Room selection leaves some crushed, all housed

By John Jacobson

The selection process for housing has come and gone, but frustrations and suggestions for improvement still linger in the air.

For most students the housing process is frustrating for one reason or another, whether it is because of the uncertainty, the lack of options or the amount of paperwork.

Freshman Ance Simanovica is going abroad for next semester, but her room situation next year is still up in the air. Mainly, she doesn’t know if she can have the same roommate she had this year when she returns in the spring of 2011.

“I was confused as to whether I should go through the process,” she said. “I was told that I don’t have to do anything for now and that I would be contacted in April and so then I’ll let them know my preference.”

However, Simanovica is still unsure how the plan will work for her roommate.

“I want to keep my roommate … but she had to find someone to live with for the fall semester.

And then she kind of had to abandon her roommate for spring semester, so we hope it’s going to work out,” she said, “but it’s still really unclear.”

Sophomore Kenneth Holbert holds nearly opposite preferences for his housing situation next year. He wanted to squat in his old room, but had to search for a new roommate.

 

 

 

“Last year I decided that I wanted to squat in my old room because it was fairly big and I been very used to it. This year I had also decided the same, but my roommate wanted a single, so he opted out of squatting,” he said. “So I had to find a person who was willing to dorm with me, which I fortunately was [able to].”

Junior Allison Boutin shares this sense of relief from finding adequate housing. Boutin will be the convener of Peace House next semester after sending in multiple applications for other houses to live in. She shared what she had to go through to secure a house for her.

“I didn’t do the lottery … I applied for a friendship house and didn’t get it,” Boutin said.

Luckily, she had also applied to Peace House.

“I think it’s going to be a really great house,” she said. “I’m the only person who’s lived in Peace House before and I think we’re going to turn out a great Peace and Justice Week [sic].”

When asked about the logic she followed to find a living location, Boutin said that she wanted a space that was for her and her housemates.

“We tried to combine all of our skill sets and we were going to do like a ‘Women’s House,’” Boutin said. “We were going to have open hours for people to come and talk and we were going to do different workshops and address different issues that women have on campus.”

Residence Life reviews applications for friendship houses, which are required to have themes.

“They don’t really tell you why they rejected your application,” Boutin said. “I know they had to go through a lot of different applications, but I wish they had set up times for an interview or something. Because what I think you can manage to write on the housing application can be very misleading.”

Student plans garden as service, education for kids

By William Duffee

Children at the TownsendCommunity Center will soon be getting their hands dirty, thanks to Earlham junior Mary Jones.

Jones is organizing a children’s community garden for the Townsend center as part of her Bonner Scholar service. She projects planting to begin in May and continue as a summer program.

“In May and in June the kids will plant,” Jones said. “The kids that come after school will be planting the garden and the kids that come in summer will be maintaining the garden every day.”

Jones intends for the garden to act both as a learning resource for the kids and as a service project for the community. She hopes that the children who maintain the garden can become involved with the local farmers’ market and perhaps donate fresh produce to local soup kitchens.

“So the kids are learning how to grow and make stuff, but they’re also learning that we can share this with the community and people in need who don’t get fresh produce,” Jones said. “That’s the goal … teaching kids how to garden, teaching them about nutrition, giving them a project that they have ownership of.”

For the time being, the garden will be for the children’s use. Community support is needed and appreciated, Jones said, but the kids will be the ones directly gardening.

“We’re calling it a community garden but it’s not a community garden in the sense that most people probably think, in that there’s a piece of land and I rent a plot and I plant my own stuff in my plot,” she said.

Instead, the garden will be an after-school and summer youth program, but, if successful, the center could “expand it, maybe, in the future and have it be more like a community garden,” Jones said.

Jones began the project last semester, starting with general research and preparation. The garden will fill a 27-by-49-foot plot behind the center.

The garden has already received community support. One volunteer tilled the plot for free this past fall, and Richmond gardeners have expressed interest in helping teach the kids. Jones has also begun fundraising, and had a letter to the editor published in the Palladium-Item, Richmond’s primary newspaper, on March 8.

Assistant Professor of Education and Director of Wilderness Programs Jay Roberts helped Jones construct a rain barrel system for the Townsend center. Rain barrels collect rainwater, which can then be used to water the garden, adding to the sustainability of the garden.

