Campus Connections

Issue Date: April 25, 2005

News and Notices

Cortell chosen as teacher of the year

Students at Lewis & Clark College chose Andrew Cortell, assistant professor of international affairs, as teacher of the year. The selection was announced Wednesday, April 13, during an afternoon ceremony on campus.

Andrew Cortell “has galvanized an interest in politics and infused a passion about higher learning,” wrote Nicholas Wetzler ’05, international affairs major in his a letter of nomination. “Students who have taken his courses have met intellectual challenges that have changed the way they think about the world in profound ways.”

Cortell has been with Lewis & Clark since 1999. His areas of interest include international political economy, international relations theory, and advanced industrialized countries. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University, and two master’s degrees and a doctorate from Columbia University. Prior to joining Lewis & Clark, he taught at the University of Utah and the University of Pittsburgh. Cortell’s courses include Theories of International Affairs, International Political Economy, Inventing America, and Advanced Industrial Economies.

Odessa Weber ’04, international affairs major now working in Europe, e-mailed her nomination of Cortell: He “is a teacher that both inspires and challenges students … to work harder, think more critically, and [who] really understands the material. He provokes new ideas and is truly excited to teach [students] to think for themselves.”

The top teacher is named each year by the Dr. Robert B. Pamplin Jr. Society of Fellows, a group of students recognized, in part, for integrity, scholarship, and leadership potential.

The other finalists were Jerusha Detweiler-Bedell, assistant professor of psychology; Orla McDonagh, instructor in music; Nicholas Smith, James F. Miller Professor of Humanities; and Benjamin Westervelt, associate professor of history.

The teacher-of-the-year process is student-driven. Each year, the Pamplin Society asks all Lewis & Clark students to submit nominations. A selection committee chooses several finalists and then requests additional student input. After debate and deliberation, the committee selects a winner. The first award was made during the 1993-94 academic year.

Finalists flank Andrew Cortell, 2005 teacher of the year. From left: Benjamin Westervelt. Nicholas Smith, Cortell, Jerusha Detweiler-Bedell, and Orla McDonagh. Photo by Shannon Smith.

Students bring home national honors

Biology majors Sasha Stortz and Brian Erickson have received 2005 Morris K. Udall scholarships. They are among 81 students nationwide to receive the $5,000 award. They are the College’s third and fourth Udall scholars.

Sasha Stortz ’06, from Sitka, Alaska, is active in multiple community projects. She serves as Amnesty International’s student groups coordinator for Oregon, was a steering committee member for Lewis & Clark’s International Affairs Symposium, plays classical violin and fiddle, and will travel to Kenya and Tanzania in the fall as part of Lewis & Clark’s overseas study program.

“This award is about community,” says Stortz. “It’s about the tremendous support and encouragement I have received from my community at home and at school, and it’s about energizing my personal commitment to conservation and human rights.” She hopes to work in conservation biology, community collaboration, or genocide prevention.

Brian Erickson ’06, from Kirkwood, Missouri, came to Lewis & Clark for the College’s strong academic programs including environmental studies and biology. He worked with other students to help the campus achieve compliance with Kyoto Protocol greenhouse gas emission reductions standards. He was instrumental in working with Lewis & Clark to sign the international sustainability Talloires Declaration. Recently, Erickson gave a presentation to the Northwest Clean Energy conference, and last year he served as a panelist at the Northeast Climate Conference. Erickson plans to pursue a doctoral degree in behavioral ecology or evolution and become a teacher or a researcher.

Erickson has also been named a Barry M. Goldwater scholar, one of 320 students nationwide to receive the award, which is one of the most prestigious awards available to undergraduates in science. Since 1995, more than a dozen other Lewis & Clark students have been named Goldwater scholars.

Goldwater scholars are selected on the basis of academic merit. This year, the scholars were selected from among 1,091 candidates nominated by colleges and universities nationwide. The one-year scholarship will cover the cost of tuition, fees, books, and room and board up to a maximum of $7,500. Learn more about national student awards.

