Various Missouri media outlets, including the note the appointment of Jason Hall ’97 as head of the state’s Department of Economic Development.

Hall has run the quasi-governmental Missouri Technology Corp. since 2009. According to the Post-Dispatch, he’s “been one of the state’s pointmen on efforts to grow high-tech and science jobs. He also helped to craft MOSIRA, the fund recently approved by lawmakers to spark investment in those areas.”

Jason Hall ’97 makes a point during a 2010 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Homecoming panel discussion on LGBT career issues as ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ PRIDE founder Larry Handerhan ’05 looks on. Hall is the new director of the Missouri Department of Economic Development. Photograph by H. Lincoln Benedict ’09.

“Jason Hall is exactly the type of bright, energetic leader we need to help create jobs and move Missouri’s economy forward,” Missouri governor Jay Nixon said in a statement.

The Civic Forum Series at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ offers presentations about the Androscoggin River and about social entrepreneurship during October.

Bowdoin College faculty members Michael Kolster, a photographer, and Matthew Klingle, a historian and environmentalist, explore the Androscoggin River’s past, present and future in a presentation at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 17.

The following week, a co-founder of the fair-trade coffee importer Equal Exchange is among four of the nation’s leading social entrepreneurs who discuss their work at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 24.

Both events take place in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Sponsored by the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, the Civic Forum Series invites audiences to contemplate civic, political and policy issues significant to Maine and beyond.

Civic Forum events are open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-6202.

Kolster, an associate professor of visual art at Bowdoin, and Klingle, associate professor of history and environmental studies, are collaborating on A River Lost and Found: The Androscoggin River in Time and Place. The project uses photography, oral history, archival research and creative non-fiction writing to examine the hidden past and neglected present of this important New England waterway.

“We will ask how an injured river might reveal an ethic of place that embraces the complexities of human and natural history together,” Klingle and Kolster state in their project description. “Our answers may suggest how Americans can embrace the middle ground between the pristine and the ruined [that is] typical of the places many call home.”

Kolster has exhibited his work in San Francisco, Boston and a variety of Maine locations. His photography project is a long-term exploration of how we perceive, and are affected by, changes in the places we inhabit. His Androscoggin images are on display in the Chase Hall Gallery at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, 56 Campus Ave., until Oct. 23.

Klingle, associate professor of history and environmental studies at Bowdoin, specializes in urban, environmental and western North American history. He is the author of Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (Yale University Press, 2007).

Social entrepreneurship

The social entrepreneurs in the Oct. 24 panel:

Peter Murray is the co-founder and president of the Washington, D.C.-based , dedicated to developing the next generation of progressive political leaders. He also founded three nonprofit organizations promoting economic mobility for low-income people.

Bethany Robertson is the co-founder and former executive director of , whose mission is to help engaged couples bring a charitable focus to their marriage. The organization has been featured in The New York Times, Newsweek, and Modern Bride, amongst other publications.

Jonathan Rosenthal of Watertown, Mass., is a co-founder of , North America’s first fair trade fruit company, and of , the first U.S. fair trade coffee company. He is now a principal in , a firm that provides innovative consulting services to mission-driven organizations.

Elizabeth Stefanski is the chief market maker of of Providence, R.I., an organization dedicated to transforming society’s most intractable systems through forward-thinking collaboration. She is also a consultant for the business-strategy firm Bazaar Strategies.

In her , Demleitner noted that while “female attorneys, female judges [and] female prosecutors have truly become a staple in our courtrooms and in the boardrooms… we still see women underrepresented at the highest echelons of the legal profession. The legal profession is now more unequal than engineering and nonprofessional jobs for women. Curious isn’t it for a profession charged with protecting fairness and equality?”

The event at the Nassau County Supreme Court was co-sponsored by the Nassau County Judicial Committee on Women in the Courts and the Nassau County Bar Association Lawyer Assistance Program Committee.  Demleitner was honored for her commitment to justice, education and equality.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ presents a community forum for local labor leaders and Latino immigrants in an event starting at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 4, in the IBEW 567 Hall, 238 Goddard Road, Lewiston.

