listen to other people and adapt to that.”

“The ability to listen and think and be respectful is a hallmark of our democracy. We’re struggling with that right now. But I think the people who want to be involved in politics should be involved in politics as citizens of a democracy. We all have a responsibility to do that…. You’ve got to vote…. You have to let people know whether you agree with how they’re conducting themselves or whether you don’t agree with how they’re conducting themselves. Because if you don’t, other people will.”

— Interview by Daniel DeVries

Fancy Footwork: Balancing Irish Dance and Academics

Emma José ’28 is a four-time Irish Dancing World Championship medalist hailing from New York City. José, who started dancing at age 3 and competing at age 8, has stayed on top of training and competitions while balancing her academics at Colgate. With an interest in environmental science, she is conducting on-campus research with Professor Paul Harnik this summer, exploring the functional responses to warming seas and how rising temperatures affect marine ecosystems. At press time, she was also preparing to attend the national championships in Washington, D.C., in July. Here’s more from her interview with Colgate Magazine:

How did you become involved in Irish dancing?

The documentary Jig inspired me from a young age. I’d watch it at least two or three times a week as a child. One of the main stars was Filipino and Irish like me, and I knew I wanted to qualify for the worlds like her.

After COVID, when I switched dance schools, I ended up going to the school that was featured in the documentary. At that point, I had never qualified for the worlds or achieved a lot of my childhood dreams. Now, being top five in the nation twice, being top five at the regionals three times, and placing in every single world championship I’ve been to — it’s pretty incredible. To realize that in the past five years, I’ve accomplished everything I have ever dreamed of and more is amazing. The best part — what carries me through — is still my love of Irish dance.

What does competing at a championship look like?

Typically at a major competition, there are three rounds. In the first round, you perform a rhythmic routine in hard shoes. You are being judged on timing and pace. Three people perform different choreographies at the same time. The second dance is in soft shoes, which are like ballet slippers. This routine is more lyrical and highlights the grace of Irish Dance. Two people perform at a time. Usually the

top 50% are called back for the final round. This dance is in hard shoes and is performed alone.

At my most recent world championship, I woke up at 3:45 a.m. for makeup and got my wig done at around 4:30 a.m. My first dance was at 8 a.m., my second was at 11:30 a.m., and my last dance was at 5 p.m. It was a long day that required a lot of pacing and some power naps here and there.

How do you manage your time on campus?

I train five to six days a week for an hour or two, and usually that takes place either really early in the morning or really late at night, depending on when I can fit it in. On top of that, I do outside cross-training, walks, and runs.

It’s difficult at times, but the people I have here are a great support system. My professors have been really helpful. I went to Scotland in October for a competition, and Ireland [twice this year]. I had to miss a few classes, but my teachers have been really willing to help me catch up on work.

They have made it seem like this is an opportunity I can do in addition to my academics. I’m really grateful for that. [Also] my next-door neighbor used to be an Irish dancer, and she’s a good friend of mine. [She’s] really helped in the moments when everything’s overwhelming.

What do you want people to know about Irish dancing?

It may seem silly with the costumes or with the lack of arm use, but every single Irish dancer, no matter what level, works really hard to be where they are.

How do people generally react when they learn that you are an Irish dancer?

People are a little starstruck when I show them the shiny costume and the tall wig I wear at competitions. Also, it’s pretty cool to say that I’m an Irish dancer because it’s definitely a niche passion.

— Aarza Sachdeva ’28

football

Villanova to Join Patriot League Football in 2026

Villanova University will join the Patriot League as an associate member for football beginning in the 2026 season. The move expands the league to 10 teams, following the recent additions of University of Richmond (2025) and William & Mary (2026).

Colgate and Villanova have met regularly in recent years and

will play one final non-league game on Sept. 6, 2025, before becoming conference opponents.

“Villanova brings a tradition of athletic excellence that aligns perfectly with the Patriot League’s core values,” says Colgate President and Chair of the Patriot League Council of Presidents Brian W. Casey.

“This is a momentous step forward — one that brings new energy, deepens our competitive landscape, and reaffirms our shared commitment to academic and athletic distinction.”

That academic strength is reflected across the Patriot League, with the highest Graduation Success Rate and Federal Graduation Rate among all NCAA DI FCS conferences.

Colgate football contributed 43 honor roll selections in 2024–25, underscoring the team’s performance in the classroom as well as on the field.

Colgate Sets New Honor Roll Record

Colgate placed a record 445 student-athletes on the 2024–25 Patriot League Academic Honor Roll, marking its fourth straight year setting a new high.

The winter/spring list included 285 Raiders. Men’s lacrosse led all Colgate programs with 47 selections — the most in the league — followed by men’s track and field (38), women’s lacrosse (32), and women’s rowing and swimming & diving (30 each).

Student-athletes earn honor roll recognition by posting a

GPA of 3.2 or higher during their championship season. Colgate ranked fifth among Patriot League institutions in total honorees.

This marks the seventh consecutive year the Patriot League has surpassed 3,000 total honor roll selections across all member schools. As a member of the Patriot League — alongside the Ivy League, one of the nation’s top conferences for combining DI athletics with academic rigor — Colgate continues to demonstrate its commitment to academic and athletic excellence.

Women’s hockey Alumnae Drafted to the PWHL

Kristýna Kaltounková ’24, MA’25 (pictured, right) and Hannah Murphy ’25 (pictured, left) were selected in the 2025 PWHL Draft on June 25 in Ottawa.

Kaltounková

was the first pick overall in the draft — the first Raider to do so in program history. She joins the New York Sirens, reuniting with her former Colgate coach Greg Fargo, who is now the Sirens’ head coach, and former teammates Allyson Simpson ’24 and Kayle Osborne ’24.

Murphy was the first goaltender selected in the draft, 15th overall, and is joining the new expansion team, PWHL Seattle.

Honoree Poet of the Pool

While some athletes have a warm-up song, MG King ’27 is a bit different: They warm up to the beats of a poem. By the time T.S. Eliot’s lines from The Waste Land — “the evening hour that strives / Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea” —

echo through their headphones, King is halfway through their consistent routine: swim, stretch, and swim some more.

Colgate swimming’s first Academic All-League honoree since 2014, King’s major in classics and the “somewhat intellectual sport” are intertwined. “Each race requires its own special ‘scheme’ of sorts,” they say. “Part of the fun is getting to figure out and perfect your own strategies: what you are capable of physically as well as mentally.”

To receive the Academic AllLeague distinction, a studentathlete must have at least a 3.20 cumulative GPA and be a key player within their sport. During the four-day Patriot League Championship weekend in February, King compiled 68 points for the Raiders. They

were a top scorer in their favored events: the 100/200m backstroke and the freestyle.

“Freestyle has this rhythm to it,” says King. “It’s not exactly like a pentameter, but you can kind of make it that.” In fact, King doesn’t just think of others’ poems while swimming — they also write their own. “When I’m swimming, I come up with some of my best work.”

Inspired by fantasies of Greek legend and early modern literature, King is a daydreamer. “At practice, you’re staring at the bottom of the pool for two to three hours a day, so you have to think of something,” they say. “When I’m practicing, I’ll run over Latin and Greek word endings [e.g., -us, -a, -um, -ic] for myself.”

A Latin and Greek tutor at Colgate, King has been recognized

as a George W. Cobb Fellow and a recipient of the Baldwin Greek Prize. Their current work as a James Madison Fellow is focused on Lucan’s Pharsalia — a historical epic about the civil war between Caesar and Pompey — and the lingering impact of civil war on Roman society.

In the evenings, you’re equally likely to find them by the pool or huddled in the woods with their friends reading Hamlet, trying to snag the lead role.

“I have realized over time that these two spheres of my life are literally inseparable,” says King, who compares tough swim practices to hard Greek exams. “Above all, though, I think what unites them most is the delight that comes only from pushing through what makes you uncomfortable.”

— Tate Fonda ’25

Long jump

A Leap Ahead

Cole Blair ’25 joined the track team in the fall of 2021 with dreams of becoming a Patriot League champion in the long jump. Less than a year later, the Georgetown, Texas, native stood at the top of the podium at the Patriot League Outdoor Championship, holding his first gold medal as a Raider and becoming Colgate’s first individual conference champ in 10 years.

It didn’t take long for Blair to achieve his goal. But he was only just getting started.

Fast forward to the spring of 2025, and Blair has wrapped up his Colgate track career in unprecedented fashion. He graduated as one of the most distinguished student-athletes in University history, leaving with six gold medals — two indoor wins and four more from outdoor competition.

“Second place is never an option,” he says. “A funny saying, which my teammates will make fun of me for, is, ‘If you’re not first, you’re last,’ which I kind of abide by.”

At Colgate, Blair also distinguished himself academically. An international relations and Spanish double major, he joined a small group of students in reviving the once-dormant Pre-Law Society, growing its membership from 0 to 186 in just a few years.

Today, Blair has relocated to New York City, where he works in a paralegal program at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis.

“The keys to success for me have been my mental state — wanting to win — and the consistency of training and enjoying it at the same time,” he says. Blair adds that he left Colgate feeling “satisfied, having accomplished all of my goals.” — Rodrigo Santiago

Patriot League Champions

The Raiders marched into the postseason as the No. 5 seed, eager to prove it was better than its 4–4 conference record (10–8 overall). But to make it happen, the Raiders knew they had to play their best — and that’s precisely what they did.

Colgate took down No. 4 Lehigh in the Patriot League Quarterfinals, then moved on to the next round, where topseeded Army awaited. The Black Knights were the heavy favorites, but that didn’t matter to the Raiders, who pulled off a dramatic performance to stun Army 16–13 and advance to the championship game.

The final hurdle for Colgate was No. 2 Boston University. Like Lehigh and Army, the Terriers got the best of Colgate during the regular season, but Colgate bested the Terriers 17–10, winning the program’s first conference championship since 2015.

The Raiders were led by goalkeeper Matt LaCombe ’25, who was named the tournament MVP after making a total of 37 saves in three games. Additionally, Rory Connor ’25, Liam Connor ’27, Hunter Drouin’ 26, and Max Yates ’25 were selected as honorable mentions for All-America laurels by the United States Intercollegiate Lacrosse Association.

Events

Arts, Creativity, and Innovation Weekend Sparks Imagination

Colgate hosted its annual Arts, Creativity, and Innovation (ACI) Weekend in April to celebrate the importance of the creative process and imaginative thinking across all academic disciplines. The Middle Campus Initiative for ACI is a cornerstone of the University’s Third-Century Plan, and its home in the new Bernstein Hall served as the focal point for the series of events.

The weekend included performances, lectures, exhibitions, and the 13th edition of the Thought Into Action (TIA) entrepreneur showcase and pitch competition. Networking events and panel discussions connected students with alumni in various industries.

On Friday evening in Memorial Chapel, Netflix co-founder and former CEO Marc Randolph sat down for a conversation with President Brian W. Casey as part of the Kerschner Family Series Global Leaders at Colgate. During the wide-ranging discussion, Randolph advised students to prepare for the future, regardless of the career or industry they choose.

“What feeds an entrepreneur is curiosity,” he says. “The skills you need — not just for entrepreneurship, but [also] for the world — are what you learn in a liberal arts school.”

Underscoring the point, notable alumni and friends participated in panel discussions with current students. The topic: careers in the arts. Panelists included Alex Coco ’12, producer of the

Academy Award–winning film Anora, as well as Flipside producer and Watson writer Adam Goldman ’94, documentary producer Nick Hasse ’17, Gotham Film & Media Institute Deputy Director Kia Brooks, marketing and communications consultant Kanitha Heng ’09 Snow, and comedy assistant Ava Wigdor ’23.

“Entrepreneurship and the arts go well together,” Snow told the student audience. “I started applying these storytelling skills I gained at Colgate to organizations and helping them build their business in a way that has been impactful.”

Both Coco and Goldman facilitated screenings and discussions of their films. The Ryan Family Film Series presented Anora, and the Hamilton Movie Theater showed Flipside with Goldman. “I felt so much freedom when I was here,” Coco said. “Nobody was trying to push me into a box. Colgate encouraged me to always think that way.”

I started applying these storytelling skills I gained at Colgate to organizations and helping them build their business in a way that has been impactful.

Kanitha Heng ’09 Snow

Meanwhile, students from Colgate’s scholar programs — Benton, Alumni Memorial, Office of Undergraduate Studies, and Lampert — presented their research at a poster session in Bernstein Hall.

The TIA entrepreneur showcase pitch competition and venture showcase were held in the Hall of Presidents on Saturday. True Ventures partner Gus Coldebella ’91 moderated the panel of alumni entrepreneurs, including Colgate’s Entrepreneur of the Year Michael Ellenbogen ’86, P’26, founder and chief innovation officer of Evolv Technology. Other panelists included The Outset co-founder Kate Foster ’99 Lengyel, FIF Collective founder and CEO Meghan Curtin ’06 McKenna, Fair Harbor Clothing co-founder and chief brand officer Caroline Danehy ’19, and PAR Technology CEO Savneet Singh.

In the venture showcase, entrepreneurs competed for a total of $10,000 in grant funding. The panel announced that Ellenbogen and McKenna would provide contestants with an additional $2,000 investment in their ventures.

