The First-Generation Network connects students with alumni who have walked a similar path.

Transitioning to college can be challenging for any student, but those who are the first in their families to attend college face unique hurdles. That’s why Rochester launched the in June 2021. The network serves first-generation alumni, students, families, friends, and supporters, offering mentorship, networking, and community building.

“T��� college experience can be incredibly isolating and intimidating without a community of those with shared backgrounds,” says Celeste Glasgow Ribbins ’91, a facilitator and consultant who cochairs the network with Doug Austin ’98, ’04S (MBA) and Jessica Colorado ’12, ’20W (MS).

Austin, a health plan operations, finance, and IT specialist echoes Ribbins. “T��� network provides opportunities for first-generation students to ask questions that they might not be able to ask of their families because—as much as those who are closest to them may want to help and have encouraged them along the way—they haven’t gone through the same experiences.”

Each of the cochairs wishes they’d had more guidance both on their paths to college and once they arrived. “Many high school students don’t even realize college is a possibility or understand the application process,” says Colorado, who grew up in New York City and majored in chemistry. She credits her high school English teacher, Dr. Barbara Rowes—who was awarded the University’s Singer Family Prize for Excellence in Secondary Education in 2012—with helping her navigate applications and better understand her choices.

Colorado faced an additional challenge in that her parents immigrated to the US from Colombia in the 1980s and didn’t know English well. “When they came to campus for orientation and other events, they couldn’t ask questions, and I didn’t know what I should be asking for them,” she says. “T���y also needed me to translate. It was a lot.”

Colorado has dedicated her career to helping underserved populations. She’s a policy analyst at the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association in Washington, DC, and a member of the University’s Diversity Advisory Council. Earlier in her career, she worked at the University’s David T. Kearns Center.

Ribbins, who is from Cleveland, chose Rochester for its proximity to home, its relatively small size, and its rigorous academics. She sang in the Gospel Choir and in Vocal Point, was a resident advisor, and was a member of the Black Students Union.

Austin grew up in the Catskills, where he says the “cows outnumbered the students.” In addition to his leadership role within the network, he serves as a mentor through his local Chamber of Commerce. He’s also served on many College class reunion committees and is a member of the University’s Diversity Advisory Council.

Claudia De Leon, Rochester’s associate director of affinity networks and equity, diversity, and inclusion programs, was a first-generation student herself. “T��� First-Generation Network amplifies the voice of first-generation students and alumni by connecting them with those who have already navigated college’s challenges and many of life’s ‘firsts,’” De Leon says.

The cochairs encourage first generation alumni to join the network, and they want current student and recent alumni to know the network is here help them on their paths.

Adds Colorado, “I had to figure out a lot on my own, but I made it to Commencement, and they can, too.”

Since starting as the University Record in 1873, the paper known affectionately as “CT” has never stopped informing, entertaining, opining, and offering its staff a training ground for journalism and life.

A NEW RECORD: What is now the Campus Times began its life in October 1873 as the University Record. The Record featured editorials, news on undergraduates and alumni, poems, jokes, and advertisements.

Alyssa Koh ’24 enjoys poring through old issues of the Campus Times, as well as its predecessors, dating back to 1873. She looks at digitized versions of the oldest papers on the University Archives website and flips through more recent bound copies in the paper’s office in Wilson Commons.

“It’s amazing to see how many different people have contributed to so many different stories over the years,” says the editor-in-chief of the paper students call “CT.” “I’m proud to be a small part of its history.”

This fall marks 150 years of almost continuous student reporting. From the inaugural issue of the University Record, launched as a monthly in October 1873, to the most recent CT, published weekly online, undergraduate journalists have informed and entertained the University community from a student perspective. In the process, they’ve trained themselves for distinguished care.

“T��� Campus Times has been a campus family for many students over the years,” says Anne-Marie Algier, interim dean of students and the paper’s longtime advisor. And because it places big demands on students’ time, “many have gone on to careers in journalism, law, and other fields where the CT laid the foundation for their work ethic.”

“Working on the Campus Times taught me a ton about reporting, writing, and editing, but it also taught me a lot about teamwork, time management, and accountability,” says Rachel Dickler Coker ’96, editor-in-chief in 1994. “It was not easy to make our weekly deadline as full-time students. I felt tremendous satisfaction when I saw a good piece in print under my name.”

A newspaper for students, by students

Twenty-three years after the University opened its doors, eight students established the University Record, the first campus newspaper at the then all-male institution located on Prince Street. The inaugural edition that rolled off hand-cranked presses in the fall of 1873 looked more like a magazine than a newspaper.

“T��� primary objective of this journal is to furnish friends and patrons of the University with reliable information concerning its workings and history,” the editors wrote. “We are confident that it will meet a want long felt by the students.”

The Record featured editorials, news on under-graduates and alumni, poems, jokes, and advertisements. It came with a subscription price: $1 for the year, equivalent to about $25 today.

Forty-five years later, as the Campus, the paper brought news of the Great War home. The June 6, 1918, edition, a special war issue, reported news of the first casualties among the student body.

News from the home front

World War I affected the University deeply and directly, and the Campus provided news of enlistments, promotions, and casualties among members of the community. But the paper was also a cherished source of home front news for students like Alfred Veness, a member of the Class of 1920, who had joined Britain’s Royal Flying Corps in 1917. Veness was in basic training and nearing an assignment to France when he received a copy of the paper. An excerpt from his letter of gratitude was published on January 31, 1918:

I received the last edition of The Campus about a week ago and was very pleased indeed to have it and learn all about the activities in dear old Rochester. . . . It means a lot to have such news when one is away from the University.

