A few days ago, I was driving to the college, listening to the radio, and there was a story about how from celebrating Pride.

In particular, the story recounted Target’s discontinuing of its Pride-themed children’s clothing line, the elimination of Pride displays from many though not all stores, and the shifting of Pride-themed merchandise to online availability only. 

About Stephen Engel
Professor of Politics and Associate Dean of the Faculty Stephen Engel offered these remarks at the raising of the Intersex-Inclusive Progress Pride Flag at Garcelon Field on June 13. His current research looks at whether discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity constitutes a violation of the Constitution’s 13th Amendment.

Similarly, Bud Light had pulled back from Pride-based marketing, and the explanation was that general marketing for Pride was costly; it provoked backlash. 

While that might make us think about a broader critique of late-stage capitalism or about how we should not conflate consumerism with political recognition and equal treatment, the story also included the comment that many companies know how to do niche marketing, so that queer consumers would still have access to queer- and pride-themed products, but that other consumers wouldn’t, and isn’t that great.

No, it is not great, I think, for at least two reasons. First, when I was a closeted 17-year-old, seeing some pride gear at a store on public display would probably have brought me some joy or, if not joy, at least carried the notion that I wasn’t alone even if I knew no one who was out at the time. 

Second, targeted messaging about Pride to those who are in the community, who are in the life, isn’t actually the point of Pride. For me, Pride isn’t about, or isn’t only about, a time to celebrate my queerness, my identity, with my community. And it’s not about, or isn’t only about, , going to a parade so I can get smacked in the head when someone from the Bank of America float throws a rainbow-colored Bank of America-branded pen at me.  

Pride is about demanding recognition, it is about demanding rights, and it is about taking up space and responsibility precisely among the people who don’t want to see you. Pride is the opposite of niche marketing.

What we think of today as Pride celebrations in June grew out of the of 1970, a commemoration of the Stonewall Riots that took place in New York City on June 28, 1969. 

But it is also important to remember that, as I teach in my classes, Stonewall is by no means the start of LGBTQIA+ political activism. Indeed, the Christopher Street Liberation Day March was based on the , which were held on July 4 in the early and mid 1960s, organized by the that was made up of the Daughters of Bilitis of New York, the Mattachine Society of New York, and the Janus Society of Philadelphia.

And those pickets — as a political strategy — drew upon the tactics of African American civil rights mobilization, upon second-wave feminist theory and action, and upon a rich history of labor activism and protest. Pride celebrates all of those historical connections and shared paths. 

As we take a moment to remember that history and those points of connection among and across communities as well as shared and distinct identities, we should also take stock of what we forget. If Pride lands in June to commemorate the Stonewall Riots, let’s also be sure to remember the three years before Stonewall when trans women stood up against police violence. 

Let’s be sure to remember when queers took a stand against state violence and discrimination at in 1958. Let’s remember when in 1961, a gender non-conforming Black queen, to protect a bar in Milwaukee from men trying to physically destroy this gathering place. Let’s remember when over 200 people picketed in front of the Black Cat tavern in 1967 in Los Angeles .

Remembering that long history of protest — of standing up to be seen — and remembering that Pride is as much a celebration as it is a political riot is more necessary than ever as our communities are confronted with hostile state governments as much as with cowering and cowardly corporate partners. 

The rights and value of our community, of ourselves, have been stripped away by state governments that have passed bans on gender-affirming care, that have banned books and even the ability to speak our truths publicly, and that have sought to divide our communities by threatening the most vulnerable among us while simultaneously elevating those within our community who are already privileged.

So, as we mark Pride 2024, some aspects of our shared experience may seem bleak or challenging, but they are no more so than what our predecessors faced. We do well to remember how they were proud, how they fought back, and how they celebrated their queerness and their community, to make better lives for us.

And, Pride reminds us to take up that challenge, and to be visible not only within our own community, within our own niche, but to everyone.

When members of the Class of 2027 arrive at ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ in August, they will be brought into the ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ fold by one of the nation’s leading first-year programs. 

Revamped in 2020, the ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ First-Year Experience was recently honored by NASPA, a leading national association for student affairs professionals, for successfully delivering a “holistic and cohesive experience for new students throughout their entire first year.”

The Collaboration Award, presented by the Orientation, Transition, and Retention Knowledge Community of NASPA, notes that the ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ FYE is now a “premier model that is fueled by a deep collaboration between academic affairs and student affairs.”

The award is a “tremendous honor,” says Professor of Politics Stephen Engel, who, as an associate dean of the faculty focusing on student academic support and experience, co-led the  team that redesigned the ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ FYE program for its debut in 2020.

The revised program, led by Engel, Associate Dean and Director of Operations Blake Reilly, and fellow Student Affairs professionals, represents a shift in how ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ introduces students to the community. 

“What matters most to all of us is that our students have a positive and enriching first year at ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝.”

Jimmy Riley

Rather than the traditional fire-hose of information delivered over the course of just a few days before classes, the new program has a more measured cadence that continues throughout the year. As a result, students are better able to process and retain all the new names, faces, and information, while also getting the big picture about ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ community values, from equity and inclusion to health and well-being.

The ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ FYE program reflects the “values that animate our community as much as it has also been a means for our students to get to know the people, programs, and policies that sustain our community,” said Engel.

And it works, Engel added, because of buy-in from the entire ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ enterprise. “The work to support the transition to ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ would be utterly impossible without the engagement of our entire community,” he said.

“No single office manages the program,” said Jimmy Riley, director of residence life and community standards, who traveled with ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ colleagues in April to accept the award during the 2023 NASPA annual conference in Boston.

“It lives as an ongoing strategic partnership among several community stakeholders, including folks from academic affairs and student affairs. What matters most to all of us is that our students have a positive and enriching first year at ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝.”

