History – News

In the News: February 2026

�ֲ��ý News — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 20:16:32 +0000

Carrie Cushman talks Museum of Art’s Marsden Hartley Legacy Project on Maine Public

Carrie Cushman, director of the �ֲ��ý Museum of Art, spoke about the museum’s current projects .

In conversation with Heather McDougall, manager of music and people at Maine Public Classical, Cushman, who joined the museum in August 2025, discussed the excitement of arriving at �ֲ��ý. The museum is preparing to launch the Marsden Hartley Legacy Project, an online digital catalog of all known paintings and ephemera by modernist painter and Lewiston native Marsden Hartley, which has been in development since 2019.

“We’re really lucky that this is happening at �ֲ��ý, and we will be the home of it and responsible for stewarding it into the future,” Cushman told McDougall.

Carrie Cushman, director of the �ֲ��ý Museum of Art, joined �ֲ��ý in August 2025. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

The �ֲ��ý Museum of Art was founded because of the Marsden Hartley Memorial Collection, Cushman explained, comprising over 400 paintings and ephemera by Hartley — by far the largest collection of Hartley’s work — which Hartley’s niece donated to the college in 1955.

“We have people coming to the museum almost weekly requesting to see work from the collection, and many are artists who are looking for inspiration in this 20th century modernist who is finally getting his due,” Cushman said.

Additionally, Cushman’s exhibition The Worlds of Ilse Bing was featured in a in the online magazine What Will You Remember?.

“9 Wellington: First Floor Library with Orange Chair and View of the Livingroom” by Shelburne Thurber (Courtesy of Shellburne Thurber)

The exhibition is on view through May 24 at Wellesley College’s Davis Museum, where Cushman previously worked as the Linda Wyatt Gruber ‘66 Curatorial Fellow in Photography. Exploring Bing’s rise to prominence, coinciding with 35mm photography’s growing popularity, the exhibition “brings her work into conversation with her creative influences and with those who she influenced in the worlds of modern art.”

What Will You Remember? also included the �ֲ��ý Museum of Art’s exhibition Shellburne Thurber: Full Circle, co-curated by Thurber and �ֲ��ý assistant curator Samantha Sigmon, in its February roundup. On view through March 21, the exhibition demonstrates how Thurber’s photography has “visualized interior work that is private, domestic, psychological, or insular.”

Mara Tieken opines on rural schools, students in The Hechinger Report; Women Writers, Women’s Books

Though public school closures and consolidations are becoming increasingly common, they rarely serve their intended purpose of saving struggling school districts money, writes Professor of Education Mara Tieken in an .

For school districts with declining enrollment or decreasing state and federal funding, “school closures may seem logical,” Tieken writes. “Close schools, ‘right-size’ districts, save money. Problem solved.”

However, she explains, school closures require additional transportation and renovation costs, often leading to districts saving little to no money, while students’ test scores and future college and employment outcomes decrease.

Associate Professor of Education Mara Tieken has extensively researched and written about rural schools and their students. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Tieken has extensively researched and written about rural schools and their students. On Feb. 5, she published a piece about the process of developing her latest book — Educated Out: How Rural Students Navigate Elite Colleges—And What It Costs Them — in an .

While writing the book, which explores how students from rural places experience attending a small elite college, Tieken developed an approach to research characterized by slowly developing relationships with the students she was interviewing, she writes.

“We often think of research as a one-way process, a passing of ‘data’ from ‘subject’ to ‘researcher,’” Tieken writes. “But that approach is neither ethical (in fact, it’s often quite exploitative) nor useful. So much more can be learned when the relationship is actually relational.”

The 13 years that Tieken spent researching and writing the book taught her to be a more patient teacher, she says, with an expanded awareness of the struggles that her students from rural backgrounds may be facing. The book culminates with suggestions for how academic institutions can better support rural students.

“All those recommendations that I make in the book’s final chapter?” Tieken writes. “I have to do them, too, and I feel obligated—in a really good way—to encourage others to do them, as well.”

Caylin Carbonell ’12 gives public talk exploring daily life, labor dynamics in colonial New England

Caylin Carbonell ’12, an assistant professor of history at Bowdoin College, gave a public lecture about labor dynamics in colonial New England households, .

Caylin Carbonell, assistant professor of history at Bowdoin College (Courtesy of Caylin Carbonell)

The talk, entitled “Laboring Lives and Hidden Stories in Colonial New England,” was the second installment in a series of free online lectures hosted by the Lincoln County Historical Association, based in Wiscasset, Maine.

Carbonell shared insights on “the daily lives inside colonial households as the country was beginning to take shape, with a focus on laborers, often a diverse group ranging from enslaved and indentured people to hired workers, including Indigenous, African, and European women and men.”

She also discussed the challenges of uncovering the stories of 17th and 18th century laborers from incomplete or nonexistent records. Carbonell, who majored in history at �ֲ��ý, is currently working on a book manuscript that closely explores daily life in colonial New England households.

Boston Globe, Sun Journal cover MLK Day at �ֲ��ý

The held during �ֲ��ý’ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, “From Silencing to Empowerment: Exploring Anger, Justice, and Post-traumatic Growth Among Refugee Women and Women of Color,” led by Yun Garrison, assistant professor of psychology, and Fowsia Musse from Maine Community Integration.

During the workshop, Garrison and Musse presented a framework of healing from trauma that they developed by examining the experiences of refugee women. For Musse, herself a refugee from Somalia, and other Somalian refugees and immigrants living in Lewiston, the workshop was particularly topical, the Globe reports; Musse said that anxiety caused by the Trump administration’s immigration deportation agenda led her to reflect on past trauma from her immigration experience.

Fowsia Musse (left) of Maine Community Integration and Yun Garrison, assistant professor of psychology, talk during the workshop they led, “From Silencing to Empowerment: Exploring Anger, Justice, and Post-traumatic Growth Among Refugee Women and Women of Color,” during �ֲ��ý’ MLK Day observance. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

“When something traumatic happens, how do we hold both anger and peace at the same time? Because sometimes they are pulling us in opposite directions,” Garrison said. “Maybe love and healing can bridge this. I do not know, but that’s what I’m sitting with right now.”

The Lewiston given by Myisha Cherry, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside.