Roberts said that Jones’ project ties in with Earlham’s recent move to create an environmental studies major and other shifts towards sustainability.

“This is exactly what I think we as the faculty were hoping for [in creating the major], which are students who are engaging in the community, doing projects that are both beneficial to the community but also to the student, and putting knowledge to action,” he said. “So I think what Mary’s doing with that particular project is a wonderful example of … what we’re hoping to do with this major as a whole.”

Associate Director of Wilderness Programs Tom Ferrell assisted Jones in designing the garden.

“I think it’s a great thing,” Ferrell said. “There’s a lot of conversation right now about healthy eating, both on-campus and in the larger community of Richmond [and] Wayne county, as well as the world right now, so I think this is a very timely thing.”

For Jones, planning the garden has been an opportunity to learn something new.

“I don’t know a ton about gardening,” she said. “This has been something I’ve always wanted to learn about, but I don’t know a lot about, so it’s been a really educational experience for me.”

100 studies, no fix for poor retention

By Micah Sommer

Earlham’s declining retention rates have raised concern among faculty and students, who are working together to understand and improve the situation. So far, their work has produced few perceptible results.

The freshman-to-sophomore retention rate this year was 81.2 percent, according to a document President Doug Bennett delivered to the Board of Trustees in February. This is the lowest retention rate Earlham has seen in 14 years. Of the 324 students who entered in 2008, only 263 returned for the fall of 2009, down from 85.3 percent just one year earlier. Other measures, such as the four-year graduation rate, have shown similar declines.

This is not the first time retention has been a concern, according to Provost Nelson Bingham.

“It’s really the same situation we’ve been facing for probably 10 or 15 years at least,” Bingham said. “Earlham’s retention and graduation of entering students is significantly lower than our peer schools.”

Bingham acknowledged a financial aspect, since the college must spend more on admissions to replace students who leave, but said that the problem goes beyond money.

“A larger concern for us is in terms of why those students are leaving, [and] whether they’re not finding what they were looking for at Earlham,” Bingham said. “Is this telling us something that we should be listening to in terms of some aspect of the institution?”

As director of institutional research, Bingham has been watching the data. “We’ve now done well over a hundred separate studies of retention,” he said, “and unfortunately I wish I could say that we got a consistent picture from that data, but we haven’t.”

Nonetheless, the administration is taking steps to address the issue. A retention working group has been meeting to discuss possible courses of action. Bennett is also forming an ad hoc committee on the first-year experience, which will examine aspects of students’ freshman year such as New Student Orientation, the general education curriculum and housing to see what can be done.

Associate Dean for Student Success Wendy Seligmann said that thinking about leaving is common among students.

“College students have made a huge choice, and I think going through that discernment process is not unusual,” Seligmann said. However, the question still remains, “What is that point where [one] student makes a decision to stay and the other student makes a decision to leave?”

In her current position Seligmann works with students who are considering leaving, connecting them with academic and social resources and helping them explore their options. Seligman said that while she can identify individual students who have decided to stay after working with her, this has not translated into large-scale improvement of the retention problem.

“We have not seen the numbers change, and that’s what so discouraging and distressing,” Seligmann said. “We’re not happy with our numbers; we know we’re a better school than that.”

Sophomore Sarah Clinton-McCausland nearly left Earlham last spring because of a lack of academic challenge and unstable personal relationships. She had been accepted at a different school, but situations at Earlham improved so that she decided to stay rather than go through the process of readjustment.

Clinton-McCausland theorized that Earlham “tends to attract the kind of people who aren’t even sure if college is the right place for them in the first place.” She noted that some students quickly discover they would rather be active in the “real world” than studying theory in class.

When asked to give advice to those considering leaving, Clinton-McCausland said, “It’s okay to decide that it’s not the right place for you, but … don’t close yourself off to [the possibility of staying] too early in the year, because I think a lot of people do that freshman year.”

Senior Rachel Hawkins said that she has seen friends leave Earlham for a wide variety of reasons. She expressed a desire for more open discussion among all members of the Earlham community on the issue of retention.

“I don’t think it’s something that’s commonly discussed except for in regards to specific incidents of people leaving,” Hawkins said. “Within the community as a whole, there doesn’t seem to be that dialogue, and that could be an important thing to people who are in the situation of considering leaving.”

