UVM NOTEBOOK
photo by Sally McCay
Inimitable
2007 Kidder Faculty Award: Professor Richard Sugarman
Professor Richard Sugarman is doing a Marlon Brando impersonation, Don Corleone in The God-father, that’s worthy of Saturday Night Live—and has his students in Introduction to the Study of Religion barely able to contain their mirth.
An orthodox Jew who dresses in traditional black attire, Sugarman has donned his black fedora to complete the image. Somehow it works. Mumbling, jabbing his index finger into the air, learned scholar morphs into menacing mafia don.
It’s a moment that students have seen before and clearly relish. It’s also vintage Sugarman, the 2007 winner of the George V. Kidder Outstanding Faculty Award.
Since he learned the art of mimicry as a child, Sugarman has used humor as a way to find common ground with others. Without it, the professor might find communication all but impossible. “How would you talk with people?” he asks.
But, often as not, there’s a purpose behind the laughs. The Brando impression is designed to bring home a small point about “family values,” much talked about by candidates in an election year, but which aren’t always a good thing (as the Corleones amply demonstrate) and a larger point, about values and justice.
Sugarman is an academic hybrid, a Yale-trained philosopher who took up residence in UVM’s religion department years ago because he has always been drawn to the deepest questions about “the human person.”
The answers, or at least a set of responses to life’s challenges, are found in a word that Sugarman utters almost religiously: the texts—seminal works like the Hebraic Bible, Plato’s Republic, and Homer’s The Iliad—that have formed the foundation of his life, and which he uses to shape his students’.
The events of 9/11 put his faith in them to the test. After much inward debate, Sugarman decided he had to teach on that terrible day. “If these books can’t respond to the most momentous questions being asked, they’re not worth teaching any day.”
The reading assignment was Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, which centers on the Biblical Abraham’s struggle to obey God’s command to bind and kill his only son, Isaac. Abraham has steeled himself to obey, until he hears an angel’s voice asking him at the last moment to restrain himself.
“What is the difference between what Abraham is doing and what the suicide bombers did?” Sugarman demanded. “Both were willing to take another’s life for the sake of something presumably higher.”
Sugarman navigated class through this moral thicket. There was no question that Abraham was a God-fearing person. But he was also just, and intuitively knew God would not let him go through with the act.
The lesson: “There’s no place for egoistic salvation. You can’t take someone else’s life for the sake of your own spiritual elevation.”
As a longtime director of UVM’s Integrated Humanities Program—students in IHP take three humanities courses and live together in the Living/ Learning Center—Sugarman’s office is located one floor down from students’ rooms. He is rarely left alone to strike a philosophical pose.
But developing strong bonds with his students, often through conversations outside the classroom, is at least partly the point of being a teacher, in Professor Sugarman’s view.
“I want to go beyond just teaching students how to think,” he says. “I want them to be decent to each other. The first thing I teach them is that they’re not minor characters in their own autobiographies. The second thing is that other people don’t feel that way either.”
Perhaps because the human condition preoccupies him and his empathy runs deep, Sugarman’s self-deprecating humor never strays far. Characteristically, he reaches for it when asked to describe the allure of teaching.
“Do you think they’re going to listen to me at home?” he asks. “I start talking, they say, ‘Dad, that’s enough. We’re not in class now.’”
—Jeffrey Wakefield
“Professor Sugarman—once friend Bernie Sanders’s ‘Commissioner of Reality’—is
the kind of Mr. Chips figure, the kind of ‘Iron John’ figure, too often lacking in today’s young ideologue professors. This is a man who convinces you to read and reread The Iliad not because you ought to be a ‘learned’ person, but because it will play itself out within your life. To this day, in a moment of indecision, I often think of The Iliad. Or Plato’s Symposium. Or the Book of Job. To others, these may be texts to name-drop. To a student of Professor Sugarman, these are reflections of one’s own life.”