Cherry’s address — “What Do We Do With All This Fear?” — explored the day’s theme of “Love, Anger and the Struggle for Justice” by closely examining and interpreting MLK’s writings and words.

The Sun Journal quoted from President Garry W. Jenkins’ introductory remarks addressing the day’s theme, sharing his interpretation of how love and anger may intersect in the pursuit of justice.

“I would rather spend my days in a space of love rather than a space of anger,” Jenkins said. “But we don’t always get to make that choice. … In linking these two, we have to wrestle with how they exist together — both in tension and in harmony.”

Myisha Cherry, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside gave the keynote address — “What Do We Do With All This Fear?” — to kick off �ֲ��ý’ MLK Day observance. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

In sharing MLK’s thoughts about fear, Cherry explained that not all fear was negative; it can, in fact, be harnessed and transformed into a powerful force for change, the Sun Journal reported.

“We should be maestros as opposed to mere masters of our normal fears … and we should transition that normal fear into courage,” Cherry said. “Courage is just not doing something in spite of your fear, it’s taking your fear and matching it up with confidence … and engaging in action.”

As the Sun Journal reported, Cherry linked this healthy fear to MLK’s nonviolent protests and actions, urging all in the audience to use their “normal” fear to advance causes they care about.

“What we should do with this fear is make something beautiful out of it,” Cherry said. “This is a time of fear for lots of us … Turning to King has been illuminating, and I find that fear doesn’t mean that we are weak, it doesn’t mean we’ve given people the upper hand. It means that we’re sensitive to injustice. It means we value the people we’re fearful for and we value the principles that we are scared we are going to lose.”

Brian Shankar Adler featured in DownBeat magazine’s cover story

Brian Shankar Adler — percussionist and �ֲ��ý instructor of drum set, tabla, and other hand percussion — and Grammy-award winning soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom released their debut album once like a spark, in their February issue’s cover story, “Making music in the moment.”

The magazine used the stage at Olin Concert Hall as the setting for a photo shoot with the two musicians, who have performed extensively in Lewiston and Portland, Maine as a duo.

Grammy-award winning soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom (left) and Brian Shankar Adler — percussionist and �ֲ��ý instructor of drum set, tabla, and other hand percussion — play together in Olin Arts Center. (Courtesy of John Doyle/DownBeat)

“We played each other’s compositions, and the music came alive instantly,” Adler told DownBeat. “Over the years, we built up a hefty book of tunes and a musical language with which to communicate.”

Without chorded or bass instruments, the brass-drum duo is a rare one, DownBeat reported. The combination makes for a unique, melodic sound, with roots in jazz, North Indian Hindustani, and Indonesian musical traditions.

“The way I see it, music is interconnected and has the power to communicate beyond borders,” Adler told DownBeat. “Listening to and playing jazz, it’s evident that the music has roots beyond America and arms that extend to virtually every corner of the world. When approached with open ears, curiosity and a sense of respect for the traditions, the possibilities for exchange are really limitless.”

Art New England reviews current exhibition at the �ֲ��ý Museum of Art

On Feb. 5, of “Precision and Expression: American Studio Ceramics from the E. John Bullard Collection,” the current show at the �ֲ��ý Museum of Art, co-curated by Assistant Curator Samantha Sigmon and Lecturer in Art and Visual Culture Susan Dewsnap. “…Bullard sought diversity and individuality in his acquisitions,” Little writes. “He also embraced humor and joy: many of the pieces will prompt a smile.”

Roberto Lugo, Fighting Shirley Cup, 2023, is currently on display at the �ֲ��ý Museum of Art.

Calling it an “entertaining and enlightening exhibition,” Little highlighted an “exquisite vessel” by Mark Bell, “Spherical Vase,” ca. 2011, which he said “exemplifies the Blue Hill, Maine, artist’s seamless style.”

Little also explained the motivation behind Bullard’s generous gift to the museum. “The collector’s longtime ties to Haystack and the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Newcastle, Maine, inspired his gift, as did the college’s ceramics program led by Susan Dewsnap, who co-curated the exhibition and accompanying catalogue,” Little writes. “Bullard envisions future students exploring and learning from these singular objects. That vision is already happening: interns at the �ֲ��ý Museum researched artists for the catalogue and labels.”

Video: Scenes from the Jenkins Inauguration, selfies, high fives, and hugs in a ‘place of warmth and welcome’

�ֲ��ý News — Fri, 10 May 2024 14:10:23 +0000

The May 4 installation of President Garry W. Jenkins’ featured historic firsts — �ֲ��ý’ first Black and first openly gay president— and also cheering students, hugging friends, high-five greetings, and plenty of selfies

These video highlights kick off with the early-morning robing in Commons, hitting a crescendo with the installation ceremony in an elegantly transformed Merrill Gymnasium, and winding down with a relaxing outdoor buffet lunch.

Take in these heartwarming and inspirational moments from the inauguration of Garry W. Jenkins:

(Theophyl Syslo/�ֲ��ý College)

Leading up to the timeless ritual of the installation was the academic procession, with a long line of �ֲ��ý leaders, trustees, faculty, alumni, delegates led by a festive marching jazz band, joined by boisterous students, faculty, staff, alumni, community members from far and wide.

As Jenkins himself said, “This place — our college — is a place of warmth and welcome, and you have made that abundantly and beautifully clear. And for that, I thank you.”

Refusing to let the killers have the last word, survivors of the genocide in Rwanda share their story with �ֲ��ý students

Deirdre Stires — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Three survivors of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi of Rwanda came to �ֲ��ý this week to openly discuss with students the trauma that’s been woven into their lives and their country’s history for three decades.

The intimate discussions offered students a powerful opportunity “to be confronted with a lived experience that is foreign to them,” said Alexandre Dauge-Roth, professor of French and francophone studies, who welcomed the guests to campus for a three-day event, “Rwanda 30 Years After: Trauma Healing of Genocide Survivors and Intergenerational Trauma.”