Admissions works to increase enrollment

By Micah Sommer

Faced with falling enrollment due to the current financial situation, members of the Earlham community are devoting significant time and resources toward attracting more students to the college.

The Office of Admissions is pursuing a number of initiatives aimed at increasing the applicant pool and improving the yield of admitted students who end up enrolling. Some of the initiatives are aimed specifically at students who are low-need, or whose families can afford to pay a higher portion of tuition costs.

In January, Vice President of Admissions Jeff Rickey and Provost Nelson Bingham delivered to the Board of Trustees a list of 17 admissions initiatives.

Rickey explained that the goal of the initiatives is to increase enrollment from last fall’s total of 1,124 students to the college’s target figure of 1,200 students. The initiatives are categorized by three specific goals: expanding the applicant pool, enhancing the quality of the applicant pool and increasing enrollment among accepted applicants.

The initiatives vary widely. One of the simplest has been to suspend the $30 fee Earlham previously charged students to apply.

“That has not resulted in frivolous applications, and we know that because our completed applications percentage is up over last year,” Rickey said.

The Earlham Financial Aid Application has also been eliminated, and Earlham will use the Free Application for Federal Student Aid to determine financial aid packages.

Other initiatives focus on messaging, capitalizing on Earlham’s place among Loren Pope’s “Colleges that Change Lives” and emphasizing Earlham’s academic rigor.

Hoping to attract more Quaker students, the college has hired a part-time Young Adult Friends outreach coordinator, who will work out of the Newlin Center for Quaker Thought and Practice.

One initiative provides travel vouchers to help prospective students visit Earlham.

Rickey explained that this initiative targets prospective students who are similar to current Earlham students and thus more likely to attend Earlham, as determined by analysis of a number of attributes. This initiative also disproportionately targets low-need students.

Rickey explained that attracting low-need students is vital to Earlham’s financial stability.

“Earlham has had and will continue to have … a commitment to students from low- and moderate-income families, but as time has gone by we have neglected to enroll a diversity of students that would include a larger number of students who are low-need,” he said.

He explained that increasing this economic diversity by attracting more low-need and fullpaying students will provide the college with the financial security to continue its commitment to higher need students.

Bingham echoed this sentiment, adding that exposure to socioeconomic diversity is important in preparing Earlham students for the future.

“I think there are vanishingly fewer opportunities … for people of different socioeconomic classes to really come together and get to know each other and interact in a positive learning fashion, ” Bingham said. He added that this interaction “provides an opportunity to really develop some understanding that this world is going to need in the 21st century.”

Although the initiatives disproportionately target lowneed students, Rickey said that the college still practices needblind admission, deciding who is accepted regardless of financial aid.

Most of the initiatives originated from recommendations by the consulting group SimpsonScarborough, which the college hired last fall to address the short-term need to increase admissions. In September the consultants visited campus and met with focus groups consisting of Earlham students, parents and prospective students. The college hired the consultants for a fee of $53,400.

Earlham has also contracted with the Art & Science Group, a consulting firm that is currently working with the college on formulating longer term approaches to admissions. The fee for these consultants is $274,300, which will be paid over two years.

Much of the funding for these initiatives comes from a draw in endowment funds that the Board of Trustees approved in June 2009. Earlham’s operating budget and the President’s Discretionary Fund also provide some funding. The total cost of the initiatives for this fiscal year is $242,000, which does not include the consulting fees. Rickey said that assessment of the initiatives’ success will determine future funding.

Senior Jay Zevin is a member of the Admissions Initiative Client Committee, which is currently meeting with the longterm consulting group. He also met last fall with the short-term consultants. Zevin sees this process as important to ensuring the continuation of what makes Earlham valuable.

“In order for Earlham to remain the community that I love and value, it needs to make good business decisions, and so I wanted to do something that was involved in the business aspect of the school,” Zevin said.

Zevin acknowledged that this may be an uncomfortable topic for some students.

“I think that at times the student reaction to things like admissions initiatives is to recoil a little bit,” he said. “That’s not the part of the community that we like bonding about, but it’s important to make sure that Earlham has a viable business strategy.”

Senior Aaron Goldbeck, who works in Admissions as a campus tour guide, said that he is conflicted about the initiatives.

“I’m invested in Earlham and I feel like it’s an important institution; it’s had incredible meaning for me,” Goldbeck said.

