In October, Inside Philanthropy showcased the extraordinary commitments entrepreneur and philanthropist Tom Golisano, a Rochester area native, is making to Upstate New York this year. Following is an excerpt from the article by Ade Adeniji published on October 8, 2024. Adapted and reprinted with permission.

Billionaire Tom Golisano Gave $360 Million to Upstate New York Nonprofits. Here’s What He Had to Say

By Ade Adeniji
Staff writer, Inside Philanthropy

In September, 2024, billionaire Paychex founder Tom Golisano surprised 82 nonprofit organizations at a press conference with a $360 million commitment in unrestricted grants. The beneficiaries, all in Upstate New York, work on causes including animals, education and healthcare for developmentally disabled children.��

Raised in a middle-class suburb of Rochester as the son of a macaroni salesman and a seamstress, Golisano is worth $6.5 billion today. He has a track record of giving that goes all the way back to the 1980s, when he established the��Golisano Foundation, and his lifetime giving totals some $775 million.��

After high school, he worked as a bank teller to help his parents with their finances, and then went to Alfred State Tech, a two-year college.

After graduating, he eventually found work at a payroll processor that provided services for large companies. But soon he noticed a gap in the market and realized he could provide these same services to small companies with 50 employees or fewer. So Golisano took the leap and started his own company, Paychex, in 1971, with just $3,000 and a credit card. The early days were tough, but soon, the company started making money and expanded its orbit beyond western New York. In 1983, the company went public. Today, it employs 16,000 people and has a market value of around $50 billion.

Two years after Paychex went public, Golisano and his wife at the time, Gloria, decided that they wanted to start giving back. Their son, Steven, is developmentally disabled, and Gloria sought to better understand his condition.

Over the past three decades, Golisano and the Golisano Foundation have emerged as top donors in this space, pledging or donating more than $300 million to support individuals with autism and other intellectual and developmental disabilities.��A main component of the foundation’s work is building institutions and centers that it intends to serve as national models of collaboration for inclusive health.

Golisano thinks that there’s still not enough awareness in the philanthropic community about the range of organizations on the ground working on developmental disabilities. And that lack of awareness serves as a barrier for these organizations to connect with funders.��

One of the Golisano Foundation’s biggest grantees in the developmental disabilities space is the Special Olympics. The foundation contributed more than $67 million to launch and expand the Special Olympics��Healthy Communities��program so that people with intellectual disabilities can access healthcare in their communities all year.

So why did Golisano decide to take his giving to the next level in Upstate New York? The Golisano Foundation already had a long-running list of trusted grantees that it has worked with through the decades in Upstate New York and southwestern Florida. Golisano calls both of these places home, and had provisions in his will for more money to flow to these organizations in the form of a bequest. But more recently, he started to change his thoughts about that.

“I applied for immortality and didn’t get it,” Golisano said. “So I decided that rather than waiting for me to kick the bucket, I would advance the money to them ahead of time. Why make them wait?”

Of the $360 million, $201 million flowed to Rochester organizations, along with another $66.5 million to Buffalo nonprofits and $40 million to ones in Syracuse. Golisano gifted the remaining $52 million to the Golisano Foundation. Organizations run the gamut from nonprofits that serve the community like Veterans Outreach Center and the Child Advocacy Center of Greater Rochester; education groups, including Alfred State College and Niagara University; and animal welfare organizations, including Better Together Pet Rescue Center and Rochester Emergency Veterinary Services.��Golisano’s huge commitment to animal welfare organizations is thanks to his wife, former world No. 1 women’s tennis player Monica Seles, a passionate animal advocate.

Ching-Shan Chang ’17E scores feature film

Composer, orchestrator, and arranger Ching-Shan Chang ’17E has written the score for the thriller Laws of Man. The film, in which two US marshals pursue a wanted murderer in the deserts of Nevada during the Cold War, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Laws of Man is Chang’s first feature score.

A composer for film, games, and other multimedia projects as well as concert music, Chang has been credited in the films Sonic the Hedgehog 2 released by Paramount Pictures and Rebel Moon: Part Two—The Scargiver, released on Netflix this past spring. She has won several awards for her compositions for short films.

“ ‘Music must tell a story’ is the principle I’ve always followed for all of my musical works,” in 2023.

Chang is an accomplished concert composer who discovered her love of composing for contemporary media while she was a student at the . After graduation, she completed a master’s degree at New York University in screen scoring and earned a spot at Tom Holkenborg’s Score Academy in Los Angeles.

Nolan Sparks ’24 drafted by St. Louis Cardinals

Pitcher Nolan Sparks ’24 was selected by the St. Louis Cardinals Major League Baseball team in the 13th round of the 2024 draft.

Sparks, who came to Rochester from Aurora, Colorado, pitched 60 innings during his final season with the Yellowjackets, striking out 80 batters while walking just 19. He led the Liberty League in strikeouts and finished his career with the Yellowjackets as the program’s all-time strikeout leader.

Sparks graduated Phi Beta Kappa in May with a major in business.

Bienfait Mugenza ’21 wins global projects for peace alumni award

Bienfait Mugenza ’21 has won the Projects for Peace Alumni Award, a global initiative founded by philanthropist Kathryn Wasserman Davis and administered by the Middlebury College Center for Community��Engagement. The initiative offers only one such award each year. Mugenza is Rochester’s first recipient.

The award is an outgrowth of Projects for Peace, which offers $10,000 grants to college students who have designed a grassroots project that promises to address the root causes of a conflict. The $50,000 alumni award supports the continued work of a past Projects for Peace grant recipient “who demonstrates innovation and persistence in working for peace,” according to the program’s website.

Mugenza, who is from Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, was awarded a��Projects for Peace grant in 2018��with classmate Philemon Rono ’21 of Kenya. The two ran a workshop in Kigali, Rwanda, called “Peace through Entrepreneurship,” that brought together youths from Congo and Rwanda. The neighboring countries in central Africa have seen rising tensions for decades.

