The vote by the �ֲ���ý faculty, 40 years ago in the Filene Room in Pettigrew Hall, wasn’t even close: 58–27 in favor of making the submission of SAT scores optional for admission.

It was the vote heard ’round the country. Within two weeks, thanks in part around the nation, �ֲ���ý had entered into, and would ultimately become a leader of the national conversation about the value of standardized tests in college admission. Today, around 80 percent of U.S. four-year colleges and universities do not require ACT/SAT for admission.

Six years after the 1984 vote, then-Dean of Admission and Financial Aid Bill Hiss ’66 called the vote “a bold move and one we haven’t regretted.” Entering its fifth decade as a test-optional pioneer, �ֲ���ý still has no regrets, says Leigh Weisenburger, vice president for enrollment and dean of admission and financial aid. 

“Standardized tests and a student’s subsequent scores are rooted in inequity,” she says. “Our test-optional admission policy removes a barrier for many talented and promising students, and we see it as a natural extension of our progressive history and mission dedicated to access and inclusion.”

Followup studies over the years have supported what �ֲ���ý believed to be true in 1984. Standardized tests are no better than a student’s high school grades as a measure of academic potential. At worse, they can filter out and discourage talented students who are already underserved by U.S. higher education.

In retrospect, the 1984 decision to go test-optional seems obvious — a slam dunk. But thanks to a first-year reporter’s account for The �ֲ���ý Student, the only record of the discussion, we know that there was staunch opposition to the proposed legislation on that Monday afternoon in the Filene Room.

Specifically, two titans of the �ֲ���ý faculty were firmly opposed to making SATs optional. One was Dean of Students Jim Carignan ’61, who had joined the history faculty in 1970 and was appointed dean of students about a decade later by �ֲ���ý President Hedley Reynolds. The other was Carl Straub, who had joined the �ֲ���ý religion faculty in 1965 and was named dean of the faculty in 1974. 

Covering the October faculty meeting for the Student was a cub reporter, Howard Fine ’88, included telling quotes from Reynolds, Carignan, and Straub. 

With a formidable disdain for flash over substance, Straub said that a decision to drop the SAT requirement had nothing to do with education. “It is more a marketing issue. I see no evidence that convinces me that the proposed [legislation] will increase the number or quality of applicants.”

In his quoted remarks at the meeting, Reynolds agreed that the legislation had a marketing angle, but one “which will, in the long run, bring more good students” to �ֲ���ý. Indeed, the prospect of good publicity for �ֲ���ý was a selling point, Fine recalls. “There was an awareness among the faculty that if SAT scores were made optional for admission, it would garner national attention since so few schools around the country had taken that path.”

Meanwhile, Carignan argued that “moving away from the SAT signals a retreat” from an important measure of academic strength at a time when “we are making real strides in strengthening our [application] pool and advancing the image of the college as academically strong.”

Professor Emeritus of Psychology John Kelsey was in the room that day, and he recalls agreeing with some of his colleagues that SAT scores were helpful predictive tools. Forty years after the vote, he’s aware of the privilege of that perspective. “As majority white and male academics, we had the bias that SATs measured something quite important: ‘What was your SAT score?'”

Kelsey has long experience as adjunct application reader for �ֲ���ý Admission. While not recalling his own vote that day, he does remember the “highly persuasive argument that SATs were highly correlated with socioeconomic status, and thus biased against a variety of groups we all wished to attract to �ֲ���ý.”

The fall of 1984 at �ֲ���ý was a typically busy time on campus in light of local, national, and global events. There was the visit to �ֲ���ý by Lisa Birnbach, author of The Official Preppy Handbook, to do a TV segment for NBC’s Today show, then hosted by Bryant Gumbel ’70.

There were incoming ripples from the looming Reagan–Mondale presidential election. On campus, a mini-controversy erupted over the two state liquor inspectors who, posing as construction workers, raided a Milliken House party.

But the drama of the SAT vote rose above them all. “It was regarded as a big deal,” recalls Fine, who went into journalism after graduation and is a longtime reporter with the Los Angeles Business Journal. 

Despite the opposition from Carignan and Straub, the legislation passed easily. Kelsey described the faculty sentiment this way: “We agreed to do a kind of experiment. And I judge that experiment to be largely a success.”

One reason the legislation sailed through, perhaps, is that the faculty Committee on Admissions and Financial Aid, chaired by Anne Thompson of the English department, had done its work. 

Supported by Hiss, whom Reynolds had plucked from the faculty of nearby Hebron Academy in 1978 to lead the �ֲ���ý Admission team, the committee presented a compelling 20-page report to the faculty, the result of five years of research. (Drake Bradley, Dana Professor Emeritus of Psychology, made major contributions to the college’s statistical research before the vote and in follow-up studies.)

The report presented what is now a consensus in the college admission world: that SATs are “not critical to making good admission decisions” and that the use of standardized tests like the SAT presents a series of ethical issues. Those include troubling correlation of test scores to family income; the rise of SAT coaching, again benefiting wealthier students; and how high school teachers were beginning to alter their curricula to, in the words of one high school teacher, “to teach kids how to take the [SATs].”

After the vote, a �ֲ���ý Magazine story noted that �ֲ���ý students with weaker test scores, including minority students, rural students, and poor students, “have made great contributions once enrolled at �ֲ���ý.” That fact, according to Thompson, “cast a great deal of doubt on the fairness of using the tests for admission purposes.”

The report included results from a questionnaire sent to guidance counselors at 95 high schools, which indicated that SATs were hurting the college’s efforts to build a larger and stronger applicant pool. Increasingly, students were using a college’s mean SAT scores, as published in guidebooks, to opt out from applying. If a student’s score was below the mean, they didn’t apply (too hard to get in); if their score was above the mean, they didn’t apply (too easy to get in).

“By not requiring SATs,” the report concluded, “�ֲ���ý could encourage a greater diversity of students to apply [and] who are capable of succeeding at �ֲ���ý, but who, for cultural or financial reasons, have not scored well and are currently being discouraged from applying.”