“I feel like if a broader applicant pool is what it’s going to take to ensure the health and the success of Earlham as an educational institution, then that’s great and I’m happy to be a part of that.”

However, Goldbeck expressed worry that, in promoting Earlham as an institution of academic excellence, the initiatives will dilute other qualities that make Earlham special.

“What makes Earlham unique, not just another well-meaning institution in cornfields?” he asked, citing Earlham’s commitment to community, social justice and its Principles and Practices as values he feared would be glossed over in promoting the college.

Senior Mandi Rice agreed that increasing the applicant pool is necessary for Earlham. However, she expressed concern about the focus on attracting low need students.

“I think that’s it’s a little suspect to be singling out economic groups for different treatment in the admissions process, because our admissions Web site still says that we practice a needblind policy,” Rice said. “I think that we need to be more upfront with [prospective] students about that.”

Rice also questioned how effective targeting low need students will be.

“I think that people who fit in well at Earlham don’t like being talked to on the basis of how much money their family has,” she said.

Sodexo moves toward trayless services

By William Duffee

Earlham students will soon be carrying their dishes in their own two hands, as Sodexo plans to reduce the use of food trays in the dining hall after spring break.

The change is part of a push for sustainability in a setting known for its substantial use of resources such as water and energy.

“We’re going to take away all of the trays in the different areas and just have trays over by the belts,” said Director of Dining Services Kathie Guyler.

While the reduction of trays is one step toward trayless services, Guyler hopes to change the whole system over the summer.

“Hopefully by the time students come back next year, we’ll be able to get the dish room kind of remodeled … a new belt, a new way of conveying dishes down where we’re not using trays,” she said.

According to Guyler, the new system would “replace the dish machine that we have that is 20 years old with a newer, more energy-efficient [machine], using less water [and] detergent.”

Guyler has been working this semester with the Earlham Environmental Action Coalition (EEAC) on how Saga will move towards a new system.

In an e-mail she sent to EEAC on Tuesday, March 9, Guyler attached a “Sodexo Dining Initiative” document, which outlines the benefits of trayless dining.

The document says that “[e]lectricity, water and chemical usage are reduced because there are far fewer dishes and trays to wash,” and that eliminating trays “substantially diminishes food waste by encouraging guests to take only the amount of food they can carry.”

The e-mail also included a statement about Sodexo’s elimination of trays in 2009 at Franklin College, in Franklin, Ind. Earlham and Franklin are roughly the same size. Franklin has 1,047 undergraduate students, compared to Earlham’s current 1,127, so the results could be comparable.

The statement says that in a three-month period of trayless dining at Franklin in 2009, “318,000 gallons of water has been conserved in 2009 compared to the same 3-month period (August, September, & October) of 2008. If we continue on this same trend, it is estimated that over a 12-month period, we will conserve over one million gallons of water in the studentcenter.”

However, opponents of trayless dining say that it is too much of a hassle and contributes to additional traffic, which could result in more congestion and longer lines in the cafeteria.

“You’d have to go back and forth from the table to the food line a lot more,” said junior Bill Rubin. “That would be aggravating.”

Some Earlham students are more receptive to the idea of a trayless cafeteria.

“I’ve never used trays; I think they’re pointless … they’re sort of wasteful and unnecessary,” said junior Lucas Williams.

The discussion of a trayless system at Saga is not new, however.

Junior Mary Jones, a member of EEAC, said that Sodexo and the Earlham Environmental Responsibility Committee (EERC) “got funding last year to pay for a trayless washer system to wash all the dishes.” However, the funding was not enough to cover the new system.

Guyler mentioned that the cost of a new system would be risky. “We actually started looking at this project last year and really ran into budget issues. It was really expensive to do what we needed to do,” she said. “You don’t want to make that kind of error in terms of spending the money and not getting the reward back.”

The move towards trayless services comes as a part of Saga’s plan for more sustainable services as a whole.

“We’re looking at what we can do here - how can we minimize our waste, how can we make our carbon footprint smaller?”

Guyler said, noting that this year Saga began recycling more plastics than in the past.

Other possible changes would include a new composting system. Currently, a student bikes most of the compost to Miller Farm each day, but Guyler admitted such an arrangement is “not the best way to transport” the compost and noted that the student cannot transport all the compost by bike. But again, a new system would not be cheap — Guyler approximated a new system to cost $25,000.

