Before their duel in The Princess Bride, the Man in Black says to Inigo Montoya, “Get used to disappointment.”

It would’ve been an apt forewarning to Democrats on election night.

Though many pundits predicted a blue-wave election for Democrats — gaining the presidency, more seats in the House, and perhaps a Senate majority — that turned out to be wishcasting. “It was a status quo election,” says Associate Professor of Politics John Baughman. “In a strange way, this actually looks a lot like 2016: Very little has really changed.”

In fact, he adds, “I think 2020 has revealed who we are as a country. It was not a dramatic, widespread repudiation of Trumpism. And if voters did shift away from Trump, it was not against the Republican Party but against Trump personally as president.”

If Biden wins the presidency — and, of course, depending on the outcome of the Georgia run-off elections — “he will likely have to govern with a Republican-controlled Senate,” Baughman added. “We’re going to have at least two years, and possibly four years or even more, of divided government. And it means that the optimistic goals of Democrats on the public policy front will have to be scaled way back.”

On Wednesday, Baughman offered insights into the election along with politics department colleagues Stephen Engel, Alyssa Maraj Grahame, Clarisa Pérez-Armendáriz as well as Stephanie Kelley-Romano of rhetoric, film, and screen studies. Their Zoom presentation was attended by well over 100 viewers.

It’s time to accept that voter behavior is not monolythic

Once again, the two major parties, especially Democrats, need to be reminded not to take for granted the voting habits of any group, said Grahame, a visiting professor of politics who made her point by sharing a conversation she had with a childhood friend on Election Day.

Her friend’s parents, Chinese immigrants, had voted for Obama and Clinton in prior presidential elections. This time, they and other Chinese American friends voted for Trump. “As immigrants, they would be targets of Trump’s particular brand of xenophobia,” said Grahame.

It’s the job of social scientists, she says, to ask questions like, “Under what conditions would it make sense for my friend’s parents to vote for Trump? From their perspective, how does Trump fit into their worldview?”

Turns out, her friend’s parents liked what they perceived as Trump’s tough-on-China attitude, feeling that Obama had allowed China to walk all over the U.S. “There are a lot of parallels between my friend’s struggles to understand her parents’ choice, and our collective struggle to make sense of the election.”

The message: “We shouldn’t be surprised to find out that voter demographics aren’t monoliths,” said Grahame. “There’s no voter demographic for whom either candidate enjoys exclusive support — and that would actually be troubling for democracy if that were the case.”

Pay attention to what the news is saying

As rhetoric from both campaigns ramps up in the post-election days, “it’s really important to pay attention to what the news outlets are saying, as opposed to what the spokespeople for the campaign’s are saying,” says Kelley-Romano, an associate professor of rhetoric, film, screen studies.

“Stick with the information that we have, because there’s going to be a lot of noise out there. I think the media is doing a good job at keeping that noise to a minimum.”

Pay attention to the difference between fanciful narratives and the rule of law

As we follow , it’s important to distinguish between partisan narratives (not to mention baseless conspiracy theories) and the rule of law.

Thus far, Trump’s attempt to say that some mail-in ballots are illegal or invalid “is a narrative framing,” says Engel. “There is literally no constitutional evidence for that claim, so I am skeptical of the lawsuits that are being brought thus far.”

At this point, Baughman believes Trump’s lawsuits declaring voter fraud are “unlikely to find success.” One reason is that the courts don’t want to toss the baby out with the bath water.

“In trying to possibly throw out bad ballots, they don’t want to throw out a lot of good ballots with the bad,” he says.

“There has to be some way for them to distinguish between the ballots that followed a correct process and those few that didn’t. In most cases that’s going to be impossible to do. They’ll be reluctant to throw everything out because that essentially throws out the integrity of the election.”

Election conspiracy theory may not gain traction (but will that matter?)

Though conspiracy theories abound, often pushed out by Trump himself, Kelley-Romano says the fact that Democrats didn’t do all that well in congressional elections might prevent conspiracy theory from gaining traction.

Indeed, says Baughman, in order for other Republican leaders to take on Trump’s call about election fraud means that those leaders would be undermining results in their own states, in some cases undermining elections they themselves ran.

So, says Kelley-Romano, “there are contradictions that will do a disservice to conspiracy theorists — but I never underestimate them. Trump will make a lot of noise — but already on Twitter, and even Fox News, there is a distancing from his rhetoric.”

Still, adds Engel, Trump’s baseless conspiracy attempts could affect a Biden presidency through “the political and rhetorical process of de-legitimizing. It is analogous but importantly distinct from Trump’s birtherism during the Obama presidency: Cast a cloud over Biden from the start in order to keep the Republican base aggrieved and motivated for 2022 and 2024.”

Our elected leaders should heed our own State Department

Hours after Trump falsely declared victory, the U.S. State Department issued a statement about the recent election in Côte d’Ivoire. It said, in part, “the U.S. calls on Côte d’Ivoire leaders to show commitment to the democratic process and the rule of law.”

“So there you go,” said Baughman. “Our own state department.”

We want clarity. Be prepared to be disappointed

Among Democrats, “there was great desire for this election to be an unambiguous repudiation of Trump’s America,” said Grahame. “But it’s almost definitely not going to be that. Our desire for clarity is its own critical failure. We all have to grapple with the fact that over 40 percent of American voters have said ‘yes’ to Trump’s America.”

“The dominant discourse about Trump — his racism and his authoritarianism — leaves us flummoxed about his apparent increased support, including among some non-white voters in certain areas. And we bemoan the extent of division in the United States.”

Rather than trying to dismiss or explain away the contradictions — by blaming low-information voters, wondering about swing voters, or saying that some voters can’t see what’s truly in their best interest — we should “instead confront the underlying systemic causes of such immense polarization.”

There are interesting outcomes everywhere.

Engel, a professor of politics, said much can be learned by looking at results outside the spotlight races. “There are some interesting outcomes, even if it’s a status quo election, even if there’s a lot of ambiguities.”

In Oregon, possessing small amounts of heroin or cocaine is now legal. Oregon also joined the District of Columbia in decriminalizing psychedelic mushrooms. And in New Jersey, Arizona, South Dakota, and Montana recreational marijuana use is now legal. Nearly a .

Engel said that “those are interesting outcomes from the perspective of legal nullification” — the legal theory that a state has the right to invalidate federal laws — “whereby the states are just ignoring federal criminal law with regard to drug possession and drug use.”

Also, in Colorado, a proposed measure that would eliminate abortion access after 22 weeks failed.

In terms of descriptive representation among newly elected officials, the election saw:

• In New York, Ritchie Torres and Mondaire Jones in the two houses of Congress. (Torres identifies as both Black and Latino, and will also be the first openly gay Latino member of Congress.)
  
• Cori Bush become the first Black woman elected to the House from the state of Missouri.

• The entire House delegation for the state of New Mexico be women of color.

• The number of Republican women voted to the House in this election be the most ever.

• Sarah McBride become the first trans woman elected to a state senate, in Delaware, making her the highest ranking openly transgender official in the country.

• At age 25, Madison Cawthorne, from North Caroline, become the youngest Republican ever to be elected to the House he is 25. (He’s the first person born in the 1990s elected to Congress.)

Some likely voters may not be playing ball with pollsters

While polls were criticized after 2016 due to failures to predict key states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, they still do a very good job, says Baugham. Again this year, the national polls seemed to be pretty much on target, “though we can’t really yet say whether the polling was off at the state level.”

But there might be an emerging systemic problem with polling, in how some likely voters might be refusing to play ball with pollsters.

“It’s a genuine concern, about voters who distrust the media and distrust pollsters. And if those distrustful voters are more likely to be Trump voters than not, then it would mean that we’re undercounting them.”

“But I’m not convinced that we need to dump on the pollsters just yet because I think by the time we get to the end of the count, I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up being pretty close to what they were projecting.”

Voting in Maine still reflects that ‘politics is local’

Maine voters criss-crossed party lines during the 2020 election, defying the trend in other states, where races are guided by the highly partisan national political landscape. “State and even local races are increasingly reactions to the national parties,” Baughman said.

Maine has been mostly immune to that trend, where, to paraphrase the, politics is still local, and less along strict party lines. “There seems to have been a much higher rate of old traditional split-ticket voting in Maine than then we’ve seen in other states,” said Baughman

For example, Democratic Rep. Jared Golden ’11 probably got support from Trump voters to win his second term representing the state’s rural 2nd District in Congress. Viewed as very vulnerable, incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins probably to support from Biden voters to retain her seat.

The Republican Party is expanding its base

“Trump seems to have increased support among a number of demographics, including non-white men, in certain places,” says Grahame. “It’s interesting because it’s not particularly consistent with the Republican Party’s approach to elections. He seems to have expanded his support from some demographics almost despite himself.”

In Florida and Texas, there’s strong evidence that .

Which is no surprise to Baughman, who says there were warning signs that the Biden campaign “had not done enough, with the right kind of outreach, to Latinx voters in various states, while Trump was investing in such efforts,” in south Florida, the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, and other places.

Democrats didn’t quite believe that Trump could be successful with Latinx voters. “There was a degree of complacency,” said Baughman. “Because of the politics — around the border, immigration, and other factors —  Democrats sort of took for granted that Latinx voters are going to oppose Trump. That was clearly a mistake.”

Some voters’ ‘political socialization’ is still ongoing

The process of how we develop our political habits and perspectives is called “political socialization.” Some Americans, such as immigrants, develop their political socialization differently than other citizens, explains Clarisa Pérez-Armendáriz, an associate professor of politics.

For example, research shows that for Latinx voters, political socialization is not handed down by older family members, so they don’t have the “my grandfather was a Republican so I’m a Republican” experience.

Instead, their socialization can be active and ongoing, occurring “through their American experience,” says Pérez-Armendáriz. And since their American experience is ongoing, their voting habits can also be more fluid.

“While some issues that Latinx voters care about will align with the Democratic party, they can be persuaded to be on one side or the other more than other voters might be.”

In some states, there may have been a COVID backlash

Though some states’ aggressive pandemic policies, such Maine’s, have saved lives, some citizens in those states may have nevertheless voted for Trump as a protest against shutdown measures. “Shutdowns have been effective,” Pérez-Armendáriz says. “But that doesn’t mean they haven’t been extremely harmful to people in ways that affect how they vote.”

For example, some voters were disproportionately affected by shutdowns — not because they had to keep working in essential jobs that might be dangerous but because they could not work. “I never heard any Latinx laborers, for example, say, ‘What I would prefer is to not have work.’”

Pérez-Armendáriz says such protested voting may have occurred elsewhere, mentioning rural Maine, where during the spring and summer one saw many signs on vehicles and front yards with vulgarities directed at Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, clear if blunt responses to the state shutdown.

COVID may have helped Republican campaigning

“There’s a strong belief in campaigns that on the ground, face-to-face interaction is incredibly important,” says Grahame.

Yet, for reasons related to the pandemic, the Democrats scaled back their on-the-ground canvassing, while Republicans still pursued in-person campaigning and in-person rallies, including in South Florida, leaving “Democrats to work overtime to try to figure out ways to substitute for that.” Digital and social-media efforts can help, but they’re not a substitute.