The program includes a dinner at 5:30 p.m., followed by a screening of the documentary “Morristown: In the Air and Sun” from 6 to 7 p.m. and a discussion with labor and civil rights activist Fran Ansley from 7 to 8.

Open to the public at no cost, this event is presented as part of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships’ Public Scholars Symposium, and is sponsored by the Western Maine Labor Council and the Maine Fair Trade Campaign. For more information, please contact 207-786-6202.

The intent of the gathering is to provide “a forum at which labor leaders and Latino immigrants in the Lewiston-Auburn area can meet each other and discuss how the events depicted in the film might shed light on the situation here in Maine,” explains Leila Kawar, visiting assistant professor of politics at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and an organizer of the event.

“Professor Ansley has organized similar events in Tennessee and this event aims to build coalitions between labor and immigrant groups in Maine.”

In 2007’s “Morristown,” director Anne Lewis’ film documents the impacts of globalization in East Tennessee. She recorded nearly a decade of change in Morristown, interviewing displaced or low-wage Southern workers, Mexican immigrants and other people impacted by globalization.

The hourlong documentary looks at issues of immigration, factory flight and the organized demand for economic justice. The film depicts the effects of massive economic change and the challenges it poses to working people’s assumptions about work, family, nation and community. Learn more: http://www.annelewis.org/Morristown.html.

The story of Morristown is not unique. Communities throughout Maine are struggling with plant closures and a downward pressure on jobs and wages. Meanwhile, immigrants struggle to provide a livelihood for their families in a system designed to exploit their labor.

Law professor emerita at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, Ansley was the principal humanities adviser to the documentary. She has actively sought to unite her scholarship, teaching and service in collaborative projects aimed at understanding and addressing problems of social justice.

Ansley speaks frequently and is widely published in the areas of civil rights, labor rights, impacts of globalization, and issues of race and gender, taking a special interest in the American Southeast and the evolving economic and cultural relations between the U.S. and Latin America.

The numerous awards and accolades she has received for her work include the 2002 W. Allen Separk Award for Superior Achievement in Scholarship and the 2003 Carden Award for Outstanding Achievement in Scholarship.

Funded by a grant from the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation, the Harward Center’s Public Scholars Symposium is a new program supporting annual presentations and discussions of academic civic-engagement work.

In its analysis, notes that Dynasty seeks to attract independent investment advisers away from traditional wirehouses and give them access to a platform of “trading, clearing, research and other support services.” In that sense, reports , Dynasty resembles a firm like self-described provider of advice and solutions to independent wealth advisers.

Quoting Penney, Reuters notes the Dynasty seeks to fill a “hole” in the marketplace “for a dedicated service provider with a deep understanding of high-end advisers and what they need to grow their business.”

Posting the most in-depth story thus far, quotes Penney as saying that by eliminating pressure on advisers to sell house brands, Dynasty’s business model allows independent brokers “sit on the same side of the table as their client and act as an adviser and get paid for advice, not have to act as a sales professional.”

In the Bloomberg story, Penney cites research by Boston-based Cerulli Associates that independent advisers will reach $5 trillion in client assets, predicting that Dynasty can capture 1 percent of that, or $50 billion, by 2016.

The startup’s impact was felt Monday after that Dynasty had recruited ( used “poached”) top financial adviser Michael Brown from Bank of America, prompting that company’s shares to dip nearly 1-1/2 percent. Brown is reportedly taking $5.9 billion in assets from Bank of America to Dynasty, where he will be a partner and the firm’s wealth-management director.

Dynasty gets financial backing and operational support from a “clutch of Wall Street veterans,” in the words of , including Todd Thomson, former head of Citigroup’s wealth-management division, as chairman of its board.

On CNBC on Monday (see clip above), the question was whether Dynasty was leading a sea change in the full-service brokerage model.  Gary Kaminsky noted that Dynasty is hoping to capitalize on a “wave of feeling” among high-net-worth financial advisers with firms like Morgan Stanley Smith Barney or Merrill Lynch who, under the thumb of in-house analysts and researchers, feel more like salespeople.