The $10,000 cash prize went to Students Helping Students, co-founded by Nathan Walsh ’28, which provides affordablecollege help for students, by students. Trust Beverages, founded by Charlotte Prendergast ’25, took second place. Talia Broder ’28, who placed third with a venture called will Vitalize, will participate in the Summer Accelerator, alongside other student and alumni entrepreneurs.

“ACI Weekend is one important and exciting way for members of this community to engage with artists, writers, entrepreneurs, and performers who share their passion for process,” said Associate Dean of the Faculty for Faculty Recruitment and Development and Associate Professor of Theater Christian DuComb.

What feeds an entrepreneur is curiosity.

Marc Randolph, Netflix co-founder and former CEO

ACI Weekend is one important and exciting way for members of this community to engage with artists, writers, entrepreneurs, and performers who share their passion for process.

Associate Professor of Theater Christian DuComb

Exhibition

Suchi Reddy Explores Collective Experience

Woven, textual, and digital elements — part of Bias and Belonging, an exhibition by Suchi Reddy — were on display in April in Clifford Gallery. Reddy, the 2024–25 Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation Artist-inResidence, opened her new exhibition during Arts, Creativity, and Innovation (ACI) Weekend.

Bias and Belonging is the culmination of several community conversations Reddy facilitated on campus throughout the

academic year with students, faculty, and staff.

Reddy is a New York City–based architect, designer, and artist. Her recognitions include the AIA Brooklyn + Queens Award, AIA New York State Excelsior Award, and Interior Design’s Best of the Year.

Bias and Belonging is Reddy’s latest exploration of collective experience as people transform themselves in digital and physical spaces. The central feature of the exhibit was a double-sided woven textile in black and white hanging from the ceiling. Icons representing the various ways participants experienced bias and belonging are shown in a grid pattern. Their feelings are represented in black and white.

Running along the center of the fabric was a red-braided cord in the shape of a heartbeat line, like an electrocardiogram

— a concept inspired by being at a friend’s hospital bedside. The electrical activity of her friend’s heart on the EKG monitor fascinated Reddy.

“I was always interested by the fact that the line was a register against this grid of information,” Reddy said.

In one of her earliest conversations, Reddy asked participants to come up with a single word that represented their earliest memory of feeling belonging — and then also bias. Reddy was surprised to find that, in many cases, participants used the same single word to describe both experiences.

Along three walls of the gallery are black and white projections of the handwritten notes from the community conversations. A line of digital iconography repeats on the wall, pulsing like a heartbeat.

“The icons are in a grid. The red heartbeat

line as well as the running line on the walls — it’s blood. It moves in that moment, and that’s what you’re seeing,” Reddy said. “I like this tension between these colors. So it was a balance between both a conceptual match and also simplicity. And then the heartbeat evolved.”

Architect and artist Rachel Mulder assisted with the creation of the iconography used in the woven textile. Associate Professor of Art and Clifford Gallery Director Margaretha Haughwout also worked closely with Reddy. Artist Molly Burt-Westvig and printmaker Annie Klein assisted in weaving the textile for the installation. The creation of the textile utilized the TC2 digital loom in the Fabulation Lab of Bernstein Hall, a hub of creativity and innovation in the Middle Campus and the physical location of the ACI Initiative at Colgate.

“Suchi is dedicated to expanding our notions of empathy, equity, and agency,” said Haughwout.

The Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation Artist-in-Residence was established in 1986 as a challenge grant in support of the arts at Colgate. The residency program permits one or more artists to become part of the Colgate community every academic year.

Suchi is dedicated to expanding our notions of empathy, equity, and agency.

Associate Professor of Art Margaretha Haughwout

Innovation

David Kelley: ‘We Just Have to Remove the Blocks’

Engineer, designer, and entrepreneur David Kelley visited campus as the Clifford Family Innovator-in-Residence in April. Kelley specializes in design thinking and human-centered design methodology, which he applied during his interactions with students, faculty, and staff.

The Donald W. Whittier Professor in mechanical engineering at Stanford University, Kelley serves as faculty director of Stanford’s interdisciplinary d.school, which is dedicated to helping students develop their creative capacity. He is a co-founder of the Silicon Valley design and consulting firm IDEO and co-author of the book Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“Creativity is not limited to the arts,” said Associate Professor of Theater Christian DuComb, who is also the associate dean of the faculty for faculty recruitment and development. “David’s residency has given us insight into how we can continue to provide opportunities for collaboration among students and faculty in innovative and interdisciplinary ways.”

As part of his student interactions, Kelley consulted with the innovation fellows from Colgate’s Design for America Studio during a roundtable discussion. The studio develops solutions for problems facing the campus and community. Fellows are currently working on a project that would improve climate education for schoolaged children, and Kelley advised them to keep pushing themselves beyond what is comfortable — not to get discouraged during the design process.

Students participated in an interdisciplinary seminar with Kelley and other faculty members to workshop designrelated challenges in creative projects. Faculty mentors included Peter L. and Maria T. Kellner Endowed Chair in the Arts, Creativity, and Innovation DeWitt Godfrey; Assistant Professor of Computer Science Noah Apthorpe; Professor of Earth and Environmental Geosciences and Peace and Conflict Studies Karen Harpp; and Weiner Family Entrepreneur in Residence Reece Wilson. Students shared their projects and

received feedback from their mentors and Kelley.

“A design-thinking tenant that really works is storytelling,” Kelley advised the students. “Paint a picture of the future — where your idea is in it, and it’s working. That allows all kinds of people to help you with your idea.”

He also encouraged the students to move toward prototyping to test their concepts. This is part of the designthinking process. “Prototyping allows you to gather information about your idea, rather than just thinking about it,” he said.

Kelley visited two Department of Computer Science courses on humancomputer interaction, toured Bernstein Hall, and visited current University exhibitions. He also met with the ACI Steering Committee to strategize about the next phase of the ACI Initiative.

“Everyone is wildly creative,” Kelley said. “We don’t have to teach students to be creative — we just have to remove the blocks.”

The Clifford Family Innovator-in-Residence program is a cornerstone of the Middle Campus Initiative for Arts, Creativity, and Innovation at Colgate and is funded by a permanent endowment from Trustee Emeritus Chris Clifford ’67, H’11, P’93 and Carrie Clifford ’93.

Discover

A Tale of Two Sleuths

Elizabeth DeWolfe ’83 explores the challenges and opportunities facing women on the eve of the 20th century while telling a tale of secrecy and suspense.

This was not the book I intended to write,” says Elizabeth (Ferrigno) ’83 DeWolfe, referring to Alias Agnes: A Notorious Tale of a Gilded Age Spy, published in April by the University Press of Kentucky.

Her plan, DeWolfe says, had been to chronicle the life of Madeleine Pollard, the former mistress of William C.P. Breckinridge, a congressman from Kentucky. In a widely publicized 1894 trial, Pollard sued Breckinridge for breach of promise, claiming he had seduced, then vowed and failed to marry her. At the time, the case (which Pollard won) was closely followed by a public eager for scandal, but little was known about the plaintiff before or after the trial. DeWolfe wanted to offer a full rendering of Pollard’s life, one that transcended the reductive label of “jilted lover.”

DeWolfe’s research led her, among many other places, to the reading room of the James Madison Memorial Building of the Library of Congress, where she pored

through the more than 800 boxes of the Breckinridge Family Papers. In letters to the congressman from his lawyer, she noticed mentions of a “Miss P” and veiled references to some sort of covert intrigue related to the trial.

She had also read a sensational memoir, popular at the time, titled The Real Madeleine Pollard. The author, one Agnes Parker, claimed to have spent 10 weeks as an undercover spy in the house for fallen women where Pollard resided; her assignment, Parker wrote, had been to befriend Pollard and elicit information that

Breckinridge could use to discredit her in the trial. Could “Miss P” and Agnes Parker be the same person, DeWolfe wondered? And who was Agnes Parker, anyway?

A professor of history and of gender, women, and sexuality studies at University of New England in Maine, DeWolfe is also a skilled — and stubborn — detective. Through extensive research, perspicacity, and “dogged persistence,” she finally ascertained that Parker’s real name was Jane Tucker. She then spent weeks scouring city directories, census records, Ancestry.com, newspapers.com — “all the tricks of the

trade” — until she finally zeroed in on the right Jane Tucker among the nearly 76,000 women of that name born around 1863.

“That was the moment that crystallized reframing the book,” DeWolfe says. The result is the story of two women (three, if you count Agnes, Jane’s “girl spy” alter ego) leading very different lives: Tucker supported herself as a single woman, working several jobs (much to her family’s disapproval), while Pollard aspired to join Washington high society and dared to expose the double standards that applied to men and women’s sexual lives. Yet they both sought the same thing.

“They wanted to live a life they designed, not a life dictated by their gender or social class,” DeWolfe says. “They wanted the American dream — not the one that was assigned to women, but the one that men got: education, geographic mobility, financial independence, choice in marriage.”

Cherchez La Femme

That DeWolfe attended Colgate to study geology and astronomy but ended up majoring in an interdisciplinary program of anthropology, art history, and astronomy is in part due to two courses she took: one on the evolution of dinosaurs, taught by the late Robert Linsley, professor of geology, and one on archaeoastronomy, taught by Anthony Aveni, Russell Colgate Distinguished University Professor of astronomy and anthropology and Native American studies emeritus.

Thanks to their teaching, DeWolfe says, “I realized that what engaged me was not the bits and pieces of science, like chemical formulas or physics laws, it was the grand narrative of life on Earth. That’s what got me thinking about the past.” (The author dedicated Alias Agnes to Aveni.)

If she has devoted her career to shedding light on the ordinary women of the past, it’s in part because she had been “bored silly” in high school social studies classes, which consisted of memorizing lists of “great white men, the battles they fought, the countries they led, the discoveries they made.” At the time, the teenage DeWolfe wondered, Didn’t anyone like me ever do anything in history?

It’s also because by studying the lives of “the majority of people who have walked on this earth” — that is, everyday men and women — “we get a more complete, rich, and deep portrait of humanity,” DeWolfe says. “It enlarges our body of knowledge, so we have more information by which to march forward into the future.”

— Sarah C. Baldwin

by Bernie Freytag

Making Contact

What might aliens from other planets really be like? In a new book, Professor Emeritus Anthony Aveni challenges assumptions.

When Anthony Aveni discusses his new book on human contact with extraterrestrial aliens, he starts with an unlikely story about natives of Papua New Guinea meeting Australian gold prospectors in the 1930s. The Indigenous people had never seen foreigners before and struggled to understand them. They were especially intrigued by their pale skin. “They thought, ‘We turn white when we die, so maybe they are our ancestors.’” They followed the new arrivals around and watched where they defecated in the field. “They go over to it, start poking it with a stick, and realize that it looks the same and smells the same as theirs,” Aveni says. “How could that be?”

The story illustrates the kind of conundrum faced when confronted with a culture very different from our own. If we ever meet aliens, we may go through a similar process of trying to understand them through our own perspective, says Aveni, Russell Colgate Distinguished University Professor of astronomy and anthropology and Native American studies emeritus. But like the Papua New Guineans, we may be very wrong in the conclusions we draw. “If there is intelligent life on other planets, what will we assume about it?” He explores these ideas in a new book, Aliens Like Us? An Anthropologist’s Field Guide to Intelligent Extraterrestrial Life, looking beyond the questions of whether there are alien life-forms on other planets to ask what they might be like. He finds answers in the field of anthropology. “If you look at contact among terrestrial cultures, you might find interesting examples that could help you understand, perhaps, how to posit ideas and frameworks for contact with hypothetical extraterrestrials,” Aveni says.

One of the founders of Mesoamerican archaeoastronomy, Aveni had an epiphany early in his career when he first began investigating Mayan concepts of the heavens. “I began to realize that not everyone views the universe the same way,” he says. “It changed my academic life.” Although he retired from Colgate eight years ago, Aveni continues to break new ground. His latest book explores how we might approach aliens’ cultural attitudes toward nature, music, language, and religion by examining both positive and negative meetings between people over the centuries. When the Spanish first encountered the Mayan people in the 16th century, for example, they burned all of their books as sacrilegious before realizing they might use them to learn the Mayan language. Afterward, a Spanish priest sat down with a Mayan scribe to learn his alphabet, without realizing that the Mayans didn’t have one — all of their words were based on syllables, not letters. “There is no A, B, C,” Aveni says.

In a similar way, some cultures don’t have a concept of individual ownership of land, or a linear

view of time. “We think of time as a piece of string with knots on it representing events, stretching up into the future,” says Aveni — a model for progress based on science and technology from the Greeks to the Renaissance to the Industrial Age. “But must we assume other cultures have to follow that route? They may measure their progress through social or cultural means instead.” Ultimately, an alien encounter must begin by recognizing that “our ways of knowing may not be the only valid ways of understanding the universe,” says Aveni. Before beaming out recordings to distant galaxies, we should stop and anticipate how they could be received by alien life-forms who might view them with a very different framework.

So far the track record of terrestrial meetings doesn’t bode well for that eventual first contact. “It is discouraging when we don’t understand ourselves as human beings because of differences of color and language,” Aveni says. “How will we ever understand hypothetical intelligent beings from another planet?” As scientists continue to discover new habitable planets outside our solar system, however, that question might not be so hypothetical in the future, bringing new urgency to the need to study and understand the other.