Freshman Stephanie Ambar, who has discussed sustainable practices with Guylar, feels that students need to put more of an effort into working together with Saga on such issues.

“Be sustainable, but through a consensus,” Ambar said. She also mentioned that though Saga has areas which could be improved in sustainability, the responsibility is not solely Saga’s.

“It’s not just Saga’s fault for some things that are not happening, it’s also … our [the students’] lack of commitment,” she said. “I think it is something that we need … to have more participation of the students, and they [Saga’s staff] are open for that.”

Earlham considers split with Indiana Yearly Meeting

By Jonas Shellhammer

The influence and presence of Indiana Yearly Meeting (IYM), one of the largest organizations of Quaker Meetings and founder of Earlham College, may be changing at Earlham in the future.

This coming June, the Earlham Board will be considering the approval of a series of changes in Earlham’s relationship with the Meeting,

One of the proposed changes would be that IYM would no longer appoint six of the 24 members of the Earlham Board, and would instead be entering what is termed a “Covenant relationship” with Earlham. This would entail making several mutual promises, one of which would be that Earlham continues to pledge that the Earlham Board remain half Quaker.

In a March 2008 letter to a task force set up by IYM to analyze the relationship it has with Earlham College, President Doug Bennett clarified some of the reasoning behind the pursuit of change.

“As we gather our students and our faculty from across the U.S. and around the world, why not our Board of Trustees as well? A national and global search for Friends would bring added diversity and richness to our work as trustees,” Bennett said in the letter.

Bennett also emphasized that Earlham is “committed to Earlham’s being, now and in the future, an institution of higher education firmly grounded in the understandings of the Religious Society of Friends.”

In addition, Bennett signaled the need for a broad and globally representative Board of Trustees, commenting that “we have grown beyond being an institution confined to Indiana ‘Quakerdom’ to be something that has global reach.”

However, the process through which these tentative decisions has been arrived at was not started recently, and is described by Bennett as a “complex and historically layered story, and one still very much in play.”

A letter from Bennett to the Earlham Board of Trustees, published in May 2009, outlined the developments of each organization. Bennett stated that these developments led to differences between IYM and Earlham.

Bennett said in the letter, “We need a Board whose organizational arrangements are justified by Earlham’s current needs rather than merely by inheritance from the past.”

A report published by the IYM task force provides insight into the differences between IYM and Earlham. The report lists several realities which it feels IYM must come to grips with, which include “policies, activities/events in the life of the college for which IYM cannot give support; e.g., residence halls that are co-ed; birth control supplies dispensed through the school nurse; Dungeons and Dragons books sold by the college bookstore, pro-homosexuality messages given at graduation; seminars given that seem new age; student groups on campus that promote non-Christian religions, and presentations such as Vagina Monologues.”

Bennett added that these concerns are held by a selection of members of Indiana Yearly Meeting, rather than by the organization as a whole.

Bennett reflected on these differences by saying that “not all colleges see themselves as being in the business of helping students grow to goodness as they become adults” and that Earlham and IYM approach this goal in different ways. According to Bennett, IYM has a tendency to actively tell students how to be good, whereas Earlham seeks to create an atmosphere in which students can independently discover what it means to be good.

A good example of how the new relationship will affect this issue is that IYM, which has given little financial support to Earlham in the past, will now be able to provide funds of its own to certain aspects of campus life. Bennett stated that one area of focus will be a stronger presence of Christian ministry at Earlham.

Practicing Quaker Jay Zevin, senior sociology and anthropology major, hopes that the new system will bring positive change.

“Over my time at and awareness with Earlham, our relationship with Indiana Yearly Meeting hasn’t been overwhelmingly positive,” said Zevin. “I feel that I want our relationship with Indiana Yearly Meeting to be built out of a deep mutual respect, and I hope that this change will provide that deep respect.”

Pollan talks food to packed auditorium

By Anna McCormally

Students in Earlham’s Environmental Colloquium were treated to the presence of award-winning writer Michael Pollan last Saturday, before he gave a sold-out appearance that had Goddard flooded with Earlham students and Richmond community members.

Pollan talked with the Environmental Colloquium, a one-credit class that looks at a different topic every semester. This semester the colloquium is doing an inventory of Earlham’s energy usage. On Saturday, Pollan spent 90 minutes with Assistant Professor of Education and Director of Wilderness Programs Jay Roberts and the colloquium’s students to answer any questions that they had for him.

