“Great work, Hannah and Emma!”⁣

That jubilant shoutout came from geology professor Mike Retelle, who posted his congrats right after his honors thesis advisees, Hannah Johnson ’20 of Brewster, Mass., and Emma Wheeler ’20 of Paradis, Norway, submitted their geology theses.⁣

He also included a happy photo of Johnson and Wheeler in survival suits prior to their plunge into a Norwegian fjord last summer.

For �ֲ���ý seniors, the honors thesis is the pinnacle of academic achievement — never more so than this year, as seniors and their faculty advisers had to make the sudden move to remote learning due to COVID-19. Moved from the original March deadline, honors were due April 1.

Despite the disruption, there was continuity: �ֲ���ý professors supporting their advisees.⁣

“Beginning with field work in the Arctic, which involved hiking over rough terrain and riding in small rubber boats in all kinds of weather, Hannah and Emma have been incredibly great to work with — always positive and always thinking,” said Retelle. ⁣

Hannah Johnson ’20 and Emma Wheeler ’20 pose in survival suits during safety training at the University Centre in Svalbard, prior to the start of summer 2019 fieldwork, which entails travel by boat. They’re about to jump into the fjord to test their suits. ⁣(Photograph by Mike Retelle)

The two theses draw on fieldwork that Johnson and Wheeler conducted with Retelle and other scientists in Svalbard, Norway. The former’s thesis looks at “Late Glacial to Holocene Sea Level History of Kapp Linne, Svalbard.” The topic of the latter is “A Hydroclimate Reconstruction in the Changing High Arctic Environment, Linnédalen, Svalbard.”⁣

Johnson sampled boulders on old shorelines with a hammer and chisel to determine the ages of the shorelines and reconstruct sea level during the retreat of the last ice sheet, as the Svalbard ice sheet 20,000 years ago is an analog of what is happening in Antarctica and Greenland today.

“After she came back she worked at the University of Vermont to dissolve the rock samples in hydrofluoric and perchloric acid, wearing hazmat gear,” Retelle explains.

Meanwhile, Wheeler’s project entailed recovering samples from a glacial lake to reconstruct its hydrology. “Her fieldwork required hauling a mooring by hand over the gunnels of a Zodiac boat, and then recovering samples and electronics from the mooring,” Retelle says. 

During summer 2019 fieldwork in Svalbard, Hannah Johnson stands at an outcrop above Linnévatnet, a lake at Spitsbergen, Svalbard. The white quartzite behind her is pockmarked with weathering pits. (Photograph by Mike Retelle)

Wheeler remembers what inspired her to choose geology as a major: a single image.

“After my first year, I remember seeing a picture �ֲ���ý had posted of two students, one standing on the other’s shoulders, inspecting a small, strange-looking bucket on top of a three-legged structure.”

The caption, she recalls, “said something about students doing research in the High Arctic with Professor Mike Retelle. My immediate reaction was, ‘Wow, I want to go there and do that’ — even though I wasn’t even really sure what ‘that’ was!” (She now knows the photo depicted the weather station in the Linné Valley on Svalbard. The bucket records precipitation).

“He is always ready to talk about anything, sediment-related or not!”

“Emma and Hannah are also mentally tough — just ask their coaches,” said Retelle. Wheeler is a three-time NCAA champion with the rowing team and a French translator for a local program that provides legal services for asylum-seekers. Johnson is a swim captain who was part of the team’s record-setting 200-yard medley relay at this year’s NESCACs.⁣

Emma Wheeler ’20 (left) and Inger Marie Aasberg, a student at the University Centre in Svalbard, do geochemical analyses of their sediment cores last September at the R.B. Gilmore XRF lab at the University of Massachusetts. (Photograph by Mike Retelle)

Typically, seniors would upload their theses from the comfort of their campus residence or the library, then celebrate with friends. That part was missing this year, but not the pride of achievement.