At right, the three Rwandan guests — from left, Esther Mujawayo, Chantal Kayitesi, and Jean Bosco Rutagengwa — answer questions about their experiences as survivors of the genocide against the Tutsi during a joint gathering of students from three classes on March 25 in a Roger Williams classroom. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Beginning on April 7, 1994, and lasting 100 days, members of the Hutu ethnic majority, incited by local authorities, militia, and the Rwandan army, murdered upwards of a million people, most exclusively from the Tutsi minority. The massacre left behind open mass graves, family members unable to find and bury their dead, mistrust across the country, and sadness that a land full of natural beauty could be stained with such horror.

“Rwanda is so beautiful, but after ’94, I thought, ‘How could it still be beautiful?’” shared Esther Mujawayo to a gathering of more than 50 students from three different classes held in Roger Williams Hall on Monday.

Esther Mujawayo shares her experience as a survivor of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi of Rwanda as Chantal Kayitesi (center) and Jean Bosco Rutagengwa listen. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Dauge-Roth is an expert in the literary, cinematic, and testimonial representations of the 1994 genocide and an internationally recognized authority on how educators can effectively teach students about the genocide.

He said that when students “engage and interact with people who have experienced radically different forms of violence and who come from different cultural backgrounds, you can no longer project your values and your judgments. You have to start to really try to understand their perspectives, their aspirations, and sense of history as much as you can, as you engage in a transformative dialogue with them.”

Event organizer Alexandre Dauge-Roth, professor of French and francophone studies, listens to the discussion session with students in a Roger Williams Hall classroom. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Some of the dialogue surprised the students. Too often, victims are reduced to their sole status of survivor, viewed as passive and without agency, or unable to move beyond their trauma. But the three Rwandan guests, who all played key roles in the reconstruction of their community, sometimes laughed and told jokes as they demonstrated their resilience and continued love for their homeland and people.

“This is why we laugh a lot,” said Mujawayo of Essen, Germany, to students the next day in the course “The Politics of Memory,” taught by Professor of Politics Jim Richter. “We don’t want the killers, the death, to have the last word.”

Mujawayo (center) laughs as Kayitesi (left) responds to a student during a class session of “The Politics of Memory,” taught by Professor of Politics Jim Richter (right). (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Students dug deep into the two-way conversion, asking their guests — Mujawayo, joined by siblings Jean Bosco Rutagengwa of Amherst, N.H., and Chantal Kayitesi of Dedham, Mass., — how Tutsi survivors balanced the memory of their loved ones who were killed with the trauma that memory brought.

Mujawayo, a psychotherapist and activist who has about the genocide, said they’ve tried to shield their children from the bad memories — while also continuing to retell the historic event so it never repeats. “But also, how do you find the right dosage, so that you don’t overwhelm them?” she asked in the gathering of three classes on Monday.

“We tried to shield them from hearing bad stuff,” added Rutagengwa, who helped to form (“Remember” in Kinyarwanda) an advocacy association for survivors’ rights and memory after the genocide. “But we also have made sure they know their history.”

Jean Bosco Rutagengwa of Amherst, N.H., speaks to students on March 25 in Roger Williams Hall. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Mujawayo used a metaphor to explain healing and storytelling: “Our story is stinking, but we use this smelling thing, this suffering, to tell a story. If you solely focus on the bad, you only have the stinking. But if you plant something good just next to it, you produce something good.”

A manure pile is a stinking thing, she said, not a place where you want to gather and talk. Mujawayo suggested then to grow something around it, like banana trees, to make it more beautiful. “Grow your bananas,” she said. “Please don’t stay there, in the negativity. Grow something beautiful.”

Bora Lugunda ’25 of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, asked the Rwandans how outsiders should best approach interviews with survivors to help document the history of the atrocity.

“It’s not that hard,” Rutagengwa said. “Survivors want to tell their story. It’s good when they share the details, because it helps in the healing process.”

Bora Lugunda ’25 (left) of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, greets Kayitesi (right) at the conclusion of the March 25 class discussion. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Associate Professor of History Patrick Otim, who next year while on sabbatical in East Africa will pursue research on survivors of the war in Uganda that took place between 1986 and 2008, appreciated this question — and the Rwandans’ responses. Otim said the three guests taught the students in his that historians have to be transparent — and also to conduct interviews with empathy and respect.

“The question for me as a historian is always: How do we treat historical actors like survivors of genocide? When we write history, we have to be respectful of their experiences and portray them in the most accurate way,” Otim said. “I wanted my students to learn how to work with or get information from survivors. This talk was a lesson in oral history.”

On Monday, as the trio talked with students from two French courses and one history course gathered in Roger Williams Hall, they detailed how they’ve lived with the trauma of living through the genocide in frank, raw terms.

Professor of French and Francophone Studies Alexandre Dauge-Roth has led students to Rwanda to partner with survivors of the genocide to tell their stories. Here, during Short Term 2009, students visit the Murabi Genocide Memorial, where 50,000 people were massacred. The marker refers to French soldiers who created a volleyball pitch amidst mass graves during their occupation in June 1994. (Courtesy of Alexandre Dauge-Roth)

They explained about the Gacaca courts (2002–2012), a system of restorative justice aimed at helping rebuild the country through public confessions and testimonies about the atrocity to put an end to decades of impunity and allow survivors to know the fate of their loved ones.

Mujawayo, who lost her husband, parents, and hundreds of relatives in the genocide, said the open, public discussion about the details of the genocide helped many to find, if not forgiveness, a certain sense of accountability and closure as they were morning their deads.

“After my sister was killed, I at least knew where her body was thrown. So we could bury her in dignity,” she said. “It was not an easy process, finding the latrines where they threw them, but it gives some comfort to restore their dignity.”

After the genocide, Mujawayo helped found AVEGA () with 50 other widows to provide assistance to Tutsi and Hutu widows and children of the genocide. The approximate meaning of “agahozo” is “to dry your tears.”

Kayitesi listens as Mujawayo shares her experiences on March 25. Seated behind Kayitesi is Jean Bosco Rutagengwa. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Chantal Kayitesi, who lost her husband, parents, siblings, and relatives, pointed out that the children of the killers too have had a difficult path moving forward by having to accept their intimate connection to the genocide. While many Rwandans want all of their people to move forward, it’s vital to keep retelling the history, “so that it never happens again.”

After the genocide, Kayitesi was also a founding member of AVEGA and has contributed to a collective testimony written by women survivors, Entendez-nous! (Hear Us). “There are always people who try to deny there was a genocide,” she said. “But it really happened.”