A newspaper rivalry

Students in the College for Women—lacking representation in the men’s Campus—launched their own paper, the Cloister Window. Competition between the Campus and the new upstart was fierce. In the 1920s, the Campus published an article declaring that the women were not “welcome” on its Prince Street campus. Annette Gardner Munro, dean of women from 1910 to 1930, responded by canceling her subscription to the Campus and banning it from the women’s enclave on the other side of University Avenue.

In 1932, two years after the College for Men moved to the River Campus, the women, now with the Prince Street Campus to themselves, renamed their paper the Tower Times—a reference to its office location high up in Cutler Union.

MEDIA MANIA: Students at the College for Women created the Cloister Window, which became the Tower Times in 1932. Times staff and their male counterparts at the Campus enjoyed a friendly rivalry—to wit, the Tower Times’s publication of the Crampus on April 1, 1949.

HARD TIMES: Its staff having dwindled to just a few juniors and seniors, CT ran a stark editorial at the close of the 1962 fall semester (right). “We find that increasingly, and for the first time, the most intelligent and able students are not entering extra-curricular activities,” the editors lamented.

The dry spell came a mere seven years following the merger of the Tower Times and the Campus to become the Campus-Times (left). The step coincided with the merger of the colleges into a single coeducational institution on the River Campus in 1955.

Introducing the Campus Times

Although students published five issues of the “Campus-Times” during the brief merger of 1943, the CT, as it’s known today, traces its birth to 1955. That was the year the women moved from Prince Street to join the men on the River Campus. Women continued to play a large role in campus journalism: the last editor of the Tower Times, Sally Miles ’56, became the first editor of the new Campus-Times.

Paper nearly folded

In December 1962, the very existence of the Campus Times (now sans hyphen) was tested when its staff had dwindled to just a few juniors and seniors. The editors published a two-page edition, with the front page a stark, two-column editorial titled “An Announcement.” The paper, published twice weekly, would be reduced from 12 pages to four. The editors decried the state of extracurricular activities on campus, attributing part of the lack of student interest to “the infusion of a few exciting new faculty members.”

A year later, the paper continued to struggle, according to Christian Yves Wyser-Pratte ’65, elected editor-in-chief in December 1963. “I inherited a dying rag,” he recalls. The paper, which received funds from student government, was back to eight pages but over budget, and the federal government had banned cigarette ads—which Wyser-Pratte says was the paper’s largest source of revenue—in college and university settings. He asked a Simon Business School professor to give him the name of the best business student, whom he could recruit as a business manager. Richard Hall ’66 took the role—a big part of a turnaround, Wyser-Pratte recalls. “I had a great team to work with,” he says, citing Hall, managing editors Cliff Fishman ’66 and Joyce Inglis ’65, and Marjorie (Mac) McDiarmid ’67, who became CT’s next editor-in-chief.

Telling it like it is

By the late 1960s, with war protests common across college campuses, many student newspapers were printing the speeches of visiting activists verbatim—obscenities included. The Campus Times was among them. Laura Drager ’70 was editor-in-chief when Black Panthers leader Eldridge Cleaver spoke at Strong Auditorium in 1968. The CT quoted him word for word, including language that offended some members of the local community.

“Most of the students heard Cleaver’s talk,” Drager told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. “T���y’d think we were misrepresenting the man if we didn’t use his words in the story.”

Some students felt the Campus Times devoted too much attention to the war and other controversial issues. Drager, who went on to a distinguished legal career, serving on the New York State Supreme Court, recalls the criticism. Some students “started a competing paper that focused on more typical student activities,” she says. “But I don’t regret the choices we made for the Campus Times.”

On-the-job training

In 1973, the Campus Times marked 100 years of student journalism at Rochester by becoming a daily. Staff often worked through the night several times a week. “My attendance in class became increasingly spotty,” Marc Rosenwasser ’74, editor-in-chief that year, told Review in 2013. “At one point, my father asked me what exactly he was paying for.”

Rosenwasser went on to serve as Moscow correspondent for the Associated Press and as a television producer the CBS Evening News, NBC’s Date-line, and PBS NewsHour Weekend.

Coker says being on staff presented “incredible opportunities” for student journalists. “I interviewed Elie Weisel and Kurt Vonnegut and had a standing weekly meeting with the University president,” adds Coker, who went on to a long career in journalism and is now director of research advancement at Binghamton University.

ROOM 102: “T��� Weekly Miracle of Room 102” is what Review called CT in 1988. Staff in that year (left), in 1997 (right), and in nearly every other year since the late 1970s have made the first floor of Wilson Commons a hive of activity.

FEATURED: Managing editor Dwayne Samuels ’93 (left) and syndications editor Louise Aibel Litt ’94 pause during production to pose for photo editor Allegra Boverman ’96. CT pages were spread across the office walls to make them easy to refer to. Samuels and Litt occupied the “features section” of the office in this image from 1993.

CT’s “Honorary Uncle”

When the staff worked through the night to put out a Thursday morning paper, Ray MacConnell, the University’s graphic arts manager, supplied the staff with dozens of homemade chocolate chip cookies. And when someone from the suburban shop where the paper was printed failed to show on a Thursday, it was MacConnell who drove the pages to the printer.

