Anthony Fauci

Fauci recalls his visit to Maine 27 years ago — WMTW-TV

A Maine affiliate of ABC, television station WMTW covered a �ֲ���ý News story that recalled how, in 1993, Dr. Anthony Fauci received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from �ֲ���ý. Fauci, whose guidance through the coronavirus pandemic has caught national attention, received the �ֲ���ý honor for his work fighting a different virus: HIV.

Then as now, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was trying to use scientific principles to stop a virus that was devastating communities — the work was like being in a “pressure cooker,” he said in a �ֲ���ý News interview. 

The �ֲ���ý visit, in contrast, was “food for the soul,” Fauci said. Talking “with really smart and curious students reminded me of the great privilege of having a liberal arts education.” 

Read the story: 

• “,” WMTW-TV, May 7, 2020 

Francesco Duina

Free market ideology won’t help us during the COVID-19 crisis. Here’s what would — Los Angeles Times

In an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times, Professor of Sociology Francesco Duina argued that government action, not the free market or private industry, is providing the strongest leadership during the coronavirus pandemic. 

Duina pointed to the fact that large industries like airlines and small businesses alike are benefiting from emergency loans and tax cuts, while federal and state governments are coordinating public health responses. He said governments should partner with the private sector to respond to crises, and government offices themselves — like those handling unemployment claims — should expand their capacities. 

“We must all assume, even in good times, the fragility of markets,” Duina wrote. “This means that we must invest, ahead of time, in government structures, programs, and funding for challenges that will inevitably arise. And we must commit to them for the long term.” 

Read the story: 

• “,” Los Angeles Times, May 18, 2020

Myron Beasley and Imti Hassan ’23

PMA Magazine, Portland Museum of Art 

PMA Magazine, a publication of the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, asked Mainers to write about pieces in the museum’s collection that resonated with them. �ֲ���ý was prominent as the respondents included Associate Professor of American Studies Myron Beasley and Imti Hassan ’23 of Portland. 

Beasley introduced Daniel Minter’s Malaga, a series of works that explore the story of a Maine island that was home to an interracial community before the state evicted its residents in 1912. 

Beasley has himself looked hard at the Malaga story: In 2018, he created “re:past,” a packed with history and symbolism. 

“Malaga is not unique in that it is a story of injustice, racism, and forced dislocation peculiar to African Americans,” Beasley wrote. “The particularities of the Malaga story, however, reveal a distinctive horror which Minter acknowledges and addresses.” 

Hassan wrote about “Mount Katahdin from Millinocket Camp,” an 1895 oil painting by Frederic Edwin Church that shows Maine’s highest peak in the brilliance of sunrise. Hassan worked at the museum as a Homer Fellow, a summer program for Maine high school students. 

“Church’s art is a reminder that nature and humans are constantly evolving,” Hassan wrote. “This work of art reminds me to live life to the fullest and remember that time is always going forward.”

Read the reflections: 

• “,” PMA Magazine
• “,” PMA Magazine

Allison Beaulieu ’13

Teamwork comes full circle for doctor from Swampscott — The Daily Item 

Steve Krause of the Lynn, Mass., Daily Item profiled Allison Beaulieu ’13, a local basketball champion who went on to become an award-winning emergency physician on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis. 

After graduating from �ֲ���ý and then New York Medical College, Beaulieu became an emergency room resident at the UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester. This year, she won the Massachusetts American College of Emergency Physicians Resident of the Year award.

What’s hard during the COVID-19 crisis, Beaulieu said, is that her patients “are all alone. There’s no family allowed back in to see them. So what you have is family members on the other end of the telephone, and that’s how you communicate. It’s not being able to have personal interactions.”

Read the story: 

• “,” The Daily Item, May 6, 2020 

Erica Long ’12

Cony High School graduate, now chaplain at Boston hospital, offers comfort, hope to coronavirus, COVID-19 patients, families — News Center Maine 

Erica Long ’12, a Maine native now working as a chaplain at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, told the Portland affiliate of NBC how her work — offering comfort and love to patients, staff, and families — has changed and intensified during the COVID-19 crisis. 