In 1990, �ֲ���ý dropped all standardized test requirement, including achievement tests. In a followup article in �ֲ���ý Magazine that year, Hiss noted that the academic strength of a study body isn’t a measure of who is admitted, but who applies. And when �ֲ���ý dropped the SAT requirement, applications jumped by a third, and the quality of the application pool remained high.

(Growing the applicant pool also had the additional benefit of improving �ֲ���ý’ selectivity, as published in college guidebooks, a hoped-for result of an optional-SAT policy that Kelsey recalls being in the air and was also noted in Fine’s reporting in fall 1984.)

Sharing his thoughts recently, Hiss said that the growth of the pool meant success at meeting a charge from his boss. “When I was hired, Hedley, in our first conversation, gave me a one-sentence charge, which I remember verbatim and have many times quoted to our staff and others over the years: ‘Take the applicant pools up and down the social and economic ladders, and spread out geographically.’

“He thought we were too narrowly middle class and too narrowly New England. He was right on both counts. So the optional-testing decision, six years later, was one step among many in having �ֲ���ý become a national college and then an international one, with a much more complex array of student backgrounds.”

The charge also reflected what Reynolds and others saw coming, a decline in New England’s share of the U.S. population. Expansion was a business decision in addition to an educational and mission-driven one.

By any measure, �ֲ���ý in the 1980s was indeed growing stronger and expanding its reputation under Reynolds, whose focus was on enrollment, facilities, and, especially, support for the faculty, which took the shape of a near doubling of its size, strengthening academic credentials, and lowering the student-faculty ratio, from 15-to-1 to 13-to-1 (today it is 10–1). 

And this might be a second reason that the �ֲ���ý faculty responded positively to the SAT legislation: respect for Reynolds’ forward-looking leadership of the college.

A former history professor and dean at Middlebury, Reynolds “understood faculty governance, he understood the intellectual life, he understood the importance of faculty scholarship, and faculty support — everything,” recalled Hiss in a 2005 oral history for the Muskie Archives and Special Collection Library. Compared to prior �ֲ���ý leaders, he was “far more of a visionary about �ֲ���ý, far more willing to change �ֲ���ý in profound, systemic ways.” 

“This is not the time for rigidity,” Reynolds said. “It is not a time for the college to stand proudly looking backward.”

A day after the faculty vote, Hiss was in Boston with Admission colleague Wylie Mitchell (later to become �ֲ���ý’ admission dean), attending the annual conference of the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC). 

There, the pair met with Ted Fiske, education reporter for The New York Times, who had just begun what would become the highly influential Fiske Guide to Colleges. “We had lunch with Ted, and he broke the story,” recalls Hiss. On Oct. 9, with �ֲ���ý prominent in the lead paragraphs and throughout, Fiske’s story ran in the Times under the headline, “Some colleges question usefulness of SATs.” 

Meanwhile, The �ֲ���ý Student had broken the news four days earlier, in its Oct. 5 edition. Fine’s story offered perhaps the most telling quotes about how �ֲ���ý rolled under Reynolds. “This is not the time for rigidity,” Reynolds said. “It is not a time for the college to stand proudly looking backward.”

Today, around 80 percent of all four-year colleges and universities . Many have been influenced by various follow-up studies conducted by �ֲ���ý, often supported by members of the �ֲ���ý staff and faculty, capped off by a 30-year study co-authored by Hiss and Valerie Wilson Franks ’98 in 2014. 

“It’s been a 40-year commitment for me,” said Hiss, who retired from �ֲ���ý in 2012. “But maybe the larger story is 40 years of �ֲ���ý and �ֲ���ý people doing the work to make the college a major force in changing American definitions of promise and intelligence.”

​�ċ

When Bill Tucker ’67 and Monica Drozd decided to renew their wedding vows, more than three decades after getting married before strangers in the Black Forest of Germany, they knew exactly where they wanted to be, and who they wanted to share the special moment with.

“We wanted to renew our vows in a context that, while still small and intimate, took place in a more personally meaningful location,” says Tucker. “�ֲ���ý and Bill Hiss immediately came to mind.”

Hiss, a 1966 �ֲ���ý graduate, was Tucker’s college roommate back in the day. They’ve been friends ever since. And besides a long career heading �ֲ���ý’ admission program, Hiss is also a licensed minister in the United Church of Christ.

“With one of my oldest, dearest friends to officiate — he kind of pulled the arc of our lives together,” Tucker says.

So it happened that Tucker and Drozd re-dedicated their union next to Lake Andrews last Friday morning, with Hiss officiating. His wife, Colleen Quint ’85, joined the gathering, along with two official witnesses, �ֲ���ý leadership gifts officers Cary Gemmer ’07 and Rebecca Lazure.

Tucker wore a suit with his father’s cufflinks and tie clip, which held sentimental value. Drozd held a bouquet of fresh flowers cut from Gemmer’s garden. The more casual — but special — event reflected the first time they exchanged vows: in a remote German chapel, witnessed by a handful of tourists and travelers.

Drozd did not attend �ֲ���ý, but she and Tucker share a love for the school, and Drozd teared up as she explained how much having the ceremony at �ֲ���ý meant to her. “I can’t even express in words — my tears are probably sufficient,” Drozd says. “Bill loves �ֲ���ý, I love �ֲ���ý and I love Bill.”

Hiss and Tucker met during Hiss’ senior year and Tucker’s junior year. Tucker was 26 years old at that point, older than a typical �ֲ���ý junior. After spending the better part of a decade in and out of �ֲ���ý including service in the U.S. Army with the Military Police Corps in Korea, he was finally ready to finish his degree.

“We didn’t meet until we both moved into apartments on the top floor of what’s now Turner House,” Hiss recalls. They were studying two very different things: Hiss was studying English, and Tucker was majoring in psychology. They both found the other’s studies to be interesting, and this set the stage for their lives to complement each other for the next 57 years.