Since then, he has founded the Congo Peace Academy, whose mission is to develop young entrepreneurial leaders and peacemakers who will transform the Democratic Republic of Congo into a “more peaceful and prosperous country where everyone can live and thrive without the daily fear of violence and war by 2030.”

Says Mugenza, “This award holds a deep personal significance for me. It is not just a recognition of my past efforts but also a reaffirmation of my commitment to peace and conflict transformation in the Congo. The application and interview process was both rigorous and enlightening, allowing me to reflect deeply on the impact of our work at the Congo Peace Academy. When I received the news of my selection, it was a moment of immense joy and validation, knowing that the efforts of our team are being recognized on such a prestigious platform.”

Erin Morley ’02E knighted in France

Soprano Erin Morley ’02E was named a Knight in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French minister of culture in recognition of her outstanding contribution to the arts. The award was presented to her in Paris in February by the president of France’s National Music Center.

This roundup appears in the summer 2024 issue of Rochester Review, the magazine of the URochester.

The following interview has been edited and condensed and appears in the summer 2024 issue of Rochester Review, the magazine of the Ģ����ý.

I spent three years at Grinnell College in Iowa before transferring to . Then I spent two years at Rochester, majoring in —I was pre-med—and playing on the basketball team.

I’m from the South Side of Chicago, where I always had a lot of options when I needed a haircut. I went mostly to a Black barbershop growing up, but, if that was not available, I could go to the Puerto Rican neighborhood or a Korean neighborhood, and there was always somebody skilled in cutting coarse hair. Being from such a diverse city, I never had an issue finding a barber.

When I went to Grinnell, I couldn’t find someone to cut my hair. The closest city was about two hours away, and I did not have a car. I felt like college was a really opportune time, and it started to take a toll when I never felt my best for that special someone or for social events or internship interviews.

I also missed the barbershop. In a lot of cities, barber shops and salons are cultural institutions. People have great relationships with their barbers, like I did with mine. They’re places where they’re hiring people struggling with homelessness or food insecurity. In most bigger cities and in Rochester, these places are considered safe havens. And we leave these places better looking but feel even better than how we look.

I had an idea for something like ClipDart when I was still in college. At first, I thought I’d create an on-demand barber app. It would be like Uber or DoorDash, but, instead of delivering food or driving you door-to-door, it would deliver a barber wherever and whenever you wanted. I worked on it for nearly five years, and the launch date was supposed to be March 15, 2020.

It was devastating to be ready to launch and then have the pandemic arrive. But at the same time, it was a really a big blessing because it gave me time to think and revamp the mission. What if you didn’t have a phone or internet at home? So, I switched to a model of finding organizations like colleges or hospitals or senior homes, who have a lot of people in need, rather than just going to a single consumer with an app.

ClipDart is now two organizations: , a for-profit corporation, and , a nonprofit 501(c)(3). Both organizations provide free, onsite haircare for historically marginalized and underserved communities. However, our nonprofit strictly serves people facing severe socioeconomic inequities such as homelessness and food insecurity.

We started off with one barber in Arizona and he really helped me build the team throughout Phoenix. That’s why our headquarters are there today. And then I said, “Do you know any hair professionals who’d be great for this in Chicago or New York or California?” We don’t just want highly skilled hair professionals but those who can also really have a conversation. And now we’re working in 26 states with over 100 partners.

The inequity comes from a lot more than race and hair type. There are a lot of low-income students who can’t afford haircuts, around $40 just for a cut. Access to haircare can also be hard for people who are LGBTQIA or who have disabilities. It’s just an equity problem for a lot of people.

The following interview has been edited and condensed. It first appeared in the spring 2024 issue of Rochester Review, the magazine of the URochester.

I got started in sound design during my second semester at , when I took sound design with Professor . On the first day, I remember my jaw just being on the floor. He showed us a session from the movie Forrest Gump that broke down all the different layers of all the sounds that went into it. It was the coolest thing. I graduated with a major in and a minor in .

Sound design exists in other fields as well, but for film or TV it means creating sound effects by recording, synthesizing, editing, and layering sounds together to amplify the story that’s happening on screen. Each movie or show requires its own set of sounds, like a tonal palette that exists within that universe and that works to tell the story. I work in animation, where you start with a blank slate. Sound editing is similar to video editing, except it’s only with audio elements. You’re taking the sound effects, and you’re mixing and matching them to create a soundscape or enhance the moment.

We use a lot of sound effects from sound libraries. And then we’ll also record our own sounds. A lot of the time, I’ll be at my desk recording objects from my prop collection. Then�� I’ll record them into my digital audio workstation and edit and layer things together.

My most recent project and my favorite to this day, is , a DreamWorks animated feature that came out on Netflix in February. There’s a character in it named Unexplained Noises. Her elbows and knees look like bendy straws, and we had to make a sound for her joint movements. But a straw is not going to make a loud enough noise. I had some pop tube sensory toys that I once found at Target and was, like, “I’m going to use this sound someday.” You pull on them and, WROOP! We recorded them as the character was walking around. The design is so custom that we’d never find it in a library.��

More recently, my team needed a sound to go with a character shaking their leg. They had to come up with just a little creak of the boot. Last summer I had found this beautiful-sounding piece of super-thick red leather at a thrift store for craft supplies. Playing with it, they could make it squeak to record this rhythmic, hyperrealistic sound for a close-up foot shaking.