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 PĂŠrez-ArmendĂĄriz 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 CĂ´te d’Ivoire. It said, in part, “the U.S. calls on CĂ´te 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,” PĂŠrez-ArmendĂĄriz 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.’”

PĂŠrez-ArmendĂĄriz 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.”

In the wake of the midterms, will Democrats moderate or move to the left?

Will Republicans continue to own the issue of immigration? And will the country’s urban vs. rural political divide continue?

Comprising professors from the Department of Politics, a noontime panel the day after Election Day briefed the ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ community on those questions and more in the wake of the latest high-stakes election cycle.

For the Democrats, “we saw an expanded [party] in terms of embodied diversity,” Professor of Politics Stephen Engel.

“We saw LGBTQ candidates win; the first openly gay male governor was elected in Colorado; and on the policy side we saw an anti-trans policy go down in Massachusetts.”

Professor of Politics Stephen Engel, seen in the classroom in April, says the midterms yielded greater “embodied diversity” for the Democratic Party. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

Associate Professor of Politics Leslie Hill pointed out that the percentage of women in the incoming House won’t be much higher than the current one.

But she saw the elections of women of color, in particular, as building momentum for women entering politics, on the right or left.

“We have two Native American women entering the House,” she said. “Two Muslim-American women are entering the House. We see women of color entering the House from districts that have elected white men to office.

Associate Professor of Politics Leslie Hill, seen at a faculty panel following the 2016 presidential election, says the election of women of color in the midterms “is building momentum for women entering politics.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

“What we’re seeing is a greater presence. What’s that going to do? Some folks suggest it will increase the confidence of more women to run for office.”

Hill, who is teaching a course on gender and sexuality in U.S. politics this semester, paid attention to the rhetoric female candidates used in their ads. She said that while they presented themselves as both mothers and, say, fighter pilots, emphasizing qualifications like military experience does “reinforce the idea of politics as men’s business.”

What did the election of more women to Congress mean in terms of the policies likely to be enacted? Hill did not want to speculate too much, but she said it helped the Democrats that Republicans did not focus on the growing economy in their campaigns.

“It gave room for those Democratic candidates across the board to be able to talk about healthcare, to be able to frame that very strongly, to be able to talk about some of the social policy issues, the family care issues, the family responsibility issues, the work equity issues,” she said.

Associate Professor of Politics John Baughman speaks during a faculty panel Wednesday on the recent midterm elections. (Emily McConville/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

Instead of talking about the economy, as Associate Professor of Politics John Baughman pointed out, “the president and some Republicans talked about immigration and the caravan and birthright citizenship.”

That, added Associate Professor of Politics Clarisa Pérez-Armendáriz, was an indication that while healthcare is being debated on Democrats’ terms, immigration is being debated on Republicans’.

People who live far from the southern border see immigration as a key issue, and President Donald Trump and other Republicans are “bringing up birthright citizenship or detention of immigrants and building tents, because we’re not going to invest in prisons,” said Pérez-Armendáriz, whose specialty is international migration.

That kind of discourse is making it so that Democrats, especially in the Senate races that they lost, went far to the right. Joe Donnelly and others were like, ‘Yes, I support the wall.’”

PĂŠrez-ArmendĂĄriz predicted that post-election, Democrats would allow funding for a wall along the southern border, and other border security measures, in exchange for protections for recipients of DACA protection. Immigration reform, meanwhile, would continue to be elusive, as policy is made by executive order and then litigated in courts whose judges were appointed by the administration.

Democrats, especially in the Senate races that they lost, went to the right on immigration, says Associate Professor of Politics Clarisa PĂŠrez-ArmendĂĄriz, seen speaking to newly admitted students in April 2016. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

“That’s a useful strategy, [for the White House] to think, ‘How can we do this implementation through the executive, put it through the courts, and the courts may increasingly implement restrictive immigration policy?’”

Pérez-Armendáriz said that even if Democrats were more successful in places like Texas and Arizona — in other words, if voters for either party were more balanced — she worried that the divide between Democrats and Republicans is too broad and they will remain unable to find common ground.

“Are we talking about, half the population thinks the world is going to end if the other half wins, and vice versa?” she said. “That’s a negative undercurrent of this.”

A fundamental question, said Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics Jacob Longaker, will be the extent to which the party should try to court moderate Republicans or white people living in rural areas.

“Are we talking about, half the population thinks the world is going to end if the other half wins, and vice versa?”

“There’s an increasing urban and rural divide,” Longaker said. “We know that Democrats have been doing quite well in urban centers fielding very far-left candidates, and Republicans have been doing quite well in rural areas, though they’re being fended off in some ways and being challenged by more moderate, center-leaning Democrats.”

The party, Leslie Hill said, will “have to figure out how to have some very serious conversations about issues where they can land, where they can create some spaces.”

One of those spaces could be acknowledging and decrying white supremacy, which Hill saw in conversations about immigration. She said she was happy to see Stacey Abrams in Georgia and Andrew Gillum address racism and white supremacy specifically.

“For me to be able to see Stacey Abrams present herself and get so close, that’s profoundly important,” she said.

“That’s glass half-full for me. There are a lot of people who did not take a colorblind approach. They said, ‘No, I’m standing against that, and that’s really important because that’s a piece of the conversation that’s opened up.”

ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ has announced eight faculty promotions, including tenure awards and full professorships, effective Aug. 1 for the 2018–19 academic year.

The promotions were recommended by the faculty’s Committee on Personnel and approved by the ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College Board of Trustees.

Malcolm Hill is vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty at ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College.

