From Assistant Professor of Theater Cliff Odle’s perspective, the artifice of theater is often the best way to expose the truth of the human condition.

In the case of the play The Luck of the Irish, which he and his students spent the first part of fall 2021 mounting, it’s also providing a history lesson in redlining, American racism, and a challenge to the audience, to ask their own questions.

“Theater works best when it is that sort of mirror, not so much to answer questions, but ask them and ask them consistently in a way that stays with people,” Odle said during a recent campus panel discussion about racial justice and housing inequity, inspired by the student production. “And so there’s a lot of questions here to ask.”

The Luck of the Irish, a 2013 play by Kirsten Greenidge, alternates between 1950s and present-day Boston, and focuses on two families and their conflict over a house. Located in a majority white upscale neighborhood, the house had been occupied by the Taylors, an upwardly mobile Black family. It’s their home, and they paid for it, but there is a dispute over its ownership.

At the time of the purchase, Boston neighborhoods were kept segregated through redlining — a practice where the federal government would refuse to insure the mortgage on a house due to perceived risk — and myriad other racist practices, so the Taylors paid the less-wealthy Donovan family to ghost-buy it for them. Decades later, the Taylors’ granddaughters can’t find the deed to the house is missing, and the Donovans insist that the house belongs to them.

“It’s a story about people dealing with these things and how these things affect these individual people,” Odle said. “This particular play comes out of a long tradition of plays about African Americans looking for space, looking for a place to belong.”

The story is also a representation of what scores of Black families have gone through historically: a system that works against their fundamental human right to house and home.

Faculty from �ֲ���ý and Bowdoin College came together the week before the play’s Oct. 28 opening to discuss the history, legacy, and ongoing impact of racist practices such as redlining. Sponsored by the Department of Theater and Dance, the session was organized by Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater Elizabeth Phillips and Diana Zhou ’23 of Shanghai, and moderated by Phillips.

Representing a range of disciplines and interdisciplines — from philosophy, economics, and theater, to Africana studies, rhetoric, and film and screen studies —they challenged the audience and each other to ask questions about what we, as a society, could possibly do to fix the inequities.

Jessica LaVoice, an assistant professor of economics at Bowdoin, provided a brief overview of the history of redlining in the U.S. Research has shown that, among other harms, redlining effectively and systematically reduced the ability of Black Americans to gain wealth, solidifying racial wealth disparities in American cities during the Great Migration of the 1900s. 

For example, by the 1940s, t more for a home to move into a primarily white neighborhood, but once they became owners, their home value would decline by 10 percent, eroding Black wealth.

These housing injustices, LaVoice said, were of course only part of what Black families suffered. “I don’t want to oversimplify the complexities and the interactions between all these different sources of discrimination and injustices across many other aspects of American life,” LaVoice said.

Theater’s Role

For Odle, the theater and the arts can offer the beginning of a solution by opening eyes.

“What I do is I impersonate people that don’t exist. I tell people to be people they’re not, I write stories that don’t exist,” he said. “Why do I do this? Well, the artifice of course, is in order to expose the truth of the human condition: who we are, where we are, why we are.”

The Luck of the Irish, like the iconic 1959 Lorraine Hansberry play A Raisin in the Sun, “deals with this idea of belonging, this idea of home ownership, something that we all kind of take for granted or have taken for granted,” Odle said.

“Now we have generations that are in a situation where they’re not doing as well as their predecessors,” Odle continued. “I think my generation, Gen X, was one of the first to really not do as well as our fathers and mothers. I’m not — I can’t afford a house.”

And as his fellow panelists pointed out, the effects of housing insecurity go beyond not having a “place” to be; they also affect the social experience of the individual, and can depend on not just race or social class, but also factors like gender.

Paul Schofield, an assistant professor of philosophy, said he believes that “if you are housing insecure or if you’re experiencing homelessness, you’re excluded from society and from participating in our major social institutions in ways that are different from simply not getting your fair share of the pie.”

“Additionally, I think it’s significant that those who are housing insecure often are unable to afford the social bonds that you would expect people who have a stable household to form,” he said. 

“They’re often separated from their families and their friends and their children, and those who are Black disproportionately are separated from their children. Black women often have their children taken away from them at a much higher rate,” Schofield added.

All Systems Are Not Go

Charles Nero, Benjamin E. Mays Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies, said that the systems supporting the inequities can — and need to be — challenged.