“Submitting online from home was not how I envisioned how this project would end,” said Johnson. “But I am still really proud of this accomplishment and incredibly grateful for the thoughtful guidance from Mike throughout this whole process. Not being at �ֲ���ý and having face-to-face interactions was difficult, but Mike quickly replaced those with Zoom meetings.”

“Mike has been an incredible mentor,” Wheeler adds. “Not only has he shared his extensive knowledge of and experience in Arctic geology, but he is always ready to listen to new ideas or think through questions I have presented.

“He also really cares about his students, and is always ready to talk about anything, sediment-related or not!”

As part of his honors thesis, Nate Stephenson ’18 of Ellsworth, Maine, plays Everyman, a character from Nikolai Gogol’s 1835 short story “Diary of a Madman.” Senior Lecturer in Theater Katalin Vecsey adapted the play () so that it’s set in the present day.

Everyman could be any one of us, Stephenson says. “But he’s still one person. So you have to find how to play one person who can be anyone.”

Maddie McLean ’17 of Hood River, Ore., a double major in music and biochemistry, talks about her senior honors thesis, in which she explored how singers create different personae in love songs.

What is it, she asks, that makes these songs so powerful?

The late Edmund Muskie ’36 was born 100 years ago — March 28, 1914, to be exact.

With help from the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library, we celebrate this statesman’s 100th birthday by offering six things everyone should know about our 1936 alumnus and long-serving Maine governor, U.S. senator and U.S. secretary of state.

Among various Muskie remembrances this month was Muskie Archives director Pat Webber’s appearance on Maine public radio’s Maine Calling for “”

Here are six things to remember about Edmund Sixtus Muskie:

1. He was from a Maine family that was sending its first children to college

Edmund Muskie is at back left with his siblings and his mother, Josephine. (Photograph courtesy of the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

Ed Muskie was the son of Poland-born Stephen Marciszewski, who changed his name to Muskie when he emigrated to the U.S., and Josephine Cznarnecka, the daughter of a Polish-American family in Buffalo, N.Y.

Muskie’s father, a master tailor who owned a shop in Rumford, was outspoken in his support of Democratic Party ideology even though it conflicted with many of his customers’ Republican beliefs.

2. Politics and the role of government were on his mind at �ֲ���ý

Edmund Muskie ’36 (left) and Charles Taylor ’36 study in their freshman-year room in Roger Williams Hall. Muskie later lived in Parker Hall. (Photograph courtesy of Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

Muskie, then known as “Eddie,” lived in Roger Williams Hall and then in Parker Hall. He was president of his class, a standout debater, and graduated cum laude in 1936.

His honors thesis in history and government made two points: (1) the U.S. needed a comprehensive national system of social security, including health, unemployment and old-age insurance, and (2) the U.S. Constitution needed to be amended to give Congress the power to check the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review, since the court had shown its propensity to strike down similar New Deal legislation earlier in the 1930s.

With the Depression a vivid reality, Muskie wrote that “the individual, without aid, cannot protect himself against the inevitable hazards which are his destiny as a member of our modern order.”

3. He revived Maine’s Democratic Party

Edmund Muskie won the Maine governorship in 1954 thanks to hard campaigning and support from savvy advisers like Frank Coffin ’40 (right). In this 1956 photo, the “Muskie Coffin” sign refers to Muskie’s reelection as governor and Coffin’s being chair of the Maine Democratic State Committee. (Photograph courtesy of Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

In 1954, Maine Democrats were looking for a candidate to run for governor, and they recruited Muskie — but only after all other potential candidates declined.

A Democrat hadn’t been governor in nearly 20 years, and only one had been elected in the preceding 40 years.

Muskie was a weak candidate in more ways than one: He was still recovering from the physical and financial effects of a broken back suffered in 1953.

But Muskie won, thanks to hard campaigning, support from savvy advisers like Frank Coffin ’40 (above) and Don Nicoll, and an intimate knowledge of the state gained during his direction of the Office of Price Stabilization. The win gained national attention, and he appeared on a new morning TV show: NBC’s Today.