“One of the joys of working at ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ is to be surrounded by exceptionally talented and creative people. This year’s tenured and promoted faculty provide outstanding examples of the consequential scholarship and creative work going on at ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝,” said Malcolm Hill, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty.

“As leaders in their respective fields and through their continuing hard work, these faculty offer our students unparalleled opportunities in the classroom, and give us all an opportunity to engage with the important ideas of our time.”

Meet the eight newly promoted professors, learn their research fields, and discover why they teach.

Promotions to associate professor with tenure

+Associate Professor of Religious Studies Ali Humayun Akhtar

Ali Humayun Akhtar has been promoted to associate professor of religious studies. (Michael Bradley/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

+Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies Jonathan Cavallero

Jonathan Cavallero has been promoted to associate professor of rhetoric, film, and screen studies. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

+Associate Professor of German Raluca Cernahoschi

Raluca Cernahoschi has been promoted to associate professor of German. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

+Associate Professor of German Jakub Kazecki

Jakub Kazecki has been promoted to associate professor of German. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

+Associate Professor of Mathematics Katharine Ott

Katharine Ott has been promoted to associate professor of mathematics. (Sarah Crosby/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

+Associate Professor of Biology Larissa Williams

Larissa Williams has been promoted to associate professor of biology. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

Promotions to full professor

+Professor of Politics Stephen Engel

Stephen Engel has been promoted to professor of politics. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

+Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies Lisa Maurizio

Lisa Maurizio has been promoted to professor of classical and medieval studies. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

Allen Sumrall ’16 says that professor Stephen Engel made him stop caring about what, for some, is a defining point of academe: the grade.

“I became more concerned about the material and writing a well-organized, interesting, thought-provoking paper than about the grade it would get,” says Sumrall, who took four courses with Engel and enlisted that associate professor of politics as his honors thesis adviser.

“That’s probably the single best lesson I learned in college,” Sumrall says. “He inspired my own thinking. I became truly interested in the material for its own sake.” In other words, he discovered what’s known around ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ as purposeful work: the kind of work that aligns interests, abilities, and a sense of higher meaning.

In a video by ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ director of photography Phyllis Graber Jensen, Stephen Engel explains what the Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching means to him.

“It’s only because of his courses that I’m doing a Ph.D. in government,” adds Sumrall, who’s building on his ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ honors thesis to earn that doctorate, combined with a law degree, at the University of Texas at Austin. Engel’s “willingness to nurture and promote that enthusiasm in students allowed me to discover what I wanted to do with my life.”

It’s not surprising that students of Engel would undergo such conversion experiences. Engel’s teaching, says politics department colleague James Richter, “is characterized by encyclopedic knowledge of his subject, clarity in its presentation, extraordinary preparation — you should see the outlines on the board when you walk into one of his 200-level classes — and an overriding concern for his students’ progress.”

Engel recently received a different kind of acknowledgement of his work with students: the 2018 edition of ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝â€™ pre-eminent faculty honor, the Ruth M. and Robert H. Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Charlotte Karlsen ’20 of Portland, Ore., sits with Associate Professor of Politics Stephen Engel in his Pettengill Hall office. She is taking Constitutional Law II with Engel as an independent study. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

On April 30, to mark the award, Engel presents a talk suggesting that conservatives may come to accept Supreme Court decisions that advance gay rights, because such decisions could ultimately serve the right’s legal objectives.

Engel joined the faculty in politics, one of ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝’ most popular majors, in 2011. The author of three books, he teaches constitutional law and development, American political development, and courses that focus on LGBT social and political mobilization.

For him, part of the appeal of a small school like ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ is that “there is both the expectation and the excitement of being in the classroom on a regular basis with undergraduates. The classroom is where I get to test ideas, challenge students, have students challenge me about those ideas,” Engel says.

In March, Timothy Lyle of Iona College and Stephen Engel (at the far end of the table) packed a Commons seminar room with their research presentation “F***ing with Dignity.” The talk was presented in coordination with ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝’ production of “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

“And it’s where I can really think through, in the context of politics, how contemporary policy disputes can be understood both in the moment and in the historical context.”

Now in her second semester of studying constitutional law with Engel, politics major Charlotte Karlsen ’20 of Portland, Ore., seconds Sumrall’s assessment of the professor’s ability to engage students. Where “Con Law I” could have been a dry and arcane exposition of relationships among the three federal branches and between D.C. and the states, Engel instead made it captivating.

“I think a lot of us were like, ‘We’re going to go through this kind of taxation or interstate highway conversation,’” Karlsen says, but instead, “we walked out with a really funny story or a life that had been changed by a federal decision. He really is excellent at balancing the personal and the academic in a way that makes constitutional law feel alive.”

Associate Professor of Politics Stephen Engel is the 2018 recipient of ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝’ Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

She adds, “Everything he says is so specific, so direct, and so comprehensible. I think that’s critical, because he reaches every member of the class.”

“One of the things that I’ve come to learn at ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝,” says Engel, “is how I value my students so much, and how important it is to me that we create environments which are nurturing and challenging.” It’s an approach that Karlsen especially appreciated during Con Law I — which Engel taught during the emotional roller-coaster ride of the 2016 election season. He provided the tools to understand the new status quo, along with some implicit reassurance about the ultimate solidity of the U.S. political system.

“To feel like there’s a structure to our country and there’s a way that things are supposed to go,” Karlsen says, “helps us have hope for the future. And also to know what expectations we should hold for our current government. It gives students agency in discovering what responsibilities they have toward our country and how the country should be responsible to us.”

2018 Kroepsch Award recipient Stephen Engel, associate professor of politics, teaches in Pettengill Hall on April 6. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

To Allen Sumrall, who came in thinking that political science was pretty much all campaign tactics and dull institutional studies, Engel introduced intriguing dimensions of the field: specifically, the sub-discipline of American political development, which studies the causes and effects of major shifts in political history.