The fact that “significant industry veterans” have joined Dynasty as directors suggests that Dynasty “thinks they have an opportunity to change the model,” Kamisky says. include former American Express CEO Harvey Golub, Bill Donaldson, co-founder and former CEO of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, and Jim Brown, CEO of Long Ridge Equity Partners.

Penney, who is former head of business development for Smith Barney, is joined on the Dynasty management team by COO Edward Swenson ’99 and Jason Pinkham ’02, chief of staff. Well-chronicled is Penney’s path from his Down East childhood to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and to Wall Street.

As summer enters its final week, we are sharing stories from students who had ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½-related summer experiences, each day through Sept. 21.

Name: Joseph Kibe ’12
Major: Mathematics
Hometown: Portland, Ore.
Summer activity: A Ladd internship with where is president and CEO.

Kibe says his Ladd internship confirms that what he’s learning at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ will indeed be helpful “in the proverbial ‘real world.'”

He’s not talking about pieces of coursework, quipping that the “ability to parse out 19th-century French literature doesn’t directly help in quantitative finance.”

“I will continue to face nontrivial intellectual challenges yet not be too flummoxed by them.”

Instead, Kibe says, the skills and aptitudes that come from learning French literature in a liberal arts context surely did come in handy. “And, frankly, that perspective was good,” he says. “Should I choose to go into industry, I will continue to face nontrivial intellectual challenges yet not be too flummoxed by them. I’ve been prepared to take them on.”

He gives an example. In a preparatory exercise at Lee Munder, Kibe was asked me to build a model to rank equities by the inverse of their price over time. “On first blush it looks like a promising strategy,” he says. “But there is a big problem that makes the strategy utterly useless.”

He explains. “The historical share prices that most companies provide to investment firms are .” That means that when a company’s stock undergoes a 2-for-1 split, the adjusted share price is half the original price, to account for the doubling of shares. “Successful companies that undergo a stock split tend to show artificially low share prices historically, so this data can’t be used used in a model” — which is what Kibe figured out.

In fact, the point of the exercise was for Kibe to find the problem with the model.

“On one level this has virtually nothing to do with specific knowledge I’ve gained in any particular ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ course,” he says. “But on another, the exercise required the sort of deep thinking that a liberal arts education helps to develop in students.”

Crain’s New York Business includes defense attorney and former criminal prosecutor Kenyanna Scott ’94 in its “40 under 40” list of rising NYC business stars. In describing Scott’s daunting study-abroad experience at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, the profile notes how she has “always had the drive to see things through.” After her official program in Nigeria was canceled due to national unrest, she organized her own program there. Living conditions were tough, but she learned get by. A former federal prosecutor in Chicago who tackled drug conspiracies and mortgage fraud, she’s now a partner in white-collar defense and investigations at Jenner & Block. Scott, a political science major at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, also devotes time to pro bono cases in family court, trying to change some of the patterns she saw as a prosecutor..

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Trustee Emeritus Frank M. Coffin ’40, LL.D ’58, a widely admired judge on the 1st Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals for four decades and one of few individuals ever to serve in all three branches of the federal government, died Dec. 7 at age 90.

In a Dec. 9 story in the Portland Press Herald, Judge Kermit Lipez of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals described Coffin as  a “national treasure. In his combination of great talents, accomplishments, humanity and decency, and in the respect and love he inspired in so many people, he was unique.”

The New York Times praised Coffin for his “writings on the techniques and obligations of a federal appeals court judge” that have guided judges everything from judicial decision making to interactions with colleagues. In her Dec. 31 , Linda Greenhouse describes Coffin as a judge who believed “that federal judges, while independent, would also be accountable to the public and constantly obliged to demonstrate the legitimacy of the judicial enterprise.”

During his lifetime, Coffin conducted three interviews for the Edmund S. Muskie Oral History Collection at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. .