Hochstettler speaks at City Club

President Tom Hochstettler joined fellow presidents from Reed College and the University of Portland for a program at the Portland City Club on April 15. The Friday Forum program was titled “New Presidents, New Priorities: Taking Private Education to a Higher Degree.”

Hochstettler highlighted Lewis & Clark’s long-standing commitment to international studies, its leadership in environmental studies at both the College of Arts and Sciences and law school, and the institution’s productive engagement of intellectual questions that arise between disciplines.

After delivering prepared remarks about each institution’s characteristics, achievements, and areas of distinction, members of the panel fielded questions from the audience gathered at the Governor Hotel downtown.

City Club Friday Forums “engage audiences in issues of significance, prominence, urgency and humanity. City Club forums guide citizens in the ways of civic affairs, giving complex subjects relevance and clarity.” Download and listen to the program.

Graduate school among handful to offer eating disorder certificate

The Graduate School of Education and Counseling has become one of two graduate programs in the nation to be certified by the International Association of Eating Disorder Professionals to offer a graduate-level eating disorder certification program.

“Individuals suffering from eating disorders are an unrecognized and underserved population,” says Boyd Pidcock, associate professor and coordinator of the graduate school’s addictions studies program. “This program gives mental health professionals the opportunity to be exposed to the best practices and research in the field of eating disorder treatment.”

Lewis & Clark’s program—designed for working professionals—offers candidates two tracks of study: an eating disorder specialist certificate for individuals who already hold a bachelor’s degree, or a certified eating disorder associate certificate for individuals who hold a master’s degree in a mental health-related field. Program participants will conduct between 1,500 and 3,000 hours of supervised direct service with patients suffering from an eating disorder.

More information is available through the graduate school’s Center for Continuing and Professional Studies at ext. 6040 or at ccps@lclark.edu.

April poetry reading in Hoffman Gallery

Poets Michele Glazer and Mary Szybist will read from their works in the Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art on Thursday, April 28, at 7 p.m. The readings are free and open to the public.

Glazer, assistant professor of English at Portland State University, has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and from Literary Arts in Oregon, and was awarded the Regional Arts and Culture Council’s first individual Artist Fellowship in Literature. Her volume of poems “It Is Hard to Look at What We Came to Think We’d Come to See” (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997) received an Association of Writers and Writing Programs award. Her recent collection “Aggregate of Disturbances” (University of Iowa Press, 2004) won the 2004 Iowa Poetry Prize. Glazer also worked at the Nature Conservancy.

Pennsylvania-born Mary Szybist, assistant professor of English at Lewis & Clark, taught at the University of Iowa, University of Virginia, and Kenyon College. Her new collection of poems, “Granted” (Alice James Books, 2003), has earned numerous honors including a 2002 Beatrice Hawley Award and a 2004 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. The volume was a finalist for the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award and was listed by the Library Journal among the Best Poetry of 2003.

The Watzek Library special collections department sponsors the series. A keepsake broadside from each poet will be available for purchase at the readings.

Orchestral globetrotting during spring concert

Concertgoers can travel around the world during a spring chamber orchestra performance that includes British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams’ haunting “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” and Armenian composer Aram Khatchaturian’s “Masquerade Suite.” The College chamber orchestra concert on Sunday, May 1, at 7:30 p.m. in Evans Auditorium is free and open to the public. George Skipworth directs the program.

“The works in this concert are lyrical and accessible and take us from Italian opera to romantic Paris, Westminster Abbey, and czarist Russia,” says Skipworth, visiting assistant professor of music and college orchestra director. “But that doesn’t negate the incredible complexity of the music on this particular program.”

Khatchaturian wrote incidental music for a play by Mikhail Lermontov and later set the five-movement suite, which includes a waltz, nocturne, mazurka, romance, and galop. Vaughan Williams used a tune by early English composer Thomas Tallis as the basis for a 1910 piece written for England’s Three Choirs Festival.

