UVM NOTEBOOK
photo by Rose McNulty
Comrades in print
Publication is part of the program for geology master’s students
On a riverbank scouting fieldwork, in a lab mining data, or at a computer wrestling ideas into paragraphs, a geologist’s research process is often a rambling journey. There could be few better mentors for a graduate student to have along on that ride than Paul Bierman, a professor with an omnipresent smile and enthusiasm for everything from the fun of counting atoms at 3 a.m. to the inherent genius of a cheap, sizable California burrito.
Bierman believes in education by total immersion. His graduate students are his colleagues; working with him and on their own projects, they are involved in every step of the research process. “The most important part for me as an educator is that people get to understand everything from setting up that field experiment to making the final measurements,” Bierman says. “It just closes that loop. It is really important that nothing is in a complete black box.”
Bierman’s aversion to black boxes is matched by his distaste for the anonymous green binding of a master’s dissertation, another place where good knowledge has been known to languish. It’s a far better thing for graduate students to get their first experience with academic research published in a scientific journal, a goal that was realized to a stunning degree when master’s student Luke Reusser was lead author on a paper in the prestigious publication Science. Bierman was among Reusser’s co-authors on the article, “Rapid Late Pleistocene Incision of Atlantic Passive-Margin River Gorges,” which explored a period when the bedrock levels of the Susquehanna and Potomac rivers dropped dramatically. For Reusser, now pursuing his doctorate at UVM, the publication was the research scientist’s equivalent of a baseball player hitting a grand slam in his first at bat in the big leagues.
A RIVER CUTS THROUGH IT
First steps for Reusser included weeks of fieldwork in the Holtwood Gorge of the Susquehanna. He scouted and mapped the bedrock terraces, the ancient riverbeds bordering the modern channel, where he would collect the mineral samples for analysis to unlock the river’s geological history. Reusser was seldom alone, heeding one of Bierman’s cardinal rules of fieldwork.
Referring to the hazards of venturing into the field solo, Bierman says, “You just go batty. It is far better to have somebody else there to bounce an idea off of who says, ‘No, you’re crazy, that can’t possibly be.’ Then you have a ten-minute discussion. I think that’s integral to science. It’s a far richer experience to have that interchange.”
That sort of back-and-forth nudged along every phase of the Bierman-Reusser collaboration, which brings together the professor’s close study of the Potomac and the graduate student’s focus on the Susquehanna. The geologists analyzed rock samples collected from the Susquehanna’s Holtwood and the Potomac’s Mather gorges for 10-beryllium, an extremely rare isotope that is produced when cosmic rays collide with rocks and sediments at the Earth’s surface. Knowing the age of each river terrace and its height above its current river bed, they were able to calculate how quickly the rivers cut through bedrock. Their conclusions: incision of the 10- to 20-meter gorges happened at a rate far more rapid than previously thought, and was prompted more by regional climate change tied to the last ice age than by water pouring from melting glacial ice.
“Because bedrock is hard and resistant to erosion, most incision within rivers running over rock occurs during extremely large flood events,” Reusser explains. “Changing climate, capable of increasing the number and severity of floods, appears to have sped up the rate of incision along both rivers about 35,000 years ago.”
PAPER COVERS ROCK
In recent years, nearly all of UVM Geology’s master’s students have published their theses. Anders Noren G’02 preceded Reusser in notching an impressive placement at the top of his young curriculum vitae when his thesis, a work that explored lake sediments and historic storm system patterns in the northeast, was published in Nature, October 2002. “Critical Writing in Geology,” a seminar taught by Bierman, has been a key part of the geology grad students’ success. The course is an introduction to the ways of academic publication and students benefit from having not just Bierman, but a class full of peers helping them through the difficult rounds of revision.