“Fresh out of the military and filled with anxiety over returning to college after a five-year hiatus, I found in Bill not only a good friend,” Tucker says, “but a role model of academic engagement combined with social conscience.”

“He didn’t really ‘get’ what the intellectual life was all about,” Hiss says of Tucker. “And he sort of learned that, he said, from watching me write an honors thesis, in the English department, on a topic nobody would want to read about.”

The friends left �ֲ���ý and became leaders in their fields. Hiss became a national expert on the gatekeeping effect of standardized tests like the SAT, while Tucker, a professor emeritus of psychology at Rutgers University, used his academic career to focus on how social science has been used to advance oppressive and racist social policies.

“To say that Bill Tucker has a lifelong commitment to racial and social justice is a big understatement,” says Hiss.

During the ceremony, Hiss, dressed for the occasion in his academic robe and hood, reflecting his Tufts Ph.D., and a minister’s stole, spoke about the love Tucker and Drozd share. He told them that “caring for each other and caring for other people is what you two do.” 

Like any group of old friends, they recognize that every moment spent together is more special as the years march on. Tucker and Drozd clasped each other’s hands while Hiss talked about the couple and their love.

He told the small gathering that Tucker and Drozd met at a dance competition, and “the two of these folks are spectacular dancers, among other things. Lucky Bill,” Hiss said, “and yes, lucky Monica, too. And I have to say, at this moment, lucky me, too.”

Jared Golden ’11 and Ben Cline ’94 actually have a lot in common. As undergraduates, both felt a bit different from their peers — Golden was older and a Marine veteran, while Cline was a conservative from the South.

Both majored in politics (Golden also majored in history), and both worked on Capitol Hill before being elected to the legislatures of their home states.

Now, they’re both first-term Congressmen from largely rural districts, Golden representing Maine’s sprawling 2nd District, the largest east of the Mississippi River, and Cline serving Virginia’s 6th District, in the northwest part of that state.

For all that’s similar about the pair, one key difference — Golden being a Democrat, and Cline a Republican — made their Reunion appearance in June a must-see.

+The nine �ֲ���ý alumni who've served in Congress

In a Pettengill Hall classroom packed with Reunion attendees, the pair covered a range of topics — at times sounding almost confessional in their frustration with the hyperpartisanship in Washington.

Interviewed by professors John Baughman (politics) and Stephanie Kelley-Romano (rhetoric, film, and screen studies), the two talked about their �ֲ���ý pasts, about what it was like arriving in Washington during a government shutdown, and how the alignment of powerful — and surprising — forces tends to stymie bipartisanship.

On their first days in Congress — during a government shutdown

When Golden and Cline were sworn in in early January, the federal government was in the middle of a five-week partial government shutdown. There was barely time to get acclimated to the offices and technology, Cline said. “We were voting on day one.”

At left and right, moderators Stephanie Kelley-Romano and John Baughman prepare for their discussion with newly elected Congressmen Ben Cline ’94 of Virginia and Jared Golden ’11 of Maine (second from left and right) on June 8 at Reunion. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The 116th Congress includes a number of charismatic, media-savvy freshman members comfortable in the national spotlight, and both Golden and Cline frequently referenced Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., during their discussion, with Golden distancing himself from her style of legislating.

“There’s room in every caucus for all kinds, and you need a little bit of every type of leader,” he explained. “Mine is, I think, a more quiet, dogged focus on issues and work, and then getting to the district and traveling around and meeting people face-to-face and making sure they feel a strong connection to their representative.”

Golden and his staff decided, instead of jumping straight into high-profile issues, to hang back and wait for his committee assignments — but he hit a wrinkle there.

“I think I bring an enlisted perspective into that committee room.”

He had promised during his campaign that he would not vote for Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., as speaker of the House, saying Congress needed a new generation of leaders. He, along with 14 other members, followed through on their promises, but Pelosi was reelected speaker anyway.

“I’m not gonna lie,” Golden said. Voting against the speaker “doesn’t make it easy to get your top committee assignments.”

One of Golden’s two committee assignments is the Committee on Armed Services, whose 62 members include 20 military veterans. Twelve of those served combat tours, but only Golden served in the enlisted ranks.

“I think I bring an enlisted perspective into that committee room,” he said. “There’s a lot of officers sitting in that room. It’s a different, boots-on-the-ground perspective on Afghanistan and Iraq or other things.”

He’s also on the Committee on Small Business, chairing that committee’s contracting and infrastructure subcommittee.

“That committee’s been a real blessing,” he said. “It’s interesting, and in my experience, the one you might not enjoy as much turns out to be really deeply engaging.”

A lawyer, Cline landed among many other lawyers on the Judiciary Committee, an assignment he credits to the Congressman succeeded in Virginia’s 6th District, Bob Goodlatte ’74, who was the committee’s chair.

He also joined the Committee on Education and Labor where, as the representative of a district dotted with four-year colleges, he works on the higher education subcommittee.

On election night in Virginia, Ben Cline ’94 hugs Bob Goodlatte ’74 before giving his acceptance speech in Roanoke. (Heather Rousseau / copyright The Roanoke Times, reproduced by permission)

Soon after arriving in Washington, Cline drew media attention for a reason he didn’t expect. New members of Congress join a lottery to pick their offices, and Cline got first pick among the 80 new representatives — and was promptly inundated with calls from news outlets asking him about his new office. “Just to show you how the priorities of D.C. are messed up,” he lamented.

“CBS This Morning wanted to follow me around,” Cline said. “I said, ‘Can I go on CBS This Morning? Because I’d like to talk about my priorities for legislation.’ ‘No, we just want to follow you around and see what room you pick.’ That was my moment of fame.”

Cline didn’t go on This Morning, and he said the national media requests have largely subsided. “I’ve been on a very quiet committee assignment of Judiciary ever since,” he joked.

