Featured: Life Imitates Art, Booming Program Takes Off, Nobel Ironies, A Study in Contrast, Vassar Doodles: What's Not to Like?, Summer Programs scholarships for children of Vassar employees.
Life Imitates Art
Play a video of the children of Chermaître
"Un, deux, trois, quatre. Bonjour, Vassar College!"
(Quicktime required)
Packed like sardines in the cab of a pickup truck, and bouncing in and out of the giant ruts and holes of Haiti’s roads, Andrew Meade, Dionne Jackson ‘95, and Mark Andrews were unsure of what to expect next. It had been four years since Meade’s last visit to the country, when he’d met with Haitian artists and gallery owners, purchasing art to sell at the Vassar Haiti Project, and then putting the money back into Haiti through a hot lunch program and toward funding a new school. In January, nearly six years after the program’s inception, and $200,000 later, the trio finally had a chance to see the art come alive as they connected with the people and witnessed first hand the effects of the program.
Pressed for Time, Raymond Lafaille
When the pickup truck finally rocked to a halt, the group knew it was time to begin the final walk to the village. Picking their way through a rocky riverbed, they journeyed single file through the sandy, red soil and up the side of the mountain to Chermaître. “There was no one else around, and we just had this visually stunning landscape to ourselves,” says Andrews, an associate professor of French. With the aid of a local priest who had coordinated their visit and help from locals, they climbed for an hour and a half, carrying toothbrushes donated by a Poughkeepsie dentist, construction paper, vitamins, pens, and bubble gum to give to the children. The village already had an abundance of brightly colored Vassar College T-shirts, part of the 30 boxes of clothing and materials sent at the end of the school year.
The group finally rounded the last corner to find 125 students standing quietly outside the small school. “I don’t think anyone from outside of Haiti had ever visited them before. They didn’t know how to react,” says Meade, director of international services and special projects, who spent part of his childhood in Haiti, when his father was chief of operations for the U.S. Embassy. The students sang to their guests in Creole, “Welcome to the village and to our school,” and “Welcome Vassar College.” Later there was singing, dancing, and drumming. They were also treated to a meal and, despite the lack of running water and electricity, their hosts served their drinks with ice, a rarity in the 90-degree weather. “This immediately struck me because, whether it’s food and ice or building materials for the school, everything has to be carried over a riverbed and up the mountain by hand, and the closest city is nearly two hours away,” explains Jackson, assistant director in development.
The children of Chermaître
“When you talk about the plight of the Haitian people and what they go through daily just to survive, that doesn’t communicate a picture of this vibrant society where people are living and working hard,” reflects Andrews. “It’s a country of opposites; you expect the worst kind of despair, but you see the best in people. They’re empty-handed, but it’s not reflected in their character or spirit.”
At the beginning, the goal of the Vassar Haiti Project was to provide the children with a hot lunch. The best way to make education a success, Meade reasoned, was to pair it with food, which acts as major incentive for parents to send their children to school. “One of the first things we noticed was how healthy and happy the children looked,” Jackson says. As the program progressed, additional money went to funding teacher salaries. Then, nearly two years ago, the program had raised enough to fund the construction of a new school, one large enough to accommodate the growing number of children and that provides separate classrooms. The new building is half completed. Progress is slow because all the materials must first be carried up the mountain. Many of the students have also helped with the building.
Despite the country’s political unrest and the presence of the police and UN forces, the group felt secure in the country and talked eagerly about making plans to return. “There was nothing to be concerned about,” explains Andrews. “Well, the roads were extremely dangerous, unpaved and there were shear drop-offs. Everyone’s all over the place, weaving in and out, like a ballet. It’s chaotic, but it worked.”
With tourism nearly extinct and deforestation severely limiting what the people can produce, Haiti’s artwork is the only export they have left. “It’s their way of finding joy,” says Jackson whose love of art and her own Caribbean roots fueled her interest in the project. “While we were there, it was almost as if the paintings had come to life because every scene—from the airport, to the markets, to the town, to the mountains—was representative of what’s seen in the art.” According to Andrews, “just a few dollars can make such a big difference there. Every little thing you do has such a big impact on Haiti.”
Their very presence was enough to instill a sense of hope in the community. “When we landed in Turks and Caicos, Andrew told our taxi driver, who was from Haiti, where we were going and about the project. You could see that he was in awe. Once we arrived at our hotel, he wouldn’t accept any money,” says Jackson. “He said, ‘You aren’t even from Haiti and look what you’re doing for my country. Thank you!’ He broke down crying and embraced Andrew. After just a week we saw for ourselves that the project will definitely be completed. As our Haitian host proudly proclaimed, ‘Chermaître is working!’”
This April, as membership on the Vassar Haiti Project committee continues to grow (dozens of students, faculty, administrators, and staff volunteer), the group is gearing up for another auction and art sale held from April 13 to 15, with the art exhibition beginning April 9.