“I thought the colloquium experience was pretty neat, to have time to ask him questions,” said junior environmental studies major Sarah Waddle, who is a member of the Environmental Colloquium and convener of Earlham’s Environmental Responsibility Committee (ERC). “It was cool to have him be right there and respond to what you asked.”

In the Environmental Colloquium, Pollan addressed many students’ questions about the green movement and sustainable agriculture.

Waddle, who has been working through ERC with Earlham’s food producer, Sodexo, to make progress in sustainability, asked Pollan at the Environmental Colloquium what changes he suggested Earlham work towards. Pollan recommended campaigns like “Meatless Mondays” and lobbying Sodexo to buy locally.

Waddle explained that ERC has been working with Sodexo and that progress is being made.

“My perception is that they’re very willing and open to other food options,” she said.

Waddle noted that Earlham is in the process of creating the position of “student sustainability manager” to work with Sodexo and Earlham to help enact sustainability initiatives in the cafeteria.

Pollan also answered a question about the green movement, which gave him a chance to expand on one of the foundations of his philosophy.

“To simply replace one kind of consumerism with another kind of consumerism is not going to solve the problem,” Pollan explained. “We need to learn to think of ourselves more as producers than consumers.”

He also called for society to “liberate itself from the sense of dependency on consumer culture.”

To Waddle, however, some of the lifestyle changes that Pollan called for in his speech later that evening seemed to be inaccessible to the less wealthy members of society.

“He himself seemed to be extremely affluent,” Waddle said, citing Pollan’s opportunity to attend a private liberal arts college and graduate school at Columbia as examples of privileges that the writer was lucky to have had. “It must be hard for him to reach out to people with different lifestyles.”

Much of what Pollan advocates involves nutritional choices and the connection between sustainable, healthy agriculture and nutritious food.

“Are people happy with fast-food culture?” Pollan asked rhetorically at the colloquium. He went on to answer his own question by painting a picture of people in the inner city lining up for hours to get government vouchers for fresh produce.

Still, Waddle wasn’t entirely satisfied with what Pollan had to say.

“He was quick to put down the food options available to our community,” Waddle said. “In his speech I felt that there was a lack of positivity about food options in Richmond.”

Waddle admitted that the conclusions Pollan drew about the quality of food available at local Richmond grocery stores was accurate, but felt that he did not elaborate enough on specific alternatives for Richmond consumers.

Sophomore Norah Doss, a resident of Environmental House disagreed with Waddle.

“I think he didn’t have the knowledge basis,” Doss said, defending Pollan, who has been an influence on her in the context of research about sustainable agriculture. “A lot of his speech wasn’t Richmond- or Earlhamspecific.”

Doss also felt that Pollan addressed the class divide that was noticed by Waddle. “He specifically addressed that in inner cities, the food he suggests is not available,” she said.

Doss compared Pollan favorably to Carol Adams, the feminist vegetarian who spoke at Earlham this past November, and whom Doss and Waddle both felt was more defensive and less willing to listen to criticism than Pollan.

“I think it’s really important that we bring speakers like Michael Pollan to Earlham, especially at a time like this, when I feel as though we’re on the cusp of big changes towards sustainability as a college,” Waddle said. “By choosing people like Michael Pollan, that’s one more statement by the college that that’s the kind of dialogue we support as an institution.”

Earlham faculty addresses lack of basic math skills

By John Jacobson and Marisa Keller

The Earlham faculty is trying to decide how to fix the problem of students failing courses because of a lack of basic math skills.

Faculty members in the science, math and economics departments are taking the initiative to promote math literacy at Earlham. They are seeking to create a way for students to become more mathematically literate, either through curriculum or a math center that will parallel the writing center as a place where students can go to get help with math homework and even take classes to help improve fluency in different mathematical fields.

In faculty meeting on Wednesday, March 3, the faculty discussed a proposal that the ad hoc math committee has submitted to Earlham College President Doug Bennett. The proposal suggests using the President’s Discretionary Fund to pay for the position of an additional math professor for three years.

In an e-mail to the faculty on Tuesday, March 2, Bennett wrote, “Three years of a new full-time mathematics faculty member would cost around $200,000. That would be an unusually large grant from the discretionary fund.”