“I think it’s important to know that white supremacy is created by and sustained by public policy. And so it is public policy that must constantly be critiqued and addressed.

“Public policy takes place at local levels, national levels. And we have to be present, or at least encourage presence at all of those levels with no guarantee of a win.”

Redlining and Reparations

Michael Murray, the Charles Franklin Phillips Professor of Economics, studies federal policy around low-income housing. He pointed out that the benefits of economic and social status are passed down through the generations, and so is the harm: sustained socio-economic inequity including education.

“When you look at racially segregated cities in the U.S., African American children end up with less education than in less racially segregated cities. So the housing discrimination is translating into shutting down the education channel for managing to accumulate wealth over the generations.”

But what about when a government has both created and historically maintained the policies that built those inequities?

In contemplating that painfully twisted reality, Murray had to compose himself for a moment. “There’s a legal principle that when government harms citizens, the government has an obligation to remedy those harms,” Murray said. “We need to be looking for suitable remedies.”

But how can we as a society can repair the damage done by centuries of racial segregation, economic, and social inequity, and by systems built and sustained on the exploitation of groups of people?

That’s the type of question that Susan Stark, an associate professor of philosophy who works in moral psychology and social philosophy, has pondered — specifically, what reparations for institutionalized racism might look like.

“Usually when we’re talking about reparations, we’re talking about actions that we all could take today, or our government can take today in order to repair wrongs that were done in the past,” Stark said.

That means taking moral responsibility for something that happened long ago.

But many people can’t wrap their heads around that. A familiar refrain heard among white Americans is that while “my ancestors may have hurt your ancestors, I didn’t hurt you today, so I don’t owe you anything.”

Indeed, said Stark, peoples’ ordinary thinking is “that I am only morally responsible for the things that I have control over, things that I do. If there’s an earthquake that happens far away, I’m not morally responsible for the occurrence of the harm that resulted from the earthquake. Because I didn’t cause it, I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

Race and Responsibility

The issue of reparations opens a whole new discussion about race, responsibility, and, not surprisingly, identity.

Looking at the many cultures and ethnic groups harmed and disenfranchised by American colonization, genocide, racial segregation, and historic social and economic inequity, the responsibility for reparations would land on white America. 

But you need to define “whiteness” to define who bears responsibility. And defining whiteness can be “slippery,” according to Nero.

“It is the very elasticity of whiteness, which is by design how whiteness defines itself. Is whiteness race? Is whiteness ethnicity? Whiteness is everywhere and nowhere, simultaneously,” Nero said.

“I wonder about how something like that figures into a discussion about who is white and who has responsibility,” Nero added. “And whether or not even the capacity to do that is an indication of just what whiteness is. It is to name whiteness, and to specify whiteness.”

The surge in popularity of DNA tests and ethnic heritage mapping has introduced another complication to the conversation, and that is who can “claim” Black or Indigenous heritage, and therefore perhaps divest themselves of the responsibility of making reparations.

“I’ve had friends who are like, ‘Oh, I’m 3 percent black,’�ĝ Odle said. “‘Therefore I suffer too.’ And there really does need to be a definition of what this sort of whiteness thing is, and who, and how your experience in this sort of thing sort of plays into it because it is kind of a slippery thing.”

But when this “slippery” whiteness has been the cultural default for creating laws, housing, and privilege for generations, defining what it is proves tricky, Nero said.

In this conversation, it’s vital that whiteness not be the focus of the conversation, according to Stark.

“I think the important thing is to figure out a way for white people to take responsibility for the wrongs of the past, without somehow centering themselves,” Stark said.

This is why it’s so important that the conversation around racial justice and housing inequity include different voices, from different backgrounds. And why a play performed on a college campus in Maine might generate that essential conversation.

“I will go out on a limb and say by itself, a play, or the arts in general, isn’t going to change things,” Odle said. “Exposure opens up the possibility for change, and that is what we need. We need audiences that are not the same audiences, audiences that don’t normally go to see theater, audiences that know normally don’t normally go to see art. Those are the audiences that we need to come in and see this, because those are all the audiences that can become those change agents. 

“Art is not going to do it by itself. It’s not designed to do that, but it is designed to get people to think, is designed to get conversations happening. It’s designed to open up doors that people will hopefully go through.”