On listening to people

What most people don’t realize, Cline said, is how much of a House member’s attention and resources are devoted to issues back home in the district.

“They see us in Washington, but they don’t see that half of our budget is constituent services, running the offices. Half my staff is in the district helping folks who have problems with Social Security benefits or veterans benefits, solving problems with passports and things like that.”

Golden and Cline or their staffs spend three or four days out of most weeks in the district, hearing their constituents’ opinions.

“I have 19 counties and cities in my district, and so I’m trying to have a town hall in each one of them,” Cline said. “That’s where the rubber meets the road, when people can actually talk to their representative. You’re just being available. That’s what’s going to restore faith in the system.”

A squad leader in the Marines, Golden said that leading a Congressional staff was very different. “I hired good, smart people who challenge me and try and push back and make sure I’m making the right decisions and be thoughtful about it. That’s a learning experience for me, too.”

Jared Golden ’11 offers his Maine constituents multiple ways to give him feedback, including taking hikes with him. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Golden said he might hold a town hall now and again, but finds that the format favors loud and politically extreme views. (Maine’s two U.S. senators, independent Angus King and Republican Susan Collins, also tend to eschew the town hall format.)

Golden also has roundtables and coffee hours, appears at public events, and even tells his constituents to take a hike.

“We say, ‘Come meet us at the head of the trail, and walk through the woods with your Congressman for an hour.’ We’ll get three or four people; but maybe some people need it that low-key.”

On partisanship

Cline, a former member of the Republican-controlled Virginia House of Delegates, had to get used to being in the minority in “one of the most partisan environments imaginable,” he said — and during a shutdown, to boot. “We’re trying, but it’s like starting from 20 yards behind.”

In Virginia, Cline said, it was much easier to work across the aisle.

“In Richmond, all of us sit in the House together on the floor at the same time, and there’s one room in the back called the Members’ Lounge, and that’s where the food is. In line, it’s Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican. When we sit down, we’re all sitting together in the back sharing stories.”

On Capitol Hill, Cline has found that there’s a partisan slant to everything from orientation, which is largely separate for Republicans and Democrats, to doorways.

“The caucuses don’t even enter rooms through the same doors. The Republicans go through one door, the Democrats go in another door. Every committee has separate lounges, a lounge for Republicans and a lounge for Democrats.”

“We are starting from a place of stark division and for those of us who want to make changes, the institution’s very resistant to change,” Cline added. “We’ve got a lot of work to do to make it happen.”

Darnell Morrow ’14 (left) greets Ben Cline ’94 (right) prior to the Reunion discussion on June 8. Both graduates of Washington and Lee Law School, the pair had met once before, when on opposite sides of a legal case. (Jay Burns/�ֲ���ý College)

Cline said he sometimes plays “Democrat roulette,” saying hello to various Democratic members of Congress and seeing who is responsive and who is not. Golden joined the For Country Caucus, a group of military veterans from both parties who are committed to bipartisanship.

“It’s really a commitment to forge relationships and try and put yourself in the mindset of, what’s the best step for the collective country?” Golden said.

“Forget talking about Middle East peace. Here in our country, we’re in a lot of trouble.”

One audience member in the Keck Classroom called the separate doors “heartbreaking,” and asked the Congressmen if there was any hope for bipartisan cooperation. Neither were optimistic.

Golden recalled listening to a podcast featuring a marriage counselor who also worked on Middle East peace efforts. The counselor said that cooperation is very difficult if people don’t trust either the process of negotiation or negotiators themselves.

“I really thought about our politics these days,” Golden said. “Forget talking about Middle East peace. Here in our country, with our politics, both sides don’t trust one another. The general public doesn’t trust the process. We’re in a lot of trouble.”

Improving relations between the two major parties in Congress won’t be easy, say Jared Golden ’11 (left) and Ben Cline ’94. “Trying to get a seedling to sprout in that rubble is challenging,” said Cline. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Cline said the Judiciary Committee, which is conducting some of the highest-profile hearings on the Hill in connection with the Mueller Report, is a microcosm of the hyperpartisanship sweeping Congress. “We were talking past each other and making points and then going back to our offices,” he said.

He said he’s trying to get all the freshman members together for lunch once a week, but the work is frustrating.

“It’s building those relationships from the ground up,” he said. “Right now we just have dust. We just have rubble. Trying to get a seedling to sprout in that rubble is challenging.”

On their �ֲ���ý experiences

Cline grew up in Lexington, Va., the son of a Washington and Lee economics professor. He had the liberal arts ethos in mind when he arrived at �ֲ���ý, and he said he got what he wanted.

On a largely liberal campus, the more-conservative Cline was “confronted on day one,” he said. But he learned to debate his beliefs in Commons, where anything and everything was up for grabs.

“Everything was on the table,” he said. “If you had something to say, say it.”

In 1992, Cline’s mother sent him a newspaper clipping — Bob Goodlatte ’74 had won that year’s House seat in his home district. Two years later, Goodlatte returned to campus for his 20th Reunion, and Cline made a point of joining the student �ֲ���ýStar team for the Class of 1974.

“Everything was on the table” at �ֲ���ý, said Ben Cline ’94. “If you had something to say, say it.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The �ֲ���ýStars were encouraged to write notes of introduction to the returning alumni. “Mine said, ‘I’m Ben Cline, I’m from Lexington, Virginia, I’m majoring in political science, and I really want to work on Capitol Hill.’”

And during the weekend, he got to meet the new Congressman and his wife, Maryellen Flaherty Goodlatte ’74.

“Sure enough, after he and Maryellen got back to Washington, there was a resume waiting for him. It was at that point that the very first staffer, an entry-level correspondent who wrote the mail, had decided to leave. I got called in for an interview.”

Cline worked for Goodlatte for eight years, becoming chief of staff. After his time in Goodlatte’s office, Cline earned a law degree and served eight terms in the Virginia House of Delegates. When Goodlatte decided to retire in 2018 after 26 years in Congress, Cline won his seat.