At Rochester I just started recording things to make my own sound effects library. I have so many recordings from my time as a student that have made it into film and television. One of my first recordings was in the Spurrier Hall basement. In one of the practice rooms, there was a piano with a really squeaky hinge. I put that into a show. It had the perfect metal squeak.��

Not every sound designer records their own sounds, but that’s my favorite part of the job. I know it’s been a fun day when my desk is an absolute mess of random objects. Audio tape, coconut shells, flutes, tissue paper, balloons, stretch bands for exercising—I have all kinds of really weird stuff that you wouldn’t ever think, “Oh, I’m going to record this.” One of the challenging and fun parts of sound design is just walking around and being an active listener in the world—picking up on little things­, hearing even the smallest of sounds and finding ways to make them larger than life.��

The headlines can show the world to be a dangerous place. But imagine looking at the world through the lens of research and educational partnerships between universities around the globe. In the 21st century, it’s not an overstatement to say that national boundaries begin to fade away.��

It’s a point that Jane Gatewood, the vice provost for global engagement, likes to underscore. It gets to the heart of what a global university is about—a celebration of global exchange, cooperation, and talent mobility uncoupled from the barriers that borders sometimes pose. And it’s all in the service of education and research that enriches lives and addresses problems that extend far beyond the borders of any one nation or continent.

The University’s Office for Global Engagement, 10 years old this year, launched Rochester into a new chapter in international education. Encompassing the Center for Education Abroad and International Services Office, Global Engagement has, on the one hand, furthered the efforts of staff who had long worked to expand study abroad opportunities and to serve the needs of international students. The results of that work are increased opportunities for study and work abroad and for faculty exchanges and overseas projects. Global Engagement has also helped maintain a diverse population of international students through the COVID-19 pandemic and multiple changes in federal immigration policy. ��

But the most significant change has been in the emphasis on institutional partnerships. Those, according to Gatewood, are the keys to becoming a truly global university.�� The office has facilitated groundbreaking research and collaborative partnerships between Rochester and other renowned universities around the world that have driven progress and enhanced educational outcomes. Says Gatewood, summing up the shift: “We’re thinking more about how we build long-term relationships with other institutions around the world.”��

Partnerships facilitate student and faculty mobility, but the work to create and maintain them is complicated, arduous, and takes place mostly behind the scenes.��

Some of the work starts with faculty initiative and input.��

“When you get faculty involved, and you get the schools involved, you can knit the curriculum together so that more students can move between schools, and have a richer, deeper understanding not only of their discipline, but also of the global context of their discipline,” says Gatewood.

Tynelle Stewart, director of the Center for Education Abroad, has seen the fruits of that work, which is vital to her efforts to increase student participation in study, work, and research abroad. It used to be that students in disciplines such as engineering, which adhere to strict accreditation requirements, had few opportunities to study abroad. Now, students across disciplines are participating in educational programs, and not just in their junior year.��

“We’re seeing that students are engaging in opportunities for longer periods of time,” Stewart says. “A student might do a semester of courses and then stay and do a research project over the summer and add on an internship. There’s just so much more flexibility in what students can do.”

Some of the most complex work falls to Ravi Shankar, assistant vice provost for international services and support, and his 20-plus staff members in the . They serve the University’s entire international population, including students, visiting scholars, international employees, and their dependents. International Services has long provided immigration advising to international students, but a couple of years ago, Shankar began a new initiative, the support and engagement team, which assists international community members with everything from navigating an entirely new culture to filling out tax forms.��

Then there’s what he calls the office’s “bread and butter.”��

“Our day-to-day work really is processing immigration requests that come in from students and from departments to bring in faculty, staff, and scholars,” he says. “We do a lot of workshops to educate the students and departments about what is required right now to sponsor a visa for students, scholars, physicians or faculty members who are not US citizens or permanent residents.”��

The process for moving international students and scholars across borders is complex and chock-full of places where plans can go awry. “If a student or faculty member is trying to come in and they’re denied entry into the United States, we might get called at midnight,” Shankar says. During high-travel seasons—winter and spring breaks, the end of spring semester and the beginning of fall—the work is nonstop, extending to evenings
and weekends.

Gatewood, Stewart, and Shankar all worry that the American immigration system may be placing the United States at a disadvantage in attracting the brightest students from around the globe.��

“We’re still the top country for our international students in terms of sheer numbers,” Gatewood says. “But when you look at surveys of where students want to go, and where they’re thinking about going, it’s increasingly Australia, New Zealand, and the UK.” Why? One factor is almost certainly that in those places, unlike in the US, higher education creates a smooth path to immigration. ��

As Global Engagement marks its first decade, it is also turning attention to scholars and students around the world whose lives and livelihoods are in danger. “There are nearly three dozen active conflicts around the world as we speak,” Gatewood says. “And there are scholars who are affected in even more places than there are active conflicts, because there may be laws that affect their ability to do their research in their home country.”��

Scholars and students facing such circumstances can be considerable assets to the University community, but it takes resources to host them. Some of those resources come from the Global Emergency Response Fund, established in 2021, in the aftermath of the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan, with seed funding from Board of Trustees Chair Richard Handler ’83 and the Jefferies Group, the investment company he leads.��

Individual programs and schools have secured funding to host scholars as well. The Humanities Center, for example, funded and launched its program, with some additional support from the School of Arts & Sciences.

These efforts have brought to Rochester visiting scholars such as Baitullah Hameedi (“Escaping the Taliban”) and Dmitry Bykov (“Satirizing Putin”), and visiting students like Anastasiya Yushchenko (“From the Epicenter of War”). Some, like Hameedi, are seeking asylum. Others, like Bykov and Yushchenko, are longing for the time when they can return home.��

Higher learning, Gatewood says, “is fundamentally about providing space to think and learn without barriers.” Around the world, nationalism is on the rise at the very time that society’s biggest challenges are global in scope. The internationalization of higher education is one means of stitching the world together.��

Gatewood was inspired toward her career path after she went on a student exchange to the former Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. “It was billed as an initiative for mutual understanding, people-to-people, as a way to foster peace,” she says.��

She and her colleagues remain committed to the same spirit of peace and understanding. Says Gatewood: “Building stone by stone is critical to do, and it’s what the world needs now.”

Global Rochester: At a glance

(Academic year 2022–23)

Student body

[visualizer id=”608492″ class=”]

4,306 international students from 135 countries

International Students

Top 10 countries of origin

Visiting students

Top 5 countries of origin

63 visiting students from 25 countries

Education abroad

This story was originally published in the spring 2024 issue of Rochester Review, the magazine of the URochester.