Long, a �ֲ���ý English major who graduated from Harvard Divinity School and is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister, has had to learn to minister to the hospital community, often at a distance, during a time of intense fear and suffering. She’s guided coronavirus patients and their families over the phone and developed new rituals of offering “Zen Dens” to staff and celebrating patients who come off ventilators. 

“My training has prepared me to draw on my faith, my beliefs, especially my belief in the transformative power of love,” Long told reporter Beth Brogan. “Then I get to see that love, both in how families care for patients, how nurses and doctors and the entire team care for our patients, and in the way that patients learn to care for themselves and love themselves.”

Jack Sapoch ’18

Croatian police accused of spray-painting heads of asylum seekers — The Guardian 

Jack Sapoch ’18, who works with an organization that distributes non-food items like clothes to migrants and monitors violence at the border between Bosnia and Croatia, spoke with The Guardian about an uptick in mistreatment by Croatian police.  

Croatia is in the European Union while Bosnia is not, so many migrants try to seek asylum in Croatia, only to be (illegally) returned to Bosnia. Lately, Sapoch’s organization has reported that Croatian police are spray-painting migrants’ heads as well as robbing and otherwise trying to humiliate them.

“Hearing reports of increased brutality during pushbacks is worrying due to the increased autonomy that state authorities have gained during these times of the [coronavirus] pandemic,” said Sapoch, who studied abroad in Bosnia and Serbia as a �ֲ���ý student and returned to Bosnia after graduation to work on human rights issues. 

“Now, more than ever, it is important for us to keep these forces accountable for their own actions.” 

Read the story: 

• “,” The Guardian, May 12, 2020 

See also:

• “,” Newsweek, May 13, 2020

Tad Baker ’80

On This Day in Maine’s History — Maine Public 

Maine Public’s May 18  On This Day in Maine’s History segment featured Emerson “Tad” Baker, an archaeologist and historian at Salem State University who is known for his work on Colonial witchcraft and excavation of historic sites in New England. May 18 is his birthday. 

“A recognized specialist in the history of 17th-century Maine, Baker has been featured as an expert consultant on the PBS miniseries Colonial House,” presenter Gale Parmelee said. 

Listen to the segment: 

• “,” Maine Public, May 18, 2020 

Peter Steenstra 

Into the Wild — Rowing News 

Jen Whiting of Rowing News profiled Peter Steenstra, who in his 12 years as head rowing coach has led �ֲ���ý to the top of its division, with four NCAA championships in the past five years and 13 All-American rowers. 

Steenstra credited his success to his rowers and staff, as well as his ability to create an atmosphere in which the rowers can develop a successful culture. “It’s moving. It’s organic. And it changes every year.” 

He said, “What I’ve learned is that you have to give them as much as you can, so you can then stand aside, in the shadows. You have to give them the ownership so they can go as far as possible. From that ownership, they get control. The athletes themselves are in control of the program.”

Read the story: 

• “,” Rowing News, May 6, 2020 

Different deadly virus. Same great scientific mind.

Twenty-seven years ago, Dr. Anthony Fauci, wearing academic regalia with a red awareness ribbon pinned to his gown, stood on the porch of Coram Library on Commencement Day to receive an honorary Doctor of Science degree for his work fighting HIV/AIDs.

Fauci, today a household name applauded for his steady and smart guidance during the coronavirus pandemic, recalls his 1993 visit warmly. It was, he says, “food for the soul.”

That spring, he says, had been “a pressure cooker,” his time fully taken by HIV science and policy issues in Washington, D.C. Taking a brief break on Memorial Day weekend to spend time on “the beautiful �ֲ���ý campus” and talking “with really smart and curious students reminded me of the great privilege of having a liberal arts education.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci listens to his �ֲ���ý honorary degree citation during Commencement on May 31, 1993, as �ֲ���ý Trustee Jeannette Packard Stewart ’46 stands ready to present his hood. Both are wearing red AIDS-awareness ribbons. (David Wilkinson for �ֲ���ý College)

As an undergraduate at Holy Cross, Fauci was a classics major who also took premed courses. At �ֲ���ý, he felt right at home, engaging with �ֲ���ý students “whose interests spanned these areas and many more — the kinds of well-rounded people who go on to do great things in government, science, the arts, and other professions.”