“Ray was an incredibly special person,” Coker says of MacConnell, who worked at the University for 30 years and died in 2019. “He never had kids of his own, but he was an important friend and mentor to decades of Campus Times editors. He was an honorary uncle to all of us.”

CT today

In 2018 the Campus Times went mostly digital. A print paper—about 2,000 copies—is still published once a month. The staff of about 25 is headed by editor-in-chief Alyssa Koh ’24 and publisher Sarah Woodams ’24 (T5).

The Wilson Commons office is quieter than in eras past. Sundays are busy, with staffers com-ing in to edit stories, but editors also can work remotely on their own laptops. Much activity takes place on social media. Today’s Campus Times has a social media editor, Alice Guzi ’26, who manages CT accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and X (for-merly Twitter) along with Karis Kelly ’27 and Jane�� Oliver ’25.

Woodams, a double major in environmental studies and studio art, is thinking of working in social media. At the Campus Times, she says, “I’ve learned how to manage people and the importance of deadlines in the business world,” she says.

Koh, who is studying English and linguistics, is considering a career in journalism. And though she will leave the Campus Times when she graduates, Koh says the Campus Times will never leave her.

“A student newspaper is where people in the campus community can become aware of import-ant goings-on outside their standard scope, and that makes it crucial that it’s run by and for the students,” she says. “To get a view of the University that the University wants you to see, take a campus tour. To really understand what’s happening on campus—to me, that’s the point of the��Campus Times.”

21ST-CENTURY EDITION: Editor-in-chief Koh and publisher Woodams lead a staff of about 25 that includes three members devoted to maintaining CT social media accounts. Student journalism, Koh says, helps students “really understand what’s happening on campus.”

Iveth Reynolds ’12S (MBA) and Raquel Ruiz ’99, ’20S (MBA) cochair the Ģ����ý’s Latin Alumni Network

Iveth Reynolds ’12S (MBA)

Iveth Reynolds and Raquel Ruiz, both first-generation Latina college students and MBA graduates of the Simon Business School, understand the significance of mentoring, networking, and peer support. It’s why they have taken on the role of cochairs for the University’s newly established Latin Alumni Network affinity group.

“It’s important to have people in our lives who have similar life experiences, have been there before us, and can guide us on our paths—it certainly was for me,” says Reynolds, an expert in staffing, project management, and diversity and leadership development. She is also the CEO of Tri-Mar Consulting in Rochester, which she founded 25 years ago.

Ruiz, the codirector of Equity, Learning Health Communities Pillar at Duke University’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute, notes that the Latin Alumni Network’s vision is to cultivate, lead, and advance the lives and careers of those who engage with the group, including alumni and current students.

Before joining Duke, Ruiz worked at Rochester for 15 years in executive roles at the Medical Center focused on strengthening health strategies and equity in research. She was also the University’s inaugural cochair for the Latino Professional Alliance, an employee resource group.

Raised in New York City, Reynolds was a latchkey kid from Washington Heights. “I was also a hard-working student, but, like many others, I didn’t have any academic role models,” she says. “Those closest to me encouraged me, but they didn’t know much about getting into college or how to navigate the experience once I became a student.”

Born in Puerto Rico, Ruiz moved to Buffalo when she was 10. “Even though I excelled at school, it was hard for me to imagine the possibilities in life, ones that could be realized through higher education,” Ruiz says. “No one in my family had gone to college.”

Fortunately, both had high school counselors who helped them through the college application process. Reynolds applied to one school, Fordham University in New York City, and got in. For four years, she was a full-time student who also worked full-time. “It was challenging, but, luckily, I had great support from a coworker,” she says. “I realize now that she was really a mentor to me.”

Raquel Ruiz ’99, ’20S (MBA)

As a student at Rochester, Ruiz tapped into resources at the Office of Minority Student Affairs (OMSA). “OMSA helped me create a road map for academic success, and they also recommended getting involved with student organizations as well as the local Latin community,” says Ruiz, who became an active member of the University’s Spanish and Latino Students’ Association and chapter founder of the Lambda Pi Chi sorority.

In addition to the new network, both are active in other University committees and community groups. Reynolds is a member of the University’s Diversity Advisory Council, Women’s Network, and Simon’s Women’s Alliance. In 2011, she founded NSHMBA, now known as Prospanica, a not-for-profit organization in western New York that empowers Hispanic professionals to advance in their careers. She is also the vice chair of the board for Catholic Charities Family and Community Services.

Ruiz is a member of the University’s Alumni Board, served as the financial chair for her 20th class reunion, and is helping to launch an alumni network in Raleigh, NC. Both Reynolds and Ruiz are serving as members of the 2024 Volunteers in Leadership Conference Committee to develop a suite of workshops and experiences for University volunteer leaders. The two initially met at a University alumni relations event. Over the years, they’ve stayed connected, including as part of the United Way’s Latino Leadership Development program, in which Ruiz participated and Reynolds coordinated.

Reynolds and Ruiz encourage students and alumni to get involved in one of the Latin Alumni Network’s committees dedicated to philanthropy, programming, and career development and mentorship. “No matter where we are in our careers, we all have something to offer to others,” says Reynolds, who underscores the importance of having different voices and career paths represented in the Latin Alumni Network.

Adds Ruiz, “T��� Latin Alumni Network is really about embodying the University’s mission so that, together, we can achieve our full potential.”

This article also appears in the summer issue of Rochester Review.