Going forward, “which campaign did a better job getting out the vote during a pandemic will be one of the really important areas of study,” says Baughman.

It may not be ‘the economy, stupid’ anymore

In 1992, Bill Clinton’s campaign hammered away at President Bush by pointing out the national recession. “It’s the economy, stupid,” was strategist James Carville’s comment, meant to highlight the the need to stay on message.

“The idea was that the average voter would look at their own experience in the economy, give credit or blame to the parties, and vote accordingly,” said Baughman. “But as our party affiliations have become more calcified, we become more impervious to changes in the economy.

“As a discipline, political science needs to reassess how we think of economic factors, at least in the context of American elections in the face of this kind of high party polarization.”

A selection of recent mentions of �ֲ���ý and �ֲ���ý people in the news media.

Therí Pickens and Stephanie Kelley-Romano

That racist Kamala Harris birther conspiracy is nothing new — Wired

Wired turned to two �ֲ���ý professors to explain what’s going on with the conspiracy theories about Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

“[Harris] could show us a home video of her being born and it wouldn’t matter now. Rhetoric doesn’t have to be accurate to be effective.”

Whether such theories, such as the birther one about Harris, are true or not is not the point, says Professor of English Therí Pickens, whose areas of expertise include African American cultural studies.

“[Harris] could show us a home video of her being born and it wouldn’t matter now. Rhetoric doesn’t have to be accurate to be effective,” she told reporter Emma Grey Ellis, who noted that the rhetorical strategies being used, conspiracy theorizing and appeals to racism, “have been handed down from generation to generation for hundreds of years while remaining largely unchanged.”

And why are there so many conspiracy theories? Because they work, and are particularly effective in the political arena.

“Conspiracy is always a way to cause doubt,” says Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies Stephanie Kelley-Romano, who is teaching the course “Presidential Campaign Rhetoric” this fall. When people have doubt, they’re harder to mobilize. “People stay home.”

• Read the story: “” Wired, Aug. 19, 2020

Ayesha Sharma ’18

Civil death: How millions of Americans lost the right to vote — The Guardian

In a powerful historical overview of how America has disenfranchised millions of citizens, Ayesha Sharma ’18 explores the concept of  “civil death…a form of punishment that extinguishes someone’s civil rights.”

Civil death has been “reshaped and reinterpreted over many generations, persisting in the form of felony disenfranchisement, through which a citizen loses their right to vote due to a felony conviction.”

Some six million Americans “cannot vote in the country’s elections because of some form of civil death,” Sharma writes. Restricting the number of people who can vote in elections “goes back to the colonies” in its racist underpinnings. “It’s a history that has disproportionately affected black people.”

• Read the story: “” The Guardian, Aug. 7, 2020

J.J. Cummings ’89

Memories and a mission: USS Gerald R. Ford marks 9/11 while proving it can perform at sea — Daily Press

“Capt. J.J. Cummings, out at sea on USS Gerald R. Ford for this Sept. 11, can’t help thinking of another 9/11 — that awful morning 19 years ago,” writes reporter Dave Ress of the Daily Press of Newport News, Va.

Now commander of the Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, Cummings was a young naval aviator in 2001, about to deploy to the Middle East. At home, he saw the second plane hit the South Tower. “I didn’t know it then, but I watched, live, as two of my friends died,” Cummings told Ress.

One was Peter Goodrich ’89, who lived next door to Cummings in Smith Hall their first year at �ֲ���ý. The second was a former squadron-mate, Brian Sweeney.

In 2001, Cummings and his squadron were training for close-support missions. “We thought we were just checking a box,” never to need the skills in battle. But 9/11 changed that mindset. Deployed to the Middle East, Cummings flew close-support missions for months over Afghanistan.

• Read the story: “” — Daily Press, Sept. 10, 2020

�ֲ���ý College Museum of Art

�ֲ���ý compiling complete catalog of Marsden Hartley’s paintings and drawings — Portland Press Herald

Press Herald reporter Bob Keyes notes that “a comprehensive accounting of all the paintings and drawings of modernist painter and Maine native Marsden Hartley has never been completed.”

The �ֲ���ý College Museum of Art “aims to change that,” he says, “and has turned to noted Hartley expert and Portland art historian Gail R. Scott to lead the effort.” Still, he adds, “it’s a massive undertaking.”

• Read the story: “” Portland Press Herald, Aug. 16, 2020

Grace Ingabire ’19

There’s more to dance than entertainment — The New Times

The New Times of Rwanda profiled Grace Ingabire ’19, who graduated with a dance major and is now “using her art as a means for change.”

Ingabire is a project manager at BeneDico, a Rwandan consulting firm that is supporting efforts to showcase and preserve traditional Rwandan dance.

“We believe that our traditional dances sometimes get modified because they are not being performed by the original culture,” she says. “So the objective of the project is to preserve these dances and promote local dancers in different parts of the country.”

• Read the story: The New Times, July 2, 2020

Mara Tieken

The pandemic has magnified the winners and losers in Maine’s educational system — Maine Things Considered

Speaking to Maine Public’s radio program Maine Things Considered earlier in the summer, Associate Professor of Education Mara Tieken noted how the pandemic is illuminating how powerfully class lines are shaping students’ learning experiences.

“Wealthier districts and wealthy private schools are typically able to offer more instruction with more rigorous and engaging learning experiences than poorer districts can offer right now,” she said.

“But it’s also about a student’s home situation, where wealthier families might be more likely to have a parent at home who’s not working, who can support the student’s online learning. Or maybe they’re more likely to have multiple laptops or devices so that siblings can actually work simultaneously on schoolwork, or they’re more likely to have strong and consistent internet access.”

• Listen to the story: “,” Maine Things Considered, July 14, 2020

Shirl Penney ’99

Shirl Penney: The Power of Scale — ���������Dz�’s

In a Q&A profile with ���������Dz�’s, Shirl Penney ’99 explained how his groundbreaking firm, Dynasty Financial Partners, provides the soup-to-nuts services that independent investment firms require, while still emphasizing the brokers’ independence.

“We felt that any time you take an entrepreneur and turn them into an employee, bad things happen,” he said. “The key distinction is we work for the adviser, the adviser doesn’t work for us.”

Dynasty is a service platform for independent investment advisers — ones that aren’t tethered to a firm like Wells Fargo or Morgan Stanley — that’s now used by more than 200 advisers at 47 firms with $50 billion in client assets.

Among other topics, Penney predicts that the pandemic will fundamentally change the value of place in the investment experience. “If you think back 20 years ago, it was all about big mahogany offices. You had to show strength to bring clients in,” Penney says.

“That’s been turned completely upside down. We have some clients now who I think will go completely virtual once their leases are up. At a minimum, I think firms are going to decrease their footprint.”

• Read the story: “” ���������Dz�’s, Aug. 28

Sam Mironko ’21

How the camera has advanced the BLM movement — Ebony

“It’s important that we take a moment to take a look at…some of the young creatives behind the scenes” of the Black Lives Matter movement who have a “special talent with the camera,” writes Paige Rabb ’20 for Ebony.

Rabb’s select list includes Sam Mironko ’21 of Belmont, Mass., noting his stunning photography from his winter 2020 semester abroad in Ghana. 

Mironko, says Rabb, is motivated “to keep pushing for Black visibility and the legitimization of Black photographers’ work,” she says. “Mironko believes that the best way to continue to support Black creatives is to get involved with them…and allow their voices to be heard.”

• Read the story: “” Ebony, Aug. 25, 2020

Jason Castro

Cracking the neural code with phantom smells — Scientific American

Associate Professor of Neuroscience Jason Castro shows his chops for writing for a lay audience in Scientific American by explaining new research that “used precisely controlled pinpoints of light to , bypassing the nose altogether.”

The study, he writes, is “one of the most audacious and systematic efforts at ‘experience hacking’ yet.”

Why pinpoints of light? Because the researchers were using genetically modified mice with a light-sensitive protein “smuggled into their olfactory neurons,” explains Castro. “When light shines on one of these modified neurons, it evokes neural activity — the brief electrical “spikes” that are the basic language of the nervous system — with timing that can be exquisitely controlled.”

The paper, he adds, is an “unprecedentedly granular look at what, in the brain, makes a given experience that particular experience. The answer, at least in the context of olfaction, has a humanistic ring to it: an experience is a matter of timing and the sum of many small particulars.”

• Read the story: “,” Scientific American, Aug. 11, 2020

Noelle Chaddock

Beyond the protests, what meaningful actions can people take for racial justice? — Maine Calling

Vice President for Equity and Inclusion Noelle Chaddock, speaking to Maine Public’s Maine Calling program, explained the power and value of the term “anti-racist.”

“I have a strong preference for the term ‘anti-racism’ over terms like ‘racial equity,” Chaddock said. “Anti-racism centers the thing, it centers the problem, it centers the behavior, and it names the people who are responsible for fixing that behavior…. Anti-racism calls us to look at the very specific action, 400 years’ worth, that white folks need to grapple with and deconstruct.”

• Listen to the story: “” Maine Calling, Aug. 13, 2020

Richard Gelles ’68

Richard Gelles, scholar of family violence, dies at 73 — The New York Times

The New York Times published a featured obituary for Richard Gelles ’68, who taught at and was dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice, noting that he “was one of the world’s leading scholars of family violence and child welfare.”

In the 1990s, Gelles was initially an ardent defender of “family preservation, the practice of reuniting biological parents with their children even if they had abused them. But after studying the horrific deaths of many children at the hands of their parents…Dr. Gelles did an about-face,” says reporter Katharine Seelye.

“He took his outrage to Washington…and helped draft landmark legislation that affirmed that the safety of a child should supersede attempts to reunite a family.”

As one expert said, “Rich’s critique of the child welfare system not only indelibly shaped public policy…but his work protected and saved the lives of innumerable children.”

• Read the Story: “” The New York Times, July 25, 2020

Josh Redd ’21

Uncommon schools summer program trains future Brooklyn teachers — Kings County Politics

“We need more Black male educators,” Josh Redd ’21 told Kings County Politics.

A graduate of an Uncommon charter high school in Brooklyn, N.Y., Redd originally wanted to be a doctor, but through summer experiences, including an Uncommon-sponsored teacher program where he was “surrounded by students eager to learn, he realized he wanted to ‘be part of something’ and to serve students in the community he grew up in.”

• Read the story: “” Kings Point Politics, Aug. 13, 2020

Nick Mazuroski ’09

$26 million solar farm to benefit Milo and Maine electricity consumers — Bangor Daily News

Construction of a large solar farm in Milo will feature 67,000 solar panels and produce enough energy for 5,430 homes, according to developers who include Nick Mazuroski ’09, director of BNRG Maine, a co-development partner with Dirigo Solar of Portland.

The power produced from the solar farm will be sold to Versant, northern Maine’s electricity provider. “It’s going to directly benefit Maine homeowners, ratepayers, anyone that uses the standard-offer program in the state,” Mazuroski said.