A little over a year ago, , Dean’s Professor and chair of the Medical Center’s Department of Health Humanities and Bioethics, crossed Elmwood Avenue and walked into Rush Rhees Library to pay a visit to , the Ani and Mark Gabrellian Director of the Humanities Center.

Ross, a pediatrician and an ethicist with a PhD in philosophy, had arrived in Rochester just months earlier from the University of Chicago’s McLean Center for Medical Ethics. The was brand new, and she had been hired to shape and lead it, along with the . Christensen, a scholar of architectural and urban design and the Arthur Satz Professor of the Humanities, was halfway through his first year heading the , and only its second director. Finding their footing in new roles, they each sought inspiration and a potential partner in elevating the profile and practice of the humanities across the University.

It was a fruitful meeting.

“We had a kind of immediate synergy,” says Christensen, who since January also serves as associate dean of the . “I was taken by her incredible initiative.”

Says Ross, “We met, and within five minutes, it was like we were old friends.”

They traded notes on everything from their shared roots as New Yorkers to their thoughts on the academic literature on hospital design. They found they harbored similar views about the relationship between the humanities and the life sciences.

Viewed through the modern academy’s operational lens, with its divisions into departments and programs, the humanities and the life sciences can seem to occupy separate universes. But seen in terms of the problems they address, they can be 
inseparable.

Ross describes the humanities as “embedded” in medical research and practice. And nowhere has that been more the case than at Rochester.

last year, Ross has written and presented internationally on ethical issues raised by organ transplantation, genetics and genomics, clinical research with human subjects, and multiple aspects of pediatrics.��After three decades at Chicago, she’d grown frustrated.

“They had a very narrow role for ethics as just clinical ethics at the bedside,” she says of the school’s medical establishment. “I wanted [to see] a much broader, 360-degree role.”

She calls the opportunity that arose at Rochester “the perfect job,” and shares an oft-told story that’s still not widely known outside the University. In short, the was the birthplace of an influential approach to patient care and research called the biopsychosocial model.

With roots stretching back to the 1940s, the model was formally proposed and described by Medical Center psychiatrist in a landmark article, published in the journal Science in 1977.

The deceptively simple model transformed medical education. As Engel explained, a physician should not be trained to look exclusively at physiology as though a patient was best seen as a system of organs. “The physician’s basic professional knowledge and skills must span the social, psychological and biological, for his decisions and actions on the patient’s behalf involve all three,” he wrote, at a time when physicians were still overwhelmingly male.

The biopsychosocial model opened a door to collaboration between researchers in medical science and other disciplines, including the humanities. In 1981, the Medical Center established a Division of Medical Humanities, and Ross credits its first director, Kathryn Montgomery, a scholar of English literature, with a groundbreaking development. Montgomery’s book (Princeton University Press, 1991) “is sort of the precursor to all of narrative medicine,” Ross says, alluding to a type of medical practice that considers the role of storytelling—the patient’s, the doctor’s, and the interaction between the two that creates yet another narrative that guides clinical decision making.

Under the leadership of its last director, physician and art historian , the division expanded into the arts, partnering with the University’s , and more recently, with the .

As Ross puts it, the Medical Center “was among the first in the country with a humanities division, and now, is one of just eight academic medical centers in the nation to have a��dedicated humanities and bioethics department.”

The decision to elevate a division into a department is no mere administrative detail. It has allowed Ross the chance to develop that “360-degree role” for ethics in a way she couldn’t at Chicago. She calls , the CEO of the Medical Center and dean of the medical school until he stepped down this past year to resume his position in cardiology, “visionary” in making the critical decision.

“One of the most important things I do is what I call embedding,” Ross says. Health humanities and bioethics “have to be embedded across the entire clinical and research spectrum.”

That means standing on an equal footing with clinical departments.

“If you’re doing a lecture on neurology, I want to be included, because I’ll talk about determinations of death and the ethical issues [that presents],” she says. “If you’re talking about cardiology, I’m going to talk about the ethics and humanity of what it means to get somebody else’s heart in a heart transplant. No matter what area of medicine you talk about, I can come up with an ethical issue. And if I can’t, I can just go back to the fundamental doctor-patient relationship, because that’s a moral relationship.”

By addressing the ethical implications of medical research and practice, she has been able to bring additional grant funding to Medical Center researchers. “When you write a grant, you have to be innovative,” she says. “By bringing in an ethics component, we’re saying, ‘we’re doing great science, but what are its implications?’ ”

But Ross didn’t want such embedding to be limited to ethical philosophy or to the Medical Center. That’s why, she says, “I reached over to Peter.”

When Christensen met Ross, he was about a semester into his role leading the Humanities Center. He was at a busy and productive point in his career. A specialist in architecture and urban design, his second book, (Penn State University Press, 2022), had just come out, and another, (MIT Press, 2024), was at press.

The Humanities Center was established in 2015, and its inaugural director, , the Dexter Perkins Professor of History, articulated a set of values as part of its mission, describing them as “some of the gifts the humanities provide: deeper understanding of ourselves and others, along with the sense of collective welfare essential for democracy to thrive.” Under her leadership, the center brought in new scholars as fellows, created forums for scholars across disciplines to share perspectives, and sponsored a faculty-led, reading-and-discussion summer program called Experiencing Civic Life for select high school students in the Rochester City School District, among other programs and initiatives.

From that footing, Christensen’s charge was to expand the center’s role. New initiatives launched in the past year include the program and a global book series, , in cooperation with the Ģ����ý Press.

And he’s asked, what more could the humanities be doing—literally? He points to an assumption about the humanities with deep roots, but one that he believes needs rethinking.

In Western culture at least, starting with the 18th-century Enlightenment period, the humanities came to be thought of as the study of “what defines the human experience,” he says. “And that is why music is a humanity, but it’s also why literature is, and why art is, and why philosophy is. These are all things that only we can do, right? That animals and nature can’t do. This is what defines us as a species and what defines the human experience.”