�ֲ���ý’ Africana program offers five plays during Black History Month that use historical events as a springboard to explore white oppression and black resistance.

Four were written by Lecturer in Theater Clifford Odle, who also teaches in the college’s Africana program. Each is based on actual incidents involving African American slaves in 18th-century New England. The fifth play, Janice Liddell’s Who Will Sing for Lena?, will be performed by Jes Washington ’13.

�ֲ���ý Lecturer in Theater Clifford Odle’s Colonial-era plays — including The Petition, shown in performance last summer with actor Stephen Sampson at Boston’s Old State House — are the products of assiduous research, including work at the Massachusetts Archives. (Robin Lubbock/WBUR)

Noon, Feb. 6, Commons Fireplace Lounge

Part I: Blood in the Revolution — “According to Mark”

Part of the larger work Blood in the Revolution, this 10-minute play reading was first in a series of four plays by Lecturer in Theater Cliff Odle marking Black History Month at �ֲ���ý. The title character “was a slave who could read and was looking for a way to free himself from an oppressive master,” says Odle. “And he felt the Bible provided a path to murdering him as long as he didn’t spill blood.”

Noon, Feb. 10, Fireplace Lounge, Commons

Part II: Blood in the Revolution — “Witness to a Massacre”

This 10-minute play reading deals with an educated slave named Andrew who was an important witness to the Boston Massacre, the 1770 killing of several colonists by British troops.

Lecturer in Theater Clifford Odle addresses viewers in the Commons Fireplace Lounge during the Feb. 6 performance of his short play According to Mark. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Who Will Sing for Lena?

Jessica Washington ’13.

Jessica Washington ’13 returns to �ֲ���ý to perform Janice Liddell’s one-woman show, Who Will Sing for Lena?

The play is about Lena Mae Baker, a domestic worker from Georgia who shot and killed her white employer in 1944 in self-defense and became the first and only woman executed in Georgia’s electric chair.

Noon, Feb. 14, Fireplace Lounge, Commons

Part III: Blood in the Revolution — “A Suit Made of Freedom”

This 10-minute play reading focuses on a woman named Mum Bett, aka Elizabeth Freeman, who successfully won her freedom from slavery in a 1780 court case in Massachusetts.

5pm, Feb. 27, Gannett Theater, 103 Pettigrew Hall

A Deerfield Homecoming

This 90-minute play combines and fictionalizes two separate historical episodes that took place in Deerfield, Mass. One involves Eunice Williams, an English colonist who was kidnapped by the French and the Mohawks as a child and became assimilated into Mohawk society. The other is about Lucy Terry, a slave whose ballad poem “Bars Fight” is considered the oldest known literary work by an African American.

In 1774, when the Boston Massacre and the Tea Party were still fresh in the minds of Boston residents and the American Revolution was fast reaching its boiling point, a free Black man named Prince Hall petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to end slavery. The petition failed; slavery in Boston would not be abolished until 1783.

This little-known moment in American history exposes the “inconsistencies and hypocrisies in the language of American colonials,” says �ֲ���ý Lecturer in Theater Cliff Odle. Those patriots clamoring for American independence from Britain appealed to lofty ideals of equality — even comparing their colonial status to slavery — yet many owned slaves themselves.

Lecturer in Theater Cliff Odle teaches a playwriting class on Oct. 1. His 30-minute play, The Petition, ran at Boston’s Old State House through September. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Odle, a playwright, explored this complexity in The Petition, a 30-minute play that ran in the council chamber of Boston’s Old State House in August and September. The story revolves around Prince Hall’s efforts to get the colony to endorse the petition for abolition, which forces Joseph Warren — a prominent member of the Sons of Liberty, a secret separatist group — to wrestle with his own beliefs.

Though Warren and other colonists were sympathetic to Hall’s cause, they argued that independence must take precedence.

In this Q&A, Odle explains how he conceived and wrote the play, and how the story of Prince Hall raises issues of race, activism, and white allyship that ring true today.

How did you get the idea to write The Petition?

I’ve been working on plays about this time period for awhile, ever since I was a tour guide for the Freedom Trail. For 11 years I portrayed a man named Barzillai Lew, who fought in the French and Indian War and was one of about 50 African Americans at the Battle of Bunker Hill. That experience guided me toward exploring a very overlooked area of history.