Bennett has, however, set aside funds to cover one year of a visiting professor in the math department. He wrote that he would be willing to extend the funds for a second and third year only if the Curricular Policy Committee (CPC) “saw it as an important and valued undertaking.”

During Wednesday’s meeting, faculty members raised concerns about a long-term solution to the problem after the three years suggested by the proposal are up. Others, however, pointed to the urgency of the problem, which leads to many students failing or avoiding classes they would otherwise like to take.

Associate Professor of Economics Rajaram Krishnan sees many of his students do poorly because of their lack of math skills.

“For some programs at Earlham, certain math is needed at the introductory level and some of us don’t have that and could do with a refresher because we’ve done math some time ago,” Krishnan said. “Another aspect of this is that in the context of a liberal arts education, being mathematically literate … is part of what is good to understand the world and we’re going to see if we can help.”

According to Krishnan, this initiative will be collaboration on the part of faculty from the math, geosciences, and chemistry departments.

“We feel that quantitative literacy is a useful thing to be shared by many people on campus,” he said.

Another supporter of the idea of promoting mathematical literacy is Earlham Associate Professor of Geosciences Meg Streepy-Smith. She expanded on the general idea of how this project will help students in both math and non-math courses alike.

“I feel like we need more support for math across the curriculum,” Streepy-Smith said.

“And if you felt like you wanted to be an econ major, but yet you don’t feel like you’re prepared for Raja’s [Intro to Microeconomics] class, you could take an intro math class that would basically prepare you for his micro econ class.”

There are also other people outside of the immediate mathheavy departments who show some support for the promotion of mathematical literacy. One of them is Assistant Professor of Politics Thor Hogan.

“I’m supportive of the overall idea that we need to increase mathematical literacy, certainly for politics students,” Hogan said. “I think that increasing your understanding on things as important as the budget process and being able to access that with the proper math skills is fundamental to really understanding how the government works.”

Last semester, Earlham announced that professors from Indiana University East would teach basic math courses at Earlham starting in the fall of 2010, but the arrangement fell through because of a misunderstanding about whether IU East would receive financial compensation.

The math ad hoc committee was organized to work with IU East, but has since moved on to address the broader issue of numeracy at Earlham. The committee is not directly afiliated with the math department, although Assistant Professor of Mathematics Anand Pardhanani is a member of the committee.

Mexican journalist decries political corruption

By Simon Levine

Adela Navarro Bello, journalist from Tijuana, Mexico, spoke Tuesday on the corruption impeding the Mexican war against drug trafficking.

Bello painted a grim picture of President Felipe Calderon’s drug war, which has left over 22,000 dead and has consumed an enormous amount of resources. She decried the massive corruption within the ranks of Mexico’s police and military, poor cooperation between the Mexican and U.S. governments and the glorification of drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Loera by Forbes and Time magazines.

As the editor of Tijuana’s Zeta magazine, Bello has continued to publish exposés of drug dealers and government corruptors, in spite of three of her colleagues having been assassinated.

Junior Alvaro Puente, physics and geosciences double major, admired Bello’s bravery.

“She said some things that very few people are willing to tackle,” Puente said.

Yet while all acknowledged the courage of her actions and the great work she is doing in Mexico, some students and faculty members had reservations about the format and message of Bello’s speech.

Freshman Lilly Cutler felt that the translation was awkwardly handled.

Cutler said, “They should have had a translator.”

Junior Ashley Girvin, psychobiology major, felt that the speech was too short.

“I wanted more, badly,” she said.

Associate Professor of Spanish Rodolfo Guzmán expressed concerns about the manner in which Bello’s speech portrayed the Mexican drug war.

“As soon as we bring it to the school it becomes an academic issue,” Guzmán said, “and if it’s an academic issue, I want to ask that it is studied from a perspective of critical thinking.”

For Guzman, the main issue is that a U.S. audience won’t have the same perspective as one in Mexico.

When we take [her] work and we bring it to the United States, the meaning of her work will change,” he said.

However, Guzmán added that he thinks Bello is a “hero” and “doing great work in Mexico.”

Zeta has a long history of covering drug violence and corruption in Baja California. Its founder and Bello’s predecessor, Jesus Blancornelas, founded the newspaper ABC in 1977, but the Mexican government quickly shut down the publication.