When it comes to images of Black people, viewers have expectations, says Bridget Cooks ’02 (PhD). Her aim is to disrupt them.

SCHOLAR AND CURATOR: Cooks is an alumnus of the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies.

A few years ago, Bridget Cooks ’02 (PhD)—an expert on visual culture, a curator, and a professor of art history and African American studies at the University of California, Irvine—posed a difficult question, first to herself as a Black American and then to several contemporary Black artists.

It was sometime after a white supremacist’s murder of eight congregants and their pastor at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church; after the fatal beating of Freddie Gray by Baltimore police officers, and the shooting death of motorist Philandro Castile by police in Minnesota; but still well before the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the deaths of Breonna Taylor in Louisville and Daniel Prude in Rochester, all at the hands of police, during the spring and summer of 2020.

She asked: “How can we acknowledge that death; how can we acknowledge that threat and find some kind of will to go on?”

Her aim, she says, was to acknowledge personal and collective trauma, and then “to look at how artists, as creative problem solvers, are trying to survive and resist and create in a moment of spectacular Black death and anti-Blackness.”

Cooks selected artists who responded to her call and mounted an exhibit. The Black Index, which received its lead funding from the Ford Foundation, opened on the Irvine campus and traveled nationally for a year. It won national acclaim in the art world and, for Cooks, a 2022 Award for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators.

ARTIFICIAL AI: The Black Index includes a series of works by Dennis Delgado ’97, whom Cooks met while at Rochester. In Do the Right Thing, Delgado, uses facial recognition software to create a composite image of faces from the landmark 1989 film by director Spike Lee. The composite, which draws from a database of all facial images the software can recognize, underscores the software’s omission from the database of many Black faces. Research has indeed shown that widely used facial recognition software does a poor job recognizing darker skin tones. Delgado majored in film studies at Rochester, and later earned an MFA from City College of New York.

Photo courtesy of Dennis Delgado

In part because the exhibit coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, it had an especially robust website, and at , viewers can still navigate it along with recordings of several accompanying conversations and lectures.

These latter images, far more pervasive in American life than ones created by Black people, compromise the full humanity of their Black subjects in favor of categorizations, she argues. To see the works in The Black Index is, for most viewers, to confront the unexpected.

A series of drawings by Lava Thomas, for example, transforms mug shots of Black women arrested for participation in the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott into dignified portraits. Dennis Delgado ’97, whom Cooks met at Rochester, uses facial recognition software to create composite images in a series he calls “The Dark Database.” Delgado constructed the composites from a database of facial images taken from films such as Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther. The resulting images are lighter than one might expect, given the preponderance of Black actors in the films. That’s precisely because, as research and tests have confirmed, the technology is ill-suited to recognizing darker skin tones. Many Black faces are simply not included in the vast datasets on which facial recognition software relies.

When Cooks entered the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies in the fall of 1993, Rochester was the only university in the country offering a graduate degree in the field. While art history tended to focus on an evolving canon of masterpieces, visual and cultural studies was dedicated to the study of images with reference to the social and cultural contexts of their creation and consumption. The program aligned well with Cooks’s approach to the study of art.

Her dissertation became the basis for her 2011 book Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (University of Massachusetts Press). In it she traced the efforts of major museums to exhibit work by Black artists, beginning with the Art Institute of Chicago in 1927 right up to the early 21st century. Those efforts, intended to be forward looking, revealed a preoccupation with situating Black artists in reference to a white norm or in correcting past omissions. Neither context considered Black artists on their own terms.

The Black Index does. Cooks points to 100 ink drawings by Kenyatta A. C. Hinkle inspired by records of Black women who are murdered or disappear every year in the United States with little attention. Hinkle calls them “unportraits.” They’re not representative, in the traditional sense.

“She makes these impossible bodies,” says Cooks. “Women with six breasts, with five legs, with multiple heads. They’re moving; they’re doing things. There’s something magical and witchy about them.” Like the depictions of Black subjects by the other artists, they invite viewers to notice the gap between their expectations and what they see before them. They compel us “to be aware of how much we don’t know about these women, to be disoriented a bit, to become curious about who they are.”

The Black Index suggests a path forward for museums that have articulated the goal of diversity, equity, and inclusion in their exhibitions, collections, and programming. Cooks sees some bright spots, citing the University’s Memorial Art Gallery, which has taken significant steps toward those ends in the past decade. “I was impressed,” says Cooks, recalling a visit to the museum. “I loved the labels. I loved the selection of artwork.”

But for many, much larger museums, she has seen little progress. “I think the problems are many,” she says. Major museums tend to be hierarchical, run and largely funded by boards whose members are often at odds with their younger, more progressive curatorial staffs. Until there is widespread change in the composition of boards, she concludes, “we’re not going to see systematic change.”

Are reports of the marching band’s last hurrah greatly exaggerated?

STANDING OVATION: Tracing its origins to the early 20th century, by the mid-1980s, the University’s marching band moved from on-field performances at football games to a pep band that performed from the stands of Fauver Stadium, a tradition that continues today.

I was both surprised and very pleased to see the photo of Yellowjacket marching band members in the Fall 2022 issue of Rochester Review and both interested and sad to learn of the probable year of the band’s demise. I had been wondering for decades about when the band stopped functioning. Can you tell me why the band was discontinued?

—Harrington (Kit) Crissey Jr. ’66

Letters from alumni of the 1970s to Review also dispute the end date of the marching band proposed in the Fall 2022 issue, echoing a 1974 Campus Times letter from Michael Horowitz ’77: “Perhaps few people realize it, but the UR Marching Band is alive and well.” And so it would be—for about another decade.