—Matt Hutton ’94
Inspired by Professor Sugarman, Hutton rose from a self-described mediocre high school student to a Phi Beta Kappa, cum laude graduate, and went on to earn his master’s degree at Harvard Divinity School. Hutton currently teaches high school English in Needham, Massachusetts.BizBlitz
Not unlike the students she teaches in Business Savvy, a two-week, total immersion, business course offered over the summer, Annie Viets ’71 knew nothing about business as an undergraduate psychology major. It wasn’t until after she’d earned a doctorate that she took a similar course at New York University and realized the importance of owning some business knowledge.
“Most of the students who take Business Savvy don’t know the difference between a bed sheet and a balance sheet,” says Viets, who teaches business courses through UVM Continuing Education, after spending fifteen years in the business world. “I was the same way—I had no idea how to read the Wall Street Journal. By the end of the course students are confidently spouting business terms that they can apply to their own lives. I think the course should be mandatory for all liberal arts majors.”
The twenty-six students in the summer 2007 “B-Savvy” course, as it’s marketed to undergrads, include history, studio art, political science, psychology, and English majors. The first week of the packed 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. schedule is a crash course in the foundations of business: marketing, finance accounting, economics, business strategy, management, entrepreneurship, ethics, and corporate responsibility.
“We learned as much as you could have crammed into one week,” says senior Ted Swartz, a psychology major, whose father encouraged him to take the course. “It was presented in a way that made it understandable for non-business majors. I definitely learned some things that will help me after graduation.”
In addition to hearing corporate executives from Ben & Jerry’s, Twincraft, Magic Hat, and other local companies, students were given tutorials in business writing, job search methods, and leadership skills. A crowd favorite was Charles Dinklage, a financial consultant from AXA Advisors, who talked to students about everything from how to buy your first car or home to 401Ks, stocks, and bonds. “He was incredibly helpful on a personal finance level,” says Grayson Hellmuth, a senior economics major. “He answered a lot of questions.”
As the course progresses, students give PowerPoint presentations on local businesses and participate in a simulated computer exercise that puts students in charge of companies. Mark Youndt, an associate professor of business who helped launch the first Business Savvy course in 2002 as an assistant professor of management at Skidmore College, acts as a consultant on decisions that include price setting, overhead, capital investments, inventory, and potential stock offerings. The team whose company makes the most profit free and clear wins.
“I wish there was a course like this when I was an undergrad,” Viets says. “When I finally took a course like Business Savvy, it opened up a whole new world for me. We want to do the same for non-business majors at UVM, so when they graduate they have the tools to make sound financial decisions and understand how business affects their everyday life.”
—Jon Reidel
Photo by Sabin Gratz '98
Going global
It was haiku night at Living/Learning’s Japanese House and Amanda Hower had to give it a shot. Though the strict five-seven-five syllable boundaries of haiku present their own challenge, Hower couldn’t resist the urge to set the bar higher yet with attempts at writing poetry in Chinese, then Spanish, before settling back into her native English.
Such multinational pluck makes the first-year student from Salisbury, Connecticut, a perfect fit for the new Global Village residential learning program. Housed in Living/Learning’s B Building, the initiative unites the cultural houses that have long been an L/L staple. The genial Dennis Mahoney, professor of German and Russian, is faculty director at Global Village, a job that is a return across two decades to his earliest roots at UVM. He and his wife lived in a faculty apartment for three years while he was faculty director of German House. “I have a deep affection for the place,” Mahoney says.
Nine language/cultural houses (Africa House, Canada House, Casa Italiana, Chinese House, German House, Japanese House, La Casa Hispanica, La Maison Francaise, and Russian House) and 120 students came together to form one Global Village with the opening of the fall semester.
Hower lives in Canada House and is studying both Chinese and Spanish at UVM. Such freedom in crossing linguistic and cultural borders is what promises to make Global Village an interesting world of its own. Beyond planned events, Hower says that the daily stuff of conversation with fellow Villagers in the laundry room or over a cup of tea has greatly enriched her experience. Enthusiastic about the potential such a place offers, Hower offers up an example of the multiplier effect when Global Village residents gather. Say a student of Chinese who grew up in France and lives in Africa House is speaking with another student who studies Spanish and Russian and lives in Canada House. “It’s almost like having six people’s worth of experience that can be shared and learned from,” she says.