In a culture with a deep tradition of oral history, Rutagengwa said that Rwandans have turned to writing down in detail the events of the genocide, so that they can make certain to pass on a true account of it. “We lost great people, but we didn’t want to lose them forever,” he said. “We needed to record who they were. So we made lists of the survivors.”

Dauge-Roth said many students were struck by the compromises that Tutsi survivors were asked to embrace in the reconciliation process, such as moving away from a punitive desire of implementing justice, embracing the restorative justice model of the Gacaca courts, and coping with the return of the vast majority of the perpetrators within their communities as necessary steps to work toward national unity.

Anthony Morton ’24 (left) of Philadelphia and Victoria Campbell Goldman ’27 of Carpinteria, Calif., listen to the three Rwandan guests on March 25 in Roger Williams Hall. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

“This was a huge shift for most,” he said. “But they were also in a situation where there was no other choice for them and for the country. The vast majority of them accepted what was demanded from them for their own country and future generations in this historical context without precedent.”

After the visit, Lily Ritch ’25 of Cincinnati, Ohio, gave to Mujawayo and Kayitesi a hand-written thank-you note that read, in part: “This conversation was rough, and I am walking away with a deep respect and admiration for you. I am inspired by your ability to feel and recognize your trauma as a necessary step toward moving forward towards progress and future prevention.”

Look What We Found: Wes Chaney’s historical contracts

Phyllis Graber Jensen — Tue, 05 Mar 2019 23:06:06 +0000

“The history of Chinese emperors and generals has been written,” says Assistant Professor of History Wes Chaney. “I’m interested in telling the stories of everyday life.”

He’s doing that with historical contracts related to land, household division, and marriage that he has collected from antique marketplaces near farming communities in Gansu and Qinghai provinces.

This household division contract allows two brothers who want to live separately to divide their family inheritance (dated from 1914). (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Dating from 1800 to the mid-1900s, these records feature mostly boilerplate language, where thumbprints represent the only likely written record of the individuals whose lives they document. Chaney can’t actually reproduce their voices à la Studs Terkel, yet he’s always looking for those places where individual experience bubbles up. His collection represents this effort — “the voice of the subaltern” is muffled, he says, but trying to hear these peasants’ stories is “what I like about it.”

Each contract has its own distinctive texture, color, and calligraphy. There’s also a distinction between red and white contracts. The former display the government office seal. The latter — comprising most of Chaney’s collection — were never registered with the county office, making them technically illegal, since they mimic the red ones but without a tax payment.

Assistant Professor of History Wes Chaney looks through his collection of Chinese land, household distribution, and marriage contracts in his Pettengill Hall office. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

In Chaney’s Pettengill office, he pulls out a household division contract from January 1914 that represents the realities of Chinese peasant life. According to Confucian ideology, he says, brothers remain in the same household for life. In reality, that often fails to work out. In this particular case, where two brothers didn’t get along, the contract stipulates how each brother will receive exactly half of their deceased father’s inheritance.

Chaney reads aloud from a list that, in addition to a few parcels of land, includes “one shoehorn, a broken wok, seven sheep, and a leather strap.”

This contract also provides their widowed mother with assets to support both her life and the cost of her eventual funeral.

A land exchange contract dated from 1938 in Huzhu County, Qinghai Province. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

It’s typical of the hundreds of contracts he has collected, and together, they tell the story of an illiterate peasantry who left no written record other than the kinds of municipal and private contracts he has in his possession. “You can construct the history of a family over time and the kind of changes in the land that they owned and why,” he says.

These records feature mostly boilerplate language, where thumbprints represent the only likely written record of the individuals whose lives they document. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

In preserving these stories of everyday village life, Chaney imagines the different ways in which he can use these papers in his research on Chinese law and land disputes. “These are not seen as important documents, they’re not seen as important to the writing of history, but I think these voices are important to history. And so I think there’s a moral argument for why I’m collecting them,” he says.

Eventually, he would like to return to China — when it’s politically feasible — and donate the documents to local libraries in their counties of origin so they can be accessible to everyone.

This Short Term, Chaney will work with a �ֲ��ý student to catalog more of these documents that he often shares in the classroom. In an increasingly digital world, Chaney says it’s essential for his students to experience what the document would have felt like.

“There’s an importance to the materiality here,” he says, “and we lose that when we read it on Lyceum or downloaded onto our phones or computers. It’s actually important to touch things.”

Marshall Scholar Chris Crum ’17 eyes legal remedies for online threats

Doug Hubley — Fri, 07 Dec 2018 14:08:09 +0000

“The commons” is a term applied to things that belong to everyone and to no one — things like the oceans, intellectual property, and cyberspace. Since his days at �ֲ��ý, Christopher Crum ’17 has been a student of this concept and of the legal means that people devise to stake a claim on the commons.

Crum’s interest recently received some powerful validation: a highly competitive Marshall Scholarship, which will support two years of postgraduate study in the U.K.

One of 48 recipients of a 2019 Marshall Scholarship (selected from more than 1,000 applicants), and only the second from �ֲ��ý since the program was founded in 1953, Crum will take a hiatus from Chicago Law to spend his two years at the University of Oxford. (Linda Griffiths Johnston ’79, a music major who also went on to Oxford, was the first Marshall Scholar from �ֲ��ý.)

At �ֲ��ý, Crum’s award-winning honors thesis in history scrutinized 17th-century intellectual debates over ownership of the seas, comparing arguments made by Portuguese jurists with those from other naval powers.

These days, he’s focused on a wholly contemporary, even exigent, slice of the commons: the internet and social media, and ways they’re undermining politics and society. A second-year student at the University of Chicago Law School, he’s interested in legal measures that governments might take to protect the integrity of elections, journalism, and data privacy.

At Oxford, Crum will dedicate the first year to a study of the social science of the internet at the Oxford Internet Institute, coming away with a master of science degree. Independent research culminating in a master of philosophy will consume the second year. Thereafter he’ll complete his law degree at Chicago.

“Chris was simply masterful at facilitating difficult conversations among his peers.”