BNRG Renewables and Dirigo Solar have 10 projects under way or scheduled for construction in eight Maine communities.

• Read the story: “,” Bangor Daily News, Aug. 30, 2020

Sam Nader ’43

“Thirst for professional baseball in Oneonta quenched in 1965” — The Daily Star

The Daily Star of Oneonta, N.Y., told the story of how then-Mayor Sam Nader ’43 brought professional baseball back to the city in 1965 after the city’s prior professional team had folded in 1951.

A 1965 Star story quoted then-editor Frank Perretta, who said of Nader, “Sam is an old-time pitcher. He pitched in high school, at �ֲ���ý College, and at Hartwick College. And since he took office four years ago he has been pitching for a minor league team in Oneonta.”

Nader landed a Class A affiliate of the Boston Red Sox for the 1966 season, which then became a Yankees affiliate in 1967 and then a Detroit Tigers affiliate. The team decamped for Norwich, Conn., in 2010.

• Read the story: “” The Daily Star, Aug. 25, 2020

Elizabeth Leavitt Nemirovsky ’88

Raising awareness and hope, Rosie the COVIDitor said, ‘We Can Do It!’ — The Bedford Citizen

Last spring, Elizabeth Leavitt Nemirovsky ’88 reimagined the iconic World War II–era Rosie the Riveter poster as a pandemic-era call to defeat the virus, showing a masked “Rosie the COVIDitor” using her well-muscled arm and fist to smash the coronavirus.

The Bedford Citizen reported how Nemirovsky created her poster as “Bedford’s COVID-19 lockdown moved from March into April and her mother entered hospice care, forcing her to quit her job.”

Initially, Nemirovsky placed the poster in a window facing the sidewalk as encouragement to the neighborhood’s growing number of walkers in the early days of the pandemic. “Rosie was an easy choice as far as an image to start with,” Nemirovsky told the Citizen. “The fun really began when I started to imagine her ka-POWing COVID.”

Later, she mounted her creation on posterboard and hauled it on her own walks of some 500 miles to raise money for a number of nonprofits, including the Greater Boston Food Bank.

• Read the story: “” — The Bedford Citizen,” Sept. 7, 2020

Sam Francis ’17

Bengals rely on one-man analytics department to make the team smarter and stronger — WCPO

“I tell people I’m the same as any analyst at any company, but my focus is football,” Francis told reporter Keenan Singleton of television station WCPO in Cincinnati.

“That can span from the roster to the draft, game management, game planning, studying opponents. We have the data available like any company does that pertain to what they do. Based on whatever question or problem we’re trying to solve, I’ll study that.”

Said Bengals head coach Zac Taylor, “He’s got a big book of information that he knows how to process a lot better than I do. I don’t hear his voice on game day. I hear it through one of the coaches, but I know there’s a lot of dialogue there.”

• Read the story: “” WCPO, Aug. 17, 2020

After a summer where endless rounds of pandemic planning and announcements seemed to define the college enterprise, �ֲ���ý’ Opening Convocation on Sept. 1 offered welcome reminders of what we’re all about.

Presented via livestream, most of the event’s speakers delivered their remarks from otherwise mostly empty Olin Arts Center Concert Hall. 

At the lectern, there was President Clayton Spencer, using the moment as a bully pulpit to affirm the power and purpose of the liberal arts in the face of rolling national crises. 

Two student leaders, Perla Figuereo ’21 and Lebanos Mengistu ’21, shared the stage, from a safe physical distance, and spoke candidly to their fellow students about how to be their best selves at �ֲ���ý.

Professor Stephanie Kelley-Romano and Professor Charles Nero, two senior members of the faculty, shared personal stories and hard-earned wisdom in service to the institution and its students.

And, at the end there was a gentle reminder of the daunting shared challenge �ֲ���ý faces this fall as Multifaith Chaplain Brittany Longsdorf, told the community that “we are called to care for one another and this �ֲ���ý Community in ways never asked of us before.”

President Spencer

In past years, only rain has driven Opening Convocation indoors. This year, the pandemic drove the event not only inside, to the Concert Hall, but its viewing audience to their laptops, phones, and desktop computers around campus and the world.

Spencer offered greetings to faculty and staff, thanking them for months of “extraordinary work…to adapt literally every aspect of life and work at the college.”

To returning students: “We have missed you terribly.”

And to the Class of 2024, she shared a “fervent hope that when you graduate in May 2024, we will all be gathered in person with your families and loved ones on a glorious sunny morning on the Historic Quad.”

“If we substitute ideology for expertise, we lose our bearings.”

Then it was on to brass tacks: “the liberal arts in the age of COVID” and her thoughts on a summer that confronted us all, “repeatedly and relentlessly, with police killings of Black people and the ongoing devaluation of Black lives.

“These are deeply distressing times for anyone who cares about our country and our fellow human beings. But these are particularly heavy times for the Black, Indigenous, and Brown students, faculty, and staff who are members of our community.”

The stumbling national response to the pandemic, she said, has forced us to learn yet again, “through bitter experience, that if we don’t get the science right, we won’t get the economics right. If we substitute ideology for expertise, we lose our bearings. Without a commitment to facts and evidence, we abandon the fundamentals of discourse, debate, and meaning making.”

“This causes us to get policy wrong and hurt people. It causes us to substitute violence for persuasion. Dealing with the challenges posed by the wicked problems we are up against depends on highly specific expertise, but it requires, in equal measure, the ability to take in information from various domains and form integrated frameworks to guide policy and action.”

Charles Nero and Stephanie Kelley-Romano

Reflecting tradition, the faculty speakers at Opening Convocation are selected by the prior year’s graduating class. It’s a “gift from the Class of 2020 to the Class of 2024,” said Spencer, adding that the 2020 graduates “chose brilliantly.”

Both members of the Department of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies, Nero is the college’s Benjamin E. Mays ’20 Distinguished Professor who studies race and American cinema, queer studies, and African American literature. Kelley-Romano is an associate professor who studies television, conspiracy theories, and presidential campaign rhetoric.

Delivering a recorded Zoom-style talk (Nero from his Pettengill Hall office, Kelley-Romano from home), the pair spoke about the importance of being able to pivot in challenging times, “with adeptness or adroitness” said Kelley-Romano.

Nero described his own pivot as a student. He was drawn to speech communications, specifically rhetoric and public address as he came of age in the American South in the era when the Civil Rights and Black Power movements “transformed the meaning of citizenship for African Americans.”

“White supremacy and anti-blackness metaphorically slapped me in the face every semester.”

Yet, he recalled, he was guided away from elevating Black voices by teachers while he was doing graduate work. A “leading professor of American public address and oratory asked me, ‘Why are you interested in writing about Blacks? Hasn’t everything been written about them?’”

Another professor discouraged Nero from writing about African Americans in 20th century progressive politics because “he was only encouraging his graduate students who were ‘mainstream and central.’”

Seeing how the traditional field of speech communication was aligned with “white supremacy and anti-blackness…metaphorically slapped me in the face every semester.” 

Nero pivoted away from traditional speech communication studies, “to African American studies (he is a member of the college’s Africana program) and, especially toward literary and film studies. I embraced Audre Lorde’s famous pronouncement that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

Though he never left speech communication completely behind — “I still believe that language and its performance are crucial for a democracy” — democracy also requires a commitment to social justice that strives to be inclusive and equitable. “The majors I have been most involved in here at �ֲ���ý emphasize social justice as crucial components for an undergraduate education.”

Kelley-Romano talked about her experience as a first-generation college student and feelings of shame that initially haunted her during her journey.

“In high school, my guidance counselor told me I was ‘not college material’ primarily, I think now, because my family didn’t have the ‘means’ of many of my classmates. So, my academic journey started in community college.”

“Maya Angelou has a quote: ‘We do the best we can with what we know, and when we know better we do better.’  But at that point, I didn’t know any better.” 

Like Nero, Kelley-Romano “did a lot of pivoting”: away from sports, away from one major to another and then another. “I made myself dizzy pivoting between loving lip-gloss and all things pink and simultaneously hating the mass-mediated messages about how I ‘should’ behave and what I ‘should’ want as a woman.”

Her identity, or what she called the performance of her identity, was under scrutiny by multiple audiences “and for the life of me I could not get it right. Maya Angelou has a quote: ‘We do the best we can with what we know, and when we know better we do better.’  But at that point, I didn’t know any better.” 

It wasn’t until graduate school that this shifted. Studying rhetoric and the power of language “prompted me to pivot my attention to critique not only the consequences of calling someone a ‘victim’ vs. a ‘survivor’ but the larger systems and their entrenched histories that put the onus on girls to ‘not distract’ boys with tight clothing, to act ‘like a lady,’ and accept that ‘boys will be boys.’”

Looking back, she said, the ability to “pivot between text and context, between exigence and audience, has made me a better scholar, teacher, and citizen.”

Kelley-Romano also spoke as a person in recovery, who has cringed “watching the invariably oversimplified depiction of alcoholism and addiction on television and in film.”

But over the years, �����’s seen and continues to track the role of language in reframing addiction, “from a ‘moral weakness’ to ‘chemical dependency’ and now to ‘a person with substance mis-use disorder.’” Each iteration of naming, she said, “redefines the agent and attempts to decrease stigma.”

As they concluded their shared talk, Nero and Kelley-Romano offered a Convocation staple: advice to the first-years. She urged the Class of 2024 to get out of their comfort zones, while Nero told them not to be afraid of getting messy as they venture into the unknown.

“Messiness is the beginning of what the late Congressman John Lewis called ‘good trouble,’�ĝ Nero said. “We know you have been taught how to write the best five-paragraph essay ever. We know you can recite facts and follow formulas. But now we want you to follow your heart, informed by your head to create new ways of thinking and being in the world.”

Perla Figuereo ’21 and Lebanos Mengistu ’21

“We want to address how difficult this year has been for many folks,” Mengistu said. “Especially for Black people. We want you all to know that we see you, we hear you, and we stand with you. The injustice that Black folks have faced and continue to face is a challenge on and off campus.”

Student to students, they gave advice.

About academics: “Take a class that interests you, one that you could have never imagined yourself taking,” said Figuereo. 

About social life: “Although it can be overwhelming at first, try to connect with your classmates and peers. Try to learn something from everyone you meet. Everyone has a story,” said Mengistu.

And about personal life: “Be comfortable with failure,” said Figuero. “Seek a balance. Be OK with saying no and yes to things when you feel it’s right. Let yourself fall in love with the new things in your life.” 

Brittany Longsdorf

Whew. After all that advice and insight, it was time for the benediction and a “collective, centering breath, ” said Multifaith Chaplain Rev. Brittany Longsdorf. “Let us sense the sacred, deep togetherness that only pilgrimaging through unknown territory such as this can bring.”

Her final words:  “We are called to care for one another and this �ֲ���ý Community in ways never asked of us before. May we rise to the occasion with compassion and courage.

“May it be so.”

It may be cold comfort in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, but within disasters there are ultimately lessons that benefit humanity.

