UVM NOTEBOOK
photo by Marielle Ludwig
Campus in mourning
Michelle Gardner-Quinn made friends quickly at the University of Vermont. Scarcely more than six weeks after the senior transfer student had begun her studies at the University, a circle of those friends who knew her best gathered on the stage of Ira Allen Chapel, yellow wildflowers in hand, and shared memories.
Standing before a chapel filled to capacity with UVM students, faculty, staff, and members of the local community, their words offered a glimpse of a vibrant, committed young woman. One spoke of Gardner-Quinn’s sense of humor, recalling their rain-soaked, muddy hike down Mount Mansfield during Wilderness Trek when, after several falls, they decided sliding on their rear-ends was the better alternative—and did it laughing all the way. Another talked about the times in the dorm room when Gardner-Quinn was quick to get down to homework on the computer even while others were chatting and procrastinating. They spoke of their friend’s love of music, then one of the young women filled the lofty hall with a simple folk melody on the violin.
Those who met Michelle Gardner-Quinn of Arlington, Virginia, during her short time in Burlington came to know her well. Many of the hundreds in the chapel for the UVM memorial service on October 15 did not know her at all, but had come to share their grief and seek comfort after a week of concern for the 21-year-old’s disappearance had turned to mourning her death.
The news of Gardner-Quinn’s killing stunned the local community and rippled across the entire nation through newspaper, magazine, and cable news coverage. The grim circumstances became familiar to many. In the early morning hours of October 7, Gardner-Quinn began to walk up Main Street to her University Heights Residence Hall after an evening downtown with friends that had included dinner with her parents, in town for UVM’s Homecoming and Family Weekend. After calling a friend at 2:15 a.m., Gardner-Quinn vanished, setting off an intensive search that ended on October 13 when the student’s body was found in a rocky crevice near Huntington Gorge.
Brian Rooney, a 36-year-old local man who loaned his cell phone to Gardner-Quinn when the battery in her own phone failed on the night she disappeared, soon became a focus of police investigations. On October 25, Rooney was charged with aggravated assault in Gardner-Quinn’s death, and police have cited DNA evidence tying Rooney to the crime. The suspect has pleaded not guilty and is jailed without bail pending trial. Aggravated assault, the most serious count Vermont prosecutors can bring, carries a sentence of life in prison.
An exceptional person
As people on campus who knew Gardner-Quinn spoke of their memories, a picture emerged of a highly intelligent, driven individual with a passion for world travel and social justice issues. “This was a mature and sophisticated person who knew how to get around the world,” said Elizabeth “Ibit” Getchell, student services coordinator in the environmental studies program and academic advisor to Gardner-Quinn. “She took very demanding courses. It was obvious that she was someone who sought out valuable experiences and made the most of them. She was driven, resourceful, motivated, and adventurous. I was highly impressed with the range of her experiences and obvious zeal for learning. She really wanted to be at UVM and worked hard to get here. In my experience, transfer students are often exceptional people, and Michelle certainly was exceptional.”
At the campus memorial service, Cecilia Danks, assistant professor of environmental studies and natural resources, read from a personal essay Gardner-Quinn completed shortly before her disappearance. The piece described the senior’s strong environmental ethic and desire to make a difference on issues such as climate change, a commitment that grew from Gardner-Quinn’s deep love of and curiosity for the natural world. (See page 64 for complete text.)
Danks got to know Gardner-Quinn in her intermediate environmental studies course, which focuses on academic and career choices and preparation. “Michelle had gone to a progressive high school and had attended a gifted and talented summer camp and was very much in charge of her learning and education,” Danks said. “She was always trying to get the best educational experience. She chose UVM to study environmental studies. In talking with her family, they said she was very happy here.”
While at UVM, Gardner-Quinn’s coursework touched on a wide variety of subjects, including Latin America, buying and growing locally-produced food, communications, and wildlife management.
To support the education of like-minded students, UVM has established the Michelle Gardner-Quinn Memorial Fund for Environmental Studies.
Renewed intensity
When the University’s trustees gathered for their November meetings, Gardner-Quinn’s fate was the first subject addressed by Carl Lisman ’67, board chair, and President Daniel Mark Fogel. Both spoke of the shock of the crime that took the student’s life, and both also made note of their pride in Gardner-Quinn’s character and achievement, as well as the University community’s rise to the challenge of the difficult time.