That was still the idea at the dawn of the 20th century. But within the rapidly growing academy, Christensen says, “it became associated with thinking versus doing. We actually need to think also about what the humanities can do.”

In that vein, Ross’s arrival could not have come at a better time. Medicine is fundamentally about doing—caring, healing, and improving the quality of life in the most elemental sense. Christensen had already been interested in connecting with colleagues in medicine for that very reason. Ross was someone who saw a humanistic discipline—ethical philosophy—as part of every aspect of clinical care and research.

During that first meeting, Christensen disclosed to Ross something that had been weighing on his mind.

“A dear friend of mine had just been diagnosed with a stage 3 brain tumor at the age of 40,” he says. “I was really struggling with all that that meant about dying young, or potentially dying young, and about your life being turned upside down.”

Ross recalls that point in the conversation well. “I said, ‘You know, what you’re experiencing is anticipatory grief. We talk about this all the time in medicine.’ ” Their conversation turned to the universality of grief. And by the time the meeting was over, they had a plan for their first collaboration.

They called it, simply, the . Through the 2023–24 academic year, Ross and Christensen have brought before the University authors, musicologists, poets, physicians, and photographers to discuss grief over sudden loss; the connection between music and mourning; a doctor’s experience declaring a child dead; grief in the face of violence and social injustice as experienced in Black communities, and more. The series invited faculty, students, and staff “to expand our networks exploring this complex topic as one university.”

, a senior associate in the Department of Health Humanities and Bioethics, calls the series “a daring first move” in what promises to be a vibrant collaboration between the department and the center, extending to other areas of the University over time.

Daiss was the inaugural McPherson Director of Education at the University’s Memorial Art Gallery and trained as a hospital chaplain at Strong Memorial Hospital. In 2002, she and Clark cocreated a course using art as a means for medical students and clinicians to enhance their skills of observation. More recently, she created , offering patients a chance to look at works of art as a means to reduce anxiety and fear. She recalls “sitting beside a woman who was dying, who would never be outside again. And we went on walks in the woods together, thanks to artwork.”

“This is an important collaboration,” Daiss says. In choosing a theme with universal relevance, “we’re showing that whether you’re a historian, a political scientist, a psychologist, a musician, or a clinician, we can all share ideas.”

But there is a method at work when it comes to turning ideas into action. Ultimately, the hope is that the collaboration will lead to new research. But that takes time, says Ross, who has a philosophy about how research germinates. “You can’t get to research until you have relationships,” she says. “The first step of trying to do research that spans the Medical Center and the River Campus is to develop relationships.”

Relationships, perhaps, like the one that has arisen between her and Christensen.

Like old friends and colleagues, Christensen and Ross don’t always agree, and their back-and-forth can help refine their thinking. Christensen observes that in the contemporary United States, there’s a stigma against expressing grief, yet none against expressing anger. As a result, people may “bypass grief and express it as anger.”

He asks Ross what she thinks, and she replies, “Well, sort of.”

“I’m going to go all Kübler-Ross on you,” she says to him, referring to the University of Chicago professor Elisabeth Kübler-Ross who identified and articulated five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. “We’re sort of stuck in our anger stage, rather than going through the five stages. And you don’t have to go through the five stages in order. Grief encompasses a lot of different emotions, not just one.” When grief gets expressed communally, there can be real beauty in that experience, says Ross.

Later in their conversation, Christensen returns to that thought. “It reminds me a bit of the art historical concept of the sublime,” he says. He offers “a nutshell version” of the concept as described by the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant: “a mix of awe and fear and beauty that you experience when looking over the top of a mountain, for example. It’s not about positive or negative emotions but about profundity of emotions.”

Ross and Christensen report hearing from colleagues and people in the community inspired by the grief series to converse and connect with others. In that spirit, the scholars are exploring the next joint venture for the department and the center.

“I think Lainie and I have some fun topics that we want to deal with,” says Christensen. “Our lives have joy, right? Joy, being the opposite of grief—maybe we want to get there at some point.”

This story originally appeared in the spring 2024 issue of Rochester Review,��the magazine of the URochester.

alumnus and entrepreneur Craig Dubitsky ’87 has teamed up with actor Robert Downey Jr. to build a brand with a social mission.

The brand is and its first product is coffee. Happy partnered with the to aid in the group’s efforts to destigmatize mental illness and encourage freer conversation about mental health. Happy’s single-serve pods are sourced through Rainforest Alliance–certified farms, and the products come with a QR code linking to the NAMI website and its mental health resources. NAMI was granted an equity stake in the company.

Dubitsky cofounded Eos skin and body-care products and the oral-care company Hello products, which was acquired by Colgate-Palmolive in 2020. Happy is designed to help consumers “rediscover the magic in the everyday,” Dubitsky says. at the time of the company’s launch, “I love this idea of turning commodities—something that’s generally widely available and does something—a little bit more desirable and interesting.

This story originally appeared in the 2024 issue of Rochester Review,��the magazine of the URochester.

Crystal Sellers Battle began her musical journey in church, singing gospel as a youth with her father and siblings. But when she entered college to study voice, “I went into my very first voice lesson and was told by my teacher that I had to choose between singing gospel music or singing classical music,” she says.

Classical vocal training has been honed over centuries to protect the health and viability of the vocal cords. Thus, the teacher reasoned, gospel singing could limit Sellers Battle’s prospects for a long and successful career—as a classical singer. Later, as a doctoral student at Ohio State, Sellers Battle found a mentor who supported her aspirations, and she was able to make a major contribution toward advancing the study of gospel music through her dissertation, .

But Sellers Battle, who started in July 2022 as the inaugural associate dean of equity and inclusion at the ’s , also knew that something unspoken was at play in the efforts of teachers to steer her away from gospel.