At �ֲ���ý, in fact, the name of an environmental studies course reflects this reality. Taught by Jane Costlow, Clark A. Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies, “Catastrophes and Hope” scrutinizes how disaster narratives can serve us.

Including, in a way, lessons about our expectations from narrative itself. Costlow led the course this winter as the catastrophe of COVID-19 tightened its grip — a catastrophe that, as Costlow and her students discussed one day, is all the more disturbing because we have little idea of how it will ultimately play out.

In other words, unlike hurricanes or earthquakes, COVID-19 thus far is defying our sense that many disasters, like novels or films, have a plot arc.

In that way, the pandemic reminded Costlow of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which was a topic of that class discussion. In the midst of the pandemic, she said, we’re “far away from having a sense of a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

Costlow is not the only member of the �ֲ���ý faculty who is watching COVID-19 and wondering what it has to teach us in terms of what we believe, how we feel and respond, and how we get along. Meet a few more:

Stephanie Kelley-Romano, Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies

For Kelley-Romano, a rhetoric scholar known for her research into conspiracy theories, the noise around COVID-19 may be too much of a professional opportunity.

Conspiracy theorizing is as old as humanity, but “what’s most different about COVID-19 is the audience,” Kelley-Romano says. “We’re all stuck at home, all on lockdown, and that’s around the world. And we have this ‘infodemic,’ this glut of information about the virus.

“Of course, people want to know what causes it, what could potentially prevent or cure it, where did it start, why is it here?” — questions that are like an open cash register to the conspiracy spinners. “And what’s different is that we’re all just available to look on our phones for obscene amounts of time.”

Another difference is the universal reach of the virus. “When we have something that so broadly affects all members of our community in such dramatic ways, it really shakes people up and makes the grasping for information to anchor ourselves more desperate,” Kelley-Romano says.

Which primes people to believe things that, in normal times, they would reject as ridiculous. “And the degree to which people stay engaged on the internet with news seems to me to be inversely proportionate to their actual emotional health,” she adds. In short, she advises, limit your screen time and don’t share conspiracy theories, even just for laughs.

From a Chinese lab being the origin of the virus, to 5G cell phone technology being a vector for it, to cow urine as a cure for it, the pandemic has produced a bumper crop of conspiracy theorizing. Unless she’s working and deliberately thinking about politics and rhetoric, Kelley-Romano finds it helpful to filter her consumption of mainstream news. “I do that only when I cook meals and I’m semi-distracted. I just trust that what I get will be enough.”

Lillian Nayder, Professor of English

“Like so many of the people around us, writers and artists are responding to the pandemic with creativity and with compassion,” Nayder says. “Literary representations will no doubt help us to understand the inequities and injustices underscored by the pandemic, as well as the connections that it has fostered and exposed.”

Looking ahead, she continues, “scholars who study ‘the literature of COVID-19’ will help us grasp the meanings of the disease in cultural, social, and artistic terms — meanings which are already emerging in the medical context of the disease and our efforts to contain it.”

Nayder’s own teaching models that scholarly imperative. Her two courses that examine relationships among literature, empathy, and medicine, she says, are “closely tied to our current crisis and our ways of responding to it — not only in terms of the panic and anxiety generated by the pandemic, but also in terms of the creativity, narrative and otherwise, that it is inspiring.

“In particular, the humanity — and the vulnerability — of medical practitioners who have stories to tell about their patients, themselves, and their families have really come to the forefront.

“These stories of loss, of suffering, of sacrifice, recovery, and love foreground the power and value of what we are calling ‘the medical humanities,’ and our understanding of our own corporeality more generally as well.”

Nayder follows The New York Times’ continuing portraits of people touched by COVID-19, “as well as the political dimensions of the pandemic,” she says.

“And, of course, I’m learning from the stories and experiences that my students are relaying as we’ve been meeting remotely” for her course “The Arctic Sublime,” which looks at 19th-century perceptions of the Arctic — a literature “with its own representations of fear, physical duress, and feelings of awe.”

As events unfold, Nayder continues, “my questions involve the ideas of ‘normalcy’ that the pandemic has raised: What is ‘normal’? When and how — and should — we return to it?”

Cassandra Shepard, Visiting Assistant Professor of Africana

“My research is on disaster,” Shepard says bluntly. Specifically, this New Orleans native examines the impact of settler colonialism — the systematic replacement of an existing population with settlers from away — on the rebuilding of her home town after Hurricane Katrina.

(Long after the 2005 storm and subsequent flooding, many longtime NOLA residents were stranded in cities where they’d taken refuge, clearing the way for a variety of new people — colonizers, really — to take their places.)

“I think about settler colonialism as a disaster,” Shepard explains. “And as a matter of fact, I consider it the disaster that creates more disaster.”

In August 2005, New Orleans residents, hauling what belongings they can, line up to enter the Superdome in advance of Hurricane Katrina. (Marty Bahamonde/FEMA)

In other words, the legacies of racial, economic, and civic injustice left by settler colonialism constitute a slow-motion, mundane kind of misery that gets noticed only when a more-newsy catastrophe comes to call.

Cassandra Shepard, Visiting Assistant Professor of Africana. (Marshanda Smith)

“The things that we think are disastrous are really just an additional cataclysm,” she says. “We’re already existing in a state of disaster — I would consider it perpetual disaster. Then we get a spike, an unusual cataclysm — that could be a hurricane, that could be coronavirus, it could be different things….These spikes really reveal what was already there.”

Shepard sees strong parallels between a phenomenon like COVID-19 and the dominance in recent decades of so-called neoliberalism, the privileging of private-sector over public interests in government activity.

COVID-19, similarly to neoliberalism, “perpetuates inequality,” Shepard says.

“We see how hard it’s hitting communities of color,” as well as unemployed, precariously employed, and undocumented workers — people ineligible for stimulus funds even though they may be doing work that’s now considered essential. “The people who were the most vulnerable are still the most vulnerable.”

In New Orleans’ 9th Ward, houses and automobiles are in piles after Hurricane Katrina. (Photograph by Infrogmation)

A disaster like the coronavirus places a certain obligation on scholars like Shepard. “One of the ways that we can show people that what we’re doing is valuable to their reality today is by engaging with disaster and showing what people don’t know,” she says — “helping people to make sense of what’s happening around them.”

Justine Wiesinger, Assistant Professor of Japanese

Wiesinger has conducted extensive research into the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent nuclear disaster in Japan’s Tōhoku region. Specifically, she studies how that catastrophe and others are represented in film and theater (indirectly inspired by the Tōhoku events, her play Waters Rise premiered in 2019).

Members of a fire and rescue team from the U.S. head into downtown Ofunato, Japan, to search for survivors following the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. (Photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Matthew Bradley)

She had planned to bring a Short Term class to Japan this year, so Wiesinger has followed the progress of the outbreak there since early February.

Yet, she says, “in some ways, I’ve almost been resisting tying COVID-19 too closely to my research, because I think it’s important to maintain a consciousness that this is an extremely different event” from the 2011 tragedy. “I want to maintain a commitment to keeping the memory of that disaster alive and a consciousness of its specifics.”

Assistant Professor of Japanese Justine Wiesinger. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Still, Wiesinger notes, there are parallels that are hard to miss. “We continue to see, in my opinion, a tendency toward slow and ineffective responses from the central government.” Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe’s “rhetoric has been critiqued as frequently meaningless, impenetrable, and avoidant of responsibility,” she says — a “tone-deafness that’s being widely criticized in social media.”

For instance, “his policy of providing two protective masks per household has been mocked in memes on Twitter using iconic pop-cultural families trying to decide how to divide up two masks among multiple people.”

“In some senses I think people throughout Japan are coming into contact with the absurdities of a leadership that is often more concerned with economics than human life — whereas after 2011 it was mostly just people in the rural Tōhoku region who had to contend directly with similar approaches.”

Wiesinger adds, “Many of us are encountering similar problems in our own countries and these tendencies will have to be confronted worldwide. Sometimes disasters give us the opportunity to clearly see where the cracks in our value systems lie.”

“Follow the money,” the FBI source Deep Throat told the reporters unraveling the Watergate burglary in the film All the President’s Men.

A corollary for our time might be “name the evil.” If you want to understand what’s driving a particular conspiracy theory, advises rhetoric professor Stephanie Kelley-Romano, then try to characterize the perceived evil that motivates the theorists’ stories.

For instance, why did then–political aspirant Donald Trump boost the “birther” conspiracy, the lie that Barack Obama’s presidency was illegitimate because Obama hadn’t actually been born in the U.S.? What was the perceived evil behind that particular rhetoric?

“It’s pretty plain,” Kelley-Romano told a �ֲ���ý audience on Sept. 19. “It’s fear of a black president, right? It’s just blatant white supremacy and racism. And so, when we see that for what it is, it becomes a lot easier to understand the subsequent rhetoric.”

Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies Stephanie Kelley-Romano poses in her Pettigrew Hall Office. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Kelley-Romano, associate professor and chair of rhetoric, film, and screen studies, was honored last winter with �ֲ���ý’ Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching. Giving her Kroepsch Lecture in Pettengill Hall last week, she treated a packed Keck Classroom to a quick tour of her ongoing conspiracy rhetoric research.

The talk, a sort of field guide to conspiracy rhetoric, was another in a welcome and timely series of �ֲ���ý examinations of truth and untruths. In fact, earlier in the day and also under the Kroepsch aegis, four faculty members described how the concept of truth figured in their teaching, a topic suggested by Kelley-Romano.

During that event, in recounting how he and Alex Dauge-Roth designed their First-Year Seminar scrutinizing the nature of truth, economist Michael Murray neatly summarized how the context has changed around the concept.

“The motivation was really our shared dismay and outrage at a climate in which alternative facts become something that people think of as real, and the dismissal of what one might learn through science,” Murray said. “We wanted somehow to provide students with a venue in which they could deal with that environment more richly and deeply.”

Malcolm Hill, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty (right), talks with Charles Franklin Phillips Professor of Economics Michael Murray and Professor of Psychology Amy Douglass, presenters at the panel discussion “Truth and How One Teaches It,” a prelude to Stephanie Kelley-Romano’s Kroepsch lecture later in the day. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

����������-��dz����Դ�’s late-afternoon lecture, distinguished by clarity, urgency, and humor, was another such venue. She focused on four subjects of her research: people who say they have been abducted by space aliens; the television blockbuster The X-Files; Trump’s conspiracy rhetoric; and the Fox News treatment of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.

“A conspiracy is a group of people who are doing something in secret for harmful or evil reasons,” Kelley-Romano explained. “And so a conspiracy theory is the belief that there is a group of people who are doing something in secret for harmful or illicit reasons.

Further, she asked, “What are the defining characteristics of it? Thematically, what are the things that unite it? Formally, what are the common argumentative strategies?” And in the case of television’s X-Files and the Kavanaugh hearings, “what are the visual trappings?”

A characteristic of conspiracy rhetoric, and a recurring device in the show The X-Files, is the mixing of fact with fiction as a means of lending credibility to the latter, says Kroepsch Award honoree Stephanie Kelley-Romano. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

As a doctoral candidate at the University of Kansas in the mid-1990s, Kelley-Romano found rhetoric around human-alien encounters becoming something of a theme in her life. She was an obsessive fan of The X-Files, whose main characters, FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, were bent on exposing a federal plot to conceal the earthly activities of extraterrestrials.