Bierman says that of all the papers he has co-authored, Reusser’s Science article has been one of the most truly collaborative efforts. The professor describes several long nights in his home office with Reusser, evenings of “let’s sit at the keyboard together and argue over these three words and what they really mean.” Reusser estimates that there were some 18 drafts between his initial foray and the final piece. Somewhere along the way, Bierman began to get the feeling that publication in Science, which accepts only 2 to 3 percent of its submissions, might be a possibility. “You start to get a feel that just maybe this has a shot,” Bierman says.
Ironically, the duo that thrived on collaboration was thousands of miles apart when the good word arrived. Reusser was in New Zealand, checking his e-mail in a cyber café, when he read the message from Science indicating that publication was likely. Alone and a long way from home, it was tough to contain his excitement. Just how would an American touchdown dance play down under? When Reusser shot the news up to UVM, there was no such restraint. “We all jumped up and down. Everyone was smiling around here for a few days,” Bierman says.
—Thomas Weaver
Just 3 Questions
Fayneese Miller, the College of Education and Social Services’ new dean, came to UVM in August after a 20-year career at Brown University, where she was associate professor of education and human development and an internationally recognized expert on the social, academic, and political development of adolescents. She led Brown’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and was the university’s first coordinator and chair of ethnic studies.
Q. What are some of your priorities for the college?
A. We have to focus on making sure that we’re infusing a very strong liberal arts component into our curriculum. I would like to offer more classes that have to do with the philosophy and history of education, so that what we do is excite the minds of young people and get them to see that education is more than teaching. We need people in education and social work who are policy thinkers, we need people who are program developers. We need a lot of different people.
I also want to create a Ph.D. program. We need to see CESS as a national/international college as well as one that serves Vermont. We still need to think about Vermont, but we also need to think about how we train people for positions throughout the country. A Ph.D. program allows us to do that—it allows us to bring in new ideas, different ways of thinking, different ways of knowing, into the college. I want a Ph.D. program that’s not just one-department oriented. I want to know how we can partner with other colleges to create something that’s really spectacular here at UVM, that speaks to the fact that we want to be interdisciplinary and not take an insular approach to the way in which we train future leaders, because the reality of the matter is you’ve got to know more than one area to be able to succeed as a leader nowadays, no matter what field you go into.
Additionally, I want to ratchet up our international studies program. Our Asian studies program is a model program. What we don’t have in Vermont—and in most states—are significant numbers of teachers who are trained and certified to teach Chinese at the public school level.
Q. Your own scholarship has focused on issues of race, ethnicity, and discrimination in adolescents and their impact on behavior and academic achievement. Tell me a bit about that.
A. What I’m primarily interested in from a research perspective is why some young people succeed and others don’t. What do we know about those who succeed that would help us understand those who don’t? I put it that way because most people focus on those young people who don’t succeed. I want to reverse that thinking.
Q. Can you give me a sense of your personal background and how it influences your work?
A. I think that the reason that I got interested in research on political attitudes of young people early in my career is because I come from a very political family. My parents were civil rights workers. I was an infant when they were doing a lot of this work, but I was very much thrown into the civil rights community. When I was in elementary school, the Poor People’s March came through my hometown in Danville, Virginia. My parents opened up the house, and we had all these people staying with us, sleeping everywhere. We didn’t have the luxury of being selfish and not wanting anybody to share our bed or share our room because it just wasn’t a choice that we had. Our parents helped us understand why they were doing this. I come from a family where there is a servant-leader mentality; I come from a family where you are expected to take your knowledge and try and do something good with it.
Feeling it
“I’m pretty much the opposite of cool,” says senior Alex Toth. This isn’t a confession: Toth is talking about the way he plays trumpet— slowly and often surprisingly, with unusual intensity and feeling. He’s no Miles Davis or Chet Baker clone, all silky smoothness. Toth’s playing reaches, stutters, yearns.
“I try not to think when I play. Ideas pop into my head, but they’re just images, not thoughts,” he says. “I see shapes, rhythmic patterns. The images start in your stomach, and then flash up through your body. It’s a feel thing. You just play and follow the shapes along.”