Funded by the British government and offered only to U.S. citizens, the Marshall Scholarships are meant to strengthen bonds between the two countries. The program is named for World War II general and U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall, whose name also distinguished the famous, massive aid plan intended to get war-ravaged Europe back on its feet.

While Crum admits to thinking that he was a long shot for a Marshall Scholarship, no one familiar with his �ֲ��ý accomplishments will be too surprised that he received the honor. A Dana Scholar, he headed for Chicago supported in part by �ֲ��ý’ Raymond J. Oakes Fellowship for continuing legal studies.

Then there’s his thesis. Its potential won him the John Cole Prize for historical research, and the final product earned the Ernest P. Miller Prize for most outstanding history thesis. “Besides his academic successes and intellectual gifts, something that particularly impressed me about Chris was his tenacity,” says history professor Karen Melvin, Crum’s thesis adviser.

“He exerted an enormous amount of energy trying to track down an elusive primary source. He communicated with librarians in Australia, the Czech Republic, and England before eventually sneaking in a trip to the National Library in London during a couple of free hours while in route to a debate tournament in Oxford.”

Shown in the lobby of his campus residence, Chu Hall, Chris Crum reads an essay about the U.S. House of Representatives for a politics course in 2016. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Alongside his academic achievements, Crum’s co-curricular contributions also stood out, notes Dean of Students Joshua McIntosh. Crum was prominent in debate, and served as an AESOP leader and Admission tour guide. And, as a member of an organizational review board in the �ֲ��ý student government, he played an instrumental role in navigating that body through an especially challenging time.

In that context, says McIntosh, “I was able to observe Chris’s many talents, courage, and character. He was simply masterful at facilitating difficult conversations among his peers, being sure to provide space for different perspectives to be shared and engaging in difficult discourse in a civil manner, even when emotions ran high.

“Chris’s calm, steady, and diplomatic approach to leadership is what allowed the issues to be resolved and to help student government move forward.”

Crum spoke to us from a vacant classroom in the University of Chicago’s Harper Library just moments after a morning of classes and just days before the start of finals.

How did the ownership of the seas lead to the dark side of the internet?

I wasn’t really sure how to take that [earlier interest] and put it into practice following the �ֲ��ý ethos of trying, in a very clichéd phrase, to make the world a better place.

After I graduated, I took an internship at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, at Harvard. And there the pieces all came together. The internet positively affects society, too, but the problems with it were really front and center [in the work] at the Berkman Klein Center.

I was going to law school in the fall, but I wasn’t entirely sure if that would give me the space to really explore how all of these ideas fit together. And that’s where I got the idea of applying to the Oxford Internet Institute, which is essentially a degree-granting version of the Berkman Klein Center.

An objective of the Marshall Scholarship program is to help scholars better understand Britain, and thereby strengthen ties between our two countries. How will that work in your case?

Something that has to happen as a result of Brexit is that the European Union and the United Kingdom will need to set up some sort of new data-sharing agreement. Depending on what that agreement ends up looking like, the U.K. and the U.S. are going to have to renegotiate data sharing across their borders. Given the sort of America-first rhetoric coming out of the U.S., for better or worse, it’s a lot more difficult to cooperate with other countries on things like free-trade agreements or in this case, free data-flow agreements.

I’m really hoping to understand what a potential data-sharing agreement between the U.S. and U.K. could look like, and whether or not it’s going to be predominantly informed by European conceptions of privacy, English conceptions, or, you know, whether an American idea of privacy is going to predominate.

And that has very deep consequences for the special relationship between our countries. Whether or not we are able to cooperate on this fundamental issue of data-sharing across borders, is really, I think, a marker of the health of the relationship.

There’s ample reason to worry about the corrosive effects of the internet and social media on democracy. You’re looking at data privacy in particular. How do privacy and democracy interact in the digital realm?

Marshall Scholar Chris Crum at the University of Chicago Law School. (Jean Lachat/University of Chicago)

I’m not a political theorist, but I think privacy is fundamental to people operating independently in a society. If there is information that only I know, I can choose whether to give it to other people. That imbues a sense of control, a sense of agency, that is important because it allows people to function more independently.

In addition, a pluralistic society, like the United States aspires to be, depends on people having different understandings of the world and different political views. And in an ideal world, we let the crucible of the political process determine what’s best for the majority of people. Information privacy allows people to develop views that are crucial to that sort of pluralistic society. It’s a theory, but I don’t think it’s implausible.

You received the Libby Prize for contributions to the Brooks Quimby Debate Council not once, but twice. How did the BQDC contribute to you?

Chris Crum and fellow debaters get ready for a van trip to a match at Harvard in October 2013. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

In a lot of ways, debate was my life at �ֲ��ý. A significant majority of my friends were on the debate team, I spent a lot of weekends traveling for debate, we practiced three times a week. I’m very lucky that I found the debate team early on in my college experience.

Debate taught me how to put together an argument, and that’s the most invaluable part of, really, anything I’ve ever done. And that’s not an exaggeration. You know, my papers got better a month after I joined the debate team. And it’s served me incredibly well in law school. I have to say that it really does play well in job interviews, when I can say that my favorite extracurricular activity is competitively solving problems on the weekend.

It also was sort of an entrée into Oxford. My senior year, the team went to the Oxford Intervarsity Debating Competition. Oxford is just such a gorgeous place, the libraries are amazing, and I thought, if this could be in my future, that would just be the icing on the cake.

Look What We Found: Susan Stark’s lucky great-grandmother

Phyllis Graber Jensen — Tue, 09 Oct 2018 12:55:25 +0000

A striking black-and-white photographic portrait of Associate Professor of Philosophy Susan Stark’s great-grandmother Flora Perrotta occupies a place of honor in her Hedge Hall office.

Stark takes great pride in her ancestor, who in 1905 was a 16-year-old motherless girl when she emigrated from near Naples, Italy, to join her father and siblings in New York City, where the teenager worked as a skilled seamstress to help support her family.

Stark considers herself lucky to be Flora’s great-granddaughter, but not in the way you might think of “lucky.”

Susan Stark takes great pride in her great-grandmother. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Stark works in moral psychology and social philosophy. This semester she’s teaching a course on “moral luck,” the idea that individuals are morally good by virtue of the lucky or unlucky things that have happened to them.