Following a moment of silence in Gardner-Quinn’s memory, Fogel said, “This tragedy has prompted us to examine the social fabric of our community with renewed intensity. While we continue to feel that Burlington and the UVM campus are comparatively safe places, we feel with new poignancy that we are not immune from atrocities like the one that took Michelle. We are committed to examining all the ways in which we might make this center of learning, discovery, and service an increasingly safe and secure environment. To achieve this end, we have been in close dialogue with the City of Burlington, both with its political leadership and its public safety officials—to whom our gratitude for exemplary service in this crisis cannot be overstated. During this dark hour, we experienced an extraordinary expression of community engagement and commitment to common goals. We will continue in that spirit.”
Following Gardner-Quinn’s murder, UVM’s Student Government Association passed a resolution calling for creation of a task force to address the security of the campus community. Fogel announced that the University would be moving ahead with that initiative with Thomas Gustafson, vice president for student and campus life, and Gary Derr, chief of staff in the office of the president and provost, heading up efforts to gather a broad group, including representatives from Champlain College and the City of Burlington.
—Jon Reidel, Thomas Weaver
photo by Sabin Gratz '98
Just 3 questions
Gregory Gause, professor of political science, is the author of two books, Oil Monarchies: Domestic and Security Challenges in the Arab Gulf States and Saudi-Yemeni Relations: Domestic Structures and Foreign Influence, and is in the middle of a third, a 35-year look at the international politics of the Persian Gulf region analyzing how countries made decisions about war and alliances. He’s published more than a dozen significant articles since September 11, many about Saudi Arabia, in publications that include Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and Current History.
Q. How has the relationship between the United States and the Saudis changed post-9/11?
A. The classic elements that have always underlain the Saudi-U.S. relationship are oil and security interests. This is a relationship based on mutual interests, not on shared values. That’s not to denigrate it. I think mutual interests are pretty important. But we have a different kind of relationship with countries that are Western democracies—and Saudi Arabia is not that.
We have a tendency to want to find the single answer to a problem, and, after 9/11, there was some tendency to look at Saudi Arabia and say, hah! That’s the problem. And if we could just get them to quote-unquote “reform” or maybe even overthrow them, all this will end.
The Bin Laden phenomenon is a product of a lot of things. Some believed that Saudi Arabia was the silver bullet, and that its particularly narrow and intolerant version of Islam, Wahhabism, was the source of anti-American terrorism. I thought that was wrong. In the debate since September 11, we’ve come to a better public understanding of the complexity of the Saudi role in all this, and how Saudi-U.S. relations need to change, but also the value of a Saudi relationship in fighting the war on terrorism.
Q. What are your thoughts on the foreign policy challenges in Iran?
A. One conclusion one could draw from the Bush doctrine is, give up your WMD and make your accommodation with the United States. The other conclusion you might draw is, get that WMD really, really quick so the Bush people don’t come after you. We see how the Bush administration treated North Korea, which has nuclear weapons, and how it treated Iraq, which did not. If you’re sitting in Teheran, it’s not unreasonable to conclude… we better get them quick, so they deal with us diplomatically instead of militarily. Is that going to push the Bush administration into confrontation with Iran? Perhaps. That to me is the big question in the Gulf region. I actually think the Iranians will be relatively responsible with the bomb. But don’t get me wrong here: We don’t the want the Iranians to get nuclear weapons. But if they do, I don’t think it’s catastrophic.
Q. What do you see ahead in terms of making progress toward settling this region and protecting U.S. interests?
A. I think there’s a bunch of things you do: You take steps domestically to reduce your dependence on oil so this part of the world isn’t as important to you. You take steps on the Arab-Israeli front to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—it’s an enormous obstacle to us pushing a democratic agenda. There’s the war on terrorism, and I think it needs to be fought on all sorts of fronts: police fronts, intelligence fronts, it’s got to be fought directly against Al Qaeda in a more aggressive way than we’ve been doing, not in Iraq.
Then, how do we extricate ourselves from Iraq without doing more damage and trying to leave behind some kind of stable, relatively representative political system that is not going to fall apart and become a playing field on which all sorts of Middle Eastern countries and ideologies fight things out? This is going to be a long slog to build up an Iraqi security force that can defend the new government. The whole region depends on how Iraq turns out.
—Interview by Kevin FoleyBillings and beyond
Seth Bowden, one suspects, can see the question coming from a mile away. “So, are you interested in a career in politics?” It is, after all, the kind of thing you get asked a lot when you’re president of something like the UVM Student Government Association. Professors, fellow students, grandparents, the occasional alumni magazine writer—they all want to know.