Toth’s visceral approach (and emphatic energy, which propels him through five or more hours a day of playing) has opened many musical doors during his time in Burlington. He’s the anchor of the UVM Jazz Ensemble’s excellent trumpet section, a fixture with professional big bands during the Burlington Discover Jazz Festival, recently released a CD with his band The Lazybirds, and his arching and arch solos on a Duke Ellington concerto had famous trumpeter Wynton Marsalis smiling and nodding his head during an on-campus master class.
Not bad for a guy who, though he began with the trumpet in fourth grade back home in New Jersey, says his playing was shaky when he started college. “When I came here I was completely unformed, completely without technique, I just had this raw energy,” he recalls. Through his close relationship with Alex Stewart, associate professor of music and head of jazz studies, and other faculty, his musicianship has developed to the point where he’d like to try to make a career out of it.
“The dream really can’t be to be famous, because what’s fame if you’re not actually enjoying the musical situation that you’re in?” Toth says. “I’m realizing that everything is empty unless the music is full.”
So Toth’s post-grad dream is to keep striving to get better, making music that feels important and scratching out a living doing so. Pretty cool.
—Kevin Foley
Accounting
+36.7%
This year’s rise in UVM undergraduate applications. Mid-February total: 17,616, a new record.
+63.4%
This year’s rise in applications from prospective students who are African American, Asian American, Latino, or Native American. Mid-February total: 1,653, a new record.
+19.3%
This year’s rise in applications from Vermont students.
Mid-February total: 2,143, a new record.
photo by Sally McCay
New sound in the chapel
From hallowed ceremony to Halloween concert, Professor David Neiweem, University organist, is fully realizing the range of a new organ in Ira Allen Chapel, and trying to build a new generation of organ music fans in the process.
At the convocation ceremony that opened the academic year, the newest addition to Neiweem’s arsenal, the Rogers Trillium digital electronic organ, was unveiled in full force. It was the latest move in a five-year battle plan Neiweem has advanced since becoming University organist in 2002. His goal: bond a new generation of students, and the community at-large, to the king of instruments by making organ music widely accessible at UVM, as much a part of the University’s fabric as it was in the early 1800s, when the University organist’s name, along with that of the president and provost, appeared at the top of official UVM communications.
Until the Rogers came along, organ music had been uncharacteristically absent from the University’s center stage. While the music department’s home in the Southwick Music Complex boasted three world-class organs, Ira Allen—one of the state’s premier organ venues, with acoustics specially designed for its robust tones—had been without an instrument since 1985, when a building renovation required placing an airshaft where the instrument’s pipes once held forth.
Making things right by putting an instrument back in Ira Allen was no easy proposition. An organ worthy of the space would cost close to a million dollars. Overhauling Ira Allen to fix its drastically changeable temperature and humidity—death to an organ’s finicky intonation system—could cost another two million.
Enter the digital Rogers Trillium, which boasts a similar decibel level and intonation to a large acoustic organ, but at a cost of about $100,000 to buy and install.
“Acoustic organs are so large, they can never be in perfect tune,” Neiweem says. “A lot of their characteristic sound comes from the range of the unison pitch from stop to stop. The more perfect it is, the less like a real organ it sounds. Sound engineers are now capitalizing on the fact that people expect to hear an organ slightly out of tune by sampling those sounds and faithfully reproducing the imperfections.”
While traditionalists may sniff at the move to digital, there’s no denying the power of the instrument’s sound or the ardor to share it of the man at the keyboard.
—Jeffrey Wakefield
Message from a bog
Nitrogen-rich diet threatens pitcher plants
For tens of thousands of years, carnivorous pitcher plants have lived in the inhospitable, low-nitrogen environment of a bog, getting along just fine on the unfortunate ants or flies that came their way.
But, thanks to acid rain, the pitcher plant’s diet is changing, says Biology Professor Nick Gotelli. “In the past 50 years, because of the burning of fossil fuels, and especially because of synthetic fertilizers, we humans are now releasing all sorts of reactive nitrogen into the environment,” he says. “Suddenly, these plants, because they are taking in rainwater, are absorbing excess nitrogen.”