A lot of people have an antebellum, Southern view of slavery. For them, African Americans didn’t really matter until 1865 — once they were free. The truth is, we’ve been a part of society since 1619. We were very much involved in all the wars that this country has fought, going back to the French and Indian War and even earlier.

What really excited me about The Petition was the chance to show African Americans as not just being victims, as not just being workers, but as people who are agents of their own independence. There was a level of Black intelligentsia who were thinking about matters of freedom and independence, the same way as folks in the Enlightenment were thinking.

Stephen Sampson plays Prince Hall at a performance of “The Petition” at the Old State House. (Robin Lubbock/WBUR)

What was the process of writing the play?

First was research, getting an idea of what life was like in colonial America. The tough part is that most of the people who wrote about themselves were middle class, wealthy, white. The people who weren’t those things didn’t do a whole lot of writing for themselves. There are a lot of blanks to fill in.

The interesting thing about Massachusetts is that slaves had access to the court system. If a master, for example, promised you freedom and reneged on that promise, you could sue them. The archives of some of these cases go back to the 1700s.

These court cases give you a sense that African Americans had access to the kind of intellectual life that you couldn’t have if you were in the South. In the North, it was a lot more common for Black people to be able to read. I wanted to demonstrate how much of a different beast it was from what we generally know slavery to be.

Did you have to fill in the blanks when you wrote the character of Prince Hall?

Yes. Although Prince Hall was a very prominent African American and a veteran of Bunker Hill, he didn’t write a whole lot about himself. We know from witnesses that he was a fairly articulate person who was well-regarded. He carried a certain gravitas. From that, we were able to create a character sketch.

We know Prince Hall tried to join one of the Masonic lodges and was rejected. Joseph Warren was definitely a member of that lodge. Paul Revere was a member. John Hancock was a member.

Here’s the wonderful irony — Prince eventually joined a lodge connected with the British soldiers stationed on the Boston Common. Several months later, at least as far as I can tell, he fought against those fellow lodge members at Bunker Hill, against the people who accepted him.

I think that says something about a certain uniqueness of the Black experience in this country — that despite the fact that we’ve been alienated, we still have a sense that this is our land. A Black man says that, despite all the denigrations he has to go through, this is where I was born, and I’m going to defend it and show people by example why they should do the right thing by us.

A key conflict of the play is that Prince Hall’s friend Joseph Warren won’t support his petition because he thought it would get in the way of a larger struggle for independence from Britain.

Part of the inspiration for that story line is Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and the letter that preceded it, from white clergy to King, asking him to delay civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham. You have people who are ostensibly supporting freedom and want to do the right thing, but they’re also urging everyone to go slow, essentially denying people something they should have already.

The idea of the disappointing white moderate goes back a ways. Especially for people who know Boston history, Joseph Warren is an almost saintly character. He provided information that allowed the Midnight Ride to happen, and he was killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill. He fought and died for the American ideal of freedom.

Yet Warren had owned a slave at one point. The slave was used as part of a deal to help him establish either the rent or the mortgage for his medical practice.

As a character, Warren gets at the complexity of the issue. He’s well-meaning but unwilling to put himself or his privilege on the line in order to do what he knows should be done. In the play, Joseph Warren warns that if we get caught up in these matters that it may be trying to raise one group against the other. It may cloud everything for everyone. It’s a very familiar argument. We hear it today.

Stephen Sampson and Alex Jacobs perform in The Petition.  (Robin Lubbock/WBUR)

What was it like to see the play through its production and run at the Old State House?

Before I had kids, playwriting was the closest thing I had to raising children, because eventually they grow out of your hands and become different things. You have to give up some control to allow the play to exist. Since theater is such a collaborative art, you have to let other voices — the actors, the director, the tech people, and everybody else — inform what’s happening.

I was there for a couple of performances. I took my playwriting class to view the performance and give them an idea of the different types of plays that you can write. They had a pretty good reaction to it — not just because I was their professor, I hope.

How does theater contribute to these big discussions around racism and history and the legacy of slavery?

I’m a big believer in theater as a mirror to society. It’s visceral; you’re feeling it happening right now. I find this active experience is very effective at getting people to think about certain ideas. We’re not looking for consensus — a play may inform their perspective, it may reinforce what they already believe, or it may get them to rethink what they believe. Theater definitely has a place in dealing with all these issues — not just informing, but also getting people to feel.