In 1980, Blancornelas and cofounder Hector Felix Miranda named their new magazine after the last letter in the alphabet, in defiance of the government that had shut down ABC.

Eight years later, Miranda was fatally on a rainy morning as he was sitting in the front seat of his car. The killer eventually convicted was an employee of former Tijuana politician and businessman Jorge Hank Rhon, who had been a subject of Zeta’s exposés.

However, as a cruel example of the corruption, Bello said, “the guns they used were found in the board room of a business owned by Rhon,” but no conviction was made.

“There is no more investigation,” said Bello, with audible emotion in her voice, “He is free, he lives in Tijuana, he is my neighbor!”

Contributing editor Francisco Ortiz Franco was also killed in a 2004 drive-by shooting, and Blancornelas was badly injured in a 1997 attack that left his bodyguard dead.

Bello also spoke to journalism students during her afternoon visit. She was scheduled to speak at a dinner on Monday in the Womyn’s Center, but her speech was cancelled due to scheduling issues that kept Bello in Mexico for longer than expected.

An organizer of the event, steering committee member Ivonne Florez, senior women’s studies major, said that the purpose of the dinner was just to hear Bello’s own story about her life’s work.

“She has a cool story,” said Florez. “Let’s hear her out.”

Michael Pollan to speak on food, public policy

By Sasha Benderly-Kraft

Environmental and nutritional activist Michael Pollan will give a talk specially designed for Earlham tomorrow evening. Though Pollan is currently on a speaking circuit to discuss his latest book, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, tomorrow he will present a talk entitled “Connecting the Dots: Nutritionism, Health and Agricultural Policy.”

Pollan, who teaches journalism at University of California, Berkeley, is best known for his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, published in 2006. In that book, Pollan analyzed the sources from which we get our food.

Tomorrow’s talk will be deeply linked to this premise: Pollan’s main conceptual framework is that the way modern American society produces food is directly linked with public health, and thus that changing the way we look at food production is crucial to improving how we live our lives.

Pollan stands opposed to the practice of choosing food for scientifically calculated nutritional values. In his second most recent book, In Defense of Food (2008), Pollan argued that nutritionism-the valuation of food by specific nutrient contents complicates and detracts from eating habits, coming to a simple, catchy conclusion: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Due to his influence on the food-oriented side of the environmental movement, Pollan has been a highly demanded speaker in recent years. Lynn Knight, Earlham’s Events Coordinator, says that Pollan was booked for this talk last year, and that it correlates with the college’s current interest in sustainability and environmental policy, such as the recent creation of an Environmental Studies major.

In addition to his talk, Pollan will lead a session of Assistant Professor of Education Jay Roberts’ Environmental Colloquium, which, for this semester, is focused on generating an assessment of Earlham’s sustainability.

Knight says this classroom element is crucial to Pollan being more than a speaker-having him available to students is seen as a crucial way of examining the ideas he puts forward.

Roberts is likewise highly enthusiastic about Pollan’s presence in his classroom.

“We are working from Paul Hawken’s book Blessed Unrest,” Roberts said, “which is about the environmental movement as one of the key social movements of this moment. Hopefully Michael Pollan can provide some perspective as to what’s really going on in that movement.”

When asked about Pollan’s specific appeal, Roberts pointed to the universality of the question
of food.

“Food touches everybody, across boundaries, so it’s a strong point on which to build coalitions,” he said.

Roberts characterizes the food movement championed by Pollan as an “unlikely alliance” of many social groups that defies traditional stereotypes of environmentalists.

“These days, it’s not just the stereotypical ‘elitist hippies’ that care about food-it’s coming to the forefront of our collective consciousness,” he said. “The big idea is that since everyone eats, food can transcend self-interest.”

This increased consciousness is showing its face in many aspects of our day-to-day life-not least of which is the fact that every one of the tickets to Pollan’s talk has been sold out for a week.

For instance, Sodexho is in the process of creating a sustainability inquiry to improve their food policy. Roberts sees this as evidence of the thought currently put into questions of food, but wonders how deep it truly runs.

“Is this really a paradigm shift, or just a trend?” Roberts asked. Pollan’s talk might shed some light on this question, or at least provide an idea of how to look at the food movement for the future.

“Connecting the Dots: Nutritionism, Health and Agricultural Policy” is tomorrow at 7:30 p.m. in Goddard Auditorium. Tickets are sold out.

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