“My �ֲ���ý network was one guy,” Cline said, “but it was a very critical guy.”

In July 1999, Ben Cline ’94 (left) confers with Rep. Bob Goodlatte ’74 in Goodlatte’s office in the Rayburn House Office Building. Cline was Goodlatte’s legislative director at the time. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Born in Lewiston and raised in nearby Leeds, Golden served two combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan before returning to Maine. By the mid-2000s, he was working a few jobs to make ends meet, including one at George’s Pizza in Auburn, a favorite Friday night pizza takeout spot for Bill Hiss ’66, a longtime �ֲ���ý dean of admission.

The two met one night, and Hiss encouraged Golden, who had briefly attended the University of Maine at Farmington, to return to college, at �ֲ���ý.

“I’m like, ‘You’re out of your mind, buddy,’” Golden said in recalling Hiss’ suggestion, eliciting a big laugh from the Reunion audience. But, he said, “�ֲ���ý didn’t laugh.”

“It’s a real lesson that nothing is really impossible. If you want to try something and work hard enough for it, and people will give you a chance and opportunities, you grab onto it, and you can do it.”

As a parent takes a photo, Jared Golden ’11 poses with a Reunion-goer’s son following the discussion. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Golden ticked off the ways he was a non-traditional student: He was in his mid-20s and “could also qualify as a townie and the only veteran on campus — so being a little different and facing some resistance in the classroom, but also bringing some,” he said.

After graduation, Golden worked in Collins’ Senate office before returning to Maine in 2013. He served two terms in the Maine House of Representatives and was elected assistant majority leader in his second term. In 2015, he married Isobel Moiles ’11.

In terms of his political perspectives, the lessons he learned as a Marine and as a �ֲ���ý graduate sometimes intertwine. One result, he said, is being able to see different sides of an issue and a propensity to challenge conventional thinking.

On election night in November, Jared Golden ’11, joined by Isobel Moiles Golden ’11, greet supporters at the Gendron Franco Center in Lewiston. (Russ Dillingham/Sun Journal)

When a Reunion audience member asked whether the U.S. government should intervene in Venezuela, Golden pointed out that Congress didn’t have much power to initiate or stop armed conflict these days. Even so, his experience tended to prevent a yes-no answer.

“It gets real complex, real fast,” he said. “When I talk about my feelings on Afghanistan, I can go, ‘Geez, what are we doing over there? We’re not really helping. We’re wasting so many resources and blood and lives of both countries.’”

But then, “I go and talk to Mustafa.”

As a student, Golden became good friends with Mustafa Basij-Rasikh ’12, a student from Kabul, Afghanistan, who had received support to study in the U.S. from the Peter M. Goodrich Memorial Foundation, founded by Sally and Don Goodrich, whose son Peter ’89 died in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

For a 2010 �ֲ���ý Magazine story, Mustafa Basij-Rasikh ’12 and Jared Golden ’11 posed together in a Pettengill history classroom. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Golden and Basij-Rasikh both thought deeply about the state of education in Afghanistan, and Golden returned to teach there one summer.

So when Golden thinks about his friend from Kabul, “it gets real hard to say we should just walk away and not engage in that type of [military] activity. A lot of questions, and the answers, are tough to come up with.”

On Capitol Hill, “�ֲ���ý has put me into a mindset which is probably infuriating at times to some of my colleagues,” Golden told his fellow alumni at Reunion.

“I will challenge conventional thinking as much within my own party and caucus as I would across the aisle in challenging the Republicans.”

At her high school in Hanoi, Vietnam, in spring 1997, Ngan Dinh ’02 listened intently as an admissions expert from the United States explained the concept of the liberal arts and described the college he worked for, �ֲ���ý.

The ideas that the �ֲ���ý expert, now-retired Dean of Admission and Financial Aid Bill Hiss ’66, put to the class of high school juniors that day — studying in a residential academic community, taking courses across disciplines, and working closely with professors — diverged sharply from Dinh’s understanding of what college would be like in Vietnam, where higher education still followed the old Soviet Union emphasis on training and information, not critical thinking and creativity.

�ֲ���ý was, Dinh recalls, all about “everyone encouraging you to listen to your heart and go for it.”

Two decades later, Dinh is a key figure in the creation of Fulbright University Vietnam, the first university to bring the liberal arts experience to Vietnamese students.

“What we want to do here is to create this university to be just like �ֲ���ý, and build relationships so that students can learn to explore themselves,” says Dinh, the university’s founding director of undergraduate studies.

”She is passionately devoted to Vietnam,” Bill Hiss ’66 says about the efforts of Ngan Dinh ’02 to establish Fulbright University Vietnam. The two posed during the afternoon rush hour in Ho Chi Minh City during Hiss’ visit last March. (Quinn Mattingly for �ֲ���ý College)

Dinh’s experience with the liberal arts and her desire to bring it to her home country began with Hiss’ presentation that day at Hanoi — Amsterdam High School. Hiss and his wife, Colleen Quint ’85, were in Vietnam to adopt their daughter and decided to do some recruiting along the way. He found that the students were “anxious to hear about American higher education and what the options might be,” he recalls.

At the time, such options were new for Vietnamese students. Just two years earlier, in 1995, the U.S. and Vietnam had normalized relations, 20 years after the North Vietnamese Army captured Saigon to end the Vietnam War. As Hiss recalls, “those students did not know �ֲ���ý from an engine block. But they were real clear that the windows were just beginning to open, and American higher ed was where the action was.”

For Dinh and other children of parents who had fought for North Vietnam in the war, “the idea of going abroad and going to study in the U.S. was very, very new,” she says.

But when she applied to �ֲ���ý her senior year and was accepted — the first in a strong contingent of Vietnamese students to attend the college since 1998 — she found that, in her family, it was a much-welcomed idea.