— Michael Blanding

physics

Exploring Quantum Light

Mehul Malik ’06 probes quantum conundrums, one photon at a time.

Mehul Malik ’06 has always been driven by big questions. Growing up in India, he was intrigued by the size of the universe and what might lie beyond it.

“The desire to try to answer some of the things that we still don’t understand today is what drove me to physics,” says Malik, who is now a professor of physics and Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in emerging technologies at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. “I think that journey really started at Colgate, because I realized that it’s not so much that there are these big questions we can’t answer. It’s more that our ability to experience the true nature of reality is limited by our human perception. We can’t even ask the right questions based on our five senses.”

Physicist

Mehul Malik ’06 in his lab at HeriotWatt University in Edinburgh, Scotland

Today, Malik uses quantum optics — the study of how fundamental particles of light called photons interact with atoms and molecules — to better understand both the universe that we can perceive and the world around us that we cannot see or entirely grasp using traditional ways of observing. For example, bits — the fundamental units of data that are the building blocks of our digital world — represent zeros and ones in classical computing. But quantum bits, or qubits, can represent zero, one, or both simultaneously.

“In my research group, the Beyond Binary Quantum Information Lab, I work with quantum states of light that can encode hundreds of levels of information, so more than just zeros and ones,” says Malik. His work has potential applications in building unhackable communication systems, powerful quantum computers that could be used to discover new materials for health care and fighting climate change, and quantum sensing techniques that could vastly improve medical diagnostics. “We do this by controlling the complex properties of light such as its structure in space, time, or even its color. We can then use these properties to study very interesting quantum effects, such as entanglement, where quantum particles can be connected over very large distances.”

For his work in quantum photonics and contributions to advancing quantum technologies, Malik has been recognized as one of the most distinguished scientists in his field by the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) and Optica (formerly the Optical Society of America), both of which recently elected him as a fellow.

“Being a fellow of learned societies gives

you a platform to effect change,” says Malik, who has been working with the RSE on outreach to underserved populations in science education. Recently, he started a program called STEM Seedlings, which aims to increase the number of female role models in Scotland’s primary schools. He’s also led efforts to advocate for the international mobility of scientific researchers by regularly engaging with U.K. policymakers.

This summer, he’s hosting Eli Mayes ’26, a physics major who shares Malik’s love of art. They also both received Alumni Memorial Scholar grants that allow students to travel for academic experiences.

Malik spent a summer in Paris as an undergraduate researching graffiti and Impressionism, and Mayes is using the funds to spend time in Malik’s lab. They have an art minor in common, and both have worked with Colgate sculpture professor DeWitt Godfrey. “It’s such a small world with lots of connections,” Malik says.

When he’s not busy harnessing the power of photons to make breakthroughs in quantum technologies, Malik continues to dabble in art, painting with his daughter, designing and giving scientific talks to audiences around the world, and enjoying the visual and performing art scenes in Edinburgh.

“Colgate was instrumental in helping me figure out what I really love. Not a lot of places in the world let you study physics and art at the same time,” he says. “I was able to exercise both sides of my brain in terms of creativity and analytic scientific ability, and I still do.”

— Katie Neith

Harvesting Power From Nature

Two Colgate researchers have managed to create an electrical generator with little more than a leaf.

Money may not grow on trees, but in the future, batteries might. Assistant Professor of Physics Ramesh Adhikari and his student Neha Viradia ’25 have created a way to harness electricity using little more than leaves collected from around campus, submerged in a bath of water. “It’s basically a battery where water is the fuel,” Adhikari says. “As long as you have access to water, it will continue to run.”

Water has long been used to generate energy from hydroelectric dams, geothermal heat, and turbines driven by waves. But those processes all rely on mechanical or physical properties. “The energy within the molecules themselves is not tapped,” Adhikari says. By contrast, their leaf-based technique creates something called a hydrovoltaic generator, in which electricity is created from the electrical potential of water molecules themselves. While such generators have previously produced low amounts of current, their generator could produce enough electricity to light an LED bulb or power a small device such as a thermometer or other sensor for hours on end. Better yet, it is environmentally friendly. “We create so much waste with electronics,” says Viradia. “Making them out of biodegradable materials can have a huge impact.”

The researchers describe their methods in a new paper published in the journal iScience, “Leaves for High Power Density Hydrovoltaic Generators.” The secret lies in the fact that leaves have built-in channels that circulate water, as well as pores on their undersides called stomata through which they perspire water vapor to keep cool. By

treating the top of the leaf with a solution of sodium hydroxide (NaOH), a highly corrosive base, the researchers are able to open pores on that side as well, creating small channels across the thickness of the leaf.

The treatment also “functionalizes” the wall of those channels by making negatively charged hydroxyl ions (OH-) stick on them. This allows only the positively charged hydrogen ions (H+) to move across the channel, making the channels “ion-selective.” Adhikari and Viradia then sandwich the leaf between two electrodes with aluminum on top. As the hydrogen ions react with the aluminum, they generate electrons that can move through a circuit to create electricity.

Adhikari has been experimenting with leaf-based electronics since 2019, embedding them with wires or using their properties to store memory. The generator process comes out of attempts by Viradia to create a leaf-based capacitor to store electricity. “The device was somehow making its own power,” says Viradia, “which is not supposed to happen.” Adhikari realized that because the leaf was wet, it was generating small amounts of electricity from water, making it a bad capacitor but a potentially good hydrovoltaic generator.

The pair continued to experiment to maximize the effect. By itself, a wet leaf only produced about six hours of decent current before it eventually dried out. They were able to increase that time by using a wick to

1. Carbon Fabric: Carbon lasts a long time, and the fabric provides a porous structure so the water can seep through it to get to the leaf.

2. Aluminum: When the positive ions come through, the aluminum reacts and releases electrons.

3. A leaf naturally has channels so water can move through and evaporate out of the stoma at the bottom.

The researchers apply a sodium hydroxide solution to create pores on the top of the leaf, so water can go across the thickness of the leaf.

ensure a constant supply of water for the device. By far the biggest increase, however, occurred when they submerged the battery entirely in water, allowing them to produce a substantial voltage and current for 300 hours — more than two weeks — before the leaf deteriorated and the aluminum corroded. They are currently experimenting with techniques to extend that life even more, but already the leaf battery represents a huge improvement over previous hydrovoltaic generators. While past generators have been able to create .5 volts of electricity, theirs can generate 1.5 volts — equivalent to an AA battery. Their ability to generate electrical current is even more impressive, increasing that of current generators by approximately a factor of one hundred.

The most immediate application for the device would be powering environmental sensors, for example, to detect chemicals in water, by submerging them full time in a water source. The device could also be potentially used as rainfall sensors because they only generate electrical current when wet, at the same time extending the usable life of the battery.

In the future, Adhikari envisions being able to take a device hiking or backpacking to create a sustainable battery on the trail to charge a phone or flashlight for days with minimal environmental impact. When that day comes, all that would be needed to generate power would be to “Just add water.”

— Michael Blanding

4. The sodium hydroxide and water solution • • • has positive and negative ions. Treatment of leaves with sodium hydroxide attaches negative charges on the channel walls. This repels negative charges of the water and only allows the positive charges to move through. The flow of only positive charges along one direction creates a current.

5. Positive charges • • • move upward to react with the aluminum and create the electrons that go through the circuit. WATER

In reality, this device is very thin, “like a piece of paper,” Adhikari says. “We use the northern oak leaves from campus.”

From First Lectures to Final Semesters: The Storied Careers of Six

Retiring Professors

They’ve appeared on Oprah and helped bring the Dalai Lama to Colgate. They’ve coordinated the introduction of computers to campus and witnessed buildings being erected. They’ve collaborated with colleagues across disciplines and become mentors for students.

In the Hamilton community, they’ve volunteered, and even served as village mayor.

You’ve likely taken a class with at least one of these six professors who retired this year. Learn more about the decades they’ve spent at Colgate and the lasting legacies they leave behind.

Ask Professor Carrie Keating what kind of psychologist she is, and she’s stumped, even after 44 years of teaching at Colgate.

“I couldn’t answer that question in the beginning of my career, and now it’s worse. I pursue questions about power, dominance, hierarchy, and leadership from a crosscultural, cross-species, and maybe even an evolutionary, developmental point of view.

“I don’t know what you call that.”

You can call it very successful, for one thing. Keating, officially a professor of

Carrie Keating: Creative Connections

psychological and brain sciences, was honored in 2024 with Colgate’s top faculty award, the Jerome Balmuth Award for Teaching.

The award marked just one milestone in a career that has stretched far beyond the classroom. Keating has worked as a consultant teaching charisma and collaboration, and has been a media favorite who’s often asked to dissect politicians’ nonverbal cues and leadership styles.

She’s spoken to numerous groups — including preschool teachers, Los Alamos National Laboratory engineers, art museum

docents, and business professionals — about what it takes to lead effectively.

“We’re primates, when you get right down to it. We respond to nonverbal cues — eye contact, posture, gestures — to judge who’s a good leader. It’s not only about what you say; it’s how you say it.”

Keating is particularly interested in charismatic influence, and she and her student researchers created a formula for that: To be perceived as charismatic, a person must look formidable, competent, and dominant. But, at the same time, they must exude warmth in order to appear

receptive and be like someone people want to be around.

Keating explains that she and her student researchers measured the brain activity of people watching charismatic and noncharismatic political leaders for one of her studies. Politicians were shown speaking in 30-second clips, without any audio.

“When people watched charismatic individuals, their brains showed activity in both the approach and avoidance centers,” Keating explains. “That’s what we called ‘Come hither, but beware.’ It creates both attraction and caution. That’s key. If a leader is only threatening — conveys only avoidance — you don’t attach. But if there’s also a draw, some warmth, you follow. And that combination is often a more powerful bonding agent than pure warmth and receptivity alone.”

Charisma can unify or destroy, she believes, because good and bad charismatic leaders synchronize individual brain processes in ways that diminish individual identity and replace it with a powerful form of group identity and allegiance.

This type of research resulted in Keating often being called to comment in the national media, especially during political campaigns. She’s appeared on programs such as The Oprah Winfrey Show (twice), PBS’s Scientific American Frontiers, Dateline NBC, and ABC’s Good Morning America and What Would You Do?

Even in the final chapter of her academic career, Keating continues to explore new territory. She is currently working with student researchers; Sinhaeng Lee, assistant professor of music; and Bruce Hansen, professor of psychology and neuroscience, on a study exploring whether musical conductors, as leaders, synchronize the brainwave patterns of their follower-singers.

“Do charismatic leaders, like a conductor, bring together individuals so that their brain waves actually synchronize with one another?” asks Keating. “And do they now perceive themselves as a member of a collective group?”

The research project reflects Keating’s love for interdisciplinary inquiry, and she is thrilled that it’s one of the first projects under the auspices of the Robert H.N. Ho Mind, Brain, and Behavior Center. Keating worked closely with Professor of Biology Krista Ingram and others to garner support for the center that is housed in Olin Hall but inspires innovative scholarship across campus, thanks to alumni funding through the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative.

Olin Hall has been Keating’s on-campus home since arriving on the Hill in 1981.

Now, she feels it’s the right time to step

away. She plans to spend more time with family in Colorado and Washington, D.C., and explore what involvement in political issue campaigns might look like for her, whether that’s consulting or stuffing envelopes or whatever is needed.

“I’ve had a wonderful career here, a wonderful job,” she says. “But it’s time for me to move over.”

— Tim O’Keeffe

Keating Quotables

What does leadership look like for men vs. women?

“It’s a real dilemma for women. If a woman behaves the way a man does in leadership, we don’t like her very much. We don’t call her dominant — we call her domineering. Leadership is skewed masculine; it’s interpreted as a masculine trait. But in fact, the data show that when women leaders are evaluated by subordinates, they’re often rated more highly. They’re seen as better leaders or more charismatic. They tend to show more care, invest more in staff development — they bring strengths that masculinity doesn’t always include.”

How did you prepare for your TV appearances?

“I don’t have the kind of natural confidence some people have for TV. But being blinded by the TV lights made me forget about myself and helped me focus on getting my ideas across.”

What additional classes do you think can benefit students studying psychological science?

“I tell them basic acting. Put yourself out there. Fall down, get up, and see how that feels. If it’s not clicking or resonating on stage, how do you improvise and get ideas for how to energize other people? It’s really nonverbal behavior training.”

Bob McVaugh: Professor, Mayor, and More

Inside the large filing cabinets of Little Hall’s Visual Resources Library, Professor Bob McVaugh has assembled a collection of approximately a thousand architectural drawings related to Colgate’s architectural history — “treasures for anyone interested in the historical evolution of the campus.” Consisting of blueprints, maps, and more, the collection will be cataloged by McVaugh in the coming months in preparation for its move to Special Collections and University Archives, where it will be available for future researchers.

When Professor of Art Bob McVaugh was hired at Colgate, he was to teach European modern art — eventually, however, he fell into a different niche: architecture. Over the course of his 45-year teaching career, he became a keystone of the minor program.