“I didn’t know if I wanted to be Mulder and Scully or if I wanted to date them, but I knew I wanted more of them,” Kelley-Romano told the �ֲ���ý audience. “And so, since I was in graduate school, I had to write about it, because I couldn’t [otherwise] justify watching it.”

Meanwhile, defying her Ph.D. adviser (“You’ll never get a job,” he warned), Kelley-Romano interviewed 100 professed abductees to form the basis of her dissertation, on the rhetoric of alien abduction.

A characteristic of conspiracy rhetoric is the mixing of fact with fiction as a means of lending credibility to the latter. An X-Files motif was the use of actual or carefully replicated news footage, often with text superimposed on it that serves the fictional plot. (One episode references the famous Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in revealing that it was actually a key X-Files character, the Cigarette-Smoking Man, who killed the president.)

In 2012, Arizona conspiracy theorist Mike Zullo announces at a press conference that Obama’s birth certificate is a forgery. The birther conspiracy that dogged President Obama was fueled by “a fear of a black president,” explains Stephanie Kelley-Romano, associate professor of rhetoric, film, and screen studies. (AP Photo/Matt York)

Fact vs. fiction gets complicated in a hall-of-mirrors way. Kelley-Romano noted that some professed abductees believe that programs like The X-Files are actually part of a real federal disinformation campaign. If it’s just science fiction, the logic goes, who would believe it? So a drama about a government conspiracy to hide the truth about extraterrestrial activities is, in reality, itself part of such a conspiracy.

Some kind of perceived evil is an organizing principle or orbital center for a given conspiracy theory.

“The blurring, and the inability to make these distinctions, is part of the problem with the perpetuation and proliferation of conspiracy belief,” Kelley-Romano said.

Conspiracy theories exploit the human need for coherence in stories, something that communications theorist Walter Fisher called narrative fidelity. “We like it when things seem to hang together,” Kelley-Romano explained. Yet “narrative fidelity or narrative rationality and rational argument are not always in sync.”

Which brought us to the role of evil in conspiracy rhetoric, a concept Kelley-Romano attributed to Earl Creps of Northwest University.  For Creps, some kind of perceived evil is an organizing principle or orbital center for a given conspiracy theory. In order to bust that theory, we need to identify the evil that the conspiracy believers are perceiving and responding to.

Kelley-Romano’s witty, energetic style captivated her listeners. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“And how can we get at combating that, right? Because we all know that we are not going to argue…any type of new mindset [into] most conspiracy believers.”

Playing on the desire for narrative fidelity, The X-Files rendered as art another tactic near and dear to conspiracy theorists: the kind of associative “logic,” Kelley-Romano explained, “whereby things that come in concurrent succession are somehow argumentatively or rationally related, which is not necessarily the truth.”

She admitted, “That was part of why I loved watching the show. I loved the intellectual calisthenics and the illogic of it.”

But what’s fun and lovable over pizza on a Friday night becomes something different and much less fun when it’s a factor in mainstream political discourse, including conspiracy rhetoric à la Trump (whom she dubbed “the conspiracy president”), and Fox News coverage of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.

Borrowing a phrase from Wabash College’s Jeffrey Mehltretter Drury, Kelley-Romano held up Trump as a great example of the “rogue ethos”: the “notion that your credibility as a politician comes from the fact that you’re outside the system. You’re willing to shake things up. You’re willing to go rogue.”

However, as Drury made clear, the rogue has to profess populist solidarity. “You can’t do it for your own personal gain,” Kelley-Romano said. “It has to be for the people.”

President Trump is an example of the “rogue ethos” at work, says Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies Stephanie Kelley-Romano. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Trump positions himself as a latter-day Rick Blaine, the Casablanca protagonist who wants to stay out of the fray but finally has to step up and do the right thing. “I don’t want to talk about this,” Trump might say, “but when I walk down the street, they’re saying, ‘Don’t give up. Don’t give up.’

“And so he has to talk about it, right?”

Trump is also a master of rhetorical questioning, which has the desired effect of spreading doubt and suspicion without leveling actual charges that would require evidence. “He’s just wondering. He’s just asking,” Kelley-Romano said. “And he manages to absolve himself of any type of responsibility.”

With a shout-out to advisee and collaborator Claire Sullivan ’19, whose senior thesis examined the role of conspiracy rhetoric in Fox News’ Kavanaugh coverage, Kelley-Romano used the 2018 hearings as an example of “tactical framing.” (The concept comes from Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication and the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.)

A Donald Trump tweet from Stephanie Kelley-Romano’s presentation shows the president’s skill with rhetorical questions.

That’s when news organizations turn their attention away from actual news content and instead, report “on the coverage or the positioning of something,” she explained.

“So rather than focus on what was actually being said during the testimony, there was this meta-narrative that unified the Fox News coverage — which was, this is actually a conspiracy by the Democrats to thwart the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, and, in particular, out of revenge for the Clintons.”

She added, “When we think about that problem of rhetorical evil, what is this conspiracy responding to? I would argue, that this conspiracy is hell-bent on defending a particular way of American life — of privilege and white, heteronormative men. And specifically, Brett Kavanaugh.”

Stephanie Kelley-Romano as seen through her Kroepsch Award. (Photograph by Jonathan Cavallero)

Michael Rocque

Megan Rapinoe did not stomp on the flag. Here’s why people got outraged regardless — Newsweek

In Newsweek, Associate Professor of Sociology Michael Rocque argued that a recent Twitter flareup — in which World Cup-winning soccer player Megan Rapinoe was accused of stomping on the American flag, when she’d done no such thing — is part of a pattern of often-uninformed outrage on social media.

“The temptation to jump to outrage is especially strong on social media, where our virtual communities of the like-minded, created by choosing our ‘friends’ and whom to follow, reinforce our preconceptions and can block any facts that get in their way,” Rocque wrote.

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

Anger spreads more easily online than other emotions, and collective anger paradoxically leads to feelings of affirmation and unity, Rocque wrote. “We’re wired to crave that collective anger.”

So before taking part in an online mob, he suggested, wait a second to get the facts.

“When we see a meme, post or tweet that sparks that familiar tingle of outrage, take a minute to look into it, verify sources or, better yet, wait to see how the story unfolds once more information is gathered.”

Read the story:

• “,” Newsweek, July 12, 2019

Joyce White Vance ’82

Prosecutors pick their battles. I chose not to pursue an ICE raid in Alabama — The Washington Post

Best-known these days for her legal insights into special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and report on the 2016 elections, Joyce White Vance ’82 recently turned her attention to the massive Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid of food processing plants in Mississippi.

Former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama Joyce White Vance ’82 speaks at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the Mueller Report on Capitol Hill in June. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

A former U.S. attorney for Alabama, Vance once declined to pursue an ICE raid in her state because she failed to “see how it would be a wise use of our resources to pull away from crimes that were affecting our community in visible ways to arrest people who, while they might have lacked legal immigration status, were going to work every day.”

Noting that it took months to plan the ICE raids, Vance wondered if there aren’t other prosecutions that might have “better served the community” than “removing parents from children — children that the parents were hard at work for, so they could help them grow into productive citizens.”

Read the story:

• “,” The Washington Post, Aug. 9, 2019

Scott Allen ’84

These doctors risked their careers to expose the dangers children face in immigrant family detention — CNN

For years, Drs. Scott Allen and Pamela McPherson did their work — inspecting facilities where U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detains immigrant families — quietly.

But in 2018, the two doctors, who are medical consultants for the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, became whistleblowers.

Since then, Allen and McPherson have appeared in myriad media outlets, including The New York Times, 60 Minutes, and The Washington Post, to call attention to the harm children suffer when confined, with or without parents, to detention facilities, such as the ICE centers at the Southwest U.S. border.

“Each passing day of continued detention of children — and no acknowledgment of the risk that we have reported — alarms me,” Dr. Scott Allen ’84 told CNN in May.

“The medical community is quite unified in opposition to the detention of children. Decades of research have shown that detention is harmful to their medical and physical health,” Allen told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in June.

For their work, Allen and McPherson, along with Scott Shuchart, received the 2019 Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling.

Read and watch:

• “,” CNN, May 23, 2019
• “,” The Washington Post, Dec. 19, 2018
• “,’�ĝ The New York Times, July 18, 2018

Stephanie Kelley-Romano

If the Democrats master this single strategy, they can defeat Trump in 2020 — Newsweek

Stephanie Kelley-Romano, associate professor of rhetoric, film, and screen studies, watched the second set of Democratic presidential primary debates in late July and concluded, in a Newsweek op-ed, that the candidates need to work on framing — defining the issues they’re talking about and the limits on their solutions.

Stephanie Kelley-Romano leads a “Television Criticism” class on March 6, 2019. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College)

For example, debate moderators often framed discussions of universal healthcare as “taking away” private insurance in favor of government-funded care. It was only toward the end of these discussions that several candidates argued that universal healthcare would be a gain, not a loss.

“In the lead-up to 2020, Democrats must remember to take control of the framing of issues early, so they can focus on what it is they are trying to explain and why,” Kelley-Romano wrote.

Read the story:

• “,” Newsweek, Aug. 1, 2019

Dan Mills

An Artist’s Maps of Imperialism and Greed — Hyperallergic

Carl Little reviewed in art news site Hyperallergic an exhibit at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art by Dan Mills, director of the �ֲ���ý College Museum of Art.

Recently named by Maine magazine as one of 50 Mainers who are “creating a brighter future for the state,” Mills creates “collaged maps,” displays of numbers related to war and colonialism overlaid on vintage maps.

“Mills delves into the devastating numbers and then converts them into chaotically beautiful cartographies,” wrote Little, a well-known Maine art critic and historian. “The central paradox of his map pieces is that, even as they record the woes of the world, they are stunning and seductive. The visuals engage; the numbers appall.”

Read the story:

• “,” Hyperallergic, Aug. 10, 2019

Rebecca Fraser-Thill

The five biggest myths about meaningful work — Forbes

Backed up by a recent study by �ֲ���ý College and Gallup on purposeful work, Rebecca Fraser-Thill explained in Forbes that meaning in work and a meaningful life go hand in hand.

Rebecca Fraser-Thill is the director of faculty engagement and outreach at �ֲ���ý’ Center for Purposeful Work and a lecturer in psychology. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Dispelling several myths, Fraser-Thill, a visiting instructor of psychology and the director of faculty engagement and outreach at �ֲ���ý’ Center for Purposeful Work, argued that meaningful work is subjective and individual — it does not have to be a helping profession, high status, low paying, or even different from what you’re doing now.

“Whether it’s simply asking a co-worker about her weekend or bringing a smile to customers in a coffee house, any act that makes us feel more connected to others also makes our work — and our lives — more meaningful,” she wrote.