 
The world of music—a practice and an art form believed to be universal among cultures and societies and with ancient roots—is vast. Yet the doorway into schools of music in the United States has been narrow. Despite the rich musical traditions indigenous to this country—Mississippi Delta blues, bluegrass and Appalachian folk, the musics of Native Americans, jazz—university-level American schools of music proliferated around the turn of the last century to teach and disseminate Western classical music. And to do so was considered a means of cultural elevation.

That historical legacy places a unique burden on schools of music, including Eastman, striving to cultivate a more inclusive learning environment. Although Eastman and its elite peers have long since begun to diversify faculty and curricula, the remnants of that exclusionary past remain entrenched.

In June 2020—deep into the COVID-19 pandemic and in the cataclysmic aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by Minneapolis police officers—Jamal Rossi, the Joan and Martin Messinger Dean of the Eastman School, announced the formation of the Eastman Action Commission for Racial Justice. The mission of the 20-person group composed of students, faculty, staff, and alumni was to recommend “actionable, achievable, measurable, and sustainable” steps to accelerate the school’s work toward achieving a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive community. Working on a tight timeframe, the commission conducted surveys of alumni, students, and faculty, and released a the following fall.

The opening lines of the report, which Rossi called read: “The Commission asserts that diversity, equity and inclusion at Eastman have failed to reach the level of highest priority at the School, noting that there has been little change in this regard since 1921.”

There has been only one full-time Black faculty member in the history of the school’s jazz program, for example, and only for a period of two years, in the 1990s. Meanwhile, “many Black alumni, while acknowledging the excellent education they received, cite harrowing and tragic experiences while students at the School,” the commission noted.

The position Sellers Battle now occupies, as well as the , which she directs, are outgrowths of the commission’s work.

Q&A with Crystal Sellers Battle

The phrase “diversity, equity, and inclusion” has become pretty ubiquitous in recent years in higher education and in workplaces generally. What do each of these words mean to you?��

Sellers Battle: Diversity comes from our mere existence. We all came from different places. We were raised differently. We have different sexual preferences and identities. We have different socioeconomic statuses and backgrounds. We all have different stories related to our upbringing.

I don’t actually like to use the word diversity, because it’s not something we need to work toward. What we do need to work toward is equity and inclusion.

Equity is about everyone having the necessary resources for a successful outcome. I use this example: all full-ride scholarships are not created equal. A student who gets a full ride who came here from a low-income household has a very different experience than someone on a full ride whose parents are doctors. When it comes time to buy a tuxedo or a concert dress, the needs of those two students might not be the same. And to provide additional resources for one, in this case, does not take away from the other.

And I say that inclusion is about the eradication of compartments. For example, I have several identities and not just one. I’m Black, I’m female, I’m a mom, I’m married, I’m straight, I was born Christian, I grew up in a two-parent household, and I was a first-generation college student. You probably have several identities yourself. And what we’ve tended to do is to decide that because someone has a different identity than ours—in any single dimension—we’re going to put them in a compartment over somewhere in the corner. An inclusive environment is one where we’re all in the same container but there are no walls.

Based on your own experiences and knowledge of the history of American music schools, you’ve pointed out that music schools have some unique challenges in fostering inclusion. What are those?

Sellers Battle: What is really challenging in the very nature of the study of music and a higher education process is that it was built on the idea that one form of music, and one which makes up a very small portion of the world’s musics, is superior to any other. Based on that assumption, schools adopted one set of rules, and those were considered the only set of rules.

The assumption of Western classical music’s superiority is very deeply rooted, and it’s interesting how that came to be. Initially most of what is thought of as classical music was created either for church services or for social gatherings in people’s homes. Art song was written to be sung in people’s homes in liederabend—nights where people gathered to sing together. So there were popular and practical reasons for the creation of this music.

But then there became the study of it, coinciding with the rise of the modern research university. And with the study of the music came the theorizing about it. And that theorizing turns what might have once been a popular art form into a high-level art form. I would say that you could probably have theorized West African music, too. It’s just that it wasn’t done.

I think we, meaning music schools in general, have made progress in accepting everyone’s various identities as a person. But then we get to the study of music and eliminate their identities as musicians. For a lot of us, especially those of us who are African American, our entrée into music was not through the classical arena.

What are your top priorities as Eastman’s first designated leader for equity and inclusion?

Sellers Battle: Priority one is identifying what equity and inclusion mean for this institution. The definitions I offered are my general definitions, but the definitions are different for every institution based on priorities and historical contexts.

Priority number two is to make the George Walker Center into a space for students. There’s a belief here that “eat, sleep, music” is how you operate—and students tend to skip the sleep part. I have a rule: we’re not going to practice in this space; we’re going to use it to unwind and rejuvenate. It’s also going to address the needs of affinity groups. So there may be nights when we’re really focused on LGBTQ+ energies, or when our Black Students Union is reserving the space for an affinity moment. But I’m also trying to convey that the George Walker Center is a space for all. And in being a space for all, it’s going to bring some people together who wouldn’t necessarily have been together otherwise.

My third priority is to engage in conversations with faculty, staff, and students to help me see where faculty, staff, and students see themselves in this process. I want to make sure that we’re all engaged in thinking about what the process for change looks like.

Have you set longer-term goals?

Sellers Battle: I have a few ideas based on the commission report and other observations. We’re probably going to be looking at curricular restructuring but doing it in small segments rather than as a major overhaul. You cannot do an about-face without proper planning and time, or people are going to get hurt.

Leading a cultural shift seems like an extraordinarily complicated and challenging job. What are your thoughts on how to go about it?

Sellers Battle: Sometimes it’s really difficult to abandon tradition. A lot of people also think that the only way to enter into conversations about equity and inclusion is through the topic of race. It’s not. Let’s go back to my description of an inclusive space as a single container without walls. Sometimes I also use the analogy of a cruise ship. We’re all on the same ship, but there are many entryways.