The program also includes Giuseppe Verdi’s overture to “La Forza del Destino”; Gabriel Faure’s “Elegie for Cello and Orchestra,” with soloist Sonja Myklebust ’08; and the third movement from Jacques Ibert’s “Concerto for Flute and Orchestra,” with soloist Kasandra Jorgensen ’05, a physics major.

New play by Chana Cox gets staged reading

Playwright Chana Cox, senior lecturer in humanities, was born to Yiddish-speaking immigrant parents and grew up steeped in Yiddish literature. Her new play “Feivel mit’n Fiddle,” adapted from a short story by I.L. Peretz, is a love story between a widow and a simple man who, for the most part, speaks through his violin. The story will be told during a staged reading on Sunday, May 8, and Sunday, May 15, at Congregation Ahavath Achim in Portland.

“Cox ably employs the resources of the stage, with realism and fantasia, to evoke the cruelty and tragedy of the pogroms to which Jewish village life was vulnerable, and the survival of religious tradition in the face of the fiercest repression,” says Keith Scales, actor, director, and artistic director of Classic Greek Theatre of Oregon, who will produce and direct the staged readings.

The cast of 15 actors includes Kam Sisco as Feivel and Louanne Moldovan as Sorah Leah. Violinist Sophie Vitells will be the “voice” of Feivel.

Congregation Ahavath is located at 3225 S.W. Barbur Blvd. For more information, call 503-621-3380.

Historical snapshot

In 1965, Northwestern College of Law merges with Lewis & Clark College. View more College milestones online.

People News

Codron joins Human Resources

Kris Codron is associate director and benefits manager in Human Resources. She brings more than 14 years of experience to Lewis & Clark. Most recently, she served as corporate human resources manager with KinderCare Learning Centers. Her experience includes benefits, training, employee relations, compensation, and almost everything in between. Codron earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Phoenix in business/e-business. She is also certified as a senior professional in human resources. At Lewis & Clark, Codron will oversee the benefits programs, work with orientation and training programs, and help with employee and labor relations. E-mail her at kcodron@lclark.edu.

Carson receives scholarship

Alana Carson J.D. ’99, reader services librarian in the Boley Library, has received a West Excellence in Law Librarian Scholarship. The scholarship is awarded yearly to students enrolled in a graduate-level program in pursuance of a career in law librarianship. Carson is enrolled in the masters of library and information science program offered through the Information School at the University of Washington via the institution’s distance learning program.

Published, presented, honors and achievements

Faculty and staff serve as ambassadors for the College through their publications, presentations, awards, grants, and other accomplishments. Recent highlights include:

Greta Binford, assistant professor of biology, received a $14,000 award from the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust for its Partners in Science Program. Binford’s project is titled “Analyses of cDNA Sequences of the Toxic Venom Enzyme Sphingomyelinase D from Brown Recluse Relatives.” Binford’s coresearcher is Cleveland High School (Portland) teacher Scott N. Burns.

John Holzworth, assistant professor of political science, has been accepted for the National Endowment for the Humanities’ summer seminar titled “Reading Emerson’s Essays.” The four-week seminar in June at the University of New Mexico offers intensive study of Emerson’s essays, along with a significant body of secondary literature on a series of topics.

The American Journal of Orthopsychiatry (Vol. 75, No. 2, April 2005) published research by Thomas J. Schoeneman, professor of psychology, titled “Interior landscapes of mental disorder: Visual representations of the experience of madness.” Schoemann, with coauthors Vaunne Weathers B.A. ’95 and Carly M. Henderson B.A. ’95, M.A. ’02, surveyed 38 textbooks of abnormal psychology and found 673 pictures of the inner experience of mental disorder.

Tod Sloan, professor and chair of counseling psychology, published an article titled “Global Work-Related Suffering as a Priority for Vocational Psychology.” His article appeared in the March 2005 issue of The Counseling Psychologist.

