Campus Connections

Issue Date: April 23, 2007

News and Notices

Vivian Gussin Paley to deliver address at College of Arts and Sciences commencement

Author, education researcher, and veteran teacher Vivian Gussin Paley—the only teacher ever to win a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant—will speak at the College’s 135th commencement on Sunday, May 6, at 10 a.m.

Paley, a noted child psychologist and early childhood education researcher, has taught kindergarten and nursery school for 37 years, primarily at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. She is the author of more than 10 books about life in the classroom. In her most recent book, A Child at Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play, she challenges reforms in early childhood education relevant to the No Child Left Behind Act, making the case that young children learn best through fantasy play as opposed to skill-based learning.

Paley’s numerous accolades include a 1989 MacArthur Fellowship granted in recognition of her books about young children. She has also won the Erikson Institute Award for Service to Children (1987), the American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement (1998), and the John Dewey Society’s Outstanding Achievement Award (2000). Her book The Girl With the Brown Crayon has received many awards including the David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English from the National Council of Teachers of English (1999), the Virginia and Warren Stone Prize from Harvard University Press for the outstanding book on education and society (1997), and Child magazine’s Best Parenting Book Award (1997).

Approximately 464 Lewis & Clark students will have completed their bachelor of arts degrees during the 2006-07 academic year. A majority of them are expected to participate in commencement.

The law school commencement speaker on May 26 will be Washington, D.C., trial lawyer Michele A. Roberts. The graduate school commencement speaker on June 3 will be nationally renowned philosopher and educator Nel Noddings.

Crisis management response structure

In response to the April 16 tragedy at Virginia Tech and the April 18 incident in which an employee spotted a student on the undergraduate campus wearing an ammunition belt, President Hochstettler asks that the campus community “be mindful of the heightened sensitivities concerning such matters and be supportive of each other as together we work through these issues.”

The Office of Campus Safety offers a wealth of online information concerning emergency preparedness for situations ranging from earthquakes to wildfires.

Lewis & Clark’s extensive Crisis Management Plan also provides guidance. It is designed to coordinate and deploy essential institutional services in the event of a major crisis or emergency on campus. In addition to describing three categories of crises, the plan defines Lewis & Clark’s emergency response structure and system, detailing how the campus will respond. According to the plan, emergencies will be addressed by the crisis management operations group, led by Campus Safety Director Tim O’Dwyer, and the crisis management policy group, led by President Hochstettler.

For more information, call extension 7855.

Former PacifiCorp CEO Judith Johansen named Board of Trustees chair

Judith Johansen J.D. ’83, former president and CEO of PacifiCorp, has been named chair of the Board of Trustees. A graduate of Lewis & Clark Law School, Johansen will become the first woman to chair the institution’s board when she assumes the position in May.

Johansen succeeds John Bates, a Portland business executive who has chaired the board since 2004. Bates will continue to serve as a trustee.

A Lake Oswego resident, Johansen served from 2002 to 2006 as the executive leader of PacifiCorp, a leading electricity producer in the western United States. Before that, she was the company’s executive vice president for regulation and external affairs. Over the course of her wide-ranging career in utilities, Johansen has also served as administrator and CEO of the Bonneville Power Administration and as vice president of business development with Avista Energy, a wholesale power-marketing subsidiary of Washington Water Power.

Johansen has held numerous leadership roles in business and civic affairs, serving on the board of directors of the Oregon Business Council and the Portland branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She was also a senior fellow of the American Leadership Forum of Oregon.

Johansen earned her bachelor’s degree from Colorado State University.

The Board of Trustees is responsible for the ongoing success of Lewis & Clark. The board is empowered to appoint the institution’s president and make major financial and planning decisions. Trustees serve three-year terms, which may be renewed twice.

Aubrey Fong receives Student Employee of the Year award

Aubrey Fong ’08, an undergraduate majoring in psychology, has received the Lewis & Clark 2006-07 Student Employee of the Year award for her work as sports information assistant.

Fong aspires to a career as an art therapist for children. She says that although her work on campus is not directly related to this field, she has learned much as a student worker.

Fong was chosen from a field of 21 students nominated by 19 departments. Nominees were evaluated on reliability, quality of work, initiative, professionalism, and the uniqueness of their contributions. Fong received $100 as part of the award.