Although Maine remained a bastion of Republican politics through much of his career, Muskie nevertheless garnered 60 percent or more of the popular vote in each of his four senatorial elections.

4. He was called “Mr. Clean”

In this early 1960s image, U.S. Sen. Edmund Muskie ’36 and Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, with an unidentified park ranger, visit Maine’s Cadillac Mountain, located within Acadia National Park. (Photograph courtesy of Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

Muskie was the grandfather of modern environmental legislation. As a senator, he sponsored both the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, which fundamentally established our federal government’s duties to preserve and protect the environment.

On the floor of the Senate after Muskie’s death in 1996, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Montana, said that “because of the work of Ed Muskie, our children are growing up in a more healthy and beautiful America.”

5. He was targeted by Nixon’s “dirty tricks” in 1972

Popular memory holds that Muskie’s campaign collapsed after he allegedly teared up during a New Hampshire press conference, but the reasons are more complex, including dirty tricks by President Nixon’s Committee for the Reelection of the President. (Photograph courtesy of Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

A front-runner for the 1972 presidential nomination, Muskie and his campaign were targeted by Nixon’s Committee for the Reelection of the President and its program of “dirty tricks.” That included the so-called “Canuck Letter” — that accused Muskie of making derogatory remarks about Maine’s French-Canadian citizens.

It is thought that Muskie’s campaign floundered in New Hampshire after he reportedly teared up while delivering a withering criticism of the conservative Union Leader, which had published an unscrupulous attack on Muskie’s wife, Jane.

In her 2003 autobiography, Madeleine Albright, who worked for the 1972 Muskie campaign and later as a Senate staffer, said that “today a male politician who cried while defending his wife would probably go up in the polls.”

6. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom

In May 1980, Edmund Muskie ’36 is sworn in as U.S. secretary of state by his longtime friend and adviser, Frank Coffin ’40, a U.S. circuit judge at the time. Looking on are, from left, President Jimmy Carter; Muskie’s daughter, Ellen Muskie Allen; and his wife, Jane Muskie. (Bill Fitzpatrick/The White House, courtesy Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

In 1981, President Jimmy Carter awarded Muskie the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian award.

Years later, in his eulogy of Muskie, Carter said that of all the people he’d ever known, Muskie was the most qualified person to serve as president. However, he added, “I don’t believe that many presidents in history have contributed as much to the quality of life of people in our nation and around the world.”

Muskie once said that “there are only two types of politics. They are not radical or reactionary, or conservative and liberal, or even Democratic or Republican. They are only the politics of fear, and the politics of trust.”

Gil Crawford ’80 could handle the heat and dust. It was the inequality of the situation that ripped at his spirit.

It was 1986, and Crawford was a volunteer helping to run a Red Cross famine-relief operation Chad. After the yellow and white relief trucks rolled into a nomadic camp and the hungry people gathered around, Crawford and his team would begin dropping 100-pound bags of grain on the baked ground.

In return, a tribesman might offer a goat. “I’d accept it, to put a modicum of dignity into the relationship,” Crawford recalls. Otherwise, the relationship “was grotesquely undignified. And it was a grotesquely inefficient way of solving a problem.”

The episode culminated Crawford’s disenchantment with traditional top-down foreign aid. It also stoked his drive to find a sustainable way to help people out of poverty.

For Crawford, that quest ended in the 1990s as he embraced microfinance, often defined as very small loans (“microcredit”) given to entrepreneurs who otherwise aren’t “bankable” and can’t get traditional loans. The phenomenon is credited with lifting millions out of poverty worldwide.

“Microfinance is efficient, sustainable, and at its core a dignified relationship between the borrower and loan officer. It’s not one of a mendicant coming with a begging bowl,” says Crawford, who is now CEO of MicroVest Capital Management, founded in 2002 as the first U.S. firm to make private investments in microfinance institutions (MFIs) worldwide.

At the time of his sobering Red Cross experience back in 1986, in fact, Crawford was already prepping for a year-long international bank training program at Chase Manhattan. He owned a master’s in international studies from Johns Hopkins but knew that financial training was the key to his future economic development work.