—Thomas Weaver
photo by Sally McCay
'My job is collecting tears'
Wiesel braves memory of suffering
Patrick Gym, filled floor to rafters on April 25, was hushed as the crowd hung on the words of a gray-haired, 78-year-old storyteller with world-weary eyes. Elie Wiesel, author, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and foremost, living witness to the Holocaust, made his campus appearance to deliver a talk and receive an honorary doctor of humane letters from the University. Soft-spoken, mesmerizing, the everyman-rabbi, Wiesel spoke intimately and without script to his audience of 3,600 people while seated at a table on the dais.
“Memory is what makes culture the extraordinary adventure it is,” Wiesel said. But, “what do we do with the memory of suffering? What do we do with suffering?” Wiesel sees the past in the present — in Rwanda, in Darfur — people and cultures facing extinction because no one comes to their aid. “We lost our dignity in Rwanda; we’re trying to make it up by helping Darfur,” Wiesel told local media in a meeting prior to the event. Whether Darfur lives or dies “depends on us,” he said.
Wiesel, who was approached in 1999 by a delegation from Sudan before the genocide in Darfur was widely acknowledged, became a champion for ending the atrocities in that region. His dedication to Darfur was, in part, what brought Wiesel to campus. His visit was initiated by UVM senior Meredith Burak, the founder of a UVM chapter of the national group Students Take Action Now: Darfur (STAND).
Wiesel told media before the lecture that he hopes more students take action against genocide. Students hold more power than they realize, he said, and he urged students to sign petitions against the genocide in Darfur. “Do something for your sake,” he said, “as much as for theirs.”
Wiesel has traveled the world many times over listening to survivors of atrocities. “My job is collecting tears,” he said. “I try to be present for them, because I remember a time when we needed someone to come” and no one did. Wiesel and his family were interned in Auschwitz; later, he and his father were moved to Buchenwald. Both parents and his younger sister died; he and two older sisters survived.
Following liberation at the war’s end, the young survivor was sent to an orphanage in France. “I plunged into study, into learning,” he said, the salvation of his sanity and the continuing passion of his life. Wiesel, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University, said: “I go on teaching because I have a passion to learn. I’m not sure I’m the best teacher in the class, but surely I’m the best student.”
—Lee GriffinWords of wisdom
After the final exam has passed, most lecture notes get pitched or, at best, wrapped in good intentions for future review then packed away never to be seen again. Not so with Nicole Baker’s jottings from 1998-2002, the span in which she took courses with Robert Tyzbir, professor of nutrition and food sciences. At graduation 2002, she compiled the professor’s greatest hits in this small notebook and gave it to him in thanks. In case you missed class those days, here’s a peek at Nicole’s notes.
4/2/01 Nothing biochemical is absolute.
1/17/02 Eating is the single most dangerous thing you can do for the brain.
3/14/02 Say things often enough and fast enough, it becomes rote memory. It does not mean that you are smart.
4/14/02 Any company with a product to lose weight rapidly is contributing to the problem of obesity.
4/25/02 Americans want three things: stay young, thin, and be able to eat anything they want.
An energetic introduction
“You’d have to sprint to make this work,” says Erik Guthrie ’10, holding up a winter boot/flashlight contraption designed to power illumination through a renewable energy source, the swing of a human stride. That’s in theory. In practice, the attached magnetic motor is ominously quiet; the flashlight, dark. “Actually, sprinting doesn’t work either,” Guthrie says with a rueful smile, “we tried that.”
Guthrie and his four teammates are freshmen in Electrical Engineering/ Mechanical Engineering 001, an early and essential introduction to the challenges of design. Along with twenty other teams, they’re presenting their final work to UVM’s School of Engineering advisory board who have stopped in for the course’s concluding open house.