It was a game-changer. “APD scholars always press for historical context,” Sumrall says. “Something a political actor does at Point A may not have the same effect as if they had done it at Point B. That point alone made my brain explode.”

Engel also wins praise for his ability to challenge students while equipping them to meet the challenges. “He asks a lot of his students, but gives them all the tools to succeed,” says Bennett Saltzman ’18 of Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.

“He gives great feedback — often writing a full page of notes on every student’s paper. This feedback shaped my senior year, as the paper proposal that I wrote in ‘Politics of Judicial Power’ last semester turned into my thesis this semester.”

Politics professor Stephen Engel is known for his ability to engage students with challenging material. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

The rewards are mutual, says Engel. “One of the fun things for me, especially when it comes time to advise a senior thesis, is to watch a student take responsibility and ownership over what they’re doing,” he explains. “And also the idea that they come to recognize that they are a bit of an expert — and often more of an expert — on a particular question than I am.”

On a recent weekend, Engel read “a senior thesis that was using some quantitative and statistical modeling techniques that were extraordinarily impressive.” Engel was struck by the intellectual maturity of the student’s argument: “He walked the reader through to understand not just what his methodology was, but why it was this, and why it was an improvement over existing attempts to answer the question that he was answering.”

It was a great moment, he continues. “I was like, ‘I’m learning!’” For Engel, that experience is part of a dynamic wired into the ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ education. “In the first year, you really are the professor and they really are the student.

“And by the point of the thesis, the roles can reverse in a way where the professor can be actively learning and the student can take responsibility for how to teach — that exciting moment where they realize what they actually have accomplished.

“You really do, as a professor, get to see the arc of a student’s academic progress.”

The decor in Stephen Engel’s Pettengill Hall office speaks volumes. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

If the government takes your house to make way for a highway bypass that will improve traffic flow, you’re entitled to (and may even get) fair compensation for that taking of your property.

But not all government takings are followed by recompense, nor are they even acknowledged as a taking. In the 1980s, for instance, municipal authorities in New York City closed gay bathhouses as a response to the HIV/AIDS crisis. They argued that the bathhouses were hot spots for transmission of the disease.

Whether or not the closures were defensible from a public health standpoint, fair compensation never entered the equation. Instead, the closures not only deprived bathhouse owners of their business income, but also deprived clients of a sociocultural milieu that was important and irreplaceable.

Timothy Lyle, assistant professor of English at Iona College (at left), and Stephen Engel, associate professor of politics at ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝, present research arguing that the 1980s closure of New York City’s gay bathhouses was an act of “dignity taking” from the gay community. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

In short, as professors Stephen Engel of ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ and Timothy Lyle of Iona College argued during a March 2 talk at the college, the bathhouse shutdowns constituted a “dignity taking”: a confiscation of property, made without just compensation or legitimate public purpose, whose goal is to infantilize or dehumanize the affected group. (It’s a concept originated by Bernadette Atuahene, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law.)

Engel and Lyle presented their recent research as part of an interpretive series accompanying the college production of Angels in America: Millennium Approaches. The lunchtime session in a Commons meeting room drew an enthusiastic capacity crowd, perhaps drawn in part by the talk’s title, which for the first time in this context at ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ dropped an F-bomb: “F***ing with Dignity: Public Sex, Queer Intimate Kinship, and How the AIDS Epidemic Bathhouse Closures Constituted a Dignity Taking.”

In June, the Chicago-Kent Law Review will publish the research by Lyle, a former visiting professor at ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ who is now an assistant professor of English at Iona, and Engel, a professor of politics who studies U.S. political and legal development and social movements, particularly involving LGBTQ issues.

What did the bathhouses mean to New York’s gay community in the mid-1980s? If many baths weren’t created “for the purpose of men to seek out sexual encounters with each other,” Engel explained, “by the turn of the 20th century, some became known as ‘favorite spots’ where same-sexual relations were not discouraged.

On Jan. 6, 1986, New Yorkers pass by the shuttered St. Mark’s Baths in Greenwich Village. The institution was one of many gay bathhouses that the city closed in the 1980s as a response to the HIV/AIDS crisis. The order to close is posted on the front door. (AP photo/Rene Perez. Used with permission)

“They provided space for men to socialize with one another as identifiably gay men,” Engel continued. “The gay bathhouse took on an even more symbolic value within the context of the 1970s when queer sex acts were articulated as a kind of liberation from heteronormative constraints.”

In a way, the bathhouses served as community centers, offering films and live entertainment, hosting benefits, and offering voter registration and screenings for sexually transmitted infections. (Bette Midler, it was noted, still regards her early-career performances at the Continental Baths as some of her favorite gigs.)

“Unfortunately, public officials’ first response to the crisis was to invade these community institutions as sites of the problem.”

“In short, the baths were sites of community and kinship formation that helped gay men to interact beyond the carnal.”

Yet that role was never considered by the authorities, said Lyle, nor were “queer understandings of space, contact, intimacy, and belonging that animated these spaces.”

“So to entertain any notion that these closures damaged the dignity of gay men, we must resist the urge to pathologize these public, anonymous, and casual sex institutions,” Lyle said. “But unfortunately, public officials’ first response to the crisis was to invade these community institutions as sites of the problem at the very time that [government was] underspending on HIV education, prevention, and resources for these communities under siege.”

The closures and the public debate surrounding them “violated the dignity of gay men in a few different ways,” Lyle said. The furor exacerbated a tendency to blame gay men for the epidemic. It overshadowed the gay community’s own substantial efforts to regulate the baths.