Hired in 1980, McVaugh’s transition into teaching about architecture was motivated by his background. “I come from a builder’s family, and so much of my early life was spent on construction sites, helping my father, working summers,” he says. When he inherited the American and modern architecture courses offered by his predecessor, Eric Van Schaack, he put his own practical spin on them.

“It’s one thing to study architecture from books and slides, but it’s a very different thing to get a physical and sensory alertness,” he argues. “For this reason, the American architecture course transitioned

into a campus architecture course, and then the campus architecture course became a Colgate architecture course — Colgate being our workshop.”

As it took shape, the offering became a staple in the Department of Art and Art History, allowing students to fuse their own experiences with Colgate’s architectural history. McVaugh also taught a variety of interdisciplinary courses at Colgate, including one with Paul Pinet (geology and environmental studies) and Phil Mulry (computer science).

In the mid-1980s, McVaugh helped shape the artistic facets of Colgate’s Core Curriculum. “I insisted that there exists something called visual knowledge — that there are things that we know visually or experientially,” not only through verbal or mathematical language.

McVaugh’s fascination with pictorial art remained a prominent part of his career. In 1985 he was awarded the NEH

Fellowship for College Teachers — a distinction that provided funding for his research on German romantic art in Europe. In subsequent years, McVaugh aided the NEH by serving as a reviewer for new applications. “I’ve loved meeting new colleagues and seeing what kind of work is being done out there,” he says.

Back in the Hamilton community, McVaugh spent the majority of the ’90s and early aughts as a member of several village organizations, including the Planning Board and the Library Board. “My good fortune in spending my career at Colgate is inseparable from my good fortune in spending my adult life in this remarkable community,” he says. When his kids were growing up, he coached youth soccer, ice hockey, and baseball.

But from 2015–17, McVaugh did something unprecedented: He served as the village mayor while continuing his work in the classroom. It was a role that his wife, Sue, had filled from 2005–11.

“We got deeply involved in the community,” he says. “It’s an extraordinarily rich organism, the village, and it was a privilege to be in the middle of it for a while.”

McVaugh’s architectural expertise also enabled his contributions to the evolution of the campus. He sat on selection committees for the architects of Persson Hall and Ho Science Center, and he was actively involved in developing the Campus Plan of 2013, which assessed the state of the campus and its future potential.

Looking ahead, McVaugh plans to spend approximately five more years in Hamilton, during which time he will wrap up and organize his work on Colgate’s campus for future researchers. Afterward, he and his wife may retire to the Philadelphia area, where they both grew up.

“Altogether, you can feel extremely good about something and happily transition from it,” he says. “It was 45 years of getting up in the morning and doing exactly what I wanted to do. There aren’t a lot of people in the world who have had that.”

— Tate Fonda

’25

Alice Nakhimovsky: Primary Source

Alice Nakhimovsky, distinguished chair in Jewish studies and professor of Russian and Eurasian studies, took a temporary teaching position at Colgate in 1975. Months turned into years and then into decades. Now, the campus knows her as one of Colgate’s earliest female professors; the editor of the book Repression, Reinvention, and Rugelach: A History of Jews at Colgate; and a longtime teacher in the Liberal Arts Core Curriculum.

Nakhimovsky is a prolific writer and translator. She has authored or co-authored nearly a dozen books and another dozen academic articles, alongside numerous additional articles and reviews. Her book Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl: Yiddish Letter Manuals in Russia and America (Indiana University Press), co-written with Roberta Newman, won a 2015 National Jewish Book Award. Nakhimovsky spent six years on the editorial board of the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, and she co-created a virtual museum that documents life in Russia’s communal apartments, with Colgate professor Nancy Ries, Cornell’s Slava Paperno, and Ilya Utekhin of the European University at St. Petersburg (Russia).

Nakhimovsky’s tenure at Colgate underscores the fact that great professors are themselves lifelong learners, who discover new areas of interest, investigate deeply, and then share their discoveries with generations of students. It’s the spirit that she is carrying into her emerita years as she looks forward to a variety of academic projects and editing work, including Colgate’s own faculty handbook.

Nakhimovsky provides a brief sketch of her long career:

How did you arrive at the University? I came to Colgate in 1975 because someone got sick, and [the University] needed somebody close by to teach Russian — I was at Cornell. I did that for two months, and then a job opened up, a two-year position. After that, I left for a year to take care of [our first baby], and when I came back, I received a letter saying, “You’re coming up for tenure next year.” I was not tenure-track until I got this note — I was a lecturer and then a visiting assistant professor. But I had written a lot, because I could, so I got tenure. It was a different time.

You taught many courses at Colgate. Did any stand out?

I think that one of the best things — and I’m grateful to Colgate for this — is the Core. I went through school myself by teaching the Core. When I first came, there was a course that was, in essence, a comparative literature course. There were wonderful people in [the] German and Italian [departments], and we read the books, and we had a small group and discussed these things. That turned into what was called CORE 152. Then I went into CORE 151. I spent the summer before the first class session reading the material, and then I taught the course until it ended — roughly 20 years later.

How did you make the transition from learning the material yourself to teaching it?

I do my best to read the secondary literature, and I like doing that. Otherwise, I’m trained in reading texts. I can read texts,

and I understand how meaning is made. I know what the approach is, and then you just engage everybody in conversation to the best of your ability. Now that I am not teaching anymore, I can say I don’t think I ever walked into a classroom without having read the text again, never once. Not for any class, not even for a work that I had read a million times.

You taught Russian literature in the classics department for years. How did you move into Jewish studies?

We have to go back to Roland Blum, professor of philosophy. In the fall of 1983, Roland said, “You’re going on sabbatical, OK. You’re going to be replaced by Shimon Markish.” In my ignorance, I did not know who this was. He was the son of the poet Peretz Markish, one of 13 poets executed by Stalin on Aug. 12, 1952 — the Night of Murdered Poets. Sima [Markish] came, and I sat as a student in that classroom where I spent the rest of my life teaching, 201 Lawrence. Afterward, Sima said to me, “You are going to do it: You are going to write a book about Jews in Russian literature, and I will give you all my notes.”

I wrote Russian-Jewish Literature and Identity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), and it was a minor big deal — because it was the first time anybody had ever opened up that subject. Neil Grabois was president of Colgate, and he decided to create the Jewish Studies Program; I could do literature. Students came from everywhere. Those courses always filled, so I had this playground and it was so fun.

Mark Walden

There is ... an essence to religion, to all religions, that favors human value.

Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies Steven Kepnes was a “child of the ’60s” — a time, he recalls, when “religion was something that many people turned to.” The religious legacies of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. formed parentheses around his studies at the University of Chicago. “Religion was in the air that I breathed as a student,” he says, “and then it grew into my career.”

Thirty-seven years later, Kepnes looks back on his time at Colgate, where his work on comparative scripture, hermeneutics, and modern Jewish philosophy flourished.

Kepnes began his work at the University in 1988, initially offering courses on Jewish philosophy. One of his most enduring offerings, Faith After the Holocaust, became a staple of the religion department, drawing more than 100 students at its peak.

“The best thing about being a professor at Colgate is our students,” says Kepnes, who has chaired the religion department and served as director of the Jewish Studies Program. “They have continually surprised me with new insights into texts I thought I knew.”

As Kepnes’ research interests later widened to include the study of comparative religions, he developed a course on

Steven Kepnes: Rooted in Faith

scriptural reasoning, which explored Jewish, Christian, and Muslim beliefs in dialogue. “There is, if you will, an essence to religion, to all religions, that favors human value,” he says.

Across his career, Kepnes’ passion for interfaith engagement motivated his travel to regions with long-standing religious histories. From 1993–95 he spent two sabbaticals in Israel, where he served as a fellow at Hebrew University and the Shalom Hartman Institute. In 2011 he taught for a semester in Rome at Gregorium University, where he shared in interfaith dialogue during a conference at a historic monastery.

“I’m an active Jew, so for me, religion is very much a part of my personal life,” says Kepnes. “But it has also fueled my contributions and work for peace among religions.” In 2008 Kepnes helped organize a visit from the 14th Dalai Lama, who spoke at Sanford Field House. “I was impressed with the Dalai Lama’s humaneness, humility, wit, and warmth,” he says. “I learned that spirituality can be embodied in the demeanor and presence of a person, no matter their beliefs.”

From 2013–23, Kepnes deepened his commitment to interfaith engagement through his role as the director of Chapel House. During a 2023 renovation, Kepnes

helped conceive and build the meditation garden, a place where visitors are invited to enjoy the sounds of nature.

In the time following his retirement, Kepnes plans to continue writing and traveling. He has two forthcoming books: Reviving Jewish Theology (Cambridge University Press) and a co-authored text, Scriptural Reasoning: Abrahamic Interfaith Practice (Routledge). Next year, Kepnes will also begin a fellowship centered around environmental sustainability and Judaism at Bar-Ilan University. “I’m retiring, but I’m not retiring from my academic interest, my writing, and my interactions with other scholars,” he says.

Tate Fonda ’25

Charles G. Hetherington

Professor of Mathematics Dan Schult has a practical streak that runs through his career as an educator and researcher. But don’t be tempted to equate the practical with the mundane.

Schult earned a master’s in economics at Princeton. He was working on his PhD when he decided to change course, leave the university, and join the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis. After three years with the Fed, though, he missed academia and returned to campus, this time at Northwestern University, to earn a doctorate in applied math.

But Schult had conditions. “I wanted my research to be connected to the real world,” he says. “And I wanted to teach undergraduates.” He pursued the first goal through his dissertation research, which looked at patterns of fire extinction. Schult and his dissertation adviser were trying to find the precise circumstances in which fire would either go out or not start. “When you turn down the flame on a gas stove very slowly, you’ll see it pop-pop-pop and then go out,” Schult says. “That’s a pulsation, a bifurcation, a change in the behavior of the flame as you get close to extinction.” Pulsations, bifurcations, and changes can be expressed in mathematical terms, and that was the work behind his PhD.

The results would have important implications for fire safety. But closely and mathematically observing the finer points of the “pop” was hard if the flame was pushed around by moving air. Making observations in a more stable environment with less air flow, like a vehicle in space, was preferable. NASA agreed and funded the effort. “Perfect for

Dan Schult: Show Your Work

us — we wanted to look at extinction limits without fluid flow around it, which can make it turbulent,” says Schult. “Good for them — they want to keep astronauts safe.”

PhD in hand, Schult moved on to his second goal: teaching undergraduates. And that’s how he came to Colgate. “Colgate’s model is the teacher-scholar,” says Schult, who was hired in 1996 to teach differential equations and applied math. Schult worked toward deploying computers within the department and teaching students to use them to solve problems in courses like Applied Math for Social Sciences.

“I was nervous for my first class,” Schult recalls. “What’s amazing is that, 28 years later, the first class of the semester, I still get a little bit nervous. It’s an interesting, fun kind of day, but the adrenaline gets pumping.”

By bulking up syllabi with computer work and expanding the number of available courses, including Mathematical Biology, Schult helped the math department launch a new applied math major in 2017. There are now more applied math majors than math majors, and a movement is underway to create a statistics major.

Even while teaching, Schult continued to pursue research with a purpose. Shortly after earning tenure in 2000, Schult took a sabbatical at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to work with researcher Mac Hyman. Hyman’s group was studying the spread of disease across human networks by modeling a bubonic plague attack on Portland, Ore. Schult began to apply the same principles to the spread of information across computer networks.

Schult also offered to help debug and innovate NetworkX, a popular Pythonbased application to help researchers

across disciplines with their data analysis. NetworkX has been used by individuals and governments to track everything from failures in electric grids to six degrees of Kevin Bacon. Schult became the primary maintainer of NetworkX in 2015, and the collaboration continues to this day with a small group of Berkeley faculty colleagues — the app recently crossed 1 billion downloads.

Schult returned from Los Alamos with renewed energy, and he struck up decadeslong research partnerships with Colgate professors Ken Segal, Patrick Crotty, Jason Myers, Bruce Hansen, and others to look closely at patterns in technology and in nature. Their investigations have led to potential innovations in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease and to advancements in neuromorphic computing, which teaches computers to work like human brains and send information across super-cold electronic synapses rather than storing it on inefficient hard drives and in RAM. Schult has also facilitated the work of countless colleagues by serving as the director of the Picker Interdisciplinary Science Institute (ISI), an internal grant maker for new research projects. Picker ISI backing helps investigations gain momentum and attract outside investment.

By bringing undergraduates into these research efforts, Schult has been able to embrace intellectual freedom and take risks. According to Schult, there is pressure to ensure that PhD projects end with a publishable result. Time commitments and career implications demand careful consideration. But undergraduates will only spend a semester or two on any one problem, and they are early in their learning curve, so they and their faculty advisers can follow their curiosity with less regard for the nature of the outcome. Whether the result is positive, negative, or undetermined, the purpose is for the student to learn the process.

Schult has a singular and affable approach to explaining and exploring the inscrutable. It’s as though he has zero doubt that any literature major can grasp the basics of chaos theory — probably because he’s made it happen more than once. His gift as a researcher comes in part from his ability both to share the excitement of a new idea and multiply its impact. Whether it’s studying fire, networks, or neurons, he has managed to pass along the love of applied math to generations of undergraduates, increase the reach of his department, and show proof that a liberal arts education can blend creativity and practicality in ways that advance humanity.