“Our identity is largely a matter of luck: who our parents are, what time period we live in, which country, what our race or gender is, what our sexual identity or sexual orientation are,” she says.

Many of these factors are not really determined by us but rather by our genes. True, environment plays a part, at times, in some aspects of our identity. “But we don’t get to pick the culture that we live in and how it regards our gender or race. A lot of it is not up to us.”

And simple luck plays a part in Stark’s very existence, she says. In her early 20s, Flora had a job at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, which infamously burned to the ground on March 25, 1911. One hundred forty-six garment workers — mostly recent Italian and Jewish female immigrants — died from fire, smoke inhalation, and jumping to their deaths in one of the deadliest industrial disasters in U.S. history.

For some unknown reason, Stark’s great-grandmother stayed home from work that day, perhaps escaping death. “Luck not only affects these fine-grained aspects of our lives but my very own existence, the existence of my whole family. I’ve often thought about how, if she had gone to work that day, my grandmother wouldn’t have been born, my mother wouldn’t have been born, and I wouldn’t have been born.”

The shelves in Stark’s Roger Williams office feature family photographs and artwork by her children. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Stark’s great-grandmother lived to be 100, and Stark got to know her as she grew up. She notes that Flora married and raised children during a time when Italian immigrants encountered significant discrimination in the United States. “It’s interesting to think about the challenges they faced,” she says. Her great-grandmother passed her immigrant’s fortitude to Stark’s grandmother, today a progressive 100-year-old, who raised Stark’s mother to be a strong woman. “And my mother raised me to be a strong woman,” says Stark. She keeps pictures of all of them on her office shelf display.

Stark believes that it can be really uncomfortable for people to acknowledge the contingency and uncertainty in their lives. “But,” she says, “I think our lives are much more contingent than we are typically willing to admit.”

�ֲ��ý faculty member to appear on Jeopardy!

Emily McConville — Thu, 30 Nov 2017 19:31:11 +0000

This member of the �ֲ��ý history faculty combined luck and brains to appear on the iconic quiz show Jeopardy!

Who is: Ian Shin?

The �ֲ��ý lecturer in history can’t yet tell us much about his appearance, which airs December 12, because of ��Ǳ貹��!’s nondisclosure rules. But he can tell us that Jeopardy!, the three-contestant buzzer game where questions become answers, hosted by Alex Trebek, has been part of his life for years.

Lecturer in History Ian Shin talks about his upcoming courses during Convocation, the week after he went on Jeopardy! (Jay Burns/�ֲ��ý College)

He watched buzzers, bets, and daily doubles with his grandmother after his family moved to California from Hong Kong. He learned some American cultural factoids that way. “And then obviously,” he adds, “for a certain set of really nerdy people, Jeopardy! is like nerd Olympics. There is a certain kind of prestige to being smart enough to be on Jeopardy!”

So when a few acquaintances competed on the show, Shin decided to go for it. Acing an online test last year got him an audition in New York, which involved another written test and a practice game.

A couple months later, he got a call from Burbank, Calif. A producer told him to show up for a taping — luckily, during the one week he wasn’t teaching or researching. Since several episodes are taped each day, Shin was told to bring extra sets of clothes, in case he won.

At the end of August, Shin flew out West. He hadn’t had time to study intensively, so he spent two days “just sort of cramming” — reading Wikipedia articles, relearning the periodic table, and studying up on sports history (the Pittsburgh Steelers, he can now tell you, have won the most Super Bowls). He also went through a database of every single Jeopardy! question ever written and every single incorrect answer.

The morning after Shin arrived, a van took him and the other contestants to the studio.

He says the atmosphere was friendly, but “the previous day’s champion was riding with us, so we were all like, ‘Oh, he is the real deal.’”

Ian Shin poses with Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek. Trebek, he said, “was very nice and was very charming with the audience.” (Photo courtesy of Ian Shin)

After a legal briefing and a rehearsal round, it was time to go. Turns out there’s a lot more that goes into the “nerd Olympics” than knowing a lot of stuff.

Multitasking, he says, is key: If you buzz in before Trebek finishes reading the question, you’re subject to a short delay, an eternity in the world of fast-paced, quiz-bowl-style games. Jeopardy! players have to juggle hearing the question, figuring out the answer, and hitting the buzzer at just the right moment.

There’s also a surprising amount of endurance involved. “You are standing up there for a half an hour, the lights are bearing down on you, you have to have a trigger finger,” Shin says. “There is a physical aspect of it that I didn’t expect.”

So Shin devised a system. “When Alex starts reading the clue, I am going to read the end of the clue to see what the last word is. So I keep that in my mind, and when I hear him say the last word, I will know when to buzz.”

Until his episode airs, we won’t know how that worked for him. But he says he made sure to name-drop �ֲ��ý during the round. And whether Shin was a one-and-done contestant or became a returning winner, he is grateful for his firsthand look at an invaluable part of American pop culture that’s been on TV nearly continuously since 1964.

“In an era of fake news and alternative facts, Jeopardy! celebrates being informed and celebrates knowledge,” he says. “It says, ‘You know something; come on the show,’ and rewards that. That’s something that I really appreciate.”

Explaining how to be an ‘antiracist,’ Ibram X. Kendi rattles conventional wisdom

Doug Hubley — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 18:11:37 +0000

You don’t decide only once to be an antiracist.

Instead, it’s a decision that circumstances, including your own character, will demand of you repeatedly. “The mind is complex, and when we think of any personality trait that we’re striving to get away from” — like racism — “it’s an everyday process,” author and historian Ibram Kendi told a �ֲ��ý audience on Oct. 23.

Author and historian Ibram Kendi, at right, greets �ֲ��ý President Clayton Spencer and Christopher Petrella ’06 of the Office of Equity and Diversity on Oct. 23. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

“We have to be conscious of it on a regular basis in order to not be that way anymore,” he said.

Kendi was at �ֲ��ý to give a talk titled “How to Be an Antiracist.” It’s a prescription he’s abundantly qualified to offer. at American University, he’s also the founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American.

Moreover, Kendi wrote Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which was awarded the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction, making Kendi the youngest scholar in 30 years to receive that honor.