The March 2 presentation “F***ing With Dignity” drew a capacity crowd to a conference room in Commons. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

Finally, public perception reinforced the authorities’ refusal “to engage in the queer logics that articulated the communal value of these spaces,” Lyle said. “Simply put, these bathhouses challenged the supposedly neat and tidy boundaries that separate the public from the private.”

The gay community’s own push to regulate bathhouse behaviors was a measure of the community’s determination and cohesiveness. Working with bath owners, organizations such as the Coalition for Sexual Responsibility and Gay Men’s Health Crisis undertook substantial campaigns to promote safer sex and to make recommendations, to be backed by inspections, for educational, hygienic, and structural improvements in the bathhouses.

Basing their presentation on archival research conducted in New York City in 2016, Engel and Lyle offered colorful examples of promotional materials from the campaign to self-regulate. Engel described a proposed poster design, listing high-risk practices to avoid, that proclaimed in bold type, “Sex is wonderful!” — and then warned, “But don’t let it kill you.”

Another poster reminded readers, “Affection is our best protection.”

The gay community’s effort to support the bathhouses, designed to balance health (and political) imperatives with sex-positivity and community solidarity, was aligned with some official resistance to closing the baths, in part on the grounds that closures would constitute excessive government interference.

New York City Commissioner of Health David Sencer was an opponent of closure, as were members of a state bathhouse subcommittee. But in adopting the CSR recommendations for bathhouse practices, the subcommittee also, in Engel’s words, “essentially co-opted the community’s efforts of self-regulation and stated them as their own.”

“Sex is wonderful! But don’t let it kill you.”

In October 1985, the state public health council amended the sanitary code such that “no establishment shall make facilities available for the purpose of sexual activities where anal intercourse, vaginal intercourse, or fellatio take place. Such facilities will constitute a threat to the public health.”

The council didn’t acknowledge, Engel explained, “that these institutions could be anything other than a threat to the public and that activities within them could be anything other than those that spread contagion.

“Furthermore, the provision made no distinction between high- and low-risk activities, and ignored the recommendations of the state’s bathhouse subcommittee, the community-based organizations, and contemporary medical science.”

The New York Daily News of Nov. 10, 1985, covered the city’s edict against establishments permitting “dangerous sex.”

Ultimately, the city shut down most of the baths. “Elected officials painted gay men as oversexed animals incapable of responding to the crisis,” Lyle argued.

“The bathhouse closures perpetuated [a narrative of gay] culpability, ignited pretty serious divisions within the gay and lesbian communities, and produced within gay men, I think, a deep distrust and even fear of government — and one another, to be honest.”

The other side of the dignity-taking coin, of course, is dignity restoration. And while the rhetoric around U.S. Supreme Court decisions striking down sodomy laws and upholding LGBT marriage might feel restorative and uplifting, Engel argued that their conceptual underpinnings, in fact, are “quite narrow.”

“Even as we may recognize the momentous achievement that marriage recognition represents as a U.S. constitutional matter,” he said, the decision still privileges those gay unions that are modeled after heterosexual marriage, while ignoring “other kinds of connection at the heart of a queer ethic of public sex.”

By the same token, Lyle noted, the advent of so-called Pre-exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) — the ongoing administration of antiretroviral drugs to HIV-negative people who are at risk of infection — is a mixed blessing from the standpoint of dignity.

“Certainly the recent research is showing us powerfully that Truvada [the only drug approved for use as PrEP] is curbing HIV infection. There’s no debate about that,” Lyle said. But a prescription for the drug is overpriced, heavily regulated, and accompanied by data collection that Lyle characterized as state surveillance of gay men’s private lives.

“This approach to health,” he argued, “is problematically entangled in capitalistic enterprises and in state-directed efforts to surveil, police, and make decisions for gay men.”

In other words, Engel said, concealed within the seeming progress of sanctioned gay marriage and of sex made safe by Truvada is the same old refusal to comprehend “queer world-making practices.”

“While these efforts ostensibly return dignity to denigrated citizens — a lot of my friends and colleagues have talked about how PrEP allows individuals to have sex without fear for the first time — they do not engage deliberately with what exactly was taken in the first place, and how, and for what reasons, that taking occurred.”

When the HIV/AIDS crisis emerged in Maine three decades ago, many residents didn’t realize it was a problem.

“People in Maine, whether they were queer or not, viewed themselves as immune and separate from HIV/AIDS, because they conceptualized it as an urban phenomenon,” says Ian Erickson ’18 of St. Albans, Vt.

But activists — most of them serving LGBTQ communities — knew about the disease almost as soon as it became widespread in the early 1980s, and they mobilized to help people prevent and manage it, whether they lived in Portland or northern Aroostook County.

For his senior honors thesis in politics, Erickson did a case study of HIV/AIDS-related activism in rural Maine in the 1980s and 1990s. By looking at a trove of meeting minutes, public service announcements, press releases, posters, pictures, and government documents at the at the University of Southern Maine, he got a sense of the strategies that activist groups used to educate and advocate. And he learned about how they conceived of themselves and their work.

His adviser, Associate Professor of Politics Stephen Engel, believes that Erickson is poised to make inroads on a topic that scholars of political sociology and LGBTQ studies have ignored. “He’s bringing to the foreground a lot of history that has not been systematically covered,” Engel says.

Erickson, who recently presented his research as part of programming surrounding the ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ production of Angels in America, hopes his work sheds more light on the lives of rural Mainers during a particular political moment, especially since rurality is often painted with a broad brush today.

With his honors thesis research, Ian Erickson is “bringing to the foreground a lot of history that has not been systematically covered,” says his adviser, Professor of Politics Stephen Engel. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

“A lot of people assume rural areas are conservative and unfriendly places to all of these different identity groups,” he says. “I was interested in dislodging that notion. It’s true in some respects that rural places are more conservative, but I thought it was interesting to take it beyond these heavily partisan narratives and look at actual lived experiences.”