“Aubrey isn’t just the best student worker I’ve ever had, she is one of the best employees I have ever had, period,” said Melissa Dudek, sports information director. “She shines under pressure, doing some of her best work when things are not going as planned. She enjoys the challenges of trying to get things back on track after things have gone off-kilter.”

In addition to her job in the athletics department, Fong is also a resident assistant and has worked on the Gender Studies Symposium planning committee.

The other finalists for the Student Employee of the Year award were Andreen Clausmeyer ’08, Kayla Kennedy ’08, Tyler Noonan ’07, Kjell Schroder ’07, and Greg Williams ’07. The other nominees for the Student Employee of the Year award included Lindsay Amor ’07, Jessica Atwater ’09, Mariah Brown-Pounds ’07, Yan Chen ’10, James Elwell ’09, Kendall Hamilton ’10, Lilly Hankins ’07, Arielle Johnson ’07, Heather Jordan ’07, Susan Kremer ’07, Rachael Lipinski ’08, Jessica Minnier ’07, Hassan Radheyyan ’07, Caroline Schultz ’07, and Krista Shapton ’07.

This is the first year Lewis & Clark has recognized a student employee of the year. The award was made possible by a grant from the National Student Employment Association. For more information, call extension 7093.

Pamplin Society of Fellows names Kugler Teacher of the Year

Undergraduate students at Lewis & Clark have chosen Rob Kugler, Paul S. Wright Professor of Christian Studies, as Teacher of the Year. The selection was announced Wednesday, April 18, during a ceremony on campus. The top teacher is named each year by the Dr. Robert B. Pamplin Jr. Society of Fellows.

Kugler joined the religious studies faculty at Lewis & Clark in 2002. He earned his bachelor of arts degree in religious studies from Lewis & Clark College, his master of divinity degree from Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, and his doctorate from the University of Notre Dame. His areas of research include interpretive traditions in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in Jewish and Christian literature from Greco-Roman Egypt. He is the author or coeditor of five books as well as numerous journal articles and essays for edited volumes. Kugler is a member of the American Society of Papyrologists, the Society of Biblical Literature, and the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament. In 1999 he was named Gonzaga University’s Scholar of the Year.

The other finalists were Yung-Pin Chen, assistant professor of mathematics; Jerusha Detweiler-Bedell, assistant professor of psychology; Dinah Dodds, professor of German; and Herschel Snodgrass, professor of physics.

New senior communications officer for public relations

Jodi Heintz will become Lewis & Clark’s senior communications officer for public relations on April 30.

Heintz has been building and executing strategic communication plans in the social purpose sector for more than 10 years. Most recently, she served as a director at Metropolitan Group in Portland, where she worked with organizations to develop effective public relations strategies to raise awareness and strengthen relationships with members, donors, and important external constituencies such as the media, professional associations, and community leaders.

Prior to joining Metropolitan Group, Heintz was a communications professional in New York. She developed a national public education campaign for the nonprofit Girls Inc. that included media relations, digital and print communications, and special events. She consulted with United Way, the largest nonprofit funder of social services in New York, on its communication initiatives on homelessness and hunger. She also worked at a nonpartisan think tank at Rutgers University on public education strategies to encourage women to run for political office. This award-winning initiative was unique in its strategic efforts to reach out to women of color and engage grassroots political communities.

Heintz holds a master’s degree in political science from University of Louisville and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Eastern New Mexico University.

People News

Published, presented, honors, and achievements

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

Andrew Bernstein, associate professor of history, will spend five months in Japan uncovering the history of Mount Fuji for his next book, with the help of his third Fulbright grant. Bernstein will leave for Japan in July. In addition to conducting research in libraries and archives, he plans to interview shrine priests, government bureaucrats, and U.S. and Japanese military officials to analyze the differences between Fuji as an imagined object and a physical place. Bernstein’s previous book Modern Passings: Death Rites, Politics, and Social Change in Imperial Japan, won an Oregon Book Award, the Frances Fuller Victor Award for General Nonfiction, in 2006.