The students’ assignment: Build a machine that will scavenge energy from the environment, store it for later use, and sense how effectively the system is working, says Jeff Frolik, assistant professor of electrical engineering. Frolik co-teaches the course with Jeff Marshall, director of the school.
The would-be illuminated boot, unfortunately, needs no sensor to show how well it is working. “Things don’t always turn out the way you like them to,” Guthrie says, capturing a difficult truth about product design.
For another team, design truth and beauty are found in the form of a cup of hot joe. “This is the Solarbolic Coffee Brewmaster 2000,” says Dan Harris ’10, with a salesman’s bravado, pointing to a half-pipe of overlapping strips of aluminum resting on a frame of cardboard. “It’s completely collapsible and, when it’s sunny, only takes ten minutes to get water to 150 degrees.”
Suspended down the middle, a black pipe, filled with water, absorbs sunlight. Once hot, the water can be released into a waiting mug; it would be good for coffee-loving hikers, explains Kate Bragg ’10, when they’re out in a place like her home in Utah, where there is a summer fire ban.
Not too surprisingly, visitor Paul Comey is paying close attention. He’s a member of the advisory board and vice president for environmental affairs at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. “Maybe we could put this in our catalog to show what students come up with,” he says, “when they put their minds to coffee.”
While solving the backwoods latté does not rank as one of the nation’s top engineering problems, the principles embedded in the Brewmaster 2000 are relevant: Define a need, design a system to effectively meet this need, and make the best use of available energy—whether the sun or the spinning of a revolving door. “Energy,” Marshall says, “is the biggest problem our society faces, and it’s inherently an engineering problem.”
—Joshua BrownThis just in
Big news for a faculty member and alumnus who were featured in last issue’s Vermont Quarterly. Josh Bongard, assistant professor of computer science, who was interviewed about his work on a self-healing robot, received a $200,000 Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship, one of only five such awards nationwide.
Insight for educators
A new archive recently added to UVM’s Special Collections Department offers an exceptional look into the complexities of learning and child development. It also chronicles the work of a Vermont leader in progressive education, North Bennington’s Prospect School, from its 1965 opening to its close in 1991.
Prospect School teachers carefully archived children’s work together with transcripts of the observational, descriptive records that the school used in preference to letter grades. Teachers used nonjudgmental language to consider the child as a whole, noting everything from physical presence and emotional skills to media preferences.
Charles Rathbone, associate professor of education, says the wealth of that educational archive now housed at UVM—which includes more than 300,000 samples of students’ work and administrative records—“might be unique in the world as a longitudinal collection of up to ten years in a child’s life.”
Patricia Carini, co-founder of the Prospect School, says, “We wanted the archives to be in a place where that history was alive and vital. UVM was the logical place, and we’re awfully pleased that they saw it in the same way.”
As educators in the state and beyond search for methods and curricula to best educate future generations, the past experience of students in a forward-looking southern Vermont school could prove to be a rich resource.
“Prospect School has always, for me, been a place that defined what education might be like,” Rathbone says. “It didn’t matter what the child brought to the table, the curriculum was responsive. It seemed to me the most equitable way to educate kids.”
—Katherine Quimby JohnsonSending off the class of 2007
The last time U.S. Congressman John R. Lewis spoke at the University of Vermont he was an energetic 22-year-old civil rights leader one year removed from orchestrating and serving as keynote speaker at the historic March on Washington. His return more than forty-four years later as speaker at UVM’s 2007 commencement ceremony was no less passionate and contained a similar message: Get off the sidelines of society and help those in need.
Lewis, a Georgia congressman since 1986, has deep roots in the American civil rights movement that extend to the March 7, 1965 day he led six hundred peaceful demonstrators across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, toward Montgomery. Because of the violence they met at the hands of authorities, the day would become known as “Bloody Sunday,” an event that shocked the country and hastened the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Lewis told graduates, “Whatever it is you care about—whether it’s getting to the truth about the war in Iraq, global warming, shrinking economic opportunities for the middle class, or the injustice of poverty—you have to find your passion and make your contribution. I knew that I could strike a blow against segregation and racial discrimination. I decided to get in the way. I decided to get in trouble. But it was good trouble; it was necessary trouble … We may have all come over on different ships, but we’re all in the same boat now.”