Elizabeth Strout ’77

Elizabeth Strout on Returning to Olive Kitteridge — The New Yorker

Elizabeth Strout ’77 thought she was “done” with Olive Kitteridge, the central character in her 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. Until, she told New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Triesman, one day in a European cafe when Olive “just showed up.”

Pulitzer Prize–winning author Elizabeth Strout ’77 stands with President Clayton Spencer following her 2017 Reunion discussion with Spencer. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Olive, Again, will be published in October. The sequel features Olive as she ages and her interactions with other characters deepen and change.

The books’ Maine setting, Strout told Triesman, is inextricable from its characters. “Olive — my Olive — would not be Olive if she lived anywhere but Maine,” she said. “She is like a barnacle clinging to the rock of the place.”

Read the story:

• “,” The New Yorker, July 29, 2019

See also:

• “,” Portland Press Herald, Sept. 1, 2019

Michelle Greene

�ֲ���ý College receives its largest-ever federal grant — Multiple outlets

Maine and national outlets covered the announcement that �ֲ���ý received a $3.97 million National Science Foundation grant to build a video database to support research in fields that rely on the analysis and recognition of images, such as neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence.

Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Michelle Greene, the principal investigator for the grant, will lead the creation of a Visual Experience Database comprising some 240 hours of video clips that depict everyday human activities and, importantly, simulate human vision and track head and eye movement.

Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Michelle Greene (right) works with student researcher Hanna De Bruyn ’18 to prepare an EEG test in March 2018. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

As Greene told Maine Public, the process of collecting video clips for the database will involve trained members of the project team, including �ֲ���ý students, “going out into the world wearing head-mounted cameras, like a GoPro. We’ll be recording what the world looks like as we engage in some common, everyday activities.”

Read the stories:

• “,” Sun Journal, Aug. 16, 2019
• “,” Maine Public, Aug. 16, 2019
• “,” The Associated Press, Aug. 16, 2019

Peter Goodrich ’89

Timeout: 9/11 still a painful day for those who knew Peter Goodrich — Sun Journal

On the 18th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Sun Journal sportswriter Tony Blasi returned to the story of Peter Goodrich ’89, the track and field All-American who died on Flight 175.

Blasi had interviewed, written about, and gotten to know Goodrich as a student as he racked up track and field awards and majored in math and physics.

Peter Goodrich ’89, shown throwing the shot put for �ֲ���ý, “was a gentleman,” said classmate Greg Nespole ’89. (Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

This year, Blasi talked to Goodrich’s classmate Gregory Nespole ’89. “Peter was a kind, thoughtful man who was modest, though highly exceptional as a student and athlete — a gentleman,” Nespole told him.

A lawyer, Nespole has long worked in Lower Manhattan, and his office is near the 9/11 Memorial. “I lost many friends,” he said. “It is still a painful day.”

Read the story:

• “,” Sun Journal, Sept. 11, 2019

Christopher Petrella ’06

Colin Kaepernick wants you to know your rights — PAPER magazine

Chris Petrella ’06 had a in a recent issue of PAPER focusing on human rights.

The issue, called a “,” by the New York Daily News, carried the theme “Know Your Rights” and featured Q&A interviews with 10 black thought leaders, including 2018 �ֲ���ý Commencement speaker Bryan Stevenson.

Christopher Petrella ’06, director of engagement at American University’s Antiracist Research & Policy Center, makes a point during a meeting of the college’s Justice and Equity Reading Group in 2017, when he was a �ֲ���ý faculty lecturer member of the Office of Intercultural Education staff. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The issue’s lead story, “Colin Kaepernick Wants You To Know Your Rights,” was written by Petrella along with radio host Miabelle Bocicault and scholar Ameer Hasan Loggins. The trio also wrote the introductions to each Q&A story.

The entire issue was guest-edited by Kaepernick, the football player-turned-social activist, whose current efforts with his Know Your Rights camps teaches young people their legal rights and, importantly, how to exercise them.

A friend and part of Kaepernick’s inner circle, Petrella is director of engagement at American University’s Antiracist Research & Policy Center.