Read the story:

• “,” Forbes, Aug. 7, 2019

John A. Elsesser ’80

Conversation with: John Elsesser — Journal Inquirer

Tim Leininger of the Manchester, Conn., Journal Inquirer sat down with John A. Elsesser ’80, who has been the town manager of Coventry, Conn., for more than three decades.

Elsesser, who over 30 years has improved Coventry’s trash and sewer systems as well as its school and recreation programs, mused that he took to local government, in part, because of his upbringing, as the son of a Baptist minister.

“We always had company over,” he told Leininger. “We were taught that you should do good for others, try to make an impact. There was a lot of pressure for me to become a minister, me and my brother and sisters actually. None of us did, but I think the issue of trying to make a positive difference was the core of that.”

Read the story:

• “,” Journal Inquirer, Aug. 3, 2019

Sarah Strong

Across space and time: translating Night on the Galactic Railroad — Metropolis

Kenji Miyazawa’s masterpiece Night on the Galactic Railroad is exceedingly difficult to translate, wrote Eric Margolis of English-language Japanese magazine Metropolis. The novel, about a lonely Italian boy who rides to heaven on a magical train, contains surreal imagery and sound effects, made-up words, and regional dialect.

In taking on the task of translation in 1991, Sarah Strong, who is now professor emerita of Japanese language and literature, sought to represent in English the emotions of reading the novel in Japanese.

“If something was weird, I wanted the reader to think, ‘That’s weird,’�ĝ Strong told Margolis. “What was funny? What was happy? What was sad? I needed to get as close as I could to really understanding the writing.”

Read the story:

• “,” Metropolis, Aug. 2, 2019

Stephanie Wade and Megan Guynes ’11

River story workshop held in Lewiston — Sun Journal

In early August, Stephanie Wade, assistant director of Writing at �ֲ���ý, ran a writing workshop at Tree Street Youth through the Androscoggin Land Trust.

Children at the youth center went fishing in the morning, then came back to write a story about their experiences, which Lewiston Sun Journal photographer Daryn Slover documented. Also on hand was Megan Guynes ’11, program director at Tree Street Youth.

See the photos:

• “,” Sun Journal, Aug. 1, 2019

Emily Kane

Winners overlook rigged games’ lack of fairness, study finds — Associated Press

For context on a Cornell study about winning and fairness, Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein turned to Professor of Sociology Emily Kane.

In the study, nearly 1,000 people played a card came in which winners could throw out their worst cards and take other players’ best cards. The winners attributed their winning to talent and only acknowledged the unfairness of the game after they were allowed to exchange cards a second time.

The study “tells us something about privilege and about society,” Kane told Borenstein. “It reminds us how powerful perceptions are — it’s not just what is happening that matters, it’s often more a matter of what we think is happening,”

Read the story:

• “,” Associated Press, July 17, 2019

Mara Tieken

Despite West Virginia education reform, the extraction of rural youth to continue — The Register-Herald

Associate professor of education and rural education expert Mara Tieken spoke with reporter Erin Beck of West Virginia’s Register Herald about the state’s struggle to both promote college education and keep young people in the state.

Associate Professor of Education Mara Tieken teaches “Community Organizing for Social Justice” in May 2018. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Tieken said that few high school graduates in West Virginia are getting college degrees — there aren’t a lot of jobs in rural areas that require them, even as traditional jobs like coal mining are declining.

“If we’re really trying to support kids to go to college, we also need to make sure that there are jobs in rural places that can use that college education,” Tieken said.

Read the story:

• “,” The Register-Herald, Jul. 14, 2019

Karl Alexander ’12

Getting Bike Share Right Is a Balancing Act — U.S. 1

Karl Alexander ’12 spoke with Princeton, N.J., newspaper U.S. 1 about how bike-sharing companies can establish themselves responsibly in communities.

Alexander, marketing manager for Zagster, told reporter Diccon Hyatt that the bike-sharing company tries to move into places — like Princeton — that will already be receptive to more bicycles, and promote bike-friendliness from there.

“You have to take the time to look at what works best for the community, whether that’s bikes or scooters, or if it is something else entirely, like increasing walkability,” he said. “You have to think before you act. You’ll probably be better off in the long run.”

Read the story:

• “,” U.S. 1, July 10, 2019

One class session with rhetoric professor Stephanie Kelley-Romano in 2015 was enough to turn Claire Sullivan ’19 into a rhetoric major.

Sullivan’s first-ever class at �ֲ���ý, it was the opening session in the course “What Is Rhetoric?”

Kelley-Romano showed music videos by female country artists, including RaeLynn’s “God Made Girls” — which features lyrics like, “Somebody’s gotta be the one to cry / Somebody’s gotta let him drive … So God made girls.”

Kelley-Romano then struck up a discussion encompassing heteronormativity, gender roles, and who’s excluded from a worldview like RaeLynn’s. “She just went off on the absurdity of the rhetorical implications of this ,” says Sullivan of Montville, N.J. The class “made me want to be a rhetoric major because she just had so much passion and enthusiasm for it.

Stephanie Kelley-Romano leads a “Television Criticism” class on March 6, 2019. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College)

“She emphasized the way we look at certain cultural texts. When you critically analyze them, you get so much more out of them and see their cultural and sociological implications in a really different way.”

Praised as a teacher who’s exacting, empathetic, authentic — and passionate about her field — Kelley-Romano has received the college’s 2019 Ruth M. and Robert H. Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Associate professor and chair of the rhetoric, film, and screen studies department, Kelley-Romano is known at �ֲ���ý and beyond for her professional focus on topics in the popular consciousness — the rhetoric of television, conspiracy theories, and abductions by space aliens, to name a few. Her biennial course on presidential campaign rhetoric is built around a mock campaign that affords an intensely hands-on, multidisciplinary experience for students.

She has led public workshops on spotting fake news, analyzed for the local newspaper a debate between candidates for Maine’s 2nd District congressional seat (including Jared Golden ‘11, who ultimately won), and, with math professor Meredith Greer, she is modeling how conspiracy theories spread.

“It’s infectious to be in a classroom with somebody who is excited about what they’re teaching.”

“Rhetoric allows us to understand how realities are created,” says Kelley-Romano. “Why we call someone a survivor, as opposed to a victim, matters. It matters who we define as terrorists. The way we criminalize drug use by some but construct it as a health crisis when it affects other people, matters.

“So it’s important to allow students to see that just because something is in a history book or in a newspaper,” that doesn’t necessarily make it true, she says. “Objectivity is a little looser than they may have been led to believe.”

Like Sullivan, it was in her first class at �ֲ���ý that Molly Chisholm ’17 of Boston first encountered Kelley-Romano. As with Sullivan, the professor’s enthusiasm made a big impression. “It’s infectious to be in a classroom with somebody who is excited about what they’re teaching,” Chisholm says. “You’re automatically engaged because �����’s so engaged and so happy to be there.”

Stephanie Kelley-Romano talks with Molly Chisholm ’17, who portrayed a Republican candidate for U.S. president in a fall 2016 campaign rhetoric course. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“I love watching students gain confidence and skills,” Kelley-Romano says.

“When I’m trying to teach a critical-thinking skill or to get them to understand the logical organization for a paper — when I see it actually happen, that’s a great feeling. And then to see it again and again, and see the change in them from the beginning to the end, is just so satisfying.”

She adds, “If I honor and respect their process of coming into knowledge and coming into themselves, and just try to help that along, then it gives them so much agency. And they’re so much more invested in doing well.”

In Kelley-Romano “there’s an element of genuineness” that’s uncommon, says Sullivan. “She lets us see who she is as a person.” For example, ����������-��dz����Դ�’s sons, 16-year-old George and 14-year-old Richie, are no strangers to Pettigrew Hall (and they also help keep their mother in tune with pop-culture trends).

“In return, she expects us to show her who we are as people,” Sullivan says. “She just cares so much about understanding where her students are coming from and what makes them people, more than just students.”

Kelley-Romano listens to a remark by a fellow faculty panelist during a viewing and discussion of the televised inauguration of President Donald Trump in January 2017. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“She has a great degree of empathy, and I think that’s always present in her pedagogy,” says ����������-��dz����Դ�’s colleague Charles Nero, Benjamin E. Mays ’20 Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies. “If you talk about the importance of care in the process of teaching, Stephanie exemplifies that.”

Some of that empathy may be traceable to ����������-��dz����Դ�’s undergraduate experience. A first-generation-to-college student at Emerson University, she took away a certain understanding of the uncertainties, insecurities, and feelings of isolation that can come with being a first-gen. She’s not shy about putting that understanding to work.

Openness about her own experience is a way to help put students at ease with their situations. “To articulate those fears or seeming insecurities and make them laughable, and to own them,” Kelley-Romano says, “makes students feel a lot more comfortable” — helps them “see that on the inside everybody can be silly, or insecure, or uncertain, and that it’s okay.”

None of which is to suggest that she is a pushover. “She wants, probably demands, that her students excel,” Nero says. “She sees her role as giving them the tools to excel, and she thinks a lot about that.

“And I think that when students leave her class, they’re aware that whatever happened — the good, the bad, the ugly — it’s on them. She encourages responsibility.” Nero adds, “I would daresay that she is brilliant as a pedagogue.”

A 2017 graduate, Gabe Nott experienced those high expectations as he honed his senior thesis under ����������-��dz����Դ�’s guidance. Now a New York City resident, Nott was writing about the TV program Last Week Tonight, hosted by comedian John Oliver, and the implications of news-focused comedy for civic discourse.

“It took me a while to figure out my argument for my thesis,” says Nott. “Every time I thought knew what angle I was going to take, she’d come back with a question I wasn’t able to answer. Honestly, it was pretty frustrating.

“But, when I finally got there, I realized that all that prodding and pushing helped me craft a more incisive analysis” that even transcended Oliver to shed light on how, Nott says, “we as a country talk about politics.”

Michaela Britt ’17, Molly Chisholm ’17, and Brennen Malone ’17 confer with Kelley-Romano during the 2016 campaign rhetoric course. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

He adds, “When I finally figured it out, she was as excited as I was. All that just made me feel like she was really invested in helping me become the best scholar I could be.”

Sullivan took the fall 2018 edition of ����������-��dz����Դ�’s campaign rhetoric course. The mock campaign involves students in just about every aspect of a campaign that involves communications — which is pretty much all of it, from developing a platform to writing ads and speeches to holding debates to mounting a crisis response.

“The mock campaign felt so practical,” says Sullivan, who played the role of the Democratic vice presidential candidate. She plans to work for a real campaign after graduation as a prelude to a career in law or politics. “She expected a professional quality of us, and so it felt like we were running a real campaign.”

She adds, “It allowed us to really think about how political campaigns craft narratives, which is obviously a huge part of the study of rhetoric.”

The fictional presidential candidate for the Democrats was a military veteran, as was his wife. “He was Jewish, and so we talked about his Jewish identity a lot. We made my character queer and married to a woman.”