Mark Walden

Teaching outside my department was one of the things I loved most about my time at Colgate.

Chris Nevison: From Plato to Parallel Computing

After more than 50 years of teaching mathematics and computer science at Colgate, Chris Nevison reflects on his career with an unexpected favorite: a “great books” course.

“I taught it several times, the Greek philosophers like Plato on up to Galileo,” says Nevison. “Teaching outside my department was one of the things I loved most about my time at Colgate.”

It is within the Department of Computer Science, though, that Nevison witnessed dramatic changes and — as one of the early members of the department — played an important role in developing courses that prepared students for the rapidly evolving field.

Nevison had arrived on campus in 1974 to teach math but would join the fledgling computer science department in 1983 after conversations with Professor Tom Brackett.

“I was using a computer in my research and simulation work, and I was helping Tom interview potential new faculty members. Eventually I said, ‘You know, I’d be interested in switching to computer science myself.’”

Brackett took him up on it, and Nevison started teaching introductory courses.

Nevison quickly became interested in and created a new course in parallel computing. “Today’s phones and laptops have multiple processors that can do many things at once,” he explains. “But early on, the challenge was how to connect multiple processors to work on a single problem. It’s a fascinating area, the programming that goes on behind the scenes.”

Nevison would also create a course in computer organization — one of his favorites — that examined the electronics and inner workings of computers.

He recalled how the University’s first computer center was in the basement of the O’Connor Campus Center in the 1970s. There was one main computer, approximately 6 feet tall, and a dozen or so terminals that resembled old-style televisions with keyboards attached.

changed,” he says. “Every few years, the computing power available has doubled, pretty much up until the present day.”

How did he and the other members of the department stay current, considering the breathtaking evolution of computing power? By doing what every good professor does, says Nevison, and by putting the skills he learned in earning a master’s and PhD from Stanford University to good use.

“You go to conferences, you read the journals, and you look at new textbooks that incorporate the advances into what you’ve been teaching. Really, it’s taking the training you get as a PhD student and continuing to learn throughout your career.

“But the fundamental principles don’t change. The idea of developing algorithms for different types of problems is the same, for example. It’s just that now you can take on much bigger problems.”

While he’s enjoying his phased retirement — including the time he’s spent hiking in the Grand Tetons and exploring Spain with his wife, Barbara Wells (who also taught computer science at Colgate for four years) — Nevison says he appreciates more than ever the opportunity he had to work with such outstanding faculty across all the disciplines.

“It’s been great to get to know faculty members from other departments and get to work with them. It’s a part of the learning and teaching experience that makes Colgate special.”

— Tim O’Keeffe

“It just boggles the mind how things have Nevison volunteered with Southern Madison County Volunteer Ambulance Corps. for 16 years, first as a driver and then as an EMT.

CAREERS THAT SOAK UP THE SUN

These graduates’ professions heat up in summertime.

By ALETA MAYNE WITH SARAH BALDWIN AND Sherrie NEGREA

In her work with

GO WILD

In Madagascar — where 100+ varieties of lemurs leap and 800-year-old baobab trees tower — travelers find an island on which 90% of its species exist nowhere else in the world. But you’re probably not getting there on your own. That’s where Anne (Milmoe) ’97 Avellana comes in.

She’s a senior adventure director at Natural Habitat Adventures, a travel company that offers wilderness experiences like swimming with sea lions in the Galápagos, photographing pumas in Patagonia, and encountering orangutans in Borneo.

The organization curates small-group trips with an ecoconscious focus, from the travel logistics to the educational opportunities to its relationships with host countries.

“The fact that Natural Habitat Adventures believes that travel plays a crucial role in protecting the planet and that conservation and exploration go hand in hand is certainly one of the main reasons why I work there,” Avellana says.

From her office in Boulder, Colo., she currently specializes in designing trips to southern Africa — Madagascar, Zambia, and Zimbabwe — where the high season is during the U.S. summer because it’s wintertime in Africa.

Avellana plans every detail, from the sites to the guides to the hotels and meals, keeping sustainability in mind for everything. “For instance, if I need to charter a plane to bring a group of travelers to their destination, I strategically schedule the trip dates so that the same plane can bring a different group of travelers back,” she explains, adding that the company offsets the emissions of all flights. (Natural Habitat Adventures calls itself “the world’s first 100% carbon-neutral travel company.”) Nearly all of the guides are locals, and the partnering hotels and organizations must share an eco-friendly ethos. Avellana is even mindful of the nitty-gritty: “I spend a lot of time looking for ways to reduce waste by making sure we have things like cloth napkins and reusable water bottles on our trips.”

The larger mission is to educate travelers and boost economies in the host countries in order to preserve natural resources. “By having people travel, we’re lifting up all of these communities, and indeed, countries,” Avellana says. “In Madagascar, most of the forests have been destroyed through slash and burn agriculture. The areas that are protected have amazing biodiversity. We want to work with locals to realize that trees are more valuable up than down because of the tourism dollars these areas bring in.”

Natural Habitat Adventures is a partner of the World Wildlife Fund and, as such, works with scientists and experts to inform its travelers through lectures. Many who take these trips are Americans, Avellana says, and “[when we] bring people to see these special places, they’re going to get invested in them. A lot of the people who travel with us are very influential and can help shape policy and, hopefully, leave the planet a little bit better.”

When Avellana tells people about her job, it’s a common misconception that she’s always on vacation, but she does travel once a year to scout her locations. At press time, she was preparing for two weeks in Madagascar to do recon for a new trip she’s planning. Her checklist included visiting different camps, interviewing guides and drivers, and talking to restaurants about meeting dietary restrictions — “making sure people’s basic needs are taken care of is a lot of what I help set up ahead of time.”

Back in Boulder, every few weeks, Avellana takes the emergency phone shift, assisting travelers and trip partners anywhere at any time, with situations like missed flights or itinerary pivots due to weather.

In her 12 years with Natural Habitat Adventures, Avellana has specialized in different locations. She spent a decade managing trips to see polar bears in Manitoba and grizzly bears in Alaska. The latter is one of her personal favorite travel experiences, in Katmai National Park, where the bears haven’t been threatened by humans “so they just don’t care about

us, and you can be a couple meters away,” she says. “Being on the ground with such an apex predator in a very safe way is a thrilling experience,” she says. “It does not compare to anything else I’ve seen.”

Avellana doesn’t call herself a thrill seeker; rather she seeks outdoor experiences — in skiing, hiking, and kayaking — and enjoys helping make Earth’s wonders more accessible to travelers. “There are lots of ways to go on summer vacation, and I’m proud to design and operate trips like these for people who are interested in the natural world.”

Personal Landmarks

Top recommendations for summer travel: Madagascar and Alaska

Family vacation plans this summer: a multiday whitewater rafting trip from Colorado to Utah on the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument with her husband and daughter

First trip outside the U.S.: studying abroad in Florence, Italy, as a Colgate student

Bucket list destination: hiking in the Himalayas

Wildlife goal: gorilla trekking in Uganda

Colgate connection: Avellana’s dad, Jim Milmoe ’69 — a class editor for the magazine since 1990 — took a Natural Habitat Adventure trip to see the Northern Lights in Churchill, Manitoba.

TRAINING THE NEXT GENERATION

Before the gates of Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo swing open to allow families to stream in, Kate Dugdale ’16 arrives in advance of her 8 a.m. clock-in. She revels in this peaceful time to stroll the grounds, greet other employees, and visit the animals. The snow leopards — who welcomed three cubs last year, so their exhibit is usually crowded — are her favorite. The Living Northwest Trail is another stop on her route, because the river otters and gray wolves are comfortable in Seattle’s weather “so you’re pretty much always going to see an animal there.”

Dugdale isn’t training the big cats or tending to the aquatic creatures, though; she’s overseeing human teenagers.

As a learning coordinator, Dugdale manages and develops programs for teens and young adults — the biggest part of which is the summer college internship program. It’s a program she knows well, not only from being in her position since February 2024, but also from being a participant. Dugdale grew up in Seattle and worked at the zoo as a high schooler.

At Colgate she majored in history and anthropology, taking museum-related classes (before it became an official program), and was a student assistant at the Longyear. After earning her master’s in museum studies at the University of Washington, she held several parttime positions at Seattle-area museums and then spent four years managing educational programming at the National Nordic Museum.

“I currently work at a zoo, but most of my training and background is in museums. They’re very similar types of organizations,” she explains, “you just have to think of the animals as the collection at a zoo.”

She’s come full circle at Woodland Park Zoo, spending part of her workdays at the Zoomazium, a learning center for younger children, where she began developing her skills in early childhood education as a teenager.

The other half of her job is running the internship program, which requires recruiting supervisors in winter, creating positions and hiring in spring, prepping for the interns (12 this year, with a plan to grow the program to 20) at the start of the summer, ensuring smooth workflows from July through August, and evaluating the program and debriefing in fall.

She acts as a resource for the supervisors and interns, putting out fires that can include

“ My role requires me to have relationships across the zoo in different departments.”

resolving conflicts between the two. “My role requires me to have relationships across the zoo in different departments,” she explains, so her walkabouts give her the chance to not only see the animals but also “be visible and talk to folks on different teams, making sure they know who I am because they might be working with an intern I’ve hired.”

Dugdale also leads a cohort experience with the interns, coaching them in professional development, inviting guest speakers to talk about career pathways into zoos and conservation, and organizing field trips to related Seattle organizations, like the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.

Outside of Woodland Park Zoo’s 92 acres, Dugdale spends her off hours enjoying her home city. “Summer in Seattle is Seattle’s secret,” she says. “When you think of Seattle, you think of terrible weather. In the summer, it’s gorgeous, and people are outside all the time, hiking, backpacking, running [activities she herself does]. But we don’t tell people that.” (Keep it under wraps, readers.)

“ I feel very lucky because I get to travel around the country talking about ice cream.”

SELLING ICE CREAM DREAMS

You’ve likely seen freeze-dried ice cream for astronauts. Game changer: What if they could make fresh soft-serve on the Moon? That’s a professional goal of Paul Toscano ’07, senior director of sales at ColdSnap, which sells single-serve frozen-treat machines and mixes.

Toscano recently sold the products to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and on his visit to the Pasadena, Calif., site, his contact wondered aloud: Could they put a machine on the Moon base? “I’d love to work on that project with you,” Toscano replied.

The Long Island–based salesman had another unexpected experience recently, when the Archdiocese of Newark (NJ) was purchasing two machines for its cafeteria. The deal was delayed due to the momentous

passing of Pope Francis. “I never thought the Pope would be affecting my workflow,” Toscano says.

Organizations like the JPL and Archdiocese of Newark — along with universities, stadium boxes, golf courses, and car dealerships — are the types of clients to which Toscano caters. There are a few hundred private residences that have the ColdSnap machine, but its main customer profile centers around group gathering places.

Here’s how Toscano built his career scoop by scoop:

A psychology major, he still uses the skills he learned at Colgate today. “Being in sales, I deal directly with people, and seeing things from their perspective is really important in developing meaningful relationships. I credit my time at Colgate for developing my understanding of how people think, react, and operate.” He also still keeps in touch with Doug Johnson, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of psychological and brain sciences. Toscano went on the Wollongong, Australia, study-abroad trip with him and says, “He’s one of my favorite professors of all time.”

With a film and media studies minor, Toscano got his first job as an associate producer at NBC and was soon promoted to producer at CNBC. At the same time, he earned his MBA at New York University: “I always wanted to do something creative, and business school taught me that being creative in a business sense can be really interesting.”

At CNBC, he started producing stories “about cool companies,” and covered a coffee company called Joyride. He couldn’t stop thinking about the concept (cold brew coffee on tap), met with the founders several times to learn about their growth plan, and signed on as its COO in 2013. He helped expand Joyride to a $30 million business, but when the pandemic hit, the company was acquired by Aramark Refreshments. “I knew that I really wanted to stay in high-end food,” Toscano says.

He spent three years at Aramark Refreshments before becoming wowed by ColdSnap in 2023. “This is going to go somewhere,” he remembers thinking. “We get to change the landscape in ice cream.” The machine was imagined by the founder and his two daughters who wanted to figure out how to make an easy-to-use, singleserve ice cream machine. The product is approximately the size of an espresso machine and works by inserting a small can, which is shelf stable and thus has a lower carbon footprint.

Of the handful of flavors of ice cream (there are also nondairy options, protein shakes, a fruit smoothie, and two coffees), Toscano has a hard time choosing his favorite: “boozy bourbon … salted caramel … Mexican hot chocolate, final answer.”

From the Moon to a Connecticut golf course that wants to install a machine on a golf cart, Toscano’s sales are serving up fun. “I feel very lucky because I get to travel around the country talking about ice cream. It’s awesome.”

MAKING BOATING MORE ACCESSIBLE, BY THE NUMBERS

Out on Cape Cod, Mass., a surprising proportion of children who live there have never been on a boat. So every June at Pleasant Bay Community Boating (PBCB), Ali Hogue ’18 organizes First Sail, which brings local third graders and their teachers to the Harwich-based campus for a free ride.