Read the stories:

• “,” PAPER Magazine, Fall 2019

Michael Rocque

The U.S. Attorney got the numbers wrong. Here’s a look at D.C.’s actual incarceration rate — DCist

A recent debate in Washington, D.C., saw criminal-justice reform advocates saying that D.C. imprisons more people than any of the 50 states. At the same time, the district’s U.S. Attorney said the opposite, that it sends fewer people to prison than any state.

The news website DCist turned to criminologist Michael Rocque, associate professor of sociology at �ֲ���ý, to untangle the numbers.

Michael Rocque, associate professor of sociology. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Ultimately, you can’t compare D.C. statistics to state statistics, said Rocque, “just as I would caution against comparing NYC to Maine.”

The contrasting data points were bandied about during a public debate over a D.C. Council bill that would “expand opportunities for certain violent offenders to petition for a reduced sentence,” according to the DCist story.

After its initial claim, the U.S. Attorney backtracked and admitted that it had used federal data that only counted inmates at the D.C. jail as opposed to D.C. inmates held by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons in federal facilities across the country.

Read the story:

• “,” DCist, Sept. 10, 2019

Edmund Muskie ’36

During his 1972 presidential race, Maine’s Edmund Muskie faced at least three death threats — Sun Journal

FBI files related to Edmund Muskie ’36 and released to the Sun Journal revealed that Muskie received three death threats while campaigning for the 1972 Democratic nomination for president.

“It doesn’t appear from the 1,038 pages of material released to the Sun Journal that the FBI ever tracked down two of the culprits,” wrote the paper’s Steve Collins, who obtained the files through a Freedom of Information Act request. “Federal prosecutors opted not to charge the other, a mentally ill man quickly found by agents.”

Edmund Muskie ’36 and supporters at a 1968 campaign event, location unknown. (Burton Burinsky / Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

Collins also learned that Muskie had a police record (sort of). “On Dec. 28, 1965, in the tiny town of Centreville on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Muskie was issued a criminal summons at Broadwater Farms for ‘attempting to take migratory water fowl with the aid of bait,’�ĝ writes Collins.

Muskie paid the $25 fine.

Read the story:

• “,” Sun Journal, Aug. 31, 2019

Clifford Odle

‘The Petition’ addresses black liberation and white allyship in the Old State House — WBUR

Jerome Campbell of Boston public radio station WBUR sat in on a performance of The Petition, a play by Lecturer in Theater Clifford Odle that explores the contradictions of the American Revolution when it comes to slavery.

The immersive play, in which audiences sit around a table in the Old State House Museum in Boston, is about Prince Hall, a free black man who unsuccessfully petitioned the Massachusetts assembly to abolish slavery.

Lecturer in Theater Clifford Odle (right) talks with Professor of French and Francophone Studies Kirk Read during Opening Convocation on Sept 3. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

In the play, Hall’s friend and ally Joseph Warren encourages the petition but ultimately prioritizes the “liberation” of white colonists from British rule.

It’s an example of the harm of white inaction, Odle told Campbell. “Unless you are arguing and agitating for people to have the same rights that you already have, unless you are willing to put your privilege on the line, the job is not done.”

Read the story:

• “,” WBUR, Aug. 27, 2019

Julia Sleeper-Whiting ’08

Local people who are all about the work share what motivates them — Sun Journal

A Lewiston Sun Journal article on what motivates community members’ work featured Julia Sleeper-Whiting ’08, co-founder and executive director of Tree Street Youth.

Julia Sleeper ’08 (right), co-founder and executive director of Tree Street Youth, speaks in 2016 with then-Lewiston High student Binto Matan and Gene Geiger, who supported an expansion of the youth center. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“Work is about creating solutions to things happening around us and solving challenges in the world,” Sleeper-Whiting told reporter Beth Herman. “As long as your focus remains on the greater purpose, the work itself remains relevant and meaningful.”

Read the story:

• “,” Sun Journal, Aug. 31, 2019

Ann Kranjec Fortescue ’84

New IMAS exec seeks cross-culture experiences — The Monitor

Francisco E. Jimenez of The Monitor of McAllen, Texas, profiled Ann Kranjec Fortescue ’84, the new president and executive director of the International Museum of Art and Science.

Fortescue said her 35-year career in museums was inspired in part by a �ֲ���ý course on 19th-century European history that included a visit to a historical farm.

“We spent two days on this farm, harvesting rye with a scythe and experiencing what it was like to live as closely as we could to 19th-century peasant farmers,” she told Jimenez. “That was when a switch went off in my head in terms of, ‘I could actually work in a museum and teach with objects.’”