The end of the band can probably be attributed to several factors, including competition from other activities and funding. Considered a student group providing a service to the University, the band could not receive Students’ Association funding and relied on an academic department—or in this case, two departments: music and athletics. In the September 20, 1982, Campus-Times, Sharmila Mathur ’85 reported that athletics became the band’s sole sponsor in spring 1981 but lacked a budget line to support it. With practice time in Fauver Stadium scarce, there was less stepping on the field and more pepping in the stands, and the baton was passed to the Varsity Pep Band, which continued to “create spirit in the fans by displaying spirit” as noted in the 1985 Interpres.

The origins of the University’s marching band—or perhaps the marching University Band—are no clearer than its coda.

In the Winter 1984 issue of Review, Frederick Fennell ’37E ’39E (MM), ’88 (Honorary) recounted his role in starting the band. “It was on a September afternoon just fifty years ago last fall when I, a pea-green Eastman School freshman . . . hiked over to the new River Campus to found the Ģ����ý Marching Band.”

While hesitating to suggest Fennell was beating his own drum, there is considerable evidence that an organization known as the University Band, which performed and marched at football games, predated his Rochester arrival by some 25 years.

“Our University band should be the rallying point for our improved cheering and for the rendering of our really good college songs,” announced the November 18, 1908, Campus newspaper. In the years that follow, information about the band appears sporadically; each successive article announces a new band almost as though there had been no previous group.

Thus the October 1926 issue of Rochester Review trumpeted the news to alumni: “A praiseworthy addition to student life is a new University band, which made its initial appearance of the season at the Clarkson game, strikingly garbed in yellow jersies (sic), blue sailor trousers, and blue toques with yellow tassels . . . The band was organized by [Eastman School of Music professor] Sherman A. Clute . . . with the co-operation of Matthew D. Lawless, ’09 . . . and Eugene Loewenthal, ’28, student manager.”

The next Review issue pointed out that “quite aside from the rendition of music . . . [the band] is providing a definite tie-up between the college and the Eastman School of Music. Only about one-third of the band members are students of the college; the remaining two-thirds are from the School of Music.”

Home games were played at University Field, in the area where East High School is currently located—bounded by Culver Road, East Main Street, Ohio Street, and Atlantic Avenue. When the River Campus opened in the fall of 1930, the band, directed by Theodore Fitch, Class of 1922, joined the football team in the new Varsity Stadium. (The stadium was named for Edwin Fauver in 1951 and is now part of the Brian F. Prince Athletic Complex.)

Fennell took over the marching band in early 1934, and by all accounts (not just his own), the ensemble was a rousing success even after he passed on the baton about a decade later. In the off-season, he converted the group into a true University Band. Fennell directed its first concert in Strong Auditorium, won Eastman director Howard Hanson’s approval, and embarked on one of the University’s most illustrious careers.

Fennell’s reminiscence may resonate with that of other marching band alumni: “Whatever has happened to me in the fifty years since then, no matter where, when, or with whom, all dates from that beautiful early-autumn afternoon with my own first group. And I don’t intend, ever, to forget it.”

Ask the Archivist features a question for Melissa Mead, the John M. and Barbara Keil University Archivist and Rochester Collections Librarian.

A journalist aims to help readers understand the latest in scientific discoveries and how that news shapes their lives.

SCIENCE TIMES: An independent science journalist, Sklar writes regularly for National Geographic and other outlets, combining her grounding in brain and cognitive sciences and anthropology to explore both the latest in breakthroughs and the ways that stories are told.

Like many people at the start of the pandemic, Julia Sklar ’14 found herself spending a lot of time at home, trying to keep up the professional connections she had built as an independent science journalist.

Interviews with scientists in their labs were out, and conferences had been postponed.

Like most people, Sklar’s professional and social life began taking place entirely through video calls, particularly the video conferencing app Zoom.

And she noticed a refrain: Why was it, so many wondered aloud and on Twitter, that they could feel emotionally and creatively energized by a day of in-person interaction, yet so drained after a day on Zoom?

Having worked as a science journalist for a decade, Sklar knew there was research that could explain the experience.

She recalled learning about a study at Boston Children’s Hospital that explored how children with autism engaged more effectively with their speech and language therapists when those meetings were video-mediated compared to when therapy took place in person.

“I thought that was so fascinating, because just anecdotally in my own life, I felt the opposite—I always had a really hard time with video chatting and found it really tiring.”

When a National Geographic editor joked on Twitter about commissioning a “10,000-word cover story” about the phenomenon, Sklar was ready.

“I wrote a story for them about the neuroscience of ‘Zoom fatigue,’ and the perspective of how, for many people with autism, Zoom calls were making their regular jobs and social interactions a little bit easier and more accessible.”

The story ended up going viral and was one of the internet’s most-read articles in 2020.

But as other outlets picked up the story and wrote their own versions, Sklar noticed that the positive aspects were drowned out.

“Zoom fatigue just became the word that everybody was talking about and the angle about the technology being an accessibility tool for some people completely got lost,” she says. “To me, that was the most exciting and interesting part of this. It was disheartening to watch the news cycle turn out that way.”

Since the first query to that editor, the Rochester brain and cognitive sciences and anthropology double major has written several stories for National Geographic, and last year, produced The Brain: Discover the Ways Your Mind Works, an 18,000-word volume that the publisher calls a “bookazine.”