More listings of faculty and staff achievements can be found in our online pressroom.

L&C in the news

College faculty and staff are in the news on a regular basis. Recent mentions include:

The Seattle Times: Review of art exhibit featuring works by Phyllis Yes, professor of art. April 15, 2005.

Christian Science Monitor: Eban Goodstein, professor of economics, comments on a new mock award to be given to “global-warming naysayers.” The resulting first annual Flat Earth Awards are a combined project of Goodstein’s Green House Network and students at Vermont’s Middlebury College. April 12, 2005.

KGW-TV (Portland, Oregon): Robert Miller, associate professor of law, comments on a proposed Indian Casino in the Columbia River Gorge. April 7, 2005.

The Oregonian: Article titled “A new generation finds its conscience” notes Lewis & Clark’s inclusion in the new Princeton Review book “Colleges with a Conscience: 81 Great Schools With Outstanding Community Involvement.” April 7, 2005.

The Business Journal (Portland, Ore.): Libby Davis, assistant dean for career services at the law school, comments on the demand for niche attorneys. April 1, 2005.

For a sampling of how and where Lewis & Clark is mentioned by media outlets across the nation and around the globe, visit the online pressroom.

Events

International scholar and journalist Josef Joffe to speak at 133rd commencement

Scholar Josef Joffe, publisher and editor of the German weekly Die Zeit and a contributing editor to Time magazine, will address graduates at the College of Arts and Sciences commencement on Sunday, May 8, at 10 a.m.

“Josef Joffe challenges people to learn about the world by putting things in historical context, which encourages us to think globally,” says Tom Hochstettler, president. “When he champions the importance of a liberal arts education, he affirms Lewis & Clark’s mission, through which our students learn to become citizens dedicated to a life of giving back in the interests of the common good and service.”

Approximately 350 Lewis & Clark students will have completed their bachelor of arts degrees during the 2004-05 academic year. A majority of them are expected to participate in commencement.

In addition to his work at Die Zeit, Joffe is a regular contributor to major daily newspapers in the United States and Great Britain and he is a frequent commentator on U.S. British and German radio and television. Joffe’s essays and reviews have appeared in New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Commentary, New York Times Magazine, New Republic and Weekly Standard. Prior to joining Die Zeit, Joffe was a columnist and editorial page editor at Süddeutsche Zeitung from 1985 to 2000.

Joffe is a visiting professor of political science at Stanford University, where he also served as a Payne Distinguished Lecturer. He is a distinguished fellow at Stanford’s Institute for International Studies and an Abramowitz fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Joffe has also been a visiting professor of government at Harvard, a visiting lecturer at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, and a professorial lecturer at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He has taught at the University of Munich and the Salzburg Seminar and lectured widely in universities and research centers around the world.

His scholarly work has appeared in numerous books and in journals around the world, including Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, International Security and Foreign Policy. His books include “The Limited Partnership: Europe, the United States and the Burdens of Alliance” (Ballinger, 1987), “The Future of International Politics: The Great Powers” (1998), and “The Future of the Great Powers: Predictions” (Orion, 1999).

Joffe serves on the boards of several higher education institutions including the American Academy in Berlin, International University Bremen and the European College of Liberal Arts. He sits on several international editorial boards and is a trustee for a handful of European museums and banks, including Munich’s Deutsches Museum. He is the recipient of the Theodor Wolff prize for journalism, the Ludwig Börne prize for essays and literature, and Germany’s Federal Order of Merit.

A native of Berlin, Joffe earned his bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College, his master’s degrees from the College of Europe and Johns Hopkins University, and his doctorate from Harvard University.

The law school’s commencement is set for Saturday, May 28, at 11 a.m. The graduate school’s commencement is set for Sunday, June 5, at 10 a.m.

Upcoming

Visit the campus Web calendar for events coming up in April and May.