Booming program takes off
Photo courtesy of the Weekly Beat
Convincing middle school kids to come to school on Saturday is a hard sell, but Poughkeepsie’s Project Thunder has found a way to teach life skills and provide mentoring in a fun, hands-on environment. Conceived in September of 2006 by Randall Johnson, a local member of the school board and city council, Project Thunder’s mission is to help local sixth, seventh, and eighth graders gain access to the city’s many educational opportunities, whether it’s finding out what a police officer’s job entails, learning how to fight peer pressure, or exploring the area on cultural field trips. Shortly after the project was under way, Johnson discovered that his long-time basketball opponent Kiese Laymon was a professor at Vassar. The two started talking and, suddenly, Project Thunder had a new component – Vassar College.
“There aren’t many programs that open themselves up to kids in Poughkeepsie,” says Laymon. “This just seemed right.” Eve Dunbar, also an assistant professor of English, immediately signed on for the project and, since its inception, half a dozen professors from different disciplines have volunteered to teach on various Saturdays. The program, which meets twice a month, devotes roughly one Saturday to holding the program on campus, giving students the opportunity to experience campus life and to work closely with professors.
The first step was introducing the kids to campus. The group toured the library and academic buildings. In the classroom, they were encouraged to explore their intellectual and personal goals through writing and talking in groups. In a future visit, they’ll also attend a play at the college.
But the students aren’t the only ones doing the learning. “You can get used to spitting out rhetoric or jargon to college students and not having to explain it,” says Laymon. “But the middle school kids ask a question and you’re forced to reexamine the ideas you take for granted, but should probably keep revisiting and reexamining. It’s very humbling.”
“It’s such a different kind of teaching,” adds Dunbar. “You have to make their own experiences speak to the material at hand. It’s rewarding because, when they do get it, they really become interested. This program is incredible because it makes this a space where we can all come to learn. It opens up all of these intellectual resources to even the youngest members of the Poughkeepsie community and encourages them to feel part of this community.”
A study in contrast
In one of Yoshu Chikanobu’s woodblock prints, a young girl practices calligraphy, her hair styled incongruously in a Western bob. In another, well-to-do men and women in Victorian garb are depicted at a horse race against the backdrop of a traditional Japanese landscape, illuminated by a display of fireworks. When East met West in late 19th-century Japan, Chikanobu documented the infatuation in hundreds of woodblock prints, created in the same style and with the same exquisite attention to detail that we associate with the masterpieces of the genre.
The first major exhibition of his work in this country, Chikanobu: Modernity and Nostalgia in Japanese Prints, runs through May 13 at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. Curated by Bruce Coats, professor of art history and the humanities at Scripps College, the exhibition includes 60 woodblock prints that span Chikanobu’s career from 1862 to 1912 in Meiji Japan, a period of rapid westernization.
What’s interesting about Chikanobu’s work is that it documents a society in transition – not unlike our own – and asks whether progress is in fact progress. (Cell phones? MySpace? Second Life?) Using newly imported aniline dyes from the West, Chikanobu experimented with a new color palette – brilliant greens, purples, blues, and reds – quite different from the subtle colorations we associate with traditional Japanese prints. Interestingly, Chikanobu overcame his fascination with all-things-Western and, later in his career, returned to more traditional Japanese themes and color schemes.
According to Coats, quoted in the Los Angeles Times (“Fashioning Imprints of Progress,” August 20, 2006), “At first, he celebrated the modernization of Japan. But as he grew older, he began to resist the changes and focus on traditional culture and nostalgic recollections of life in Edo Japan. His late works are mostly rosy-eyed views of the past.”
Ongoing tours of the exhibit will also run during the art center’s extended Thursday night hours. Visit fllac.vassar.edu for more information.
Nobel Ironies
Prof. David Kennett
Not many people can claim to personally know a Nobel prize winner, but when Edmund S. Phelps was recently named the 2006 winner in economics, David Kennett’s tally rose to three. Professor of economics at Vassar with a particular interest in comparative and international economics, Kennett was a PhD student at Columbia University under Phelps, Robert Mundell (1999 winner), and William Vickrey (1996 winner). Vickrey, in fact, was both his thesis adviser and friend. “Of course they were all brilliant in their way,” says Kennett, “but Vickrey was the most intelligent man I’ve ever known well – extraordinarily intelligent.”
According to Kennett, the prize in economics is a bit different from the others because it was established more recently (1969) and is funded by the national bank of Sweden, the Sveriges Riksbank, in memory of Alfred Nobel, but not from Nobel’s original bequest. It is also different because, unlike the prizes in science and medicine, it is more of a lifetime achievement award, rather than a prize for a specific advance. Nevertheless, it is a tidy sum – one million dollars.
Mundell, who is Canadian, won the prize “for his analysis of monetary and fiscal policy under different exchange rate regimes.” Kennett’s translation: “He had a significant influence on how economists view exchange rates.” Before his win, Mundell bought a castle in Italy. When asked how the Nobel would change his life, he said, “Now I know how I’m going to make repairs on the castle.”