�ֲ��ý President Clayton Spencer, who described as a “gut renovation of our collective thinking about race,” welcomed a large audience to Gomes Chapel for Kendi, who offered a 50-minute talk as well as subsequent Q&A and booksigning sessions.

Introducing Kendi was Christopher Petrella ’06, associate director of programs for �ֲ��ý’ Office of Equity and Diversity. Petrella’s generous preface concluded with an apt quotation from the abolitionist Frederick Douglass (who, he noted, spoke in Lewiston at �ֲ��ý’ invitation in 1874): “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Historian and author Ibram Kendi, left, chats with Kingdell Valdez ’19 of North Andover, Mass. Valdez met Kendi during a session of the course “Introduction to African American Studies” on Oct, 23, prior to Kendi’s evening talk. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Once at the pulpit, Kendi responded with his own Douglass quote, one from 1874 that, he said, sums up the entire sorry history of racist thought: “When men oppress their fellow men, the oppressor ever finds in the character of the oppressed, a full justification.”

Kendi was pitch-perfect for the �ֲ��ý audience. While steps to becoming an antiracist constituted the heart of his speech, he framed that checklist with arguments about American racism that were occasionally surprising and always thought-provoking.

“How and why did racist ideas become, literally, our common sense — in which racist ideas make sense to us, and antiracist ideas seem radical, extreme, and completely nonsensical and illogical?” Kendi wondered.

“How and why did racist ideas become, literally, our common sense?”

He said that writing Stamped from the Beginning, which chronicles that ideological evolution over more than five centuries to the present, led him to a concept he calls the “dual racial history of America” — a dynamic process, like something from Newtonian physics but a lot harder on people. In this duality, every evidence-based effort to undo racism provokes a new and more sophisticated defense of racism.

Take, for example, the Jim Crow laws that followed the defeat of the South in the Civil War. And the proclamation of a “post-racial era” following the election of the nation’s first black president. Post-racism, Kendi said, is “possibly the most sophisticated racist idea ever constructed….It is a representation of every racist idea in history.”

Following Kendi’s talk in the Gomes Chapel, Ella Fenderson, age 11, asks Ibram how elementary school students can talk about race in school, as her mother, Grace Kendall, director of design services for the �ֲ��ý Communications Office, looks on. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

He argued that ultimately there are only two causes of racial tension, or only two exits from any discussion of racism. Either the inferiority of some races to others is a true fact, or the existence of discrimination is. You can’t have it both ways, or neither way.

So if you accept the premise of post-racism — that discrimination doesn’t exist — then all that’s left is the inferiority of one group or another. And away you go, down the road to growing your own personal racist beliefs, which are all the more convincing because you thought of them yourself.

In Stamped, Kendi distinguishes between producers and consumers of racist ideas, and focuses on the producers. What motivates them? That led him to another key element in the talk, and one that stands conventional wisdom on its head.

It’s commonly believed that ignorance and hate fuel racist ideas and ideologies, and those in turn are codified in racist policies. But just the opposite is true, Kendi said.

He argued that people implement racist policies to protect their own political, cultural, and economic interests and then, perhaps on the principle that the best defense is a good offense, deploy racist ideas to advance those policies.

Rakiya Mohamed ’18 of Auburn, Maine, poses a question to historian Ibram Kendi during a session that followed Kendi’s Oct. 23 talk at �ֲ��ý. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

“It shocked me to find that,” he said, “because of course I had been taught that historically, the main cradle of racism had been ignorance and hate.”

Kendi noted that no group of people he studied for Stamped considered their ideas racist. (And still today it’s generally the racists who cry, “I’m not a racist.”) “People believed that black people were literally a different species of being that was closer to animal kind — ‘That’s not a racist idea, that’s science.’”

Getting to the heart of his address, Kendi structured his rules for being an antiracist in a logical historical order:

Reject what “segregationist” ideas, ideas based on perceived functional biological distinctions between races. Kendi cited research from 2000, based on the genomic mapping of people representing five races, that showed that 99 percent of their genetic makeups were the same — and the remaining 1 percent was just scientists’ reluctance to pronounce an absolute. “There’s no such thing as biological races,” he said.

Bolstering his case with more medical facts, Kendi took on the widespread belief that sickle-cell anemia is a “black disease.” Instead, he explained, the disorder collaterally confers some resistance to malaria, and so is found more often among populations well-established in malarial regions — not just in Africa. (A discussion about sickle-cell that Kendi had with his wife, a doctor, convinced her that a white child in her emergency room actually did have sickle-cell, despite the “black disease” label.

Recognize that different races are equal culturally as well as biologically. “A dominant strain within abolitionist thought,” Kendi said, “was this idea that slavery, of course, was wrong — but one of the reasons it was so bad is because it was preventing black people from receiving the fruits of superior New England culture.

In his talk “How to Be an Antiracist,” Kendi combined logic, humor, and moral suasion to powerful effect. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

“Following the Civil War, there were many well-meaning former abolitionists who were like, ‘We finally now have the ability to go down into the South and civilize some of these people.’ Probably some of your well-meaning ancestors went down there and did that” — albeit with antiracist motivations, as they rejected the racist notion that former slaves couldn’t be civilized because they were biologically inferior.

But in fact, Kendi said, slaves brought culture from Africa and developed culture in slavery (and elements from those cultures, obviously, remain vital in contemporary U.S. culture). If you want to be an antiracist, don’t judge other cultures by the standards of your own culture — that only creates a hierarchy in which other cultures can’t prevail.

Recognize behavioral equality. We’ve been trained to see blacks as dangerous, a stereotype supposedly supported by statistics that correlate high rates of violent crime, arrests, and incarceration with African Americans. But, as Kendi explained, rates of arrest and incarceration don’t correspond to rates of actual crime (thanks in part to prejudicial policies like racial profiling or sentencing guidelines that are effectively race-based).

As for violent crime, he pointed out that crime rates in middle- and upper-class black neighborhoods parallel their white equivalents: rates are much lower than in low-income areas. What high crime rates really correspond to, regardless of race, is poverty. To reduce violent crime, invest in job creation.

Practice an intersectional analysis of racism. “It’s nearly impossible to be an antiracist and not also be a feminist. It’s very difficult to be an antiracist and simultaneously be an elitist. It’s pretty much impossible to be an antiracist and also be homophobic,” Kendi says. In other words, racist thinking doesn’t have to apply to race — it can be racialized thinking that justifies prejudice against all manner of identities.

