“Just as the nutritional value of food declined from healthy to unhealthy, so too has the nutritional value of content,” said Macris, general manager of The Escapist magazine and senior vice president of Alloy Digital. “Instead of a balanced diet that mixes great-tasting content with nutritious fare, we instead feed our minds with the equivalent of deep-fried donuts.

“If we care about the health of our minds as much as we care about the health of our bodies, we need to begin to balance a content diet as fervently as we balance our food diet,” he added. “We don’t need to give up video games or quit watching CSI, and we can keep listening to Beyonce. But it wouldn’t hurt us to read something really hard — like Edward Gibbon’s A History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — or to watch something slow and methodical like The Godfather or listen to something sonorous and melodic like Mozart.”

Macris was one of eight speakers to participate in TEDx Binghamton University, which drew more than 1,200 people to a sold-out Osterhout Concert Theater in the Anderson Center. Organized by students Lenny Simmons and Jonathan and Stephen Prosperi and attended by President Harvey Stenger, students, faculty members and administrators, the conference promotes and stimulates conversation about how to put good ideas to work.

Other speakers for the “Sex, Tech & Rock ‘n’ Roll” theme were:

• Justin Garcia, a Binghamton alumnus, on dating in America.
• Kyle Cranmer, an experimental particle physicist, on the discovery of the “God particle.”
• Daniel Drezner, foreign policy expert, on zombies and the “metaphor of the living dead.”
• Joshua Harker, an artist/digital sculptor, on the “third Industrial Revolution.”
• John Boyer, a senior instructor at Virginia Tech, on Homo habilis and the university.
• David Ferrucci, artificial intelligence expert, on Watson the computer and Jeopardy.
• Michelle Thaller, NASA science communicator, on dark matter in the universe.

The conference also featured classic rock ‘n’ roll from the band Just Passin’ Thru. The quintet, which features alumnus Matt Telfer ‘78 on guitar and Geology Department Chair Bob Demicco on Hammond organ, played a set before and after intermission that featured covers of hits from Santana, the Rolling Stones, the Grass Roots and the Spencer Davis Group.

Macris began his talk (called “If People Are Getting Smarter, Why is Our Content Getting Dumber?”) by discussing the similarities between the consumption of content such as books, TV, movies and music, and the consumption of food.

“Like food, content has a taste to it,” he said. “The Avengers tastes different than The Dark Knight Rises. Which you prefer is a matter of taste. Never before has the content menu offered so many varied, excellent tastes. If you enjoy consuming content, the world is an amazing place.”

But this varied content also carries nutritional value, Macris said. As food feeds our bodies, content feeds our minds. Nutritious content will increase knowledge, expand vocabulary and improve critical thinking and problem solving. Unhealthy content will shorten attention span, damage concentration and weaken problem solving.

“If our mental menu is nutritious, we should see people getting smarter and sharper,” he said. “If our mental menu is not wholesome, we should expect to see a spreading epidemic of stupidity that would parallel the epidemic of obesity.”

Macris pointed out several deflating statistics about reading, which is “the most nutritious way to consume content.”

• The length of sentences in books has fallen from 40 words per sentence in 1710 to 14 in 2010. “It can’t decrease much further unless we start speaking in tweets,” he said to much laughter.

• The length of paragraphs in books plummeted when the television era begin in the 1950s.

• The reading levels of newspapers, magazines and textbooks have fallen.

• Only 42 percent of Americans ages 18-24 read literature in 2002, compared to 60 percent in 1982.

• The percentage of adults who read for pleasure drops by 7 percent each year.

“Not only are Americans reading simpler books, flipping through simpler magazines and learning from simpler textbooks, they are doing a lot less of the above,” Macris said.

More Americans could read at a 10th-grade level in 1949 than the number who can read at a sixth-grade level today with more than four years of extra education, he added.

The “dietary shift” to TV also has had consequences, as shorter “MTV editing” has made content more addictive and damaging to the attention span.

“How many of you find blockbusters from the old days to be too slow?” he asked. “Even 18 minutes (the length of TED talks) is probably too long in today’s world, so we are going to have a halftime show,” prompting a picture of singer Beyonce on the overhead screen.

The final content form — music — can be beneficial, Macris said. For example, classical music can increase cognitive recall and improve “performance and stressful tasks — like Ted talks!” he added.