Commencement 2007 honored 2,494 new UVM graduates, representing thirty-nine states and twenty countries. In addition to John Lewis, the university presented honorary degrees to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; Jackie M. Gribbons; Leonard Miller ’51; Floyd Rourke; and Thomas Slayton ’63. Posthumous degrees were awarded to Eric D’Oench and Michelle Gardner-Quinn, an emotional moment that drew a standing ovation from graduates and guests.
—Jon Reidel G’06Just 3 questions
Mark Stoler, military and diplomatic historian and newly-named professor emeritus with his retirement in May, was a 2006-2007 recipient of a Kroepsch-Maurice Excellence in Teaching Award. Despite renown as an author and scholar, it’s teaching that Stoler regards as his true gift, his passion, even a “religious calling.” He’s had a reputation for being both demanding and beloved from the day he arrived at UVM with a ponytail in 1970 through his thirty-seven-year tenure in his first, and only, fulltime faculty position.
Q. How has your teaching evolved over time, both as you’ve matured and the culture has changed?
A. My teaching style hasn’t changed that much over time, although I was so young in the beginning I was like the students’ brother, then I became more like their favorite uncle, then their father, and now their grandfather, I guess. But I’ve always been a tough grader. I want to push students beyond what they think their capacities are; I want to make them think in ways they haven’t thought before. My aim is to make them uncomfortable, because if you’re comfortable, it means you’ve got a set of preconceived notions that are not being challenged.
What has changed over the past five to ten years, given the consumer culture, I’ve had to be more explicit in my opening lecture. I had to be willing to risk my popularity… to clarify that the values they might be bringing into the classroom I did not share. If students believe they are the customers at the university, I beg to differ: That makes me the checkout clerk, and that’s not why I got a Ph.D. and decided to teach. I offer a model of education as social contract a la John Locke, with rights and responsibilities on each side.
Q. Do you feel free to share your personal ideology with the class?
A. My responsibilities (are to) provoke students, get them to question, get them to look at different sides of an issue, not give them my own ideology. If I have a bias, I let the class know about it. Since I think so little of Woodrow Wilson—I think he’s the most overrated president in American history and one of the most dangerous—I assign a biography that praises him. So, in that sense, I will always try to balance. When I had a class in the ’70s that overwhelmingly supported dropping the atomic bomb, I would end up attacking the dropping of the bomb. Now that I have students that overwhelmingly attack dropping the bomb, I tend to support it. So I’m constantly playing the adversarial role. I’m an iconoclast. I love to shatter idols and myths.
Q. How much of your mission is to get students to scrutinize how knowledge of history can—or should—impact current policy?
A. It’s very important. But, as important, is the need to avoid simplistic lessons about the past. What I see constantly is people looking for analogy, for ‘lessons of the past’ to apply to the present. I’m on the verge of rejecting any analogy, because they are so often misused. What I think may be simply a human tendency is that you will choose the lessons from the past that reinforce the conclusions that you have already reached. History is a process. I do not think history ever repeats itself—patterns of human behavior do, but history does not.
If I have a bias, it’s the bias of using the mind rather than the heart. And that has come with age. I was a romantic in my twenties. I have come to believe that romanticism, emotionalism can very easily lead to [trouble]. Which doesn’t mean that rationality is going to work. Very rational people got us into Vietnam; McNamara’s the classic in that regard. Maybe the bottom line would be there are no easy answers.
When I wrote up my biographical blurb for retirement, we each had to come up with a quotation that summarizes us. I used Havel’s, “Seek the company of those who seek the truth. Avoid the company of those who have found it.”
UVM SHELFLIFE
Words on words
Alum's collection grows from love of books
After Kevin Graffagnino ’76 G’78 published his first book of quotations in 1996, Only in Books: Writers, Readers & Bibliophiles on Their Passion, he had no intention of publishing a second. But ten years later, the executive director of the Vermont Historical Society and former UVM special collections librarian felt he had no choice but to publish All the Good Books: Quotations for Bibliophiles (Vermont Heritage Press) in order to have a place for the hundreds of quotes on books, reading, and writing he’s discovered since the release of the first volume.