Rhetoric professor Stephanie Kelley-Romano meets in her office with Kathryn Carew ’17 of Falmouth, Maine, in 2016. Carew and Kelley-Romano published her senior thesis, a study of Donald Trump and the “birther” movement, in the Journal of Hate Studies. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Sullivan says, “It got us thinking about how we talk about identities, and how those identities are perceived and portrayed to a greater public.” Developing candidate personas — their backgrounds, beliefs, relationships — reflected an important emphasis in the �ֲ���ý approach to teaching rhetoric: an understanding of intersectionality, how different aspects of identity relate to one another and how they are treated in communications.

“Our focuses on gender, race, sexuality, and ethnicity are crucial organizing principles to our major,” Nero says. “Stephanie has been fundamental in the creation of that.”

Four years after the RaeLynn revelation, Kelley-Romano advised Sullivan on her senior thesis, which looks at the role of conspiracy rhetoric in the Fox News coverage of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings — a research project they hope to publish together.

The relationship has meant a lot to her, Sullivan says. “To have somebody who has known me throughout the entire four years, academically and a little bit outside the academics, has been a very comforting experience.” Even after �ֲ���ý, “I know that she’ll really be there for me.”

A fall 2018 session of her course “What is Rhetoric?” features Kelley-Romano using a Halloween costume to riff on her research into alien abduction stories. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Walk into Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies Stephanie ����������-��dz����Դ�’s second floor Pettigrew office, and you’ll enter an alien environment. Not that it’s strange or different from other faculty offices. Rather, it’s filled with objects connected to alien beings.

Kelley-Romano, who teaches rhetorical theory and criticism, wrote her doctoral dissertation on “The Myth of Communion: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Narratives of Alien Abductees,” in which she drew from 130 interviews with people who believe they’ve been abducted by aliens.

One of her conclusions is that people who believe they’ve been abducted have woven a collective myth that acts as a kind of religion, and �����’s at work at turning the dissertation into a book, What’s Up: Alien Abductions and Why They Matter, the outline of which appears on her office blackboard.

Today, ����������-��dz����Դ�’s calling out a favorite pop-up book, Alien World: Fact or Fiction, that includes three-dimensional paper presentations on aliens, UFOs, and the supposed 1947 UFO crash at Roswell, N.M., which birthed a wide variety of conspiracy theories about alien spaceship landings.

This particular book, like many of the UFO-themed collectibles in her office, are gifts from her students, some of whom have taken the course she teaches on the rhetoric of alien abduction. “�ֲ���ý has incredible academic freedom in terms of what we can teach,” she says.

After offering the course, she began to receive gifts from students, often from study abroad locations, who would discover all kinds of curiosities: alien root beer, condoms, rolling papers, dolls, soaps, and salt and pepper shakers, to name a few.

At top, some of the alien collectibles in Stephanie Kelley-Romano’s Pettigrew office. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Her gifts include non-alien items, including a piece of the University of Kansas basketball floor — �����’s a huge Jayhawks fan — and whatever the gifts, they often come from students with whom she enjoys longstanding connections. “It’s a reminder, an acknowledgement of the fondness we have,” she says, “of the relationships that I’ve created and maintained for almost 20 years now.” She remembers how the mother of a student in her alien abduction course years ago quilted an alien blanket for her newborn son, who is now 16.

Students often arrive in her classroom with one question: Does Kelley-Romano actually believe in alien abduction? Subsequently they learn to ask better questions about how we create our belief systems. “Alien abduction functions as a system of beliefs that offer a larger kind of metaphysical grounding,” she says.

“When students take that understanding and apply it more broadly to systems of belief that are created through narratives and stories, they’ll consider why we believe some stories and not others.” They learn to critique and assess different arguments, including conspiracy arguments, how they work, and how we combat them —a legitimate skill sadly necessary for their generation.

Kelley-Romano loves watching her students move “from a place of bemused skepticism to the recognition of this is how we create truth.” They spread their wings, set off to new universes, but their lives remain linked. And the gifts arrive.

Procrastination can be an art form. As finals approach and term papers come due, there are ever more opportunities to perfect stalling — and overcome it.

We asked students and professors how they put off work. Their answers included:

• Netflix
• Online shopping
• Posting on Instagram
• Staying in Commons until it closes
• Organizing papers
• Drinking tea
• Going on really long runs and/or walks
• Making six-hour music playlists
• Visiting neighbors
• Answering the questions of a �ֲ���ý Communications employee in lieu of grading papers

We also asked students, faculty, and staff about strategies they use to manage their time and get work done.

Jessica Mayo, a therapist at the �ֲ���ý Counseling and Psychological Services Center, recommends that students try to keep in mind a general sense of what is due when so they “can plan what they’re going to be doing weeks ahead.”

It’s important to “break things down into reasonable tasks,” she adds, using a schedule or planner to fit those tasks into the time available.

Mayo sees an uptick in procrastination issues at the end of the semester, which makes sense, and she points to a range of college resources that students can access, such as the Counseling and Pyschological Services Center, the staff at the Academic Resource Commons in Ladd Library, or a Student Affairs dean or faculty adviser.

Here’s what campus folks told us.

1. Turn procrastination into productivity

For many, like Korbin Houston ’18 of Chicago, putting off one task means taking up another.

“I try to procrastinate with other productive things,” Houston ’18 says. For example, “I usually have a lot of emails to send, so I do a lot of emailing instead of doing other substantial things that are important.”

2. Put away the distractions

“I’ll turn my phone off and put ‘Do not disturb’ on my computer,” says Oriana Lo Cicero ’20 of Bellingham, Wash. “I’ll turn off all the sources of social media and tell my friends, ‘I can’t hang out until this time.’”

3. Put on blinders

“When I really need to buckle down, I take the page I’m supposed to be working on, usually a Word doc, and maximize it so it fills the whole screen,” says Halley Posner ’18 of Southport, Conn. “When I can’t see the clock on my laptop, it’s easier to focus in on the work I need to get done.”

4. Set a goal and a reward

First-years Carolyn Snow and Abby Hamilton, friends from Yarmouth, Maine, say they procrastinate by calling each other and talking about the work they’re not doing. When it comes to actually accomplishing something, “I set time limits,” says Hamilton. “I will be like, ‘In 15 minutes, I will be done with this chemistry problem,’ or ‘I will read five pages, and then I can be done and go to bed.’”

Lo Cicero says she sometimes tells herself that if she can get a certain amount of work done, “you can play ukulele for 20 minutes, and then you have to get back to it.”

Oriana Lo Cicero ’20, a chemistry major from Bellingham, Wash., sometimes plays the ukulele as a study break. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

5. Know how you work

Oaklea Elfstrom ’21 of East Haddam, Conn., advises knowing the times at which you’re most productive. “If I try to do homework at midnight I won’t be able to, so instead I go to bed at 10:30 and get up at 6 and do homework then,” she says.

6. Make a to-do list

“I’m a planner,” says Houston. “I have several to-do lists. I’m always trying to plan ahead and make sure I have free space to do work and try to manage the work.” (Jessica Mayo would approve.)

That worked for Houston earlier this week, she says. Her environmental studies capstone course didn’t meet at its usual time, so she worked on another project with a classmate. “We were able to get that done, go to class, eat, and then try to do work and run around and talk to professors. I was able to get a decent amount of work done.”

7. Just get started

Associate Professor of Rhetoric Stephanie Kelly-Romano, at left, confers with Molly Chisholm during the fall 2016 course “Presidential Campaign Rhetoric.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Faced with mountains of papers to grade, professors are hardly immune to procrastination.

“I make piles,” says Stephanie Kelley-Romano, associate professor of rhetoric. “I take all the grading I have to do and separate it by class and sometimes by student and assemble it. I also make sure it’s appropriately stapled or fastened. I get pens ready.”

Once she can’t put it off any longer, she commits to just one small task. Once she gets going, the rest is easier.

“I do a little bit, like grade one paper,” says Kelley-Romano. “If I do one, I do four.”

8. Get out of the house

For some, home isn’t necessarily the best place for homework.

“I have mentally separated my room from school, because I associate my room with relaxing and Netflix,” says Bailey Richins ’19 of Westerly, R.I. “Normally, I have all of my work with me, I find a place to study, and I stay there until I get what I need to get done, done.”

Carolyn Snow heads to the library. “If I go to a public space like the library, and there are other people — not people that I know, like Abby [Hamilton] — I feel like I should not procrastinate as much because I see everybody else working,” she says.  

9. Work alone

“I’ll try to get as much work done in one block of time as I can, instead of doing homework slowly with friends that I could have done really quickly,” says Lo Cicero.  

10. Set reasonable amounts of time to get things done

“I block out everything and try to anticipate how long each assignment will take,” says Sam Rickerich ’18 of York, Maine. “If it seems like it’ll be a big one, it’ll probably take longer than you think, so start early.”

11. Make fear of shame work for you

Professor of Spanish Baltasar Fra-Molinero says he procrastinates on new articles by working on material “that, while fascinating, is not what I should be writing on.”

His motivator, he says, “is the impending shame of showing up with empty hands and no credible excuses.”

12. Know when to move on

“As my grandfather says, do it good enough for government work, so that’s a good 75 percent effort,” says Elfstrom.

Sarah Rothmann contributed reporting. 

Eighteen students in the course “Presidential Campaign Rhetoric” have been going full tilt on a mock White House campaign since September.

And today, Oct. 25, full tilt becomes warp speed as the Republican and Democratic campaigns face what’s known in politics as an October surprise.

8:28 a.m. — It’s a crisis! (Well, not really)

Associate Professor of Rhetoric Stephanie Kelley-Romano steps to the lectern in a first-floor Pettigrew Hall lounge and gets right to the point.

“You’re being brought into a crisis that’s international in scope,” she tells the students seated before her. “And you’re being brought into the loop because it’s your job to help communicate the crisis, announce a plan to deal with it, and to calm the public.”

That’s not your average class assignment. Then again, Presidential Campaign Rhetoric isn’t your average course.

Associate Professor of Rhetoric Stephanie Kelley-Romano announces the (not real) smallpox outbreak. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

8:32 a.m. — And the campaign is on!

Each campaign has already developed biographies and platforms, the Dems offering “Progress We Can Count On” and the Republicans, “The Future We Deserve.”

They’ve held conventions, deployed candidate videos, held debates, used polling data collected by a sociology course, consulted with a music course on campaign music, reacted to attack ads, and, today, have to face a crisis.

All that has drawn in hundreds of other students: “voters,” more than 600 at last count, who include all rhetoric and debate students plus students in 23 other �ֲ���ý courses. “President Clayton Spencer has registered to vote, as have alumni and parents,” Kelley-Romano says.

From left, Republican campaign members Jacqueline Forney ’18 of Bloomington, Ind., Molly Chisholm ’17 of Boston, and Honor Moshay ’17 of Los Angeles listen to the details of the public health crisis. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

8:34 a.m. — It’s smallpox! (but not for real)

The “crisis” at hand is an outbreak of smallpox in the U.S., and the campaigns have until noon to develop a public statement that will inform and calm the nation while announcing a containment plan.

“I mean, smallpox is supposed to be eradicated,” says Gabe Nott ’17 of Bronxville, N.Y. He’s playing a Democrat from Maryland running for president. “Yeah, I know,” Kelley-Romano says, deflecting the implied question.