Bogs are among nature’s most unlikely and elegant ecosystems. A typical bog forms on top of a geological “kettlehole”: a pit, left behind by scouring glaciers, that fills with rainwater. Because there is almost no flow in or out of a bog, its water is very low in oxygen and supplies few nutrients, including nitrogen. Still, a sheet of sphagnum moss slowly grows across the hole, and, over millennia, fills it with peat. Living on top of this “bog mat,” pitcher plants employ cup-shaped leaves to capture insects and rain that provide nutrients not available from a bog’s saturated soils.
“If we could maintain current rates of nitrogen deposition, or perhaps see a slight decline, pitcher plant populations would be in pretty good shape,” says Gotelli, “but if we see modest increases, say on the order of one to two percent per year, which is likely, these populations look like they will be doomed to extinction.”
A glut of nitrogen from rain and snow makes a dangerously unbalanced pitcher plant diet, Gotelli explains, drawing on ten years of research in bogs of Vermont and Massachusetts. “When the plants receive natural prey items, they are, in addition to receiving nitrogen, also receiving phosphorous, which the plants need,” Gotelli says, “but the atmospheric deposition has no phosphorous in it, so it shifts the nitrogen/phosphorous ratio.” And this shift makes the pitcher plant give up its pitcher. Instead of developing its characteristic tubular leaf, the plant changes morphology and forms a flat leaf that increases photosynthesis. The plant is also more likely to flower in the spring on its newfangled diet.
These might seem like benefits, but the result is less survival in juvenile plants. In Gotelli’s models, a century or two of this reduced survivorship draws a population line down to zero. And these problems scale up from the individual plant to the bog ecosystem.
Gotelli’s findings are part of a body of research suggesting that damaging feedback loops may develop: as nitrogen levels increase, some bog-specializing plants are killed off, while others, especially grasses, begin colonizing these once unwelcoming habitats. This may have implications for global warming. Though peat bogs cover only a small amount of the Earth’s surface area, they have locked up perhaps 30 percent of the planet’s terrestrial carbon. If bogs start to disappear, “how much of this carbon will be released into the atmosphere?” Gotelli wonders, since more atmospheric carbon means a stronger greenhouse effect.
—Joshua Brown
Nicholas Gotelli is among the 2005-2006 University Scholars, who also include John Burke, professor of microbiology and molecular genetics; Carol Miller, professor of psychology; and Robyn Warhol, professor of English. The Graduate College annually honors four professors as University Scholars in recognition of sustained excellence in research and scholarship.
Claiming tradition
Anthropologist applies expertise to Cherokee same-sex marriage case
Kathy Reynolds and Dawn McKinley never wanted to make a fuss over their relationship. Then Reynolds had to go to the hospital and McKinley wasn’t allowed to visit: They might have been partners, but in the hospital’s eyes they were not family. So the Oklahoma Cherokee women decided to get married under tribal law—the first same-sex couple to do so—beginning a complex cultural and legal battle.
“It took me about 12 seconds to decide that I wanted to do what I could to help these women,” says Brian Gilley, assistant professor of anthropology, who has been involved with the couple’s legal team for almost two years and contributed an affidavit taken under advisement in the couple’s widely publicized case before the Cherokee Judicial Appeals Tribunal, the tribe’s highest court.
After the hospital incident, the women had received a marriage application under tribal law and organized a wedding ceremony. But when they tried to file the application, the tribe moved quickly to stop them—a pattern quite familiar to Gilley, of Oklahoma Cherokee and Chickasaw ancestry himself and an expert in gender and sexuality among Native Americans. His book on the subject, Becoming Two-Spirit: The Search for Self and Social Acceptance in Indian Country, will be published in October by the University of Nebraska Press.