As Fauci stood on the Coram porch, then-President Donald W. Harward read the degree conferral, which he had written. He said, in part:

“To investigate scientifically is to begin to move from the darkness of ignorance to the illumination of limited understanding. To investigate humanely is to realize that even limited understanding is a gain to be used compassionately.”

+1993 Honorary Degree citation for Dr. Anthony Fauci

Those intertwined qualities, the capacity to investigate scientifically and humanely, had drawn Harward and other �ֲ���ý leaders toward Fauci as a potential honorary degree candidate.

By the early 1990s, in the position he still holds today, as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Fauci had already made great contributions to the understanding of HIV and the creation of successful strategies for combating AIDS.

In a chronicles Fauci’s evolving mindset and approach to HIV/AIDs research through the 1980s.

At first, Fauci’s approach was traditional and “paternalistic,” writes Specter. Though earnestly seeking new treatments and cures, Fauci and the NIAID didn’t readily acknowledge or welcome input from activists and victims, who, among other things, demanded that experimental drugs get into the hands of AIDS sufferers more quickly.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, greets Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., with an elbow bump before a House Committee on Oversight and Reform hearing on the coronavirus situation, March 11, 2020, on Capitol Hill. (Joe Gromelski ’74 / Stars and Stripes)

Many scientists, said Fauci, “instead of listening to them, simply withdrew.” But not Fauci, who transformed himself from a conservative bench scientist into, as Specter writes, “a public health activist who happened to work for the federal government.”

“He was the only scientist in the government who was taking HIV/AIDs seriously throughout the Reagan administration,” recalls Martha Crunkleton, who in 1993 was �ֲ���ý’ dean of the faculty and vice president for academic affairs. It was Crunkleton who wrote Fauci’s honorary degree citation.

“He would listen to all of us who were telling him — in frequently loud, angry ways — to pay attention to so many people dying. He brought the resources of scientific research in the government to bear on the plague.”

In Fauci, �ֲ���ý could honor someone who was “intentionally addressing robust human challenges” through “engagement that linked academics to civic and community dimensions.”

In doing so, Fauci became the scientist we know today. While respecting that “strict scientific principles…have to be adhered to in medicine,” as he told The New Yorker, he also recognized that “a humanistic touch is needed in dealing with people. You have to combine social aspects, ethical aspects, personal aspects with cold, clean science.”

In Fauci, Donald Harward saw a scientist who exemplified elements of what a �ֲ���ý education could and should offer in the coming years and decades: more opportunities for undergraduate research, greater engagement between the ivory tower and human communities.

And in Fauci, as Harward recently recalled, �ֲ���ý could honor someone who was “intentionally addressing robust human challenges” through “research that had its scope broadened to community connections — engagement that linked academics to civic and community dimensions.” (Today, the Center for Community Partnerships, named for Harward and his late wife, Ann, carries out that mission.)

Being able to take a break from HIV policy and science work in Washington, D.C., in 1993 to visit and engage with the �ֲ���ý community was “food for the soul,” says Dr. Anthony Fauci. (David Wilkinson for �ֲ���ý College)

In her citation, Crunkleton praised Fauci for helping society clearly understand both “the complexity of the virus itself and the simplicity of our human need to care for all who are and may become infected.”

Her appreciation has only deepened since then. “For five decades, he has shown a deep understanding of the importance of connecting knowledge to action,” she said recently. “Dr. Fauci exemplifies everything �ֲ���ý, at its best, teaches its students to be and do — fight for truth and the public good.”

Even minus today’s renewed awareness of Fauci’s talents, 1993 would stand as a singular point of pride for the college, says Harward. “Ann and I simply knew that we were recognizing someone who not only incorporated the values of liberal education — and of �ֲ���ý — but would be, by his work, suggesting the integrity of what we might aspire to be as an institution of learning.”