Another student tries to pull info from Kelley-Romano: “What vaccine do you need to prevent smallpox?” The professor doesn’t bite: “I don’t really know. Maybe you should check with the CDC.”

Gabe Nott ’17 of Bronxville, N.Y., is the Democratic candidate for president in the mock campaign that’s a key element of the course Presidential Campaign Rhetoric. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

8:40 a.m. — ‘A real disaster’

The campaigns spend the first half-hour or so figuring out what smallpox exactly is — a reminder that they’re young (or I’m old). Lots of us were aware of the last smallpox outbreak (1972 in Yugoslavia, killing 35 people), but these students were born between 1995 and 1996.

“Don’t fear monger.”

The Democrats’ candidate for vice president, Courtney Foster ’18 of Newton, Mass., notes that smallpox was “a real disaster” before being eradicated. Campaign manager Amanda San Roman ’17 of East Setauket, N.Y., responds that their statement doesn’t need to talk about the horrors of the disease. “The public is not already worried about smallpox. Don’t fear-monger,” she suggests.

A senior interviewer for Admission, San Roman has to switch hats because �����’s got two interviews scheduled at Lindholm House. “Sorry, I can’t work on this now,” she says, and heads off.

At right is campaign manager Amanda San Roman ’17 of East Setauket, N.Y. Next to her is press secretary Ian Erickson ’18 of St. Albans, Vt. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

8:46 a.m. — Is it terrorism?

The campaigns have split up to work. Upstairs in the Republicans’ war room, they’re getting clues about how presidents handle health crises by watching, on a widescreen TV, how President Obama talked about Ebola in 2015. Downstairs, the Dems analyze Obama’s May 2016 briefing on the Zika virus.

Like the Dems, the Republicans are trying to grasp the historical scope of smallpox. They learn that smallpox was used as a biological weapon in the 18th century, when the British intentionally gave smallpox-infected items, including blankets, to Native Americans.

And now, smallpox and bioterrorism, plus some ambiguous hints in two official-looking memos given to the campaigns by Kelley-Romano, has the campaigns on high alert.

The Republicans’ presidential candidate, Molly Chisholm ’17 of Boston asks her team, “Do we need to address that?” Downstairs, the Democrats ask the same question: “Are the Republicans going to go to national security?”

On the stool, Molly Chisholm ’17 of Boston, the Republican candidate for president, and her team review President Obama’s statement on Ebola. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

9:08 a.m. — ‘We need a lab coat’

On the question of whether to speak to the bioterrorism threat, Chisholm makes the call: “We need to talk about bioterrorism. As Republicans, we need to be the national security party.”

Following her lead, her team comes up with rhetorical tactics, and Honor Moshay ’17 of Los Angeles, the campaign’s media director, is a font of ideas: “Why don’t we get a �ֲ���ý EMS student to stand next to her during her address? We need a lab coat, too.” She adds, “Maybe we could get Paul Menice,” mentioning a well-known officer with Security & Campus Safety.

Matt Baker ’17 of Clinton, Md., Chisholm’s running mate, texts a friend who’s a �ֲ���ý EMS. “We got him,” he says.

Matt Baker ’17 of Clinton, Md., is the Republicans’ candidate for vice president. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

9:17 a.m. — A short walk to another world

When Kelley-Romano told Nott to check with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, she wasn’t kidding.

A little after 9, the campaigns leave Pettigrew, cross Alumni Walk, and enter Hathorn Hall for their meeting with CDC consultants, aka students in the course Mathematical Models in Biology, taught by Associate Professor of Mathematics Meredith Greer.

The Republicans, pictured, and the Democrats head into Hathorn Hall for their meeting with the CDC consultants, aka math students. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

9:30 a.m. — ‘We have guests’

The short walk from Pettigrew to Hathorn takes the rhetoric students from one academic world to another. “We have guests,” Greer tells her students as the Democratic and Republican candidates and their staffs enter Hathorn 303.

The professors give a brief overview of the mock situation before the group splits in three: Democrats, Republicans, and students playing the media.

Greer and Kelley-Romano have teamed up before to deliver a public-health “crisis” to the PCR class. That was Ebola in 2014, when that disease was in the news.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Meredith Greer and Kelley-Romano brief the students. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Chisholm, in fact, was part of a student team that worked with Kelley-Romano to tweak the course during her freshman year. “It’s really cool to see the interdisciplinary side of the course come into full effect,” she says.

 9:42 a.m. — Mars and Venus

According to the memos, two smallpox cases are in Massachusetts, where the Republican candidate, Chisholm, is governor, and two cases are in Washington, D.C., next door to Maryland, where Democrat Nott is governor.

The campaigns are meeting with the CDC consultants to develop a strategy for containing the smallpox outbreak in their home states.

It’s slow going at first as the two groups, rhetoric and math, weren’t quite sure what the other needs — Mars and Venus and all that.

“It was a tough barrier,” Chisholm says later. “They knew a lot about smallpox and not a lot about rhetoric. We knew a lot about rhetoric and not a lot about smallpox and modeling.”

The students’ discomfort is part of the plan, explains Greer. “They learn so much from working it out on their own.”

Moshay, the Republicans’ media director, asks what seems to be a reasonable question: “Can we quarantine a city?” The math students chuckle — from their reading, they know that large-scale quarantines are easier said than done.

Moshay tries again: “What are the typical responses to smallpox?” which elicits the most blackly humorous line of the day, from a math student: “Widespread panic and death.”

Math students Evan Goldberg ’19 (right) of Belmont, Mass., and Joseph Torres ’17 of Los Angeles work with the campaigns during their visit to the “CDC” in Hathorn Hall. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

10:30 a.m. — ‘That was awesome’

Math student Gabe Whitehead ’17 of Shaker Heights, Ohio, who is working with the Republicans, uses a computational software called Mathematica to run various epidemic scenarios.

He pumps his fist: He’s figured out that a blend of vaccinations and quarantine measures for Chisholm’s home state of Massachusetts would result in a manageable death toll. Without a containment plan, the model predicts all-out catastrophe: 85,000 dead. With the plan, the deaths would number 7,000.

Whitehead shares graphs with the Republicans that show various scenarios. “When we got the graphs from Gabe, that was awesome,” said Chisholm.

“How can theory be used in current-day life?”

It also represented a communication breakthrough. “When we outlined what we wanted to do in our speech — dissuade fear and show the public that we have this under control — they were able to give us what they knew.”

Greer says her students were jazzed to link their knowledge with a real-world scenario. “They loved the feeling of working with data and with real disease ideas,” she says. “This project has an especially realistic feeling, one that is important to see in math classes. All this theory we have learned: How can it be used in current-day life?”

Math student Gabe Whitehead ’17 of Shaker Heights, Ohio, talks with the Republican campaign. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

10:53 a.m. — ‘We don’t want to sound paranoid’

The two campaigns head back across Alumni Walk to their Pettigrew war rooms to work on their smallpox statements, which they’ll deliver in the Digital Media Studios at noon.

Chisholm wants her statement to explicitly say that a foreign country might be to blame. She also says that the statement “has to be a rallying cry. We are still trying to win votes.”

Her campaign manager, James Erwin ’18 of Yarmouth, Maine, is more cautious. “We don’t want to sound paranoid.” A minute later, Moshay shows up with facemasks and a white lab coat for their �ֲ���ý EMS person to wear.

The Republicans’ campaign manager, James Erwin ’18 of Yarmouth, Maine, plugs away on the statement. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

11:13 a.m. — “I don’t always know what I’m doing”

Amanda San Roman, the Dems’ campaign manager, who had to leave to do Admission interviews, returns. “I talk about this course in all my interviews,” she says because prospective students “are so impressed by it.”

She tells the prospies that the course “is more in depth than anything they’ve experienced before. And it ranges so far around campus. We have all different groups coming together and teaming up to make this as real as possible.”

And what does “real” feel like?

“Adrenaline,” San Roman says. “As a 21-year-old student, I don’t always know what I’m doing in this. But it’s cool to be going through it with people who are interested in it and who are trying really hard.”

The Republicans’ printed statement cleverly incorporated the campaign logo and those of FEMA and the CDC. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

11:29 a.m. — Thai chicken

A half-hour remains until each candidate has to deliver their address, and 95 percent of everyone’s attention is focused on prepping their statements.

Moshay speaks to group’s remaining 5 percent. “What’s for lunch?” she asks. “Thai chicken,” answers Michaela Britt ’17 of South Burlington, Vt., who handles video production for the campaign. “Oh, that’s good,” says Moshay. Then it’s back to work.

Moshay displays progress on their statement. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

11:55 a.m. — ‘We will not crumble’

Gabe Nott will deliver his statement first, and Foster, his running mate, tries to calm his nerves. “Stay calm and controlled,” she says.

“You know me,” he says with a tight smile. “If there are two things I am, it’s calm and controlled.”

The speech goes without a hitch. “Smallpox has been eradicated before, and it will be again,” he says, channeling every president from FDR to Obama. “We did not bow to Pearl Harbor…. We will not crumble now.”

Nott delivers his statement in the studio of the Digital Media Studios in Pettigrew Hall. (Phyllis Graber Jensen)

12:08 p.m. — “Stay calm and follow instructions”

While Nott delivers his talk alone at the lectern, Chisholm is flanked by the �ֲ���ý EMS student Sam Whitaker ’18 of Hollis, N.H., who plays a CDC staffer, and Erwin, her campaign manager.

Nott alludes to the possibility of bioterrorism without naming a country, saying that the “re-emergence of the disease could have been an intentional attempt to undermine American safety and well-being.”

The Republicans hit the bioterrorism angle, too, saying it’s “very unlikely” that the smallpox came from a U.S. source. Chisholm goes a step further, mentioning specifically that Russia has smallpox stocks and that the outbreak “is a new type of international terrorism to consider.”

“For the rest of us, it’s important to remain calm and follow instructions from public-health officials,” she says.

“We have faced crises of this magnitude in the past, and every time, our attention to detail, our intuition, and our deliberate approach has guided our country. Events such as these endure as memorable moments of strength and unity for our country.”

She concludes her speech by saying, “God bless America.”

Chisholm prepares to deliver her briefing. In background, �ֲ���ý EMS Sam Whitaker ’18 of Hollis, N.H., gets ready to play a CDC staffer who will stand by the candidate. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

12:18 p.m. — Is there a winner?

“They both did well with the specifics of containment and using action verbs to put themselves in the action and in the solution,” Kelley-Romano said.

Beyond the lessons of the day, Kelley-Romano puts a fine point on her course.

“I think life is interdisciplinary — a �ֲ���ý liberal arts education demands the simultaneous consideration of multiple fields of knowledge,” she says.

Rhetoric, specifically, “prepares students because it forces them to consider not only the construction and content of what they see and hear but also examines the medium — radio, television, film, and social media — and its impact.”

Chisholm, flanked by the Republicans’ video production staffer Michaela Britt ’17 of South Burlington, Vt., and Brennen Malone ’17 of Philadelphia, who plays the husband of Democratic presidential candidate Nott, confer with Kelley-Romano after the briefing. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)