The work draws on the latest research into the neuroscience of perception, flavor, chronic pain, and consciousness to provide a status report of sorts on the human brain, “the final frontier of human biology,” as Sklar notes. Forthcoming from National Geographic in April 2024 is her second bookazine, a new volume devoted to the science behind stress.

Sklar credits her double major and other campus opportunities with setting her on her path as a science journalist. In BCS classes, she became grounded in the world of modern science and how research takes place. She then honed many of her journalism skills at the Campus Times, where she worked as an editor throughout college.

After reading a profile of Fred Guterl ’81, then the executive editor of Scientific American, in Rochester Review, she reached out to Guterl, who provided helpful advice on how to pursue her goal of bringing the two interests together and becoming a professional science journalist.

Now, she sees her anthropology courses as also having played a pivotal role.

“We dissected some of the problematic history of anthropology, particularly through a colonial lens. I find that really helpful today,” she says. “Whose right is it to tell a certain community’s story? That comes up a lot with representation and diversity in the journalism industry.”

Based in Boston, Sklar was in Vienna, Austria, this winter for a fellowship at the Complexity Science Hub, where she worked on a project exploring how urban infrastructure influences human health. At the same time, she was teaching an online graduate level science journalism course at Johns Hopkins.

As part of the fellowship, she conducted workshops designed to improve the ways in which scientists and journalists engage with one another.

Improving those conversations is key to ensuring that the public remains informed about how scientific advances influence modern life, she says.

While fascinating, news about scientific discoveries, breakthroughs, and other research is only part of the story.

“T��� thing that’s always the most interesting to me is how all of these innovations impact real lives or have the potential to change the society that we live in.”

A year-long teaching post at the Eastman School of Music provided Martha Graham with “a new adventure of seeking” that would prove pivotal to her place as a pioneering dancer and choreographer, according to a new biography.

Neil Baldwin ’69. PHOTO BY BLUE MOON PHOTOGRAPHY NJ

As a scholar and author, Neil Baldwin ’69 willingly expresses an affinity for the currents of American culture that lead to reinvention—older currents being reconfigured and recast in new ways.

If through lines can be found in his life’s work as poet, critic, and biographer, that might be one. The former founding executive director of the National Book Foundation and now a professor emeritus at Montclair State University, Baldwin has written highly regarded books about poet and physician William Carlos Williams, visual artist Man Ray, inventor Thomas Edison, and auto magnate Henry Ford, among others.

A new biography of modern American dance icon Martha Graham—the first in more than 30 years—seemed a logical addition to that pantheon.

“I felt like [Graham] had been left out of the narrative that I’ve been creating for my whole life about American art,” Baldwin says. “I thought, ‘Wait a second . . . what about dance? I did art. I did literature. I did technology.’”

“At a rather late point in my career, I suddenly am hit over the head with this physical nature of modernism, movement- wise, and how she used her body to create a new aesthetic,” he says. “Again, the key note is new, to make it new, as Ezra Pound says, to carve space and to create shapes with the body that no one’s ever done before—Graham was the pioneer of physicality.”

After more than a decade of research and dozens of interviews with Graham dancers— former and current—Baldwin published Martha Graham, When Dance Became Modern: A Life in 2022.

Listed in many year-end round-ups as one of the best books of the year, the biography recounts Graham’s creative life, from growing up in Pittsburgh to her status as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.

Among the many institutions where Graham left a lasting mark was the Eastman School of Music. From the fall of 1925 to the spring 1926, Graham participated in an innovative, but short-lived, program of “dance and dramatic action” at Eastman.

“She was hired with the express reassurance that she was going to do something different than just conventional ballet at Eastman. And she welcomed that,” Baldwin says. “In terms of the theme of the book, “When Dance Became Modern,” that’s really important because the roots of her modern mode can definitely be traced to that year.”

ENCORE: Graham and her Eastman students reprised the New York City debut for a late spring recital in Rochester. MARTHA GRAHAM COLLECTION/MUSIC DIVISION/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

What brought Graham to Eastman?

At that point, she was starting to develop her own choreographic style of movement. And when she was hired by Rouben Mamoulian who was the head of a newly established school of dance and dramatic action under George Eastman, she was told that she could use the class to experiment in developing her individual technique, which is what she was really itching to do at that point.

She had paid her dues in vaudeville and as a showgirl. She had traveled back and forth across the country and performed in all these little towns from east to west and north to south with Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis and their dance company.

Did she have a plan in mind as she joined the faculty?

When she left the Greenwich Village Follies and moved beyond vaudeville, she said she wanted to create her own dances in her own body and that was crucial to the Eastman residency. Intrinsic to the origin of modern dance, is there was no formal, pre-existing repertory. There’s no, “Oh, let’s do Swan Lake.” Everybody has the pattern and the narrative and the staging of Swan Lake to follow, whereas Graham was concocting dances from simple, pedestrian movements like walking, running, skipping, and leaping and drawing upon her students’ inner energy to make new movement patterns come to life.

Is it fair to say the roots of the Martha Graham Dance Company can be traced to her time at Eastman?

Three Eastman students—Evelyn Sabin, Betty Macdonald, and Thelma Biracree—were the nucleus of what became her company. Looking back upon that nascent period, which was less than a year, she was teaching in New York City at John Murray Anderson’s school and then she would take the train up to Eastman and teach her classes and she went back and forth like that from New York to Rochester. She featured Eastman students in her New York City premiere in April 1926.