“Everyone goes out and has a great time,” says Hogue, who is program director at PBCB. The nonprofit’s offerings are for everyone — in addition to school groups, there are adult lessons, cruises for the Councils on Aging, and adaptive programs. “We try to get every cross section of our community covered,” she says.

Adaptive sailing and kayaking programs enable those who have physical or cognitive challenges to experience the water, sometimes for the first time. Beyond a dedicated adaptive program, PBCB aims to make all of its programming as inclusive as possible. “We’ll get calls from parents who say that their kid is typically turned away from other programs because of a disability, but more often than not, we’re able to find ways to make our youth sailing programs accessible for their child. It’s important to us that everybody feels they have a place here and on the water.”

Hogue grew up in North Attleboro, Mass., but vacationed on the Cape with her family and worked at Cape Cod Sea Camps during her college summers. A biology major at Colgate, she tried working in a lab after graduation, but quickly found that the spark wasn’t there: “The people around me were super happy to come check their parasites in the middle of the night, and I did not have that level of excitement about what we were doing,” she says. “I was having dreams of quitting my job and going back to work at camp. [Now] here I am. I manifested a full-time, year-round job of working at a camp.”

She joined PBCB as a science director in 2021 and moved into the role of program director, managing operations and staff — as well as filling in gaps when needed. “Like any small nonprofit, everyone does everything,” says Hogue, who sometimes washes boats, fixes website issues, and handles social media. In the off-season, PBCB offers events like family science nights, lectures, and yoga workshops: “We dabble in lots of stuff over the winter to try to keep people engaged.”

Head to the beach to learn more about Hogue and her work:

“We’re a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and our mission is to make boating and marine science education more affordable and accessible.”

“We offer ~4,500 experiences a year” to local youth, adults, outreach participants, and school groups.

“PBCB offers semi-private and group sailing, paddling,

“ It’s important to us that everybody feels they have a place here and on the water.”

Julia Cumes

and a floating classroom experience for individuals and a range of partner organizations, totaling around 400 experiences per season.”

“Our floating classroom [named Friend] is a 37-foot pontoon boat with solar panels on top, so it is fully solar powered.”

9/5/25: “We end the summer with a big regatta weekend, The Sandpiper Invitational. Then we pull the boats because we’re getting into hurricane season.”

“I learned to sail when I was 11 or 12. My first job in sailing was working at Sea Camp in Florida for one summer [as a first-year at Colgate].”

2 certifications: “I have my U.S. Sailing instructor cert, and my launch tender license with the Coast Guard, so I can drive people out to their moored boats.”

1979: Colgate graduating class of her mom, Jan (Huerter) Hogue

“The waterfront’s open 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day, so we’re busy.”

10-second reflection about summertime: “The best part is working a long day in the sun, and then you go home, take your shower, get in your comfy clothes, and you’re on the deck enjoying a sunset. You just had a great day outside, and then it’s that golden hour relaxing time, knitting or reading on the porch.”

TAKING THE SWEAT OUT OF PICKLEBALL

Wendi Green ’98 Aspes became obsessed with pickleball the way many people did: She was at home during the pandemic looking for something to do when she decided to give it a try.

“I ordered a net and some starter paddles and set it up in the driveway, and the whole family just started playing,” says Aspes, an avid tennis player who lives in Atlanta. “And I realized this is a lot more fun than I thought.”

While playing with her brother-in-law, Aspes noticed that they were both wiping the sweat off their hands on their clothes. A fast-paced mashup of badminton and ping pong, pickleball involves constant movement, which can lead to excessive sweating. To deal with this problem, Aspes turned to gels, powders, sweat bands, and towels before coming up with a better solution: Designing clothing that would absorb sweat.

Aspes uses a patented technology called DRYV, a two-layer fabric that wicks

moisture away from the body while acting as a towel to absorb sweat. After spending months creating a line of sports apparel incorporating this fabric, Aspes and her brother-in-law, Jason, launched Wringer Wear in March 2025.

“When you talk to any player, whether it’s pickleball, paddle tennis, ping pong, racquetball, or squash, and you say, ‘Do your hands sweat when you play?’ — every single one across the board says ‘yes’ because you’re holding a paddle or racket tightly,” Aspes says. “So we’re a solution for a problem that racket sports enthusiasts have. You can wipe your hands directly on your gear and it will absorb the sweat.”

Wringer Wear is available online, at selected clubs across the country, and at pickleball tournaments nationwide. The line includes everything from shirts to sweatshirts to hats; prices range from $35 to $95.

Creating a sports apparel business is what Aspes calls her “second act,” following a 10year career working in the nonprofit world — most recently as marketing director for Ian’s Friends Foundation for pediatric brain cancer research.

While she is now a board member, Aspes left her position at the foundation in March so she could focus on her new start-up. Her work on the venture had begun in 2021

when she partnered with a California-based manufacturing company to bring her idea to life.

“Pickleball is the fastest-growing sport in the country, and Wringer was built for those who love the community and the competitive aspects of the game,” Aspes says. Statistics bear out that claim: For the past four years, participation in pickleball has increased more than the growth in any other sport, according to the Sports and Fitness Industry Association.

Aspes hopes that Wringer Wear will give players a competitive edge in their game because it will allow them to focus on their next point instead of their sweaty hands.

So far, the reaction to the line from pickleball players Aspes has met at tournaments has been positive. “People are really excited,” she says. “They see it as a solution.”

The demand for the apparel is likely to increase as pickleball continues to grow in popularity because of its appeal to all age groups and the sense of community it offers, Aspes says.

“We live in a divisive world, and not that pickleball is going to solve any of our world problems, but it brings people together, and you feel like you’re part of something,” she says.

— Sherrie Negrea

“ Pickleball is the fastestgrowing sport in the country.”

A BREATH OF FRESH AIR FOR CITY KIDS

Several times a week, Lisa Gitelson ’91 leaves her office in midtown Manhattan and drives two hours north to Sharpe Reservation in Fishkill, N.Y., where she’ll visit one of the Fresh Air Fund camps and its Model Farm. The farm cultivates more than just rhubarb and strawberries; New York City children learn about plant care, eating healthy, and tending to animals. This is in addition to traditional camp activities like swimming, boating, and arts and crafts.

Five of the Fresh Air Fund’s six sleepover camps are on Sharpe Reservation, and as CEO of the youth development organization — which provides outdoor experiences, at no cost, to New York City children from underserved communities — Gitelson goes to support the staff, connect with campers, and give tours to potential donors.

“At the end of the day, I’m in charge of making sure that this work happens,” Gitelson says to describe her job in a nutshell. She just completed a new strategic plan for the organization and oversees all operations, including fundraising, staff, and communications.

This role, which she began in 2022, is the latest in Gitelson’s career of advocating for children. She spent numerous years as an attorney specializing in foster care and family court cases. Then in 2012, she accepted a position as director of foster care and adoption at the family services nonprofit Sheltering Arms, after serving as its in-house counsel. This new role “was something I’d always been extraordinarily interested in doing. I moved into big-picture work and impact work; it felt like a natural progression of what I hoped to do,” she says.

Gitelson, who grew up in Croton on Hudson, N.Y., “loved the outdoors”; she went to summer camp as a kid and became a counselor as a teenager. Her two children — who are now 20 and 24 — also went to camp

“ We want youth who were campers to be our counselors, to be our leaders, to be the next CEO.”

and have an appreciation for nature, even though she raised them in the city.

“One of my kids will call and say, ‘I’m having a really hard day. I’m going to go for a walk in the park.’ I love that. [Being outside] gives you a way to center yourself.”

That mindset — that children can savor nature, even with skyscrapers nearby — propels her work today. “The outdoors impacts each of us in the most positive of ways: physically, mentally, and in learning,” she says.

The organization is launching a new program called Fresh Air City Explorers, focusing on mentorship and outdoor access all year. “In my dream, on Saturday you come to our program, and you go sledding at Inwood Hill and have hot cocoa. We don’t want kids to think the only way to get outdoors is to get on a bus and come to us during the summer. We want them to know that the outdoors of New York City is theirs year-round.”

Another new program is at Camp Tommy, which received its starter funding from Tommy Hilfiger. (There’s also Camp Mariah, supported by Mariah Carey.) Camp Tommy is transforming from a camp for teen boys to a youth leadership training camp.

“One of our major goals is that our youth stay with us to become our staff,” Gitelson said on the podcast Learning Unboxed. “We want youth who were campers to be our counselors, to be our leaders, to be the next CEO.”

STEAM BY THE SEA

Every summer, Newport, R.I., hosts tennis tournaments, golf championships, sailing regattas, and tens of thousands of tourists oohing and ahhing their way through the opulent mansions built by Gilded-Age millionaires.

But the City by the Sea is not all glitz and glamour. Just 3 miles from the tony shops of Thames Street and the lavish “summer cottages” of Bellevue Avenue, the North End might seem a world away. The neighborhood is home to half of Newport’s school children and a significant population of marginalized residents — many of whom power, rather than partake in, the tourism and hospitality industry.

The North End is also home to the Newport Experience, or NEX, a six-week, full-day summer program that enables the area’s young people, grades 5 and up, to explore and engage in the riches of Newport County.

NEX is an offshoot of FabNewport, an experiential learning program for middle and high school students founded by Steve Heath ’80 in 2013. At the time, with two decades of teaching under his belt, Heath was serving as internship coordinator for the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center, where students do much of their learning in real working environments — a perfect fit, given his conviction that young people often learn best outside of the classroom. One day,

“ Doing something for someone else is when human beings feel fulfilled.”

he led a field trip to a Fab Lab, or digital fabrication laboratory, in Providence. (A fabrication laboratory provides community members with access to computercontrolled equipment, software, and training, making it possible to design and make “almost anything,” according to MIT, where the concept originated.) During the visit, Heath was struck by the students’ enthusiastic response. We need one of these! thought Heath, who soon obtained a grant for FabNewport. Today it runs a year-round slate of STEAM programs in schools and offers after-school programs in its North End lab, which provides space, materials, and tools for kids to make, learn, and do — whether that’s creating jewelry, using a laser engraver, or making a fishing rod.

The organization has also cultivated a network of area partners who expose students to resources to which they might otherwise not have access, such as surfing, golf, sailing, a wildlife sanctuary, the town’s art museum, and local farms. Heath, who describes himself as “a catalyst who is weaving Fab learners into the fabric of the community,” points out that the benefits of access flow both ways. FabNewport’s partners want to serve under-resourced youth, he says, “because service is where we are at our best. Doing something for someone else is when human beings feel fulfilled.” It’s a perspective he acquired at Colgate, where he majored in philosophy and religion. His professors were “the first group of people I’d met who were committed to something outside of themselves,” he says.

In 2018, after five successful years of FabNewport, Heath and colleagues realized there was a need for learner-centered, content-rich programming not only at the end of the school day, but also at the end of the school year, so they created NEX. Seven years later — and despite recent funding cuts — the camp is thriving: 50 young people, mostly from the North End, are taking advantage of what Aquidneck Island has to offer this summer.

In addition to creating a sense of trust, inclusivity, and belonging, Heath says, both FabNewport (which recently won the Youth Empowerment Award from the Rhode Island Governor’s Workforce Board) and NEX aim to provide kids with a sense of agency — the ability to envision a positive future for themselves undergirded by the skills and relationships that can help them realize that vision. This is a big leap from the original Fab Lab concept, he says: “We’ve gone from making things to making lives.”

— Sarah C. Baldwin

Endeavor

Counseling That Clicks

His successful start-up is meeting college students where they are — and changing the future of campus mental health.

ody Semrau ’14 was struggling.

CDuring his senior year at Colgate, the anxiety and depression he’d experienced for years was intensifying, which led the political science major and Sigma Chi brother to shrink away from social events and spend more time alone.

While he knew he could benefit from talking to a counselor, the prospect of visiting the on-campus counseling center “overwhelmed me,” Semrau recalls. “I worried about who I’d run into, and then the awkwardness of having to admit to a stranger that I was having a hard time.”

He eventually connected with a campus counselor and got the support he needed — “a turning point” in his life, Semrau says. But the fear and stigma that prevented him from seeking help sooner stuck with him.

In 2017, through Colgate’s Thought Into Action Summer Accelerator program and a grant from the Entrepreneurship Fund, Semrau launched BetterMynd, a mental health and teletherapy platform that makes therapy accessible — and confidential — for college students.

The goal behind the platform, says Semrau, is to meet college students where they are, both emotionally and literally. Counselors are available 24/7, and sessions are facilitated virtually, so students don’t need to leave their dorm rooms to get help. The platform also offers mental wellness workshops and tools to help students manage stress, anxiety, and academic pressure before they find themselves in crisis. Another major point of pride for BetterMynd’s founder: the diversity of its network of therapists, with more than 40% of the company’s counselors

identifying as people of color. And unlike many on-campus counseling centers, students can choose the counselor who best fits their needs and preferences. “That’s a huge benefit for students who want to work with someone who has a similar background and lived experience as them,” says Semrau.

In the eight years since its founding, BetterMynd has grown to serve more than 50,000 students through partnerships with 150+ schools and 300+ licensed counselors. While the company’s 23 employees mostly work remotely, Semrau serves as CEO from BetterMynd’s headquarters in Buffalo, N.Y., not far from his hometown of Rochester.