Erickson came to the idea of studying AIDS activism by delving into rural queer studies, an emerging field that looks at the experiences of LGBTQ people who don’t live in cities. The approach challenges “metronormativity,” the idea that LGBTQ people can only live happily in cities, and those who live in the country either stay there unhappily or are preparing to migrate to cities.

Though HIV/AIDS doesn’t affect only LGBTQ people, Erickson focused on the disease after he realized there weren’t many historical accounts of how rural Maine was affected by the pandemic.

As he read and researched, Erickson found that ideas about AIDS contributed to metronormativity.

“When you apply AIDS, it’s, ‘You only go back to your rural hometown to die,’” he says. “It’s a cycle of migration and movement and life that posits the city as being a queer utopia and rural areas as being a place of secrecy and silence and loneliness.”

Activist groups in rural Maine — and there were a surprising number of them, Erickson says — directly challenged that narrative.

Almost from the beginning of the HIV/AIDS crisis, they worked to persuade people who lived in the central Maine city of Bangor that AIDS wasn’t just a Boston or a Portland problem, and people in smaller towns that it wasn’t just a Bangor problem.

Some groups, like the Eastern Maine AIDS Network, raised awareness by making it clear that AIDS did not only affect LGBTQ people — though the “de-gaying” of AIDS had the unintended consequence of erasing the experiences of LGBTQ people, Erickson says.

Members of the Maine Lesbian/Gay Political Alliance march past a protester during a pride parade in Bangor in 1993. (Bangor Daily News)

Like such urban organizations as ACT UP, which had two chapters in Maine, groups like the Eastern Maine AIDS Network and the Down East AIDS Network created community resources and held marches and vigils. But they also organized transportation to get people to medical care.

Northern Lambda Nord, which worked in northern Maine and Quebec and published materials in both English and French, helped people network and served as an information clearinghouse. In this way, the group challenged another narrative about rural LGBTQ people: that they were isolated and therefore lonely.

LGBTQ people in rural areas weren’t all that isolated, Erickson says. They were well-aware of national trends and had access to information and medical care, thanks in part to Northern Lambda Nord’s and other groups’ efforts.

And they didn’t consider being isolated a bad thing in the first place. At the archive, Erickson saw letters from out of state to Northern Lambda Nord, asking what it was like to be gay in northern Maine. The answer was often that there was a growing community and a live-and-let-live attitude.

“These people were crafting really specific communities, but they weren’t doing it because they didn’t want to be isolated,” he says. “They loved being isolated.”

Erickson thinks a more potent challenge is loneliness, the danger of not being able to talk to or connect with anybody like oneself. In addition to providing services, Northern Lambda Nord worked to build a community — people could call its phone line to get information about HIV/AIDS, but also to be connected to other people.

“Community-building, phone lines, connecting people to people — those combat loneliness,” Erickson says. “That’s a unique aspect of rural HIV/AIDS activism.”

Having completed more than 30 hours of fieldwork in local schools for my education courses, I consider myself well-acquainted with one part of the Lewiston-Auburn community.

ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ senior Claire Brown, meanwhile, has gained her expertise in quite a different area of our community.

Brown, a politics major from Rockville Centre, N.Y., has interned at the Maine District Court in Lewiston since her first year at ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ —including two summers funded by the Harward Center for Community Partnerships — and this year she leveraged that experience to do honors-thesis research on the effectiveness of Maine’s Adult Drug Treatment Courts.

An alternative to jail, drug treatment courts provide multidisciplinary and rehabilitative support for drug-addicted offenders.

Existing in the U.S. since 1989, every state and territory now has a drug court. Maine has five adult drug courts, plus three family treatment drug courts and one for military veterans and civilians who have co-occurring substance abuse disorders and mental illness. For confidentiality reasons, the locations of Brown’s research interviews are not disclosed.

If a student asked you about your thesis, how would you explain it to them?

My thesis is comparing adult drug court to more traditional forms of incarceration and criminal justice in Maine.

Why did you focus on adult drug court vs. a traditional court setting?

Adult drug court is unlike a traditional trial setting where you discuss the matters of the case and then you’re done.

In adult drug court, you see the whole team: the judge, the prosecutor, the probation officer, and the treatment providers. My experience is that they are very invested in the drug court participants’ rehabilitation, about understanding the lives of the people involved, and about building honest relationships with them.

Claire Brown ’17 (center) presents her research on Maine’s Adult Drug Treatment Court system during Mount David Summit on March 31. At left and right are Isobel Curtis and Yarisamar Cortez, fellow presenters about community-engaged research. (Josh Kuckens/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

The goal of this support is so that when offenders are struggling and relapse, or if they commit some other violation because they are struggling with addiction, they’ll seek help rather than create more problems for themselves.

What inspired your idea?

I wanted to write my thesis on something connected with the community and the court system. During my internship work, I noticed how many cases — whether criminal, family, or other matters — involved parties whose problems were caused in large part by their drug addictions.

I became really interested in the idea of rehabilitation through the court system, specifically the criminal side of drug involvement and the law. And I wanted to study drug court more substantively than it has been before, beyond traditional metrics and end goals such as reducing recidivism, reducing illicit drug use, and saving money in the justice system.

What did you do as a judicial court intern?

My main duty was to digitally record trials, case management conferences, and different proceedings. I also helped the judges review case files. Since I have been doing it for so long, the judges allowed me to write the first draft of some of the court orders.

How did your internship help your thesis work?

It helped me make connections in Maine courthouses. For example, one day, a drug-court prosecutor was in our Lewiston court for a day. Through her, I was able to observe drug court proceedings a few times.