My belief is that if you are not comfortable coming into this conversation through the door of race, then let’s have you enter through another door, which may be about age, or another which may be about religion, or gender, or a particular interest—whatever it is that’s going to get you into the space. Then we can begin the conversation.

Equity and inclusion is about much more than race. Let’s talk about the challenges of socioeconomic status, or religious identity, and all of these other dimensions to our identities. And then people who are not comfortable entering through the door of race are going to find out that there are some similarities between the challenges they face that are based on a particular aspect of their identity and the challenges faced by people that stem from race.

We’re not going to be able to eradicate institutionalized racism, or any other kind of structural inequity, in a day. But we can till the soil to break some of it up. And that takes work. A lot of work. But that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible work.

Editor’s note: This story was originally published on October 5, 2022. It has been updated to feature the video��titled Breaking Down the Barriers of Gospel Music.

“Sometimes I wonder what it was exactly, that led me to pull The Dead Zone by Stephen King off of my parents’ bookshelf when I was in fourth grade,” says Jason Middleton. “It was the first ‘grown-up’ novel I ever read. There were certainly parts of it that I found kind of upsetting, but also magnetic. It almost felt as if the world was opening up in a new way.”

is an associate professor of English and of at the . He also directs its . His captivation by King’s novel led to a lifelong love of horror films. Although horror is just one of the film genres Middleton has immersed himself in—both as a fan and a scholar—it’s a genre whose appeal he thinks is especially durable.

In horror, “normality is threatened by a monster,” he says. “What’s so wonderfully expansive about the horror genre is that the monster keeps forming and reforming in relation to the fears and anxieties of its time. And on the flip side, normality, and the depiction of normality, keeps evolving and changing based on the historical period as well.”

Work as the American nightmare

There have been some clear trends. In the post-World War II era, the monster was often a stand-in for anxieties about the atomic bomb. During the feminist movement of the 1970s, the monster often suggested anxieties about female power and female bodies.

That critique has extended into a new era—late capitalism, a phrase coined to describe a world of globalized commodification that’s . The essays focus overwhelmingly on 21st-century horror films. Those depict a world of economic precarity and a hollowed-out middle class that make up “a new ‘normality’” of survival, or of just getting by. And even that bleak environment is vulnerable to new monsters that threaten what stability protagonists have been able to muster—or that they are striving to attain in the first place.

In (University of Texas Press, 2023), Middleton has joined with Aviva Briefel, who teaches literature and film at Bowdoin College, to make the case that there’s been another kind of monster lurking in American horror films all along: the post-industrial world of work.

In the essay collection, which they coedit, Middleton and Briefel suggest that ambivalence about work is a theme that has roots , when it usually came in the form of the mad scientist. In modern horror films, starting roughly in the 1970s, ambivalence evolved into a fuller critique. Middleton and Briefel describe the critique as reflecting “social fears and anxieties that took root in the 1970s and 1980s in response to deindustrialization, automation, globalized labor, union busting, and rising income inequality.”

An easy example is , a pathbreaking film that’s 50 years old this year. Rural, unemployed slaughterhouse workers are never shown performing slaughterhouse labor, but are shown “repeating the trained motions of this labor upon their human victims,” they write.

New categories of uncompensated work

Middleton is especially interested in forms of uncompensated work, which he argues fall disproportionately on groups that are already marginalized. He isn’t just talking about such uncompensated labor as housework or family caregiving. In his own contribution, “No Drama: Emotion Work in Midsommar,” Middleton explores “emotion work” in the 2019 film directed by Ari Aster.

He describes emotion work as “suppressing and modifying, and maybe not expressing one’s own feelings in order that a spouse or partner has the kind of optimal experience that they themselves expect to have in the relationship.” It has a long history in the quest of women to get by but has proven resilient even as women have achieved greater economic independence.

(2019) depicts the arduous efforts of a 20-something female protagonist, Dani, to hold onto her relationship with her distant and disengaged boyfriend, Christian. The couple attends a summer festival in Sweden that turns out to be an annual ritual of a murderous cult.

Its horrors mirror Dani’s labors in preserving her attachment to Christian. But she also attains a level of power within the cult, and the film’s cathartic ending shows Dani ending the relationship by sacrificing Christian.

It’s actually a breakup story, Middleton explains. But in showing the slow, laboriousness process in which Dani comes to recognize Christian’s neglectfulness, it’s the inverse of many lighter breakup films. “It’s kind of the horror movie version of a breakup film like Eat Pray Love or Under the Tuscan Sun,” he says. “The semantic elements are mostly the same—travel, exotic location, meeting different people, food, all of these things. But whereas in those films, the work of a breakup is frictionless and fulfilling and idealized, Midsommar uses the horror genre to instead express the work of a breakup as just agonizing, laborious, and painful—and ultimately, in the end, cathartic.”

The horror of stagnation—and of leisure

The essays in the collection also demonstrate how the experience of economic precarity can differ along racial lines. Briefel’s essay, for example, is subtitled “The Hard Work of Leisure in Jordan Peele’s Us.”

“In a 2019 interview for Vanity Fair, Jordan Peele explained that one of his objectives in the film Us was to represent Black leisure,” Briefel begins. “Yet relaxation is a major source of horror in the film.” shows a Black family living with a constant threat of merely letting their guard down.

In another essay, Mikal Gaines, an assistant professor of English at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, coins a subgenre of “Buppie horror,” which reworks the conventional home-invasion thriller. (2008) is an archetype, Gaines explains, of a subgenre that “seems to say that entry into a rarified class status historically reserved for whites must be paid in blood.”

For many white Americans, however, the threat is losing what they have—or living with the dread of having already lost. Middleton’s colleague at Rochester, Joel Burges, finds in David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 film a depiction of “the precarity of white working-class identity.” The film shows a group of young adult friends in a desolate and stagnant postindustrial Detroit. It’s a reworking of the stalker films of the 1970s and ’80s, explains Burges, like Middleton, an associate professor of English and of visual and cultural studies. It Follows adheres to the slasher convention of punishing people for sexual acts. Sexual encounters between the characters—men as well as women, in this film—infect characters with “It,” a stalker who lurks after them, and takes changing forms, but always of mangled middle- and working-class white bodies.