As the case moved through the Cherokee legal system, tribal lawyers’ arguments included the assertion that same-sex marriage was not permitted by Cherokee law and was not part of the tribe’s tradition. Gilley’s carefully documented affidavit, on the other hand, drew on Cherokee and other traditions to argue that, in fact, “there is overwhelming evidence for the historic and cultural presence of multiple gender roles and same-sex relations among most if not all Native North Americans, including the Cherokee, and that they historically shared in the institution of marriage.”
Although many contemporary Native Americans are conservative, particularly on matters of gender and sexuality, Gilley says that gender (and, for that matter, marriage) were traditionally seen by Native Americans in complex, sometimes fluid ways that bear little resemblance to the binary biological categories favored by Westerners.
“The idea of tradition in native societies carries symbolic capital. If you say something is traditional it is seen as legitimate…” Gilley says. “What many Cherokees in this instance failed to recognized, and what is often the case with native peoples, is that the things they are calling traditional values are things that came about through interactions with Euro-Americans.” Summing up the subtle argument of his affidavit, Gilley says: “In fact, homophobia is not a traditional value.”
In a ruling filed Dec. 22, 2005, the Cherokee Supreme Court rejected the marriage opponents’ case and did not accept the argument from the plaintiffs, all tribal leaders, that permitting the marriage to stand would injure the Cherokee Nation’s reputation.
—Kevin Foley
photo by Sally McCay
New Heights
Honors College students get settled
The attractions of the new University Heights Residential Learning Complex, now home to UVM’s Honors College, are many. From the granite-trimmed fireplace in the lobby to the vaulted ceiling in a meeting space to the unique designs of student rooms, some of which include spiral staircases and lofts, the building defies the utilitarian image the term “residence hall” may conjure.
Such details and amenities are nice, but nothing compares to having a relatively private bathroom. As parents helped students move into the north complex before the opening of the spring semester, the beauty of sharing a bathroom with a handful rather than a floor-full of people was a popular topic of conversation. There are a variety of singles, doubles, and suite rooms in the building, and all have a bathroom within the unit rather than the traditional dorm-style facilities down the hall.
Caitlin Crowley, a Lola Aiken Scholar in the Rubenstein School and pole-vaulter on the track and field team, praised her new digs as she settled in. Maybe not quite home, but a definite step up from Wills Hall. “It feels like a hotel,” Caitlin says while her mom, Judi, gives an approving nod to the big towel bars and hooks in the bathrooms. She also notes, with some maternal bemusement, that students are responsible for cleaning their own bathrooms. The University provides cleaning materials, instructions, and grisly warnings about the hazards of a poorly cleaned bathroom.
Laura Balzer, an Honors College sophomore from Middlebury, Connecticut, and her roommates have truly moved up in the world, scoring the “penthouse” in the room lottery by landing the fourth-floor, west-facing suite, easily the best residence hall view on campus. Their rooms look out over the trees to the lake and Adirondacks, and north toward University Row. “We’re really excited, it’s great,” she says.
Beyond the view, she’s excited about what the new residence hall will mean for the programming and day-to-day life of UVM’s new Honors College, an attraction that convinced her to apply to UVM early-decision two years ago. “It’s great being together with people who want to learn and love to learn,” Balzer says. “I’m a nerd like that.”
Work continues on the south complex of University Heights, which is scheduled to open fall semester 2007 as an environmentally themed residence hall.
—Thomas Weaver
Toward peaceful neighborhoods
“Two-Way Street,” a new UVM-produced documentary, has been created to educate and stimulate dialogue between students planning to live off campus and members of the community. The film was conceived by Gail Shampnois ’81, director of UVM’s Office of Student and Community Relations.
Then Burlington Mayor Peter Clavelle was among those in attendance at the film’s January premiere. “I truly believe that the community fabric is stronger than ever in this area and that town-gown relations are the best they’ve been in the history of the institution,” Clavelle said. “But we’ve still got work to do.”