In August 2015, Claire Brown ’17 poses with Judge John Beliveau at the Maine District Court in Lewiston. Her judicial internship, which inspired her honors thesis research on adult drug court effectiveness, was funded in the summers of 2014 and 2015 by the Harward Center for Community Partnerships. (Josh Kuckens/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

What did you find out?

I found that drug court in Maine is an improvement upon carceral state conceptions of punishment and surveillance as well as success and effectiveness.

What do you mean by “carceral state conceptions of punishment and surveillance”?

The drug court team views the participants as people and not just criminals, so drug court is more rehabilitative than incarceration and probation. The overall focus is on treatment as opposed to punishment and monitoring.

The surveillance used in drug court is more meaningful and humanizing. The intense monitoring of the participant in the community is intended to prepare him or her to live in the community post-drug court — as opposed to being monitored within a controlled environment while incarcerated, or only loosely monitored on probation.

And what does “success and effectiveness” mean in this context?

I mean that the team members did view their results beyond traditional metrics of reducing recidivism and other goals. The team also had rehabilitative notions of success and effectiveness: to better the lives of the participants and equip them with the skills and pro-social connections that will enable them to lead sober, law-abiding lives.

What was your thesis routine?

I usually worked in Coram. I had to code much of the interview data manually, looking for the different themes and connections between the interview data, and I don’t like to sit down for too long, so Coram’s standing workstations helped with that.

What were the ups and downs of your thesis process?

One of the challenges for this project was narrowing the focus on what I was studying. I began by observing four areas when I should have been only observing only two or three. I ultimately settled on surveillance, punishment, and access and bias. The last refers to structural advantages, such as strong family support or employment that may make it easier for some people to succeed both within and following drug court.

It all clicked for me when I actually began witnessing drug court cases in practice and saw all of these factors come together.

On the up side, I earned a Community Engaged Research Fellowship this year from the Harward Center. We had a seminar discussion every other Sunday, and that really helped with some of the history, methods, and ethics of community-engaged research specifically.

I’ve presented my research at the Mount David Summit on campus and at the Engaged Scholarship and Social Justice Conference at Harvard. I learned about the community-based research done by students from other colleges and was able to have meaningful discussions with another student on my panel who had done research related to the War on Drugs.

Can you describe your relationship with your adviser?

My adviser is Associate Professor of Politics Stephen Engel. He’s an expert in constitutional law and American politics. He was always happy to meet with me and offer me advice when I was struggling with the research process.

Were there any moments when you said, “There aren’t enough hours in the day to get this work done!”?

Transcribing the interviews was the most time-intensive part — just listening to all the “uhs” and “ums” and repetitive sentences was really hard. One of my politics professors recommended that I invest in a transcription foot pedal. I should’ve!

What was the most enjoyable part about working on your thesis?

I feel like my thesis is really a culmination of my ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ experience. Graduation is coming up, and I can’t imagine just leaving the court.

I loved doing interviews because it was fascinating to hear the different members of the team involved in drug court describe the trusting relationships they’ve built with participants. That was a very valuable part of my thesis.

What advice would you give to students who will be writing thesis?

The earlier you settle on a topic, have an idea of where you’re going, and start looking at the literature, the better shape you will be in.

And also: Just relax. Thesis is a big project and a daunting project, but also take some time for yourself.

What are your post-grad plans?

I will be working as a project assistant at the law firm Sidley Austin, in New York City. I start in late June.

A day before the election, the ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ politics department announced that it would offer a postmortem on Wednesday, Nov. 9.

And they couldn’t have picked a better title for the event: “What Just Happened?”

Those were likely the first words in households all over America Wednesday morning as both friends and foes of President-elect Donald Trump absorbed the news of his upset victory.

At midday, four members of the politics faculty propped their sleep-deprived eyes open for an hour to offer insights about the election and some predictions about U.S. governance under Trump.

John Baughman, an associate professor of politics, speaks during the Wednesday discussion in the Mays Center. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

Concern evident in their faces and postures, about 200 students, staff, and faculty filled the Benjamin Mays Center to hear what John Baughman, Ben Moodie, Leslie Hill, and Will D’Ambruso thought about the outcome. In question-and-answer form, here are some takeaways:

Why didn’t the experts see Trump’s win coming?

Baughman, associate professor of politics and an occasional commentator for the news media, listed factors that the pundits didn’t see or couldn’t have seen.

He described some regional variations from past voting patterns, such as a strong showing for the Democrats by Latino voters that continued a recent trend — but that was offset by a surge, unforeseen by pollsters, in white working-class voters with less than a college education.

More culturally significant, perhaps, was Baughman’s observation that campaign organizations and their get-out-the-vote efforts in some ways “seemed not to matter” in a  presidential campaign driven less by party organization and affiliation and more by raw emotion.

ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ President Clayton Spencer takes notes in the Mays Center during the “What Just Happened?” panel analyzing the 2016 election. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

Baughman said that this was “not an election that seemed to turn primarily on debates over key policy choices, the way that we’ve seen in other elections.”

Instead, “policy took a back seat to other kinds of debate and rhetoric” that appealed to voters’ anger and fears. He also noted that racial and ethnic animus was “a key factor” in the outcome, and suggested that the rhetoric of prejudice, now embedded in mainstream political discourse, will be hard to remove.

“This is one of the most troubling aspects of this election, and something we’re going to be responding to for a while yet.”

Baughman added, in response to a question near the end of the gathering, “You can’t just turn off divisive, racist campaign rhetoric.” Washington will find some way to govern, but hate rhetoric has been legitimized.

If the economy was not a dominant theme in this election, Baughman did note that “changes in partisanship over time map very directly onto changes in income inequality.”