Ngan Dinh, pictured in Ho Chi Minh City in March 2018, was the start of a strong contingent of Vietnamese students to attend �ֲ���ý since 1998. (Quinn Mattingly for �ֲ���ý College)

“My dad was in the war, fighting against the U.S.,” she says. “I remember the moment he said, ‘When the father was 18, he was fighting against the Americans, and when the daughter was 18, she was getting all the kindness and generosity from the Americans to go to the best university in the world.’”

For Dinh, the best part of “the best university in the world” was �ֲ���ý people. She made friends with roommates, Associate Dean for International Student Programs James Reese, and Den staff alike.

Dinh’s propensity for connecting with people influenced how she approached one of her majors, economics. For her, the discipline is “not just about numbers.”

“It’s not about money. It’s not about demand and supply. It’s really about people and people’s behavior. It’s about learning about the world, how things happen. It has stories. It has a lot of imagination.”

“It was like coaching, mentoring, showing me possibilities that I had never imagined.”

Dinh adopted that approach for her honors thesis, looking at the wage gap between China’s rural migrants and urban workers and concluding that discrimination against migrants was the cause.

Her �ֲ���ý mentors included Jim Hughes, Thomas Sowell Professor of Economics, and Margaret Maurer-Fazio, Betty Doran Stangle Professor of Applied Economics. In her thesis acknowledgements, she thanked Hughes for being “my problem solver” and “my best friend in America,” and Maurer-Fazio for “thoughtfulness, care, and intellectual inspirations.”

Their support went above and beyond, Dinh says. “It was like coaching, mentoring, showing me possibilities that I had never imagined.”

With majors in economics and Asian studies, Dinh graduated magna cum laude, was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, and won the Ralph J. Chances Prize as the outstanding economics major. She went on to earn a master’s degree from the University of Chicago and worked in economic consulting in Boston for several years.

Dinh often thought about returning to Vietnam to work and contribute to her country. “But I didn’t know when, and how,” she says.

She began to find her answers during a year back at �ֲ���ý as a visiting faculty member, in 2007–08.

Living in Boston at the time, she stayed with Maurer-Fazio during the school week. Watching her former student teach for the first time, Maurer-Fazio saw Dinh’s embrace of people, especially the way she routinely invited experts and other practitioners into her classroom.

“What would it be like if I go back and teach economics in Vietnam?”

“The way she found new materials and set up the course and brought in people who could address the issues they were talking about in class was particularly creative,” Maurer-Fazio says.

And in her students, just a few years younger than she was, Dinh saw herself — “full of questions, [thinking] ‘I don’t know how this works,’” she says. “Economics is one way of looking at the world, and it’s really fun to share that piece of how you look at the world.”

Dinh recognized that students in Vietnam could benefit just as much as their counterparts at �ֲ���ý from an education that encouraged questions and creativity. “I loved the �ֲ���ý students,” she says, “but I also thought, if students in Vietnam got a chance to do this stuff, what would it be like? What would it be like if I go back and teach economics in Vietnam?”

The next year, Dinh accepted a faculty position at the Fulbright Economics Teaching Program in Ho Chi Minh City, established in 1994 as a partnership between the University of Economics in Ho Chi Minh City and the Harvard Kennedy School to teach public policy and other fields to Vietnamese civil servants and leaders.

Dinh — who earned a doctorate in development at the University of Cambridge as she taught — saw government officials and others use her lessons to affect the lives of Vietnamese citizens.

With the new Fulbright University Vietnam welcoming its first incoming class, Ngan Dinh, the director of undergraduate studies, joins prospective students during an admission reception last March. (Le An Tuan for �ֲ���ý College)

For example, the head of a provincial Poverty Reduction Office might be charged with doing a survey of household wealth in his community, but he wouldn’t know that statistical errors can crop up in such surveys. Guided by Dinh’s expertise, the head could “go back and implement changes right away in their office,” she says.

“The economics departs from being a textbook story and becomes real life.”

In 2010, Maurer-Fazio and a colleague, biologist Pamela Baker ’69, visited Dinh in Vietnam as part of their �ֲ���ý Fall Semester Abroad program, based in China.

Maurer-Fazio’s husband, the late Ron Fazio, joined the group in Vietnam. He had served in the army during the Vietnam War, earning a Bronze Star in combat, and it was his first trip back to the country since fighting there.

Dinh made it possible for Fazio and her own father, a veteran of the North Vietnamese Army, to tour the country together.

“The economics departs from being a textbook story and becomes real life.”

When Dinh has ideas, “they’re new and creative, and things come out of them,” Maurer-Fazio says.

Dinh had ideas about higher education in Vietnam, and in 2016, she was tapped to bring those ideas to one of the country’s first private nonprofit universities, Fulbright University Vietnam, as its first director of undergraduate studies.

A trifecta of experiences and qualifications makes Dinh perfect for the job, says Bill Hiss, whose 1997 presentation first sparked Dinh’s interest in liberal arts presentation.

“She is passionately devoted to Vietnam and to bettering its young people’s prospects and their ability to contribute to Vietnam as a country,” Hiss says. “She has seen more styles of education than most people in Vietnam, and she has long experience as a classroom teacher.”

During a May 2016 visit to the country, President Obama poses with Ngan Dinh and the rest of the Fulbright University leadership during ceremonies announcing the school’s opening. (Pete Souza/White House)

With support from the U.S. State Department and Congress as well as Vietnamese sources, the university offers an English-language, American-style liberal arts education to undergraduate and graduate students.

Students work closely with their academic advisers, they have opportunities for off-campus experiential learning, and they live in dorms, eat together in dining halls, and play sports.

And one element of Fulbright University Vietnam is fundamentally �ֲ���ý. The university is test-optional — students don’t have to take the Vietnamese college entrance exam or any other standardized test in order to apply, making the university more accessible to students from poorer areas of Vietnam.

“We really want students from different socioeconomic backgrounds,” Dinh says.