“What I’m saying ultimately is that when you think about antiracism, you should think not just about equality between racial groups — you should also think about equality between all of the racialized groups within your race and without.”

Kendi’s conclusion wasn’t surprising, but was certainly uplifting. “What becomes the activity of the antiracist?” he asked. “I would encourage each of you, when you look out at racial disparities, to see not what’s wrong with people, but what’s wrong with policies.”

The audience listens to author Ibram Kendi in �ֲ��ý’ Peter J. Gomes Chapel on Oct. 23. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

An overview of new faculty, and the look of �ֲ��ý’ future, from Dean of the Faculty Matt Auer

Matt Auer, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty — Thu, 22 Sep 2016 17:10:22 +0000

Dean of the Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs Matt Auer. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

At �ֲ��ý, we often try to imagine the college 25 or 50 years out. What �ֲ��ý looks like in the future is at least partially revealed each time we hire a new faculty member. Today’s new recruit may teach at �ֲ��ý through 2050 or beyond.

Our ability to peer into the future is especially sharp this year because we recently hired nine tenure-track faculty members who will make an impact on the curriculum and on scholarship across all of our intellectual divisions — that is, in the humanities, natural sciences and mathematics, social sciences, and interdisciplinary programs.

Carolina González Valencia is a great example of a new faculty colleague whose impact will likely be felt early and consequentially. She’s an expert in digital media and drawing. Her interest in areas like representations of migration, identity, and “nationlessness,” and her ability to teach students to inscribe their own understanding of these issues on paper, canvas, and film, will add major new intellectual thrusts to the work of the Department of Art and Visual Culture.

She is also the first Mellon Diversity and Faculty Renewal Postdoctoral Fellow at �ֲ��ý. In her first year, she enjoys the advantages of a postdoctoral fellowship before converting, automatically, into a tenure-track assistant professorship in 2017–18.

Patrick Otim is the second of our two new postdoc fellows. A historian, his expertise is in 19th- and 20th-century East Africa, focusing on intellectual history in the pre-colonial era.

We talk about “a college for coming times” in our mission statement, but Carolina’s and Patrick’s backgrounds, experiences, and expertise illustrate that the coming times are already here.

Patrick is joined in the history department by Wes Chaney, who adds breadth and depth to our increasingly strong social, historical, and humanistic perspectives on China. Wes’ work is at the intersection of the environment, society, and the law in China during the Qing Empire (1644–1911) with a special interest in historical China’s border areas.

Network Infrastructure Project Manager Kevin Poland, left, and Desktop Operations Analyst Matthew Thomas install components of �ֲ��ý’ new High Performance Computing Cluster at 65 Campus Ave. New members of the physics faculty have taken the lead in bringing the system to �ֲ��ý. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ��ý College)

Wes has an instant community of fellow intellectual travelers since he comes on board at �ֲ��ý at the same time that Mia Liu and Nathan Faries begin their shared assistant professorship in Asian studies. Mia is a history, art, and visual culture expert, focusing on China. Nathan’s research considers religion, particularly Christianity, in Chinese literature in the contemporary context. Both Mia and Nathan teach Chinese language and culture courses.

The trend of faculty renewal is boldly evident in the natural sciences, too. Andrew Kennedy, an organic chemist whose work has neurobiological and medicinal applications, is fortifying connections between our department of chemistry and our program in neuroscience. Kennedy is already a major force nationally in understanding cognitive dimensions of a rare, genetic disorder called Pitt-Hopkins Syndrome.

Andrew Mountcastle, a new assistant professor in biology, is exploring the boundaries between physics and anatomy in living creatures, particularly insects. His students can expect to learn everything about the secrets of insect flight, from biomechanical, locomotive, and physiological perspectives.

The trend of faculty renewal is boldly evident in the natural sciences, too.

Two new assistant professors in the Department of Physics and Astronomy are helping to boost �ֲ��ý to a new level of computing capability. Jeff Oishi is a computational astrophysicist whose specialty is fluid dynamics and whose laboratory is the cosmos, as he studies solar magnetism. His new colleague, Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic, uses supercomputers to understand the structure and behavior of supermassive black holes.

With Oishi taking the lead, �ֲ��ý is now installing its first High Performance Computing system — a scalable computer cluster that, for example, will allow the astrophysicists to crunch data-rich imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope. This increase in the size and sophistication of the college’s supercomputing resources will continue in dramatic fashion as the college makes hires in the new Digital and Computational Studies program this year, and next.

50 years ago: Ali, Liston, Lewiston, �ֲ��ý

Jay Burns — Fri, 22 May 2015 13:47:09 +0000

�ֲ��ý and �ֲ��ý people are part of the main event in media coverage ahead of the 50th anniversary of the famed Muhammad Ali vs. Sonny Liston boxing match, held in Lewiston on May 25, 1965.

The May 26, 1965, front page of the Lewiston Daily Sun (now the Sun Journal). The fight story refers to Ali as “Cassius M.A. Clay,” the media not yet agreeing to refer to the boxer as Muhammad Ali.

Six alumni are quoted or noted in by Harvey Araton of The New York Times: Al Harvie ’65, Peter Heyel ’65, Dick Rozene ’65, Bryan Carlson ’67, Tom McKittrick ’67 and John Jenkins ’74.

The Times story steps outside the ring to look at the social and cultural fabric of Lewiston, then and now. In the process, it talks about �ֲ��ý’ evolving relationship with the city, from being a disengaged “leafy oasis of privilege” in 1965 to a more robust community partner today.

Meanwhile, the Lewiston Sun Journal published a major commemorative print and online edition, “ the title referring to Ali’s lightning right jab, seen by few, that felled Liston midway through the first round.

Online, the Sun Journal‘s coverage includes a story by columnist Kalle Oakes, plus video clips, sharing the fight-night recollections by brothers Al Harvie ’65 and Keith Harvie ’68.

During the final week of May 1965, �ֲ��ý was in session — final exams were taking place — so a number of students found their way downtown to see, and sneak into, the fight at the Central Maine Youth Center, now the Androscoggin Bank Colisée.