In these bodies, however, Burges found something beyond the slasher convention in which sex equals death. In It Follows, the work of getting by literally takes place mostly in low-level, dead-end service occupations that fill the young adults with dread to have. There’s emotion work, in other words, in surviving the bleak landscape through which “It” stalks victims. “Dread is slow,” Burges writes. “Its menace bears down on you with steadily intensifying pressure that never relents.”

Horror films in the post-COVID era

When Middleton and Briefel got started on their project, COVID-19 was sweeping across the globe. No one knew at the time just how much the pandemic would transform the world of work. Have these changes started to play out in horror films? And if so, how?

Says Middleton: “Something that I noticed during the last few years is that some really interesting horror movies take place not only entirely in a house, or entirely within an enclosed space, but entirely just a person and their laptop. For example, (2021). The whole film is just from the perspective of an isolated teenage girl on her laptop, as she’s on it every night to do these internet challenges that grow increasingly dangerous and threatening as she does them.

“It’s just the horrific experience of being on the internet on your laptop all the time.”

When the launches its production of ’s Orlando this October, it joins a trend: an increasing and intensifying interest in the eponymous novel by Virginia Woolf.

Ruhl has described her play, which she wrote in 1998, as true to the story Woolf told in the 1928 book. As she remarked in a 2010 , the icon of literary modernism possessed a mind “so incandescent, it was hard to leave anything out.” Woolf’s novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) are considered exemplars of modernist experiments in form. But in the context of those works, Orlando has long been seen as “an outlier,” according to , a professor of English at Rochester.

“The kinds of things one associates with [Woolf’s] work are not necessarily things one finds there,” she says. There’s no stream of consciousness to render the interior life of its protagonist. Instead, Orlando is a satirical and fantastical plot-driven narrative—and, as Ruhl has described as “a wild ride.”

A ‘wild’ exploration of identity and gender fluidity

Orlando is a nobleman who one day, early in adulthood, wakes up as a woman. He’s born in the 16th century during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and when the story ends in the 20th century, Orlando—now she—is still alive, and just as remarkably, still youthful.

Ruhl’s play is one of a few adaptations of Woolf’s novel, which has also been made into opera and film. An award-winning playwright whose accolades include a MacArthur fellowship, Ruhl has found interest in her play growing in tandem with contemporary fascination with the novel. As the notion of gender fluidity has entered mainstream discourse, the novel has become recognized more widely as far ahead of its time. The English writer Jeanette Winterson, who has penned the introduction to a of the work set for release in 2024, has called Orlando

Clearly, says London, Orlando “speaks to queer identities and to nonbinary identities, even if those wouldn’t necessarily be terms that Woolf was using.” But it also speaks to a universal truth. “One of the things Woolf was trying to address in her writing is the fluidity of all identity. We’re not simply one thing. Each person has these multiple selves.”

For the cast, serious reflection and roles that are ‘almost bonkers’

For the college student cast, the timely themes of Orlando have inspired reflection and deep engagement, while the story itself and its theatrical possibilities have made work on the production an adventure.

Orlando is portrayed by Stella Carleton ’26, an English major from Houston. She echoes London, saying “Orlando is Orlando regardless of which gender they are presenting as, but that gender is still important to the way they move about the world.” And yet, Carleton adds, “While the issues of gender identity are vital and core to the story, I also want to make sure every audience member can find something to take away from the show.”

For Gabriel Pierce ’25, who plays the Archduke Harry—a comical foil to Orlando—the experience of working on the production has been transformative. Pierce, a biomedical engineering major from Canandaigua, New York, describes his perspective on gender and sexual identity prior to his work on Orlando��as “essentially, enough to care, be informed, and do what I could to support movements, but not enough to think of it outside of a political conversation. My interest in gender and gender fluidity has deepened significantly as I’ve worked with my role.”

The kind of evolution Pierce describes reflects the value of theater in teaching and learning, according to , the Russell and Ruth Peck Artistic Director��of the International Theatre Program.

“Theater is an expression of radical empathy—the creative and imaginative ability to situate oneself in, and to understand the mind and heart of another,” Maister says. “The study and expression of theater teaches students—be they onstage or off—to critically grapple with the core questions that underpin our communal humanity, while creating community, empathy, understanding, humility, and compassion.��And because it is a live event, it is one that happens at human scale but engages the full measure of the imagination.”

Theater can also be, of course, loads of fun. Adds Pierce: “Some of these characters and scenes are so whimsical, they are almost bonkers.”

Working with director , cast members describe an environment of creative inspiration and bold experimentation.��Britt Broadus ’24, who portrays Sasha—the first love interest Orlando experiences as a woman—says, “Unlike other productions I’ve been a part of, the cast has been able to play an active role in constructing this story together.” An English and psychology major from Damascus, Maryland, Broadus adds: “We’ve been encouraged to bring in our own ideas, music, and dance moves. We’ve all been able to add something which makes it feel like we’ve collectively created this story full of humor, honesty, and passion.”

Pomerantz says this kind of collaboration is vital.

“Whenever I begin work with a group of actors, one of the first things I tell them is that if do my job as director the way I believe it should be done, when the audience attends a performance, one of first things they should say or think is that they can’t imagine this play being able to be done by another group of actors,” he says. “The play should feel so inextricably tied up with this particular cast and this present moment that it should all feel inevitable.”

Pomerantz calls a dance sequence in which each cast member contributed a segment “one of my favorite parts of the show.” Moreover, cast members discussed with him issues relating to gender identity which he says deeply resonate with the play.

“I have been ‘schooled’ by this cast during this process—and I mean that in the most positive way possible,” he says. “And that has absolutely been part of the thrill of working on this timely material at this particular moment.”

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