A big driver of BetterMynd’s growth, says Semrau, came during the pandemic, when the number of college students seeking counseling online skyrocketed. A 2022 survey from Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse found that 65% of college students felt their mental health had worsened during the pandemic, and 60% of students who said they wanted therapy in the past year didn’t get it. That growing demand overwhelmed already understaffed college counseling centers, leading to long wait times or session time caps.

BetterMynd met the moment, offering schools a way to keep up — and prevent vulnerable students from falling through the cracks.

“COVID-19 revealed a need to provide an alternative to the on-campus counseling center,” says Semrau, who notes that colleges are continuing to steadily seek out BetterMynd’s service in the years since the pandemic started, with more campus leaders recognizing professional mental health support as critical to student retention. “When students can get the help they need, they’re less likely to withdraw or fall behind academically,” he says.

The other key factor in BetterMynd’s success, according to Semrau, is the destigmatization of mental health care among young people and the normalization of therapy — a heartening shift for the former college student once too apprehensive to seek out care for himself.

“Gen Z is having open, honest conversations about mental health both in real life and on social media, and that leads to more people getting the help they need,” says Semrau. “I’m really proud that BetterMynd is part of that.”

— Mary Donofrio

Health

High Intensity, Low Pressure

Fitness coach and entrepreneur

Mandy DiMarzo ’02 is helping her followers find strength in movement — and in rest.

or a professional fitness guru who specializes in intense workouts, Mandy DiMarzo’s wellness philosophy is surprisingly chill.

Yes, her popular BURN by Mandy workout program is centered around high-intensity interval training (HIIT), but, according to DiMarzo ’02, tough sweat sessions are just a small piece of the overall fitness puzzle.

“Some days you might need to go hard and sweat it out, but other days, maybe your body needs a walk in the woods,” says DiMarzo, a former Colgate soccer player and triathlete who now considers walking one of the most powerful exercises. “It’s meditative,” she says.

DiMarzo, who lives in Clinton, N.Y., didn’t always take such a Zen approach to fitness. In an April 2024 TEDx event, DiMarzo spoke candidly about her battle with anorexia and her addiction to punishing workouts — and how her outlook has changed. “I equated strength with running over 110 miles weekly and minimizing my food intake to the brink of collapse,” she says. “My definition of strength was all wrong.”

In 2020, during the start of the pandemic, DiMarzo created BURN, a virtual fitness program that combines cardio and bodyweight strength training. A bevy of overuse injuries forced the lifelong athlete and long-distance runner to reconsider her relationship with exercise — and adopt a “less is more” approach.

The fast-paced 45-minute workouts, available to BURN subscribers, are tough but also accessible. They’re “scalable to any fitness level,” says DiMarzo, who livestreams sessions from home and peppers instruction with motivational quotes, quips, and real talk about her struggles.

Her authenticity quickly earned BURN a following — thousands of male and female devotees whom DiMarzo has dubbed “the tribe.”

“I’m sweating — and sometimes swearing — along with everyone else,” she says, noting that followers have gotten into the habit of sending their instructor “sweaty selfies” at the end of each session.

And while BURN workouts are intense, they’re also “joyful,” says DiMarzo. “I want people to laugh as they’re sweating, and to feel grateful for our bodies and what they can do.”

A frequent speaker at wellness retreats, corporate events, and universities, DiMarzo takes pride in talking openly about her recovery, and offers audiences advice for cultivating a healthier relationship with food and exercise. Here, DiMarzo shares her guiding mantras:

You are the CEO of your body; hire, fire, and promote accordingly.

“I want people to realize that they’re in charge of their bodies, and we have the power to choose only what serves us,” says DiMarzo. She encourages her clients to “fire” negative thinking and “promote” movement that brings joy. That idea of being the boss, says DiMarzo, is especially important for people like her, who once felt ruled by food and exercise. “It’s all about reclaiming control.”

Trade “Rise and Grind” for “Rest and Recharge.”

At the height of her disorder, DiMarzo remembers an alarming visit with an orthopedic surgeon, who warned that her

regimen of extreme exercise and calorie restriction was wreaking havoc on her bones and joints. “Yet I had insisted on running 14 miles that day, ignoring his advice for rest,” she says. “I had mistaken constant pain for progress.” Now, DiMarzo relishes her rest days and tells her clients to “honor the need for rest. Constantly going hardcore is not sustainable,” she says. “When you choose movement that energizes you and brings you joy, you stick to it.”

Ignore the numbers.

As a former college athlete and runner, DiMarzo says stats — her weight, miles logged, calories consumed — once dominated her life. Today, she doesn’t weigh herself or count calories and eschews gadgets that quantify her physical activity. “I don’t even wear a watch,” she notes. When leading workouts, DiMarzo encourages her followers to gauge their effort “by feel” instead of counting reps. “Longevity doesn’t care about numbers,” she says. “Can you play with your kids without getting winded? Can you carry your groceries? Those are the health markers that matter.”

— Mary Donofrio

DiMarzo has returned to Colgate often in recent months. She delivered the keynote address during the TIA Incubator Weekend in February, helped train the field hockey and women’s volleyball teams during their offseasons, and led HIIT workouts with the Colgate Women’s Network.

She’s Helping Leaders Find Strength in Vulnerability

Through mindfulness and compassion, Samreen Khan ’96 McGregor is reshaping how executives think about leadership.

n her popular leadership workshops, Samreen Khan ’96 McGregor asks high-powered CEOs to do something unexpected: nothing.

No goal setting, no whiteboards, no performance metrics. Instead, she starts each session by inviting her clients to close their eyes, breathe deeply, and just be

It’s a rare moment of stillness for business leaders whose self-worth “is often defined by speed and output,” says Khan McGregor.

“Most of us take for granted that we’re human beings, not human doings,” she adds. “Real leadership starts with presence, and presence requires space.”

That philosophy is the heart of Khan McGregor’s work as a leadership coach and consultant. As founder of the Turmeric Group, a London-based leadership firm, Khan McGregor draws on neuroscience, organizational psychology, and somatic methods like breathwork to help senior executives navigate their high-stakes roles with clarity and compassion — and, most important, vulnerability, which she calls “the core prerequisite for effective leadership.”

It’s a sharp departure from the future Khan McGregor envisioned when she arrived at Colgate in the early ’90s. Khan McGregor, who was raised in Venezuela and later attended the American School in London, thought she might follow in the footsteps of her engineer parents. But at Colgate, she found herself drawn to philosophy, political science, and international relations — fields that spoke to her natural curiosity about people and systems. “I was very qualitative in my mindset,” she says.

After earning a degree in political science, Khan McGregor returned to the U.K. and spent several years in financial services before earning a master’s in business systems analysis and design from London’s City University. The coursework fueled her interest in organizational behavior,

the study of how people operate within teams, cultures, and systems. She soon took a position with Ashridge Consulting, a leadership development firm based in Hertfordshire, England, where she spent nearly a decade immersed in psychotherapy training, systems theory, and business performance frameworks like the Theory of Constraints, a method for identifying what limits performance in an organization.

By the mid-2000s, Khan McGregor, now a mother of two, joined and helped build a consulting start-up. But when the travel demands became unsustainable, she launched her own leadership practice, working independently with clients across sectors while raising her young family in London.

“It was a very flourishing time for me,” she recalls. “There was a lot of interesting work, and I was able to build a client base and be a mother.”

Then, suddenly, Khan McGregor’s world came to a halt. In 2017 her 9-year-old son was diagnosed with a brain tumor. For more than a year, “life was upended,” she says, with treatment spanning hospitals in the U.K. and in Boston. “It was awful. And it was wonderful,” she recalls. “It transformed everything inside me.”

Her son went on to make a full recovery, but the experience reshaped how Khan McGregor approached life, both personally and professionally. “I don’t think I truly understood my purpose until I woke up and realized I have agency and choice in what I do and why I do it,” she says. “What happened gave me the courage to ask my clients the really hard questions about emotional regulation, suppressed grief, burnout, even questions of purpose and identity.”

That perspective shift led Khan McGregor to launch the Turmeric Group, a boutique consultancy built around the conscious, human-centered leadership she had come to believe in deeply. With her team, Khan McGregor partners with organizations to design leadership programs, facilitate team development, and guide culture change, often working with companies navigating major transitions or rapid growth.

experience and its impact on her family changed her understanding of power, presence, and identity. Part memoir, part leadership guide, the book encourages readers to learn from adversity and lead with greater self-awareness, curiosity, and authenticity.

“[Writing the book] was cathartic,” she says. “It enabled me to articulate my identity, my purpose, and the essence of my contribution to clients, and even as a friend and family member.”

Today at Turmeric, Khan McGregor is especially focused on helping clients build what she calls “spaciousness” — the intentional stillness required for reflection, regulation, and connection. “The biggest constraint on leadership,” she says, “is how well or how ineffectively someone manages their energy.”

And as Khan McGregor emphasizes to clients during team sessions and one-onone coaching, leadership isn’t about having charisma or exerting control; it’s about consciousness. “When people feel truly seen and safe, they can step into a deeper level of honesty and connection,” she says. “And from that place, everything changes.”

— Mary Donofrio

Khan McGregor was named 2024’s National Coach of the Year by Paseda360, a U.K.-based personal development firm, for her innovative approach to executive coaching.

Her son’s cancer battle also inspired her first book. In Leader Awakened: Why Accepting Adversity Drives Power and Freedom (2022), Khan McGregor details how her son’s

A Prescription for Mystery

After a decades-long career as a physician, Mary Rae ’75 is thrilling readers with her series of medical whodunits.

What are the elements of a compelling mystery novel? Start with interesting characters. Sprinkle subtle clues that take on greater significance later. And always have a surprise twist.

Mary Rae ’75 certainly didn’t see her surprise career twist coming. Sure, she’d pivoted a few times within her rewarding medical career in Texas. She served for 20 years as an emergency room physician, worked as a primary care doctor at Texas Christian University’s student health center, then spent several years in community health before retiring from the field in 2020 and moving to Oakland, Calif.

But on a 2018 trip to Galveston, Texas, with her longtime physician friend Wanda Venters, Rae offhandedly mentioned that

the historic coastal city would make a great setting for a mystery novel. Venters replied, “Well, why don’t we write one?”

The pair has since written not one but three medical mysteries featuring their physician protagonists, Louise Finnerty, MD, and Marnie Liccione, MD. Their characters have taken on challenges ranging from dengue fever to PTSD and opiate use to a cold murder case with suspected mob ties. “The writing is so much fun,” Rae says. “We’re not looking to win the Booker Prize. These are page-turners for when you’re looking for a good airplane read.”

Rae’s medical career was a surprise twist in itself compared to her career aspirations while at Colgate, where she majored in geology. But after moving with her soonto-be husband, Cody Arnold ’75, back to his

native Oklahoma so he could attend medical school, she realized, “I was better suited to a career involving people.”

Her geology degree provided an unexpectedly perfect preparation for medical school. “Our geology studies were so eclectic, drawing on physics, chemistry, and biology,” she says. “You used your head; it was diagnostic.”

Throughout her medical career, Rae served as a subject matter expert for her mother, Catherine Rae, who wrote eight mysteries after the age of 65. “She’d call and say, ‘Oh, darling, I need to know how I can kill somebody with arsenic,’” Rae says. “I would never have thought about writing a murder mystery if it hadn’t been for her.”

For each book, Rae and Venters work out a broad plot outline and then break up the writing by character. Rae writes Louise Finnerty, who, like Rae, is an even-tempered emergency room physician, is married with two children, and has a dog named Chico. “Our family members and pets have shown up quite a bit in our books,” she says.

The first Finnerty and Liccione mystery, Break Bone Fever, was published in 2021, when Rae was 65. It revolves around the death of a physician who’d been researching dengue fever at a high-security infectious disease laboratory modeled after the Galveston National Laboratory, which the authors toured for research. The book was a finalist for the 2022 Colorado Book Awards.

Their second book, Breaking Apart, set at a Colorado veterans administration hospital, won the Silver Falchion Award for best thriller at the 2024 Killer Nashville competition. “That was great validation, to win a national award,” Rae says.

Their third book, Breaking News (December 2024), returns to Galveston and explores the city’s history of organized crime.

“I think our training gives us an edge within the medical mystery genre,” Rae says. She recently presented a talk on how to write medical scenes to the Northern California chapter of the Mystery Writers of America.

The authors are currently working on their fourth mystery, which will be set on a fictional college campus in Colorado, where Venters lives.

Rae is always on the lookout for details to include in her writing. “I might see something at the supermarket or on a walk and think, ‘That just might work in the story,’” she says. “I’ve run into people who’ve ended up in my books in both good ways and bad. But hopefully the villains don’t recognize themselves.”

— Kristin Baird Rattini

Announcing the West Campus Initiative Through New Gifts Toward the Student Experience

The most significant campus expansion in history at Colgate is now underway.

Through the support of a number of significant new gifts, Colgate has announced the launch of a project to create a cohesive West Campus along Broad Street. Among the contributions to the project is a gift of $50 million to The Campaign for the Third Century from Peter Kellner ’65, P’87, GP’16,’19 — the largest single gift ever made to Colgate. At the close of the semester, he increased his gift by $10 million to a total of $60 million.