Did you work with Eastman as you were recounting Graham’s time in Rochester?

The Eastman School’s historian, Vince Lenti, and his books, for example, For the Enrichment of the Community: George Eastman and the Founding of the Eastman School of Music (Meliora Press, 2004), were very helpful. The head of special collections at the Sibley Music Library, David Peter Coppen, was also extremely helpful. Paul Horgan’s memoir of Mamoulian was a gem, as were some old Rochester Democrat and Chronicle clippings files I discovered in the Reading Room of the Library of Congress. I would say that the story of Graham’s time at Rochester is more known among the Eastman community than the larger University community.��

How do you think your time as a student at Rochester set you on your path as a writer and scholar?

It was my freshman or sophomore year, when the Outside Speakers Committee brought the charismatic cultural critic Susan Sontag to campus. I don’t think she was even 30 years old. She had just published what would become her most enduring classic, Against Interpretation. I remember all of us students sitting on the floor in a circle around her. That was my first really vivid inspiration about how you could write about the alchemy of societal mores and art and performance and visual art. I still return to Against Interpretation every few years.

During my freshman year, I took a course called American Intellectual History with the brilliant, resonant-voiced, impassioned professor Loren Baritz in the history department. The startling keyword for me was “intellectual”—the core of his thesis in his book City on a Hill. That was a major cataclysmic epiphany for 18-year-old me.

Through a deep dive into an iconic album, Warren Zanes ’02 (PhD) explores a lost virtue in recorded music.

(Illustration: David Cowles for Rochester Review)

I’ve written songs almost my entire life. I became part of a roots-rock band, the Del Fuegos, in the early 1980s, when I was 17. I went to college after I left the group and continued to write songs. I was writing songs in Rochester, when I was a student in the visual and cultural studies program. Those actually became my first solo album, Memory Girls.

I’ve been working on a book, just out, about the making of a single album in 1982: Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. Some records stay with you, and Nebraska has been that for me. It’s mysterious. It’s imperfect and unfinished. And to come out with a record like that when you’ve just been in the top 10 of the popular music charts was unthinkable. I wanted to know why he did it. And answering that question was going to take me years—until I sat down with him and got to ask. And I don’t think he has an answer fully in the can.

The imperfections in the music were significant, and I say this knowing plenty of imperfect records had come before. But that was mostly music that lived out on the margins. This was imperfect music right in the hot center of the marketplace.

One of the things that makes this record a touchstone is that around 1982 recorded music was stepping into the digital era. It was the same year Time magazine’s person of the year was the personal computer. And for music makers, the digital era was when the possibility of making perfect music became more accessible with every passing year.

When people started recording music digitally, they started looking at music as waveforms. Engineers who used to close their eyes and listen were now opening their eyes and looking. And they would see, for instance, where a vocal is off pitch. Or when the drummer starts to speed up.

The problem—and I’m going to label it a problem—is that it became harder to resist fixing the imperfections. I’m not talking about EDM [electronic dance music], which lives on the grid, but music made by human beings playing instruments in a room.

Bruce made Nebraska sitting on his bed and turning songs into recordings on a little cassette. He didn’t mean for them to go anywhere. They were meant to be a reference so he could go rerecord them. Then he said, “I don’t know what happened, but I can’t make this better. I have to put it out like this.”

Musicians did often prefer their demos to the final product. The magic of a demo was that you just focused on the song and getting to know it. There was an absence of scrutiny. In the studio, there’d be an engineer, a producer, a band—everybody looking at you.

I tell people, in addition to Nebraska, go listen to the Beach Boys’ “Wild Honey.” The Beach Boys are known for these gorgeous harmonies, and in “Wild Honey” there’s so much joy and abandon in that vocal. If that were recorded today, the engineer would really work it over.

But sometimes the best, most emotionally resonant music, isn’t perfect. It changes speed. The pitch wavers. And there’s an intimacy to that.

An Eastman keyboardist aims to capture the passion and romance of classical music as it sounded in the late 18th century.

METHOD TO MOZART: “Every time I heard someone play [Mozart’s] music, I was baffled by how terrified they sounded of doing the wrong thing,” Bezuidenhout says. “I was determined to find a way to bring out more passion, relaxation, and romance. And I could do that on these old pianos in a way that I just never could on a Steinway.”

The “super lonely” child, as Bezuidenhout describes himself at that age, was “completely bamboozled by how beautiful the music was” and became obsessed both with the film and Mozart’s compositions, which he felt gave him a way to escape his solitude.

“Those feelings you have as a kid with music like that just never go away,” he says from his home in London.

Today, Bezuidenhout is a leading period-instrument keyboard player, best known for his fortepiano interpretations of the complete keyboard music of Mozart (Harmonia Mundi record label). Earlier this year, he released his 25th album—the last volume of the complete Beethoven Concertos (Piano Concertos Nos. 1 & 3) recorded with the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra.

A regular guest with the world’s leading ensembles—and with conductors including Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Philippe Herreweghe, Giovanni Antonini, and Daniel Harding—Bezuidenhout was named Most Exciting Young Musician for the 2005–06 season by the Dutch Federation of Music and Drama and earned a nomination in 2013 as Gramophone magazine’s Artist of the Year.

During the 2017–18 season he became an artistic director of the Freiburger Barockorchester and principal guest conductor with the English Concert.