Asked the same question a few years earlier, Vickrey, also a Canadian, had said, “I don’t need the money, but I could use the bully pulpit.” “He was a very unusual man,” says Kennett, “six-foot-two, crazy white hair. He used to rollerskate from Columbia to 125th Street Station – in the ’50s and ’60s, mind you. He was a Quaker, and he saw unemployment as a huge waste of human potential and well-being, and he was angry about it. In the 1980s some economists developed the theory of the natural rate of unemployment, and Vickrey felt this gave the government an excuse not to do anything about it. He intended to use his Nobel prestige to influence fiscal policy to reduce unemployment.”
Sadly, Vickrey has the distinction of being the shortest lived of Nobel winners. A few days after winning, he was driving himself to Boston where he was scheduled to give a lecture, but he never arrived. They found him in his car the next day, the victim of a heart attack.
Even more ironic – Phelps won his prize “for his analysis of intertemporal tradeoffs in macroeconomic policy.” Kennett translation: “in part for his work on the natural rate of unemployment. Phelps’s work says that if you try to make the situation better in the short run, you just get more inflation in the long run.”
Were they good teachers? “Quite honestly? No. They were inspirational mentors, but I doubt they would have lasted in the classroom at Vassar.”
Vassar Doodles: What’s Not To Like?
Although the purists in the American Kennel Club rant and rave against doodles and other so-called “designer dogs,” to know a doodle is to love it. Originally bred in Australia as hypoallergenic guide dogs, Labradoodles appeared on the U.S. scene in the late 1990s where their popularity unleashed a breeding frenzy. Take America’s favorite family pet – the Golden Retriever – and cross it with a non-shedding Standard Poodle, and what do you get? A Goldendoodle. But to label Schnoodles, Cockapoos, Goldendoodles, et al. “designer dogs” is misleading. The true “designer dogs” are the “purebred dogs,” whose genetic makeup is highly controlled and monitored. With the exception of the Labradoodles bred from Australian Tegan Park stock, doodles are quintessential mutts – shaggy, happy-go-lucky, non-shedding, people-pleasing, and fun-loving. Meet the Vassar doodles:
Goldendoodles Simone Beatrice Harriford and Luna are half-sisters and best friends who work together to keep the Sociology Department on its toes. Simone was born in June 2004 at Brewer’s Goldendoodles, near Cincinnati, Ohio, to a Golden Retriever dad and a Standard Poodle mom. Luna was born about eight months later – same dad, different mom. Luna is highly educated, having completed preschool, kindergarten, high school, and college at Candice Cunningham’s Positive Paws, earning the degree of Canine Good Citizen. Simone has some formal education and aspires to continue to higher ed. To doodle critics, Simone says, “They are just jealous of my beauty!” And Luna barks,“Doodles of the world: Embrace your mutty selves!”
Labradoodles Ozzie and Little Bear Van Develder are adopted brothers. Ozzie, born in 2003, hails from Bonnie’s Camelot Kennels in Illinois, while Bear was born in 2005 at the Lakeside Dog House in Upstate New York. Both home-schooled, Ozzie is a self-taught public relations professional who is occasionally called upon to lend a paw in the Office of College Relations. Little Bear has a more reserved temperament, although he, too, occasionally assists in College Relations. A highly skilled acrobat, Ozzie lives for the chase and confounds his opponents with spectacular jumps and whirlygigs. His most astounding trick is to jump into a car through the driver’s seat window, without damaging the driver.
Mecushla (aka Koosh) Lichtenberg is the only Vassar doodle with a bonafide Tegan Park lineage. Born in Australia in 2005, she immigrated to the U.S. at the age of eight weeks, sponsored by Hudson Labradoodles in Claverack, New York. After some rudimentary training, she arrived in Poughkeepsie to organize the Lichtenberg household and undertake her responsibilities at AAVC where she works as the Alumnae House greeter. At home, her favorite pastime is chewing expensive things, like cell phones and shoes. According to her human, she has a decided preference for Prada, clear evidence of her “designer dog” status.
In order of appearance, the doodles’ people are Diane Harriford, Light Carruyo, Julia Van Develder, and Pat Lichtenberg
Photos by Light Carruyo, Tamar Thibodeau, and Beth Trickett
Summer Programs scholarships for children of Vassar employees
Internal Drive: Two scholarships (excluding lab and lunch fees).
Registration deadline: April 18
Sports Camps: One full scholarship to each camp
Day camps: coed basketball, coed soccer, coed advanced soccer
Residential camps: coed swim, girls soccer, girls field hockey, coed squash, and coed fencing
Registration deadline: May 11
Info: www.vassar.edu/summer/sports.html
Questions? Stop by Summer Programs (Main, second floor)
or call Antonia Sweet at ext. 5904
or email: answeet@vassar.edu