For the past year, Dinh and her staff — which, for a month in the spring, included Hiss as a volunteer consultant for admissions and financial aid — have introduced the concept of the liberal arts to potential students, explaining everything from interdisciplinary learning to study abroad.

Ngan Dinh sits in front of an architectural model showing the future buildings of Fulbright University Vietnam. (Quinn Mattingly for �ֲ���ý College)

“We’re telling stories — what it is like to go to the dining hall, what it is like to choose a major,” Dinh says.

This fall, the first 50 Fulbright University undergraduates are taking part in a “co-design year,” where students and faculty develop the curriculum together.

Dinh hopes Fulbright University — and other liberal arts colleges yet to be established — can offer Vietnamese students the same experience that she could receive only by going to the U.S.

“What we can do is show them what’s possible by changing your mind and looking at things in life with a different attitude, with a different light,” she says. “Fulbright can be among many other people and places to plant the seeds in young people.”

Netflix options ‘Friday Night Lights’-like soccer story ‘One Goal’ — The Hollywood Reporter

and the reported that Netflix has bought the rights to One Goal by Amy Bass ’92.

The book, whose publication in February gained national attention, tells the story of the Lewiston High School boys soccer team, comprising mostly immigrants from Somalia and other African countries, that won the 2015 Maine state championship.

During a visit to Maine Immigrant and Refugee Services in Lewiston in March, Amy Bass ’92 talks to Shobow Saban, a Lewiston High School graduate and key figure in her book, One Goal.  (Daryn Slover/Sun Journal)

Bass cautioned that a book’s optioning does not necessarily mean it will be produced — but she said the story of the LHS soccer team is an important one to tell.

“It’s very much about Lewiston being a microcosm of bigger things happening right now,” she told the Press Herald. “Communities that come together don’t always stay together. It takes a lot of work.”

Baxter State Park, home of Mount Katahdin, gets new director — Portland Press Herald

The , the , and reported that Eben Sypitkowski ’05 will become the newest director of Baxter State Park, which contains Mount Katahdin, Maine’s highest peak.

An environmental studies major at �ֲ���ý who studied coastal bloodworm digging for his honors thesis, Sypitkowski is currently the park’s resource manager, and he told WABI that he hopes to continue the vision of Gov. Percival P. Baxter, who donated the land for the park in the early 1930s.  

“This is a place to turn off your cellphone and let your relationship with nature be contemplative and not structured by commercial interests,” he said. “This is a place to step out of our connected world, and reconnect with yourself and nature.”

Large study finds colleges that go test-optional become more diverse and maintain academic quality — Inside Higher Ed

and other news media reported the findings of a major study of optional SAT policies co-authored by Bill Hiss ’66 and Valerie Franks ’98.

One of the study’s major conclusions is that SAT-optional policies can lead to an increase in underrepresented students in both the applicant pool and the first-year class.

The study also finds that, once in college, students who did not submit test scores posted lower grades initially, “but they ended up highly successful, graduating at equivalent rates or —  at some institutions —  slightly higher rates than did those who submitted test scores,” according to Inside Higher Ed. “This, the report says, is ‘the ultimate proof of success.’”

As dean of admissions from 1978 to 2000, Bill Hiss ’66 spearheaded the college’s test-optional policy. Since then, he’s tracked the policy’s effect at �ֲ���ý and nationally. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The study is the second major SAT-outcome study for which Hiss and Franks have been key players.

Hiss, who was �ֲ���ý’ dean of admissions from 1978 to 2000, spearheaded the college’s move to test-optionality in the 1980s. He and Franks have studied the issue extensively as more and more schools — most recently and notably the — drop the requirement to submit SAT or ACT scores.

Working: Building a brand — Sun Journal

The Lewiston caught up with Robert Little ’12, a local filmmaker whose latest projects include shooting for DIY Network’s reality series Maine Cabin Masters.

Little’s company, Sublime House Media, works on “filmmaking that could have a positive impact,” writes Kathryn Skelton. He’s parlayed experience filming in Indonesia and for National Geographic into making videos that help immigrants, and working with kids on filmmaking.

For Maine Cabin Masters, Little is following a crew of builders who fix up cabins in the woods. “Every profession has a wealth of knowledge, and I feel like people forget that about the trades,” Little told Skelton. “Video in a lot of ways is a trade. You’re making a product, and there’s lots of tools involved.”

Researchers to study history and impact of increased rain in the Arctic — The Boston Globe

What happens when, because of climate change, rain replaces snow in the Arctic?

Professor of Geology Mike Retelle and a colleague at UMass Amherst have won a $760,430 grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate the phenomenon, reported.

Professor of Geology Mike Retelle poses with Allie Balter ’14 and Greg de Wet ’11 at a field site in Svalbard, Norway, in 2013. (Courtesy of Greg de Wet)

Increased rainfall could have devastating effects on communities like Svalbard, Norway, which could suffer landslides and flash flooding.

According to a , Retelle and Bradley will study lake sediments in Svalbard in order to reconstruct a long climatic history. “This will provide a unique perspective on the nature of recent sedimentary changes and provide insight into the effects of contemporary changes in climate on the hydrological regime of this region,” Retelle said.

At �ֲ���ý College, new focus on ‘Purposeful Work’ — WGBH-FM

Boston public radio station WGBH-FM profiled, a signature �ֲ���ý program that helps students discover work that aligns with their interests and values.

The station talked to Callie Reynolds ’18, who completed a Purposeful Work internship in her Connecticut hometown in 2015; she also completed the “Life Architecture” course that teaches students how to approach the twin life goals of professional and personal fulfillment.

In 2017, Gerald Nelson ’18 interned at Sports Illustrated Kids as part of the Purposeful Work Internship Program. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Purposeful Work, she says, “is all about figuring out what I want to do with my life.” She’s now heading to Stockholm to work for the nonprofit study-abroad foundation DIS.

Reporter Kirk Carapezza also interviewed Peter Bysshe ‘93, who was on campus during Short Term to teach a course on brand culture building, part of the Purposeful Work program that offers practitioner-taught courses on practical and applied areas of study.