No surprise then that Bowden’s answer is well thought out, maybe even a bit politic. While he’s greatly interested in the working of politics and government, he’s not necessarily interested in being a politician. “People look at the figurehead, public functions of politicians, and confuse that with the work of being able to goal set, problem solve, brainstorm, and advocate,” he says. “That’s what interests me the most.”
For political heroes, Bowden doesn’t look to career politicians, but to leaders such as Nelson Mandela, “who have used the political system to fight for just causes.” Perhaps even more so, he admires those whose names we might never know. “There are countless, unnamed people who do the nitty-gritty work of diplomacy but don’t get the seven-second soundbite on CNN. People who are behind the scenes are the driving force in American politics.”
The political science major’s interests lean toward international relations, perhaps rooted in the fact that his childhood and adolescent years were spent in both New Hampshire and New Zealand. (No detectable Kiwi accent, but he’s given to an occasional phrase—“when I started university”—that has a whiff of elsewhere about it.) Burlington has been home since 2002, when Seth’s parents moved back to the states after his father, Breck, was appointed as the Patrick Chair in Watershed Planning and Science in UVM’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources.
During SGA meetings this year in Billings’s Marsh Lounge or wherever post-graduation life takes him after May, Bowden feels his academic focus has prepared him well. “Political science is an interesting way to engage the world,” the senior says. “I feel like having a political science and economics background provides a broad framework to understand the real reasons events take place.”
—Thomas Weaver
Photo by Glenn Russell/Burlington Free Press
JU.S. poet laureate reads at Ira Allen
Donald Hall already boasted impressive literary credentials—former New Hampshire poet laureate, award-winning author of multiple books of poetry, prose, and children’s literature—when he was first invited to speak at the College of Medicine’s Templeton Lecture in Spirituality and Medicine. Last June, not long after accepting UVM’s speaking invitation, Hall garnered another accolade for his work. So it went that the University was honored on October 24 with a visit from the United States’ new poet laureate.
Hall met with students and faculty in the UVM College of Medicine and delivered a public talk and reading in the afternoon. The event in Ira Allen Chapel drew more than four hundred people—young and old, poets and non-poets, students, faculty, and community members.
“I like to visit medical schools to read and talk and answer questions,” Hall said softly as he pulled papers and poetry books from his briefcase and settled into a green armchair on the chapel stage. “My own connection with medicine has been cancer and a stroke myself, but my chief connection has been the fifteen months I spent taking care of Jane Kenyon with her leukemia,” he explained. Kenyon, his wife of twenty-three years and also a poet, died in 1995. Hall wrote and published a collection, titled Without, in response to their experience.
Following his reading, which included works by Kenyon and Thomas Hardy, in addition to Hall’s own poetry, the writer fielded several questions from the audience. The closing question, a request for Hall to describe his own experience with spirituality and medicine, went to the heart of the Templeton Lecture’s theme.
“I’ve come to admire many members of the medical profession for what I would call their spirituality, their empathy,” the poet laureate said. “The profession seems to attract people, or change the people it attracts, to creatures of great intelligence and empathy.”
—Jennifer NachburTop russian poet also visits campus
October was a hot month for poetry at the University. A week before Donald Hall’s appearance, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, widely regarded as Russia’s greatest living poet, drew a standing-room-only crowd to Carpenter Auditorium under the auspices of the Dan and Carole Burack President’s Distinguished Lecture Series.
When his work first emerged, poets such as Boris Pasternak, Carl Sandburg, and Robert Frost praised Yevtushenko as the new voice of Russian poetry. With the 1961 publication of his now-classic protest poem against Soviet anti-Semitism, “Baby Yar,” Yevtushenko’s fame grew. Today, “Baby Yar” is inscribed in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
Yevtushenko’s connection to UVM came through his friendship with Professor Kevin McKenna, who met the poet last year at the Institute for Global Enterprise in Indiana. In addition to his public lecture, Yevtushenko’s campus visit included interaction with students and faculty in classes and social settings.
photo by Sally McCay
A hydrological spine runs through it
UVM’s newest classroom/lounge/concert hall/performance space has a capacity of approximately 250—more if students sit on the grass or perch on the granite boulders. Mount Mansfield views are the best on campus, though the locale promises to be damp in April, chilly in February. This new outdoor amphitheater between Austin and Millis residence halls is the centerpiece of the visually striking and eco-friendly landscape design at the new University Heights Residential Learning Complex.