In addition Jean-Pierre L. Conte ’85 has given a remarkable $25 million gift to name the building that will anchor West Campus. Further leadership support for the West Campus initiative brings total investments to $115 million, with gifts of $10 million from Becky Hurley ’81 and Christopher Hurley ’81, P’12,’12; Robert Fox ’59, GP’23,’25; and Stephen Sprague ’72.

“I offer profound gratitude for these gifts,” says President Brian W. Casey. “Colgate intends to offer the strongest residential liberal arts education in America, and the West Campus initiative is key to achieving that vision.”

Colgate’s comprehensive Third-Century Plan, launched during the University’s

Bicentennial celebration in 2019, includes the completion of the Residential Commons system and the West Campus as initial priorities. Currently, first- and second-year students reside in one of four Residential Commons on top of the hill. Extending that residential life experience for juniors and seniors — ensuring that their living spaces provide the opportunity for community and for the development of independence that will serve them well after graduation — is the vital next step.

“When President Casey began working with the faculty, administration, and trustees on the Third-Century Plan, that really grabbed me — recognizing that it’s not going to be done overnight,” says

Kellner, reflecting on his gift and the change he hopes it will bring to Colgate. “I wanted to do something that really would have an impact on the University.”

Different forms of Colgate student housing, built over many decades, currently line Broad Street and College Street. In spite of their proximity to campus and to each other, these buildings can seem distinct and distant from Colgate’s physical and historic core. The building program, launched with unprecedented levels of support from alumni and parents, will form an intentional campus neighborhood.

A reenvisioned Broad Street will demand extensive new construction. New residential units will be added to this part of the campus. Among the new residential units will be Fox House at 70 Broad Street and Hurley House. The new Social Center, named in recognition of Conte’s gift, will draw the community to West Campus for events, activities, and other programming.

“My Colgate experience helped me achieve my personal and professional dreams, as both a first-generation student and the son of immigrants, by providing me with an education that continues to serve me today,” Conte says. “The new Conte House will be a vital gathering place for students of all backgrounds, and supporting future generations in this way is nothing short of an honor for me and my family.”

North House and South House, two large residences, will be attached to the Social Center. Nearby, two studies will provide spaces for seminars, individual and group study, and other projects. The Walk will form a common pathway and communal place throughout the West Campus. The Park will provide a green anchor, located on an extension of Taylor Lake.

I wanted to do something that really would have an impact on the University.

Peter Kellner ’65, P’87, GP’16, ’19

Buildings in the West Campus will be designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects (RAMSA) and other architects, and landscapes will be designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA). Both firms have worked extensively with Colgate: MVVA is completing initial work on Peter’s Glen, also funded through a gift from Kellner, and RAMSA most recently completed Bernstein Hall, which opened in fall 2024.

Renovations to Greek and theme houses will take place alongside construction. This work has already

begun at 66 Broad Street, and it will continue at 70 Broad Street this fall. The current house will be removed, and a new house will be constructed and named for Fox.

Once construction and renovations are complete, juniors and seniors will move into West Campus theme houses, fraternity houses, sorority houses, apartments, and townhouses. This renovation and construction work will ensure all future seniors will have the option to live in single rooms, if they so choose, and approximately half of the junior class will also have the option to live in singles.

“Residential life at Colgate plays an important part in the education of our students,” says Vice President and Dean of the College Paul McLoughlin. “In their first and second years, they build community with their classmates. In their junior and senior years, we want that experience to continue even as they build the skills to live independently and to be good citizens after they graduate. I am so grateful for the gifts that have made it possible for Colgate to achieve this vision.”

Now in its sixth year, the ThirdCentury Plan is guiding the University’s long-term development and securing its place as a leading national liberal arts institution. To support initial priorities within the Plan, Colgate launched The Campaign for the Third Century in 2022, setting a goal of $1 billion — the largest fundraising effort by a liberal arts university of Colgate’s size.

“This moment is of great significance for Colgate and will allow us to complete a 200-year-old campus,” Casey says. “These projects — and the creation of a new part of the historic campus at Colgate — will set the trajectory of Colgate for decades to come.”

The Faces of Giving

Peter Kellner ’65, P’87, GP’16,’19: Earlier this spring, he pledged $50 million — the largest single gift in Colgate history. At the close of the semester, he increased his gift by $10 million to a total of $60 million. This is in addition to past gifts that funded Peter’s Glen, faculty chairs, and more. A member of Delta Upsilon fraternity and manager of the football team, he earned an MBA from Columbia University and was the managing director of Morgan Stanley in London. He received the Wm. Brian Little Award at Reunion 2025 and a Maroon Citation in 2015. “This campaign is transformational,” he says. “It’s about bringing Colgate into where it’s supposed to be — as one of the outstanding educational institutions in the world.”

Jean-Pierre “J-P” Conte ’85 pledged $25 million to the new Social Center. An economics and international relations major and men’s club crew member, he earned an MBA from Harvard University, is chairman and managing partner of Genstar Capital, is a director of ConnectiveRx and Signant Health, and supports multiple philanthropic nonprofit organizations, including Pepperwood Preserve, 10,000 Degrees, SEO Scholars, and the UCSF Foundation. He lives in San Francisco, Calif. “Colgate has the opportunity to be bigger, better, and more relevant in today’s world,” he says. “I'm happy to be part of it.”

Bob Fox ’59, GP’23,’25 pledged $10 million for 70 Broad Street. A German major, varsity swimmer, and judiciary board member, he earned an MBA from Harvard. He held top leadership roles at Del Monte, Canada Dry, and Foster Poultry Farms, and served on the Alumni Council and Board of Trustees. Fox received a Maroon Citation in 2009, a Wm. Brian Little Award in 2019, established the Robert A. Fox ’59 Institute for Leadership in 2007, and funded the Mark S. Randall Chair in Swimming and Diving. “Colgate changed my life,” he says. “Now it is my opportunity to give back.”

Steve Sprague ’72 pledged $10 million to fund The Park and study spaces. He served as the CFO for Rafferty Holdings, treasurer and secretary at Rafferty Asset Management, and worked at Goldman Sachs. An economics major and member of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, he was class gift challenger for his 50th Reunion and created a scholarship to honor his father, James B. Sprague ’37. He lives in Scarsdale, N.Y. “Colgate has had my heart for many years,” he says. “The changes we have already seen on campus are just a harbinger of what’s to come, and I can’t wait to see it all come together.”

Christopher ’81 and Becky (Bair) ’81 Hurley P’12,’12 pledged $10 million for the future home of the students associated with the Colgate Union. Christopher, an economics major and varsity football player, is managing partner at Hurley McKenna & Mertz. Becky, an international relations and political science major, is of counsel at Hurley McKenna & Mertz and senior land use advisor at The Lakota Group. She serves on the Board of Trustees and Women’s Leadership Council. They established the Hurley Family Chair in Dialogue, Deliberation, and Decision-making in 2022 and were drawn to West Campus plans that provided housing for students engaging in civil discourse. “It is essential to foster spaces where people can engage across differences with respect and reason,” Becky says. “Supporting the University’s efforts in this area reflects both our values and our hope for the future.”

SALMAGUNDI

HISTORY

Once Frozen in Time: The Colgate Family’s Gilded Age Brownstone

Abandoned by William Colgate Colby in 1911, the “mystery mansion of Madison Square” sat untouched for 27 years.

In the first decades of the 20th century, a formerly elegant brownstone in Manhattan sat abandoned. The pre-Civil War beauty, situated across from Madison Square Park at 22 East 23rd Street, was built for the Colgate family.

William Colgate — the father of the University’s earliest major benefactor, James Boorman Colgate — founded his soap, starch, and candle company two years after arriving in New York as an English immigrant in 1804 and apprenticing with a soap boiler. Headquartered at 4-6 Dutch Street, the company grew thanks to products like “cashmere bouquet” scented soap, according to the Encyclopedia of New York City

By the mid-19th century, Colgate was rich and influential. He was an ardent Baptist who worshipped at the Baptist Tabernacle Church on Second Avenue and 11th Street, which he reportedly contributed the funds to help build. He and his wife, Maria, moved with their children to their new brownstone mansion at 22 East 23rd Street in 1851. After their daughter Mary married Robert Colby a few years later, Mary and her new husband moved into the brownstone and shared it with her parents.

It was a befitting new neighborhood for this prominent family. Officially made a city park in 1847, Madison Square was becoming

the center of the most exclusive residential enclave in New York — close in proximity to theaters and shopping but with the peace and privacy of a well-manicured park as a buffer.

“The unique location where Madison Avenue begins afforded the family an uninterrupted view up the avenue, as well as a prestigious place on the park,” wrote Miriam Berman in Madison Square: The Park and Its Celebrated Landmarks.

William Colgate didn’t live long in his East 23rd Street house. He died in 1857, after his wife passed away in 1855. Through the next several decades, various descendants of the family occupied the brownstone — seemingly still lovely but no longer in a fashionable neighborhood. Madison Square Garden, the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and other businesses made the enclave more commercial.

The last occupant, according to one newspaper account, was William Colgate’s grandson William Colgate Colby, who was born inside the house in 1858. Colby, a Yale graduate, seems to be the family member who, in 1911, walked away from what was described as the “sole remaining private residence on Madison Square.”

“The legend tells that when his wife died 25 years ago, Colby walked out of the brownstone structure, turned the key in the lock, and thereafter left the house unoccupied — with furniture, books, and clothes untouched from that day on,”

reported one newspaper in 1934.

“Colby used to come down twice a year from his New Hampshire retirement, and on those occasions his short, square-set figure would be seen entering or leaving the silent house,” the newspaper continued. “But no one ever lived in the place, and the tightly sealed shutters were never removed from the windows or doors.”

William Colgate Colby died in 1936, but the full story of the mystery mansion didn’t appear until 1944. That’s when William Colgate Colby’s sister, Jessie Colgate Colby, decided to sell the house to a developer who intended to put up a one-story taxpayer.

Berman’s account has the brownstone abandoned in 1918. “For 27 years the house and its contents stood untouched, visited only on occasion by a guard to check the burglar alarm,” she wrote. “Upon its sale, boards were removed from its entrance and its French windows were opened wide.”

In 1945 four floors of furnishings and personal items frozen in time from the

Clipped

From “Swim Test All Dried Up,” the Colgate Maroon-News, April 22, 2005

Gilded Age were up for sale. “Thousands of people on the street who passed the house stopped to gape at the ancient brownstone that had once been one of the finest homes on Madison Square,” wrote Berman. “The crowds peered through the dusty parlor windows at the elegant objects of a Victorian past, covered with at least 6 inches of dust. There were gold chandeliers, marble columns, elaborately carved gilt-framed mirrors, paintings, and mahogany furniture.”

Artifacts from the 19th century included a rosewood piano, two gold harps, volunteer fire department helmets, ostrich plumes, waistcoats, crimping pins, and leghorn hats, according to a 1945 Philadelphia Inquirer report.

“Just as the sleeping palace might have remained unchanged year after long year, so the Colgate mansion was exactly as it had been in the summer of 1918 when the last of the family stepped across the threshold and rode away,” wrote the Inquirer.

“Beds were neatly made beneath blankets of dust; towels hung over the old-fashioned

wash stands. Writing paper and pens were ready on the desks. Great cedar closets were hung with the hobble-skirted, pointy-shoe styles popular at the beginning of the First World War.”

Antique dealers were admitted inside to pick through the objects and take what was valuable. Onlookers were able to glimpse pieces as they were carted away.

One onlooker stated that he had been a friend of William Colgate Colby, and he recalled how Colby told him about “the happy evenings he spent in this house,” wrote Berman. The now-empty brownstone sold for less than its assessed value of $77,000, and the taxpayer building that went up in 1944 still stands today. It now houses a McDonald’s.

A longer version of this story by Esther Crain first appeared in a Feb. 23 post on Ephemeral New York, Crain’s blog chronicling the history and “present-day urban weirdness” of New York City. It is reprinted here with permission.

“On Monday, April 18, the faculty voted unanimously to eliminate the Swim Test as a requirement for graduation, ending a tradition dating back to the 1930s…. ‘The AAB acknowledged that the test is a long-standing tradition at Colgate and that tradition is important,’ [Assistant Dean of the Faculty Jill] Tiefenthaler said…. ‘While swimming is recognized as important as a skill, it was not seen as the most and only important skill (for example, CPR is also very important) and, therefore, its status as the only nonacademic skill required for graduation from Colgate didn’t make sense.’... The Physical Education Department will now devote the resources previously used to enforce the requirement to encourage first-years to take advantage of swim instruction courses…. The Swim Test may be gone, but Colgate’s aquatic tradition is certainly far from getting washed down the drain.”

Provide drinking water to farmworkers p.77

Perform Irish dance around the world p.12

Enter the mystery mansion on Madison Square p.104

Measure politicians’ charisma p.24

Find joy in your workout p.45

See leaping lemurs in Madagascar p.32

Solve a common pickleball problem p.40

Become Hamilton’s fire captain p.96

Forecast the future of currency p.87

Teach CEOs how to meditate p.46

Pen medical mysteries p.47

Make a movie about aging p.54

Win six gold medals in long jump p.15