Future projects include Bach Christmas Cantatas and Handel Dixit Dominus—both with the Freiburger Barockorchester— and the English Concert, featuring Purcell Odes and Handel Chandos.

In one music review, the New York Times wrote that Bezuidenhout’s performance of keyboard works by Mozart demonstrated the “dazzling variety of colors he can draw from his instrument.”

Bezuidenhout’s repertoire extends beyond Mozart to works by Baroque and Romantic composers, including Purcell, Handel, and Bach, to the music of Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Brahms. But Mozart has remained a main focus for the Australian/South African pianist—in part to interpret the prolific composer’s works in new ways.

“Every time I heard someone play his music, I was baffled by how terrified they sounded of doing the wrong thing,” he says. “I was determined to find a way to bring out more passion, relaxation, and romance. And I could do that on these old pianos in a way that I just never could on a Steinway.

“While there is a great deal to be learned from historical sources, an equally important aspect of my approach is based on ‘gut’ feelings; on the realization of sounds in my imagination,” he adds. “It is a highly postmodern exercise in a sense—deeply subjective and based on background and personal experience.”

Bezuidenhout says the Eastman School of Music was instrumental in allowing him to develop that trial-and-error approach as an advanced keyboard student.

He remembers “a constellation of important people” at Eastman who valued that process much more than a heavily structured curriculum.

“It was this free, open environment where there was so much experimentation,” he says. “T���y allowed me to be myself at a time when—at least hypothetically—other faculty might have tried to suppress these slightly fantastical tendencies.”

Those tendencies included bouncing between the fortepiano, harpsichord, flute, and chamber music.

For example, Rebecca Penneys, a professor emerita of piano and Bezuidenhout’s principal piano instructor, was “unbelievably open-minded.” Meantime, Paul O’Dette, a professor of lute, inspired him to use historical information to enliven and enrich music making. (Bezuidenhout became O’Dette’s assistant for several years). He also counts his work with Malcolm Bilson (fortepiano) and Arthur Hass (harpsichord) as deeply stimulating: “Both teachers instilled in me a newly found appreciation of the myriad possibilities offered by these instruments; they are both scrupulous stylists, too—remarkable.”

“We were renegades in a way,” he says of himself and his peers, “with the consent of our teachers.”

That preference for unconventionality paid off. The year Bezuidenhout received his bachelor’s degree, he recorded his first disc of Mozart, titled Sturm und Drang, and captured first prize at the prestigious Bruges Fortepiano Competition.

Ģ����ý 60 percent of Bezuidenhout’s typical music season is solo work, which he finds the most demanding. When recently preparing to perform the Schumann Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54 for the first time, he spent between five and six hours a day for several weeks before he felt ready.

He also performs chamber music—the accompaniment of vocal repertoire is a particular source of joy—and collaborates with musicians such as tenor Mark Padmore, Carolyn Sampson, Anne Sofie von Otter, and Isabelle Faust.

“It’s a fantastic mix,” he says. “I could never get bored because there’s such constant variety in this field. I always wanted a career that would challenge me in many different directions.”

For another challenge, Bezuidenhout is thinking about buying a harpsichord so that he can delve into the instrument more deeply. He’s looking forward to several years of intense training and possible future recordings including the Bach Harpsichord Concertos (with single strings).

But it needs to be the right kind of training—the kind he received generously at Eastman at a time when he was trying to build a child’s dream into what would become a professional career.

“It was an entire atmosphere of collective acceptance and flexibility,” he says. “I had that in a complete sense from everyone I came across there.”

Veterinarian and former Olympic-level bobsledder John Cogar ’71 offers his help during a two-week volunteer trip to Ukraine.

STAFF SUPPORT: The staff of a Ukrainian clinic presented Cogar with a flag to thank him for his service treating abandoned dogs and cats as a volunteer veterinarian near the capital of Kyiv.

John Cogar ’71 became a veterinarian to help animals in need. He never expected he’d be doing it in a war zone, in his 70s, more than 4,500 miles from his regular practice in Ray Brook, New York.

“It was the experience of a lifetime for sure,” he says of a two-week volunteer trip to Ukraine last October.

The trip was organized through Cogar’s connections as an Olympic-level bobsledder, a sport he undertook after graduation. As a member of the US team, he befriended former US luge coach Dmitry Feld, who eventually moved to nearby Lake Placid, site of the 1932 and 1980 Winter Olympics.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, Cogar offered his help to the former coach, who had been raising money and support for Ukrainians. Feld told him that many of the nation’s pets needed medical attention because their owners had been killed, some had fled the country, and some were incapacitated. He and Feld flew to Ukraine to set up clinics.

From an operating room in Irpin, northwest of the capital city of Kyiv—about 50 miles from the front lines—he performed surgeries, treated injured animals, gave vaccinations, and conducted physical examinations. Over the course of 10 days, he performed roughly 80 operations, often working by flashlight when the electricity was knocked out.

Starting at Rochester as a mechanical engineering major, Cogar switched to biology. A standout running back in football and a sprinter in track, he was elected to the University’s Athletic Hall of Fame in 1996.

After graduating from Cornell Veterinary School, he bought a practice near his home in Saranac Lake and operated it until 2008. He now works at the business part time.

From his home this winter, Cogar says his work in Ukraine isn’t finished. “When you lose everything and have nothing left, your pets mean everything. This experience is something I’ll cherish forever.”

“I intend to go back and perform more surgeries when the war ends. I know they’ll be desperate for the help, and I’ll be there.”