The amphitheater sits downstream from a “hydrological spine.” That’s landscape architect talk for a streambed that channels the roof and pavement water run-off from the University Heights halls. In the amphitheater, the water cascades through small waterfalls in a stone grotto before reaching a wetland at the low point on the east end. Wetland plants, such as iris, juncus, carex grass, rushes, and sweet ferns, filter a significant amount of the storm water run-off.
“To trap storm water and filter it through plants, it’s two for one. You clean the water and you get this beautiful landscape,” says Jason Hutchins, general manager of Landshapes, the Richmond, Vermont based landscaping firm that installed the design created by Yaki Miodovnik of Philadelphia’s Andropogon Associates, a pioneering national firm in ecological planning and design.
As that hydrological spine begins to babble, faculty Walter Poleman and Steve Libby, who oversee the eco-focused residential learning programs at GreenHouse in the south complex of University Heights, are interested in exploring ways their students could get involved in working with and maintaining the site. Next door at the Honors College, Dean Bob Taylor admits that he’s taken aback by how the amphitheater has come together and its potential. “It’s just fantastically beautiful,” he says and rattles off the possibilities of such a stage—music, open mike, student plays, or readings by student writers.
—Thomas WeaverQuote unquote
“ Science.”
Adrian Ivakhiv, assistant professor in the Environmental Program, and a scholar of culture, religion, and the environment.
Species specific
Botanist heads National Geo exploration of China's ferns
What’s a species? Open your biology textbook and read: “Species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations that are reproductively isolated from other such groups.”
Well, that sounds tidy.
But, as David Barrington, professor of botany, will tell you, this famous definition has spawned as much controversy as clarity. And it’s just one of dozens. Though there is broad agreement about the biological reality of species, where and why to draw the lines between them can be devilishly hard.
To see how hard, drive into the mountains of western China in a Mitsubishi SUV full of botanists and try to decide how many species of thin-leafed holly ferns are growing at your feet. Ready for a debate?
That’s what Barrington—an expert on the holly fern genus Polystichum—did for twenty-four grueling days this August with several Chinese botanists and former student Michael Sundue ’99, a staff member at the New York Botanical Garden. They drove six thousand miles looking for ferns, ranging from ravines on the border of Myanmar to Buddhist forest reserves deep in the Himalayas—all with the goal of better understanding the holly ferns’ family tree.
The trip went under the banner that every guy with a new camera and field vest dreams about; Barrington was leading a National Geographic Expedition. “It’s not like the helicopter or the ropes-in-the-mountain thing at all,” Barrington says, with a wry smile. “You spend all morning walking up one hillside.”
As Sundue recalls: “We’d be standing there and someone says, ‘that’s five species.’ Another says ‘two,’ and then we’d really get into it: Is the small one small because it’s young or because it’s a different species?”
Unraveling questions like this are key to Barrington’s decades-long, worldwide cataloging of Polystichum, quiet residents of forest floors and limestone outcrops. “China is their world center, with 168 named species. The question is: Are all those names really species?” Barrington asks. “Because of the intimidating diversity, the work just hasn’t been done.”
Using insights from this summer’s fieldwork and DNA analysis in labs in the United States and in China, Barrington and his co-leader, Chinese botanist Zhang Li-Bing, will help refine and rewrite the account of Polystichum for the monumental, eighty-volume Flora of China.
“This kind of work is fundamental to understanding biodiversity,” Sundue says. “Many different disciplines of biology rely on the results of the taxonomist.”
—Joshua Brown
It's not easy being a New England apple
New research explores organic protections
The plum curculio is a nasty weevil: pimply, snout-nosed, and hump-backed, “not to mention ill-mannered,” contends agriculture specialist Guy Ames from the National Center for Appropriate Technology. By itself, this pest has been enough to drive many New England apple growers away from trying to grow their fruit organically—that is, without using synthetic pesticides.
And it’s not alone in chomping on apples. Following the curculio, a bestiary of apple maggots, Oriental fruit moths, tarnished plant bugs, thrips, leaf miners, and mites hungrily prowl. If that’s not enough, mildew, fireblight, bitter rot, and other diseases attack many varieties of apples; the regional favorite, Macintosh, is particularly susceptible to scab.
“It is extremely difficult and prohibitively expensive to produce organic tree fruits in eastern North America,” concluded Cornell University’s orchard expert Ian Merwin in 2001. Apples seem the worst of the lot.
Or you can look at it like Lorraine Berkett does: “It’s the holy grail of organics,” she says, walking toward a razor-straight row of new apple trees at the UVM Horticulture Farm. “If we can produce marketable organic apples in New England, we’ll be doing something that many growers say is impossible.”