In April, John Parry, associate professor of law, gave a talk titled “Torture Warrants and the Rule of Law” at Albany Law School’s Conference on the Work and Scholarship of Alan Dershowitz. His essay titled “Law, Seduction, and the Sentimental Heroine,” written with Andrea Hibbard, visiting assistant professor of the humanities, was published in the June 2006 issue of American Literature, and was awarded the 2007 Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Studies Association Essay Prize.

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

Events

Lecture analyzes “secret wars” of the Central Intelligence Agency

John Prados, senior fellow and project director of the National Security Archive, will give a talk based on his most recent book, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA, on Monday, April 23, at 7 p.m. in Council Chambers. The event is free and open to the public.

Prados’ book is the most comprehensive history of the Central Intelligence Agency to date, offering new interpretations of classic operations such as the Bay of Pigs Invasion. He also recounts lesser-known projects such as Tiber and Angola, and virtually unknown stories of work done in Guyana and Ghana.

Prados holds a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University. An editor as well as an author, Prados has worked on books and articles relating to national security, intelligence matters, diplomatic history, and military affairs, including Iraq, Vietnam, and World War II. He is contributing editor to MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, and a contributing writer for the VVA Veteran, the official publication of the nonprofit organization Vietnam Veterans of America. Prados’ articles and op-ed pieces have appeared in Vanity Fair, the New York Times, Scientific American, and many other publications.

Legal scholars discuss the lives of unhappy lawyers

Two of the leading critical legal scholars in the country, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, will give a talk titled “The Hedonic Quality of Lawyers’ Lives: Why Are They So Unhappy?” on Thursday, April 26, at noon in the Lezak seminar room at the law school.

Delgado and Stefancic, both of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, publish work that is widely read outside the legal academy. A husband and wife team, they have written numerous articles and 10 books. Their book Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror won a Gustavus Myers award for outstanding book on human rights in North America in 1998. Stefancic and Delgado also serve as editors for the New York University Press series Critical America.

Delgado is one of the leading commentators on race in the United States. He has appeared on Good Morning America, the MacNeil-Lehrer Report, PBS, NPR, the Fred Friendly Show, and Canadian national public radio. Author of over 100 journal articles and 15 books, he has had his work praised or reviewed in the Nation, New Republic, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. His books have won eight national book prizes, including six Gustavus Myers Awards for outstanding book on human rights in North America, the American Library Association's Outstanding Academic Book, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination.

Stefancic writes about law reform, social change, and legal scholarship. Her recent book, How Lawyers Lose Their Way: A Profession Fails Its Creative Minds, examines the causes of lawyers’ unhappiness. Her 1996 book, No Mercy: How Conservative Think Tanks and Foundations Changed America's Social Agenda, examines the current U.S. political landscape.

Those interested in attending should call extension 6852.

John Callahan reads from forthcoming novel

Lewis & Clark literary scholar John Callahan will read from his forthcoming novel, A Man You Could Love, in a special event on Thursday, April 26, at 7 p.m. in the Armstrong Lounge. The event is free and open to the public.

Callahan, the Morgan S. O’Dell Professor of Humanities, is a leading Ralph Ellison scholar and the executor of the Ellison literary estate. Callahan is the editor of Ellison’s posthumous novel Juneteenth (1999) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: A Casebook (2005).

Callahan’s first novel, to be published in May by Fulcrum Books, imagines the career of an Oregon politician, complete with insider Washington machinations, a resurrected Vanport community on the banks of the Columbia, and a Mount St. Helens–style volcano explosion that propels the protagonist to political stardom.

Callahan is also the author of several other works, including In the African-American Grain: Call-and-Response in Twentieth-Century Black Fiction (2001) and The Illusions of a Nation: Myth and History in the Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1972).

Post-Earth Day celebration

Looking for a way to make a difference? The Lewis & Clark College Earth Day Committee will host several events on campus and at Tryon Creek Park on Friday, April 27. The events schedule includes service opportunities, workshops, a swap meet and various celebrations.

Sponsored by the Department of Environmental Studies and cohosted by LC Students for Barack Obama, Momo and the Coop, Free U, Students for a Democratic Society, the Co-op, and the Garden Club, the daylong event is designed to engage the Lewis & Clark community in earth-friendly activities. For more information, call extension 7378.

Upcoming

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