Read the story:

• “,” The Monitor, Sept. 3, 2019

�ֲ���ý College

New students at �ֲ���ý College told to become activists — Sun Journal

The Sun Journal covered �ֲ���ý’ Opening Convocation, in which labor activist and civil rights leader Dolores Huerta received an honorary degree and delivered the keynote address.

The 89-year-old co-founder of the United Farm Workers told the incoming Class of 2023 to learn their history and engage politically to get the country “off the road to fascism.”

Dolores Huerta acknowledges applause as she’s given an honorary degree at Opening Convocation. Ready to present her with the honorary hood is Michael Murray, Phillips Professor of Economics. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“The wonderful thing about a democracy is that we can change things,” she said. But “nothing is going to change unless you decide to change it.”

Read the story:

• “,” Sun Journal, Sept. 3, 2019

See also:

• “Convocation speaker Dolores Huerta to the Class of 2023: ‘We have the power,’�ĝ �ֲ���ýNews, Sept. 4, 2019

James F. Amaral ’80

“We want people to bake”: Baker, food writer team up to publish book — The Lincoln County News

Jessica Clifford of Maine’s Lincoln County News interviewed Borealis Breads owner Jim Amaral ’80, who wrote a cookbook with food writer Cynthia Finnemore Simonds.

Amaral told Clifford that the goal of the book, Borealis Breads: 75 Recipes for Breads, Soups, Sides, and More, is to encourage people to bake, even if it costs him business at his popular bakery.

“It’s hard not to feel good about yourself when you bake a loaf of bread, no matter how it turns out,” Amaral said. “It’s a life-affirming thing when you bake – you’re nourishing yourself, you are nourishing your family.”

Read the story:

• “,” The Lincoln County News, Sept. 9, 2019

As faculty lined up on Alumni Walk in full academic regalia before Opening Convocation, we asked some of them to look ahead to the courses they’re most excited to teach this fall.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Geneva Laurita. (Theophil Syslo)

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Geneva Laurita chatted with colleagues under one of Alumni Walk’s many birch trees. She’s excited to teach “Descriptive Inorganic Chemistry,” which deals with carbon-free materials like metals.

Long required for majors, the course will have a lab component this year.

In fact, the new lab component was designed last spring as part of a Short Term program known as “Course (Re)Design,” which gives faculty the chance to create a new course or redesign and existing one.

In Laurita’s case, she and students under her guidance worked together to develop the course’s new lab experiments, giving her future students the opportunity for hands-on experience and exploration of research techniques.

Across the way, Lecturer in Theater Cliff Odle and Associate Professor of Theater Chris McDowell waited on a cast-stone bench for the Convocation procession to begin.

Odle is teaching an introductory playwriting course — one step, he says, toward building up the college’s playwriting program. He wants students to submit plays to the prestigious Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival.

In addition to his playwriting course, Lecturer in Theater Clifford Odle (center right) teaches a First-Year Seminar, “Politics and Performance on Stage and Screen,” shown in the Fireplace Lounge of Commons, as well as a beginning acting course. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The class is where budding playwrights start to shine. “We’ll find out who the drivers are,” Odle said.

Last year, one of Odle’s students sent an original play to an important playwriting conference.

McDowell, meanwhile, is teaching “Pattern Drafting and Draping” to aspiring designers.

“It uses a part of the brain that students don’t always get to tap into,” she said. “It’s analytical and mathematical, but it also involves creation.”

As the 11 a.m. start of Convocation approached, more and more faculty filled Alumni Walk. Stephanie Wade, a lecturer in humanities and assistant director of Writing at �ֲ���ý, is teaching “Feed Your Mind: Food Justice and Community Gardens,” a First-Year Seminar where new students will work in — as well as write about — local community gardens.

“I love seeing my students learn about community and about each other through food,” Wade said.

“It’s exciting and frightening how much is relevant.”

Professor of Politics Stephen Engel. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College)

Finally, the academic procession stepped off toward the Historic Quad.

Professor of Politics Stephen Engel walked and talked about his upcoming course on constitutional law, which will examine timely topics like presidential pardon power, and how it might or might not apply to a president pardoning himself.

“It’s exciting and frightening how much is relevant,” Engel said.