To see “Two-Way Street”: uvm.edu/health/oscr/?Page=twowaystreet.html
UVM SHELFLIFE
Bedtime Socrates
Prof brings Greek philosophy to the younger set
For an unassuming academic who spends his time tucked away in the attic-like offices of UVM’s Classics Department, talking with students and reading Plato in the original Greek, Associate Professor Mark Usher ’92 recently pulled off something seriously cool. Stepping out of the comfortable confines of the scholarly journal, Usher has turned the foundation of philosophy into a joyous romp of a children’s picture book.
“Long ago in ancient Greece, a boy named Socrates declared that all he knew was nothing. So he spent his whole life asking questions,” begins Wise Guy: The Life and Philosophy of Socrates, published last fall by Farrar Straus Giroux. Excluding Socrates’ early life, for which we have no information today, Usher has based the text entirely on ancient sources, taking what is known about the adult to imagine the child as “a curious boy, and cheeky, too.”
Usher, too, was a curious kid, and while he swears he wasn’t indoctrinated in the Presocratics from the cradle, he was but five or six when D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths sparked his interest in the classics. His fate was sealed as a UVM undergraduate: “I majored in classics,” Usher explains, “primarily because the more I got into any topic of European philosophy or European history or modern literature or thought, the more I realized that it all goes back to the classics.”
Wise Guy presents Socrates in all his sprawling glory—an intellectual who loves to party, who’s as physically tough as he is wise, who values the craftsman over the lawyer, who eschews material goods and laughs at his own bad looks. It aims to entertain and inform at every age level, even for adults. “I wanted people to feel smarter by reading the book,” Usher says.
The classics professor and UVM alumnus says that he wrote the book to capture the mystique of the man, not to drum in some high-minded idea that children must know more about Socrates. And yet it’s clear that he’d like to see Socrates become an antidote to the consumerist, entertainment culture that kids are bombarded with.
“(What I want them to take away) is that they should not be afraid to ask tough questions, to be interested in finding answers that convince them,” Usher says. “(I want them to) see that there are more important things in the world than iPods and television and T-shirts and brand names… there’s something about Socrates and Greek philosophy in general that privileges the soul and the mind and things that are beyond the everyday dross that we deal with… If a kid decides that it’s okay to be intellectual and they associate (that) with asking tough questions all the time and talking about ideas with other people, that’s a good thing.”
—Lee Ann Cox
Borderline Movements in African Fiction
by Lokangaka Losambe, Africa World Press, Inc.
In this collection of critical essays, Loka Losambe, professor of English, explores African subjectivity and its representation in African literature. Through an analysis of the novels of such authors as Chinua Achebe, Mongo Beti, and Mbulelo Mzamane, Losambe identifies the hybrid and borderline identities of African societies negotiating between Africa’s pre-colonial tradition and Western values.
The Book Lover’s Cookbook
by Shaunda Kennedy Wenger ’91 and
Janet Kay Jensen, Ballantine Books
Great works of literature don’t have to end when the last page is turned. This cookbook features nearly 200 recipes from celebrated novels and non-fiction for readers to enjoy when the book is over. Bring the world of literature to your table from breakfast (Behold! Ichabod’s Slapjacks), to dessert (Turkish Delight) and everything in between (A Little Woman’s Butternut Bevy, James’ Ginger Peaches, Fried Green Tomatoes, and more). As you prepare your literary repast, read from the quotes and passages that feature the food, which alumna Wenger and her co-author have conveniently included.
The Two Faces of Education:
An Insider’s View of School Reform
by Michael Allen ’88, Rowman and Littlefield
Hailed by Cornel West, author of Race Matters and Democracy Matters, as “a fascinating book that deserves our attention,” The Two Faces of Education, scheduled for release in April, offers an important look at the non-curricular issues school-age children navigate each day. From peer pressure to parental disinterest, learn how educators and administrators can effectively help students gain the skills they need to deal with the many personal and social matters that affect their education.
(for UVM staff)