“It’s a lot easier to start collecting quotes than it is to stop,” Graffagnino says. Between the two books, he has amassed 3,400 quotations from an impressive range of sources—from Horace to Joan Rivers—including writers, politicians, actors, business leaders, and musicians, among others.
“You expect Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde,” Graffagnino explains (and you won’t be disappointed), “but I think there’s a surprising range of twentieth century authors or people in fields that have nothing to do with literature or writing.”
When asked about his favorite quote, a question that seems to cause at least a little discomfort over having to choose from so many, Graffagnino admits that he prefers “witty and funny” over “serious and solemn.”
“I can think of one by Gypsy Rose Lee,” he says, “who was a stripper in the 1930s and 40s, and she was also a mystery novelist—a best-selling mystery novelist. She said something like, ‘Royalties are all right, but shaking the beads brings in money faster,’ and that makes me laugh.”
Although Graffagnino takes pleasure in finding unusual quotes from unusual sources, don’t let names like Gypsy Rose Lee and Joan Rivers fool you: his original passion, which dates back to junior high school, is collecting old books.
“This little guy,” Graffagnino says, gesturing to the cover illustration of All the Good Books, “is pretty much me in a nutshell—lost in the world of these antiquarian volumes, reading, studying, and enjoying them, maybe as the first person to open them in a few centuries.”
Although Graffagnino has no plans to give up his identity as a “bibliofool” and will no doubt continue to notice potential quotations when he sees them, he’s satisfied with the two volumes he’s created.
“The first one took twenty years, this one took ten years. The next one,” he says, “I’ll let someone else do because there’s no end to it. People will never stop saying something about books, reading, and writers.”
—Amanda Waite ’02 G’04The Prince of Nantucket
Jan Goldstein ’73, Random House
Jan Goldstein, whose first novel, All that Matters, graced the L.A. Times bestseller list in 2004, published his second novel, The Prince of Nantucket, in May. Goldstein has roots in the UVM theatre department where he wrote and directed Covenant, a rock musical. His new novel, which tells the story of recent divorcé Teddy Mathison’s return to Nantucket to care for his estranged, Alzheimers-afflicted mother, was chosen by Yahoo.com as a “top book” on their national list.
Quelch’s Gold: Piracy, Greed,
and Betrayal in Colonial New England
Clifford Beal ’80, Greenwood Publishing Group
While most audiences are satisfying their zeal for pirate stories this summer with yet another installment of the adventures of Captain Jack Sparrow, consider reading UVM alum Clifford Beal’s book about Captain John Quelch, who, in 1704, docked his ship in Marblehead, Massachusetts, after having mysteriously left that port ten months earlier. It was the booty of Brazilian sugar, hides, guns, and gold dust in the hold that led to Quelch’s arrest on charges of murder and piracy. In Quelch’s Gold, Beal ’80, a defense and security affairs writer and former editor of Jane’s Defense Weekly in London, tells the story of Quelch and the political ramifications of the trial that led to his hanging.
Daring to Hope: The Power of the Gift
Erwin Kinsey’77, Heifer International
Heifer International, a non-profit organization devoted to working with communities to end hunger and poverty, began with a simple idea: Instead of providing food to the hungry, with gifts of livestock provide them with the means to feed themselves. Daring to Hope: The Power of the Gift, written by UVM alum and former director of the Heifer Program in Tanzania Erwin Kinsey and colleague Dennis Murnyak, documents the history and success of Heifer International’s thirty years in Tanzania. Along with photography of the country’s stunning landscape and stories of its people, the book also features poetry by Erwin’s cousin and fellow alum, celebrated Vermont poet Leland Kinsey ’72, whose trip to visit his cousin inspired his 2004 volume In the Rain Shadow.
(for UVM staff)