That’s exactly what this professor of plant and soil science aims to do. With a $657,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, she and her colleagues are leading the only significant university research effort in New England studying organic apple farming, and one of only a few such efforts nationwide.
The scientists aren’t hoping to find a single horticultural sword to strike down the curculio and other attackers. Instead, they are starting what they see as a nearly decade-long effort to test and combine numerous approaches that all meet the now federally regulated rules of organic farming, and that would be successful in the marketplace.
“There are organic alternatives to all the challenges growers face. It may be a matter of integrating them well,” Berkett says. “But we’ll see what the research shows.”
UVM SHELFLIFE
photo by Sally McCay
A fan's notes
Jazz education once looked a little like this: A customer silently flips through the racks at a musty, basement record store, then swoops down suddenly upon an album. He checks the vinyl, flips the jacket, and pores over the liner notes, which usually were written by a critic or musician. Only then (and only possibly), did the record go home.
“Think about that: When you were taking a chance on a record, before you ever actually cued it up, you had already read the critic,” says John Gennari, associate professor of English and author of Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics, which was published this summer by the University of Chicago Press. “I was interested in that in and of itself; the fact that my experience was already being influenced by this other person. I got fascinated with who these people were.”
Liner notes, of course, are only a small facet of jazz criticism, but their central location—after all, they physically stand between listener and record, audience and art—makes them a provocative example of the often controversial ways jazz critics explained, shaped, and promoted the music. But despite the critics’ importance, and the rising profile of jazz studies in universities, Gennari’s book is the first book-length study of the role of critics in jazz.
The intellectual niche was attractive, but it wasn’t primarily an academic calculation that drew Gennari to studying jazz critics. It was passion. He became serious about jazz in college. As he began listening to the music, he says, he found it “mysterious… hard to access.” To learn about it, he prowled those basement record stores, binged on college radio—and read the critics.
A drummer, Gennari felt he had a fairly sophisticated appreciation of jazz’s rhythmic complexity; his drumming, he says, is good enough to know when someone is really good. But translating rhythmic pulse into prose, illuminating the music’s subtleties with words, this seemed impossible at first to Gennari.
“I wondered, ‘How do they do this? How do they feel that time?’ And then, how does someone actually write about it in a way that evokes the mystery without being too schematic and predatory about it?”
Jazz critics did more than write, as Blowin’ Hot and Cool documents. Even as they argued for jazz as art, some critics played key roles in the music industry, salvaging (or savaging) careers, producing records, or promoting concerts. Often these activities inspired resentment; sometimes they created friendships. Gennari’s book finds no formulas in the interactions between musicians and critics. Instead, he documents decades of history and personalities to explain how jazz became the soundtrack for American intellectuals and illuminate the complex nature of race relations in a sphere dominated by African Americans.
—Kevin FoleyBlacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 1815-1860
Harvey Amani Whitfield,
University Press of New England
Had Harvey Amani Whitfield, assistant professor of history, not chosen to migrate from Chicago to Nova Scotia for graduate school, his book, Blacks on the Border, he says, never would have been written. A book that has been called a “foundational work (that) will be crucial to everyone studying the Black Atlantic” by peer reviewers, Whitfield’s first book provides insight into the lives of the “forgotten” group of African-American refugees who, after the War of 1812, moved north to the U.S.-Canadian border in search of freedom. Whitfield’s research explores how people from disparate areas, with differing experiences of slavery, negotiated the many cultural influences present in their lives and came together to create families, communities, and traditions.
This Far from the Source
Neil Shepard ’73, Mid-List Press
Neil Shepard ’73, professor of writing and literature at Johnson State College, has published his third collection of poetry. The poems in This Far from the Source, which have appeared on the Verse Daily and Poetry Daily websites, employ naturalistic imagery to a wide range of subjects, many offering a meditation on the simultaneous power and failure of language. Though Shepard acknowledges the struggles of language and representation, a fact of our living “this far from the source,” the poems, in their storytelling and prose-like style, feel effortless.
Celebrate! Connections Among Cultures
Jan Reynolds ’78, Lee & Low Books
Author, photographer, and world-traveling adventurer Jan Reynolds shares her take on human ritual and celebration in her children’s book Celebrate! Connections Among Cultures. Through photos and captions, the book explores the distinct cultural traditions of seven groups of indigenous people, from the Amazonian Yanomami to the Australian Aborigines. Though each culture’s celebrations are unique, Reynolds’ photographs and descriptions reveal a sense of familiarity and similarity among all human rituals and customs, including the traditions of the United States.
(for UVM staff)