“When I work with designers, I love watching them get from a stuck place to an unstuck place,” Bysshe told Carapezza. “We recognize that liberal arts students can do anything. We have them do real things so they can feel what it’s like, so it’s not just rhetoric anymore.”

Why are poor people in America so patriotic? One man went on an odyssey to find out — Salon

Chauncy Devega of Salon talked to Professor of Sociology Francesco Duina, author of Broke and Patriotic, about why the poorest Americans .

Asked why Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Duina said Trump tapped a backlash against ideas such as political correctness.

Professor of Sociology Francesco Duina teaches a course in political sociology. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College)

For Trump, political correctness amounts to collective demands for unconditional equality. For him, “this is a way of saying that these collective identities — whether it’s blacks, gays, women, etc. — demand things from the government as a matter of right,” Duina said.

Yet to Trump and his supporters, such demands are a “non-American thing,” he added, that go “against the tradition of individualism: You have certain basic rights as an individual, not as a group.

“I think the people who voted for Trump by and large could be characterized as more individualistic-oriented. They lack interest in the government providing things for them and are more interested in the government getting out of their way. His voters and other supporters also feel that the government is corrupt and catering to all sorts of people instead of them.”

Can tech save the humanities? — The Boston Globe

The incorporation of technology into subjects like English and philosophy could breathe new life into the humanities, . Moreover, the increasing prevalence of technology in our society makes the humanities more necessary than ever.

Joshua Macht ’91 talks about entrepreneurship with Shaina Lam ’17 of Portland, Maine, in 2014. (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ���ý College)

Humanities and technology can intersect in promising ways, such as creating a game based on Henry Thoreau’s life or, as students in �ֲ���ý’ Digital and Computational Studies program did this year, helping dancers compose music with their bodies.

“If the humanities are ever to enjoy a true resurgence, it will come as a result of a reinvention that embraces a fresh new take on old disciplines,” Macht writes.

Studying art, philosophy, or literature could also guide the development of technology. “We’ll need to develop not just the technical skills to build better tech, but also the moral and ethical reasoning to guide how society deploys them,” he writes.

Art review: Prints with a purpose – and power — Maine Sunday Telegram

In curating an exhibition of prints and posters in Portland, Maine, Myron Beasley debunked the myth that good art is “pure in itself and free from any ideological or utilitarian purpose,” the Maine Sunday Telegram’s Daniel Kany.

Beasley, an associate professor of African American and American cultural studies, curated “Print, Protest, Power,” exhibited at Able Baker Contemporary from May 18 to June 22. The prints and posters in the exhibition, created mainly by black artists during and after the civil rights movement, had clear messages of political action and fighting for justice.

“The works make a compelling case not only that there is much to be done, but that such efforts can and will be successful,” Kany writes. “The art builds on successes of the past as well as current topics of change politics, so when it looks to the future, it does so not desperately, but confidently.”

The quest to make super-cold quantum blobs in space — Wired

reported on Associate Professor of Physics Nathan Lundblad’s work with the Cold Atom Laboratory, the first-ever environment that is both cold enough and free enough of gravity to create a Bose-Einstein condensate.

In 2014, Associate Professor of Physics Nathan Lundblad works with summer student researcher Ben Lovitz ’15 of Portland, Ore., in Lundblad’s ultra-cold atomic physics lab. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The Cold Atom Lab was launched to the International Space Station in May. The “blobs” the lab creates “should yield new insights about how atoms organize themselves,” writes Sophia Chen.

Working remotely, Lundblad will study this entirely new state of matter. “Imagine you were in a culture where you’d never seen ice,” Lundblad said. “You find out that when you cool water past 32 degrees Fahrenheit, this amazing form of H2O appears that is crystalline and regular.”

A camp for Jewish connections — The Jewish Week

The Jewish Week named Carine Warsawski ’07 one of its . Warsawski is the founder of Trybal Gatherings, which creates camp-like retreats for young Jewish adults.

Though she traveled to see family frequently growing up, Warsawski told the magazine that she first felt truly connected to Judaism during a camp, and during college and afterwards she worked at camps and for student tour companies. “It became important to lead experiences that helped people connect to their Jewish culture, no matter the geography,” she said.

“Summer camps are one of the Jewish community’s greatest assets,” she added. “Trybal is an opportunity to take my own transformative experiences from camp and offer [that] to others.”

Implicit Bias: Understanding our own beliefs — Maine Public

Weeks after a Starbucks employee called the police on two black men sitting in the store and Starbucks implemented an afternoon of anti-bias training for its employees, Lecturer in Neuroscience Laura Ligouri on implicit bias.

Ligouri, the founder of a nonprofit that applies psychology and neuroscience to human rights issues, said implicit bias is an unconscious process that influences people’s preconceived ideas about others and can lead to prejudice against groups different from one’s own.

Laura Ligouri, teaches “Neuroscience, Ethics, and Society” in May. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Ensuring that implicit biases don’t lead to discrimination takes more work than a few hours of training, Ligouri said — to understand and confront their biases, people must slow down and be willing to have uncomfortable conversations on an ongoing basis.  

“To create change, it has to be a commitment to a program that becomes a practice,” she said.   

Diet may influence the spread of a deadly type of breast cancer, study finds — ScienceDaily

Researchers including Charles Perou ’87 have found that blocking an amino acid found in certain foods might stop the spread of a particular type of breast cancer, the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center .

The team discovered that limiting asparagine — found in “dairy, whey, beef, poultry, eggs, fish, seafood, asparagus, potatoes, legumes, nuts, seeds, soy and whole grains,” according to the press release — in mice prevents the spread of triple-negative breast cancer.

The next steps are to test the effects of asparagine in healthy humans and then in cancer patients.

Perou is a leading researcher into variations of breast cancer and precision medicine. In October, the AACI Distinguished Scientist Award for his work in those fields.