“Gil was always a social-justice guy,” says fellow history major Rachel Fine Moore ’80, who worked with Crawford at �ֲ���ý on such political-action issues as a fight against a bottle-bill repeal effort. “But I remember thinking how unusual it was for a social activist to know that he needed financial training to achieve his goals.”

Martin Fisher, a childhood friend and fellow social entrepreneur, explains that Crawford’s late father, a banker, helped shape his son’s faith in capitalism. “Gil is a humanist but also a strong believer that private-sector money and business models can help people on a large scale,” says Fisher, who recalls the game nights — involving Risk, chess, poker — that his friend organized back home in Ithaca, N.Y.

Gil Crawford

“He’s also got an intellectual curiosity,” Rachel Moore continues. “I’m sure he could party with the best of them, but there was a whole intellectual component to what he was about.”

That intellect, and a certain dogged constancy of vision, is apparent when one considers that Crawford’s career is a straight line from his honors thesis, in which he explained how Sweden avoided violent working-class unrest during its late–19th century transition to democracy. Crawford suggested that the existence of many small businesses (farming, lumber, minerals), scattered across the country helped the working class stay connected socio-economically. As he wrote in 1980, presciently, “the development of rural economies can temper the problems inherent in modernization.”

Though he credits �ֲ���ý with teaching him to “really keep at something,” he’s always been a self-driven person. Take his tennis game. “I’m not the kind of guy who needs to force the ball down someone’s throat, but I do need to feel that I’ve played a good game.”

Crawford’s job is a bit ironic. He’s making money for wealthy investors, but that money comes from the world’s poor — the very people who Crawford wants to serve through microfinance. The cognitive dissonance hurts sometimes. “When I drive in from the Bogotá airport and see a family around a small fire, there’s a part of me that, even today, wants to ask the driver to stop so I can give them 50 bucks,” Crawford says. “That act would make me feel good, but it is not going to have any meaningful long-term impact.

“That’s what I struggle with in this work” — Crawford’s voice catches — “you dine in New York City with an investor who is enormously blessed with material wealth, and then travel abroad and experience the intrusion of poverty.”

Gil Crawford (left) visits Mongolia in 2004 to conduct due diligence on a microfinance institution, XAC Bank. At right is bank CEO Ganhuyag Ch.Hutagt; in middle are MFI clients. MicroVest made its initial investment in XAC, of $1.5 million, a few months later and has continued to provide financial capital since then.

This dichotomy is mirrored in a larger debate about the impact of private investment in MFIs. Ahlam Fakhar, a visiting professor of economics at �ֲ���ý, explains why some say it’s a bad idea.

When MFIs emerged, they got their loan money from donor-driven entities focused mostly on the social impact. As MFIs matured, they proved profitable, which has attracted private capital from firms like MicroVest. For example, say an MFI in Tajikistan charges a microcredit rate of 35 percent. If the various costs of making that loan are 20 percent, then 15 percent is left over, which the MFI can use to pay for loan funds and still remain profitable.

But, Fakhar cautions, remember that microfinance emerged only because the private market failed to provide poor people with affordable credit. “I’m pro-market,” she says, “but if the market failed the first time around, how are you going to sustain social responsibility this time?” In other words, as global capital surges toward MFIs, they in turn might begin to exclude the riskiest — read poorest — clients once again.

Crawford disputes such scenarios: “Commercial microfinance can lift the largest number of working poor out of poverty.” The riskiest and poorest who seek loans, he says, should be served by donor-driven MFIs helping to “push the frontier of microcredit.”

Private investment in MFIs, he believes, is actually the key to sustaining the microfinance phenomenon. “What MicroVest is about — and I’m getting excited here — is creating institutions that are part of the financial tissue of these societies,” he says. “And not just for 10, five, or four years until some aid project is finished. “We’re about building institutions that are going to be around for 500 years.”

By H. Jay Burns

Illustration by Marty Braun