The overriding message from Baughman was that the U.S. has arrived in something like political terra incognita. “The establishment has been repudiated,” he said, especially within a Republican Party divided over Trump’s candidacy. “But it’s not clear yet what the alternative is.”

With the White House, Congress, and in all likelihood the Supreme Court in conservative hands for years to come, how can liberals have a meaningful voice in policy-making?

Activism at the local level is imperative, the panelists agreed. Especially so, as Baughman noted, because the Democrats have for years been hobbled by a shortage of strong candidates emerging locally and working their way up to regional and national influence.

“It’s up to people outside the political institutions to push for these sorts of things,” said Leslie Hill. “The other piece is us in the community and the ways in which we can figure out how to go forward. We have the vote, but we also have other ways of engaging politically, and that’s really important.”

What are likely economic effects of the election?

Flanked by John Baughman and Leslie Hill, Ben Moodie discusses the economic implications of a Trump presidency during the Nov. 9 “What Just Happened?” panel discussion. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

Ben Moodie, lecturer in politics and sociology, explained that during the campaign, Trump made evident his lack of interest in policy details. That puts “congressional conservatives in the driver’s seat” when it comes to federal finances — and between big tax cuts for the wealthiest and expanded spending on infrastructure and defense, the national debt is likely to balloon.

Such deficit spending would be good for economic growth given current conditions, Moodie said. Although more-progressive tax relief would be better economic medicine, more government spending — whatever the money is spent on — could nevertheless boost the national economy.

Funding for liberal priorities is certainly threatened. While the panel didn’t agree on the feasibility of repealing the Affordable Care Act, it will be pruned, perhaps drastically, as will Medicaid and other benefits for the poor. However, Moodie predicted, Social Security and Medicare will likely be spared.

What are the election’s political implications for women and for minorities?

Students, staff, and faculty fill the Benjamin Mays Center to hear a Nov. 9 politics faculty postmortem on the 2016 elections. (Phyllis Graber Jensen)

Echoing Baughman’s concern about racist campaign language, Hill wondered if misogyny has become “the new normal” in political discourse. For young women in the room, she said, the 2016 races must have been a devastating introduction to political participation in both tone and outcome.

Hill shared a quote from a Nov. 9 article in The Guardian: “Faced with the choice between a qualified woman with flaws and a man who had lied, evaded taxes and faced many sexual assault allegations, voters chose the man.”

Hill looked briefly at some demographic trends in the election. She noted that while Latin women and Asian–Pacific Islanders (men and women) voted in numbers roughly matching the past two presidential elections, their support for the Democratic candidate this time was less.

In terms of gender equality in political representation and especially leadership, the nation was trailing its economic peers when it entered the 2016 election, Hill said — and the events of Nov. 8  didn’t helped. She pointed to the U.S. Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, which has materially affected access to the polls for African Americans and other minorities.

“I can only imagine what John Lewis must be saying,” said Hill, referring to the civil rights and VRA advocate who offered ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝’ Commencement address in May.

Hill said that the prejudice and hostility unleashed during the 2016 campaign “may come down to people’s everyday lives. It worries me.”

Trump’s temperamental unsuitability to be in charge of the U.S. nuclear arsenal was an issue during the campaign. Should we be worried?

Lecturer in Politics William d’Ambruoso talks about international nuclear weapons security during the panel discussion. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

Lecturer in Politics Will d’Ambruoso opened his segment with the laugh line, “I’m going to talk casually about armageddon.” But the outlook for Trump as commander in chief, he indicated, is actually complicated and hard to predict.

Seeking to reduce U.S. costs for defending its allies, Trump has supported opening the nuclear club to nations like South Korea. The question is, will more nuclear arsenals around the globe result in stronger deterrence and more stability, or the opposite — especially since the international commitment to keeping nukes out of the wrong hands is not ironclad?

On a different front, d’Ambruoso suggested that Trump’s ties with Russian leader Vladimir Putin could actually reduce international tensions — “but human rights will be the loser,” he said.

D’Ambruoso summed up the uncertainty of Trump’s international role when he started an answer with, “I’m not exactly sure” but then added with a chuckle, “Well, of course I’m not sure!”

How will a Trump administration affect local law enforcement in terms of police misuse of force against blacks and others?

Jane Costlow, the Clark A. Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies, listens to the discussion in the Mays Center. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

Racial-justice interventions by the U.S. Justice Department like those we’ve seen under President Obama are unlikely under Trump, said Baughman. And a Trump-packed U.S. Supreme Court is not likely to support African American rights. But the federal court system below that level could provide a buffer.

What will happen to political promises such as Trump’s appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton?

The next four years, Baughman suggested, will afford a chance to see how much Trump meant of what he said on the campaign trail. But his term “will also be an interesting test of political institutions” — notably the career civil servants who embody much of the experience and know-how in Washington.

Will they be a stabilizing force? Baughman wondered, noting that the civil service is “a part of our political system that we usually take for granted.”

What might a Trump presidency mean for LGBT equality?

“What Just Happened?” fills the Benjamin Mays Center on the day after the election. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

Though unable to attend the Wednesday session, Stephen Engel, chair of the politics department, had already answered that question in October.

In a story for the McClatchyDC news service, Engel, who is the author of Fragmented Citizens: The Changing Landscape of Gay and Lesbian Lives, said that “the prospect for LGBT rights is not good” under a Trump administration.

Right off the bat, executive orders will likely be reversed, and, over time, courts will become more conservative.

A strategy to watch, Engel said, is states implementing “state religious freedom restoration acts.” Such acts could allow a baker, for example, to say no to making a wedding cake for a same-sex couple or a restaurant to deny an LGBT person a table based on religious convictions.