But post-1950 music has veered toward an increased loudness and a reduction in the diversity of chords.

“The most nutritious music could be sedating, complex and unfamiliar, while the least nutritious music would be loud, simplistic and sound familiar,” Macris said.

Boyer also examined the strengthening of the mind in his talk, titled “Homo Habilis U: Reinventing the University Experience for a Changing World.” Boyer excitedly told the audience of how the Homo habilis species (whom he nicknamed “Handy Man”) lived more than 2 million years ago and was the first to use stone tools — “the first technology.”

Homo habilis eventually became the “evolutionary winner” of his era after starting out as a “scavenger” of the world, Boyer said. For 200,000 years, the world changed from desert to water and back and forth.

“A funny thing happened on the way to extinction,” he said. “The world changed — radically and rapidly. One by one, these species who had specialized in a very specific niche in the environment died. They faded away. Handy Man wins! Handy Man lives! Handy Man kept going!”

Homo habilis thrived because it was an early adapter of technology, worked with its brain and hands, and was curious and inquisitive.

Boyer used the anthropological story as a parallel to today’s world.

“I believe that we as a species are once again at the brink of radical and rapid change in our society and on this planet,” he said. “What’s changing? What’s not changing?” pointing to technology, jobs and the climate, among others.

The world has a place to bring people together, Boyer said. It is a place where the older generation can share knowledge with the younger generation and talk about the issues of today and tomorrow. The university, he said, is “one of the best inventions of the past 3 million years.”

But most people go to universities to “get a job,” Boyer said, and take specialized courses in a specialized field.

“The university is not well-equipped to get you a job,” he said. “That’s not what we are here for. We don’t crank out workers. We crank out thinkers.”

Boyer prefers that people go to college to adopt technology and innovate, work with their brain and hands, and be curious and inquisitive. They are characteristics that have worked for millions of years.

“You’ve got to have tools in your tool belt when you get out of college,” Boyer said. “You don’t know what your job will be. We don’t know what your job is going to be. Think about all of the technology. It didn’t exist 10 years ago. How can we prepare you for jobs that don’t exist yet? We can’t. But we can prepare you to think, act on your feet, build a skill set, innovate, and like Homo habilis, keep going.”

– Eric Coker

Here are some other features:

• Each community will have its own entrance (Newing on the left, Dickinson on the right), and its own color scheme.

• The academic center, accessible from both sides, includes seminar rooms for tutoring, benches and computers, tables with data/power and a printer room.

• The Newing side includes a new Broome Closet, a soundproof practice room.

• The Dickinson side includes space for the CoRE (computers, robotics and engineering) special-interest housing module.

• The large multipurpose room that includes a stage for the Dickinson Community Players can be divided into six smaller spaces as needed — each with multimedia capabilities — and includes ramp access to the stage.

• There will be a shared kitchen and serving area, with separate dining rooms that will each accommodate about 400 people in varied style seating. A connecting, outside patio can be accessed from both dining rooms.

• The Kosher Kitchen has two separate kitchens in the building, separated from the main kitchen.

• The kitchen will include several stations: deli, pizza (with a wall oven), pasta, expeditions (Mongolian Wok), entrees, beverages, granary, international, soup/salad bar, grill.

• The common dish room includes a more efficient conveyor system that can move 300 trays at a time into the cleaning area.

• Health Services will have a room on each side for outreach efforts and programming.

• Each side has a meeting room, and offices and storage for its hall government, as well as for its faculty master.

• There is a gas fireplace in the large Dickinson lounge.

• A large table being built from local trees will be the centerpiece of the large Newing lounge.

• There will be a refurbished, working phone booth on the Newing side, salvaged from one of the former Newing buildings.

• There are elevators and meeting rooms on each side.

• Skylights provide natural lighting.

1. “Go to the Troll Bridge.”
–Evan Feinberg

2. “Turn 21 and instantly be too old to be at The Rat.”
–Anthony Zampardi

3. “Hike to the top of the Nature
Preserve at midnight with friends.”
–Evan Ashton

4. “Be in Weekend Warriors in Pipe Dream.”
–Allison Rothstein

5. “Start in the Anderson Center and try to get to the Union without going outside for more than a minute.”
–Joe Monte

6. “Earn your passport from the
Ale House.”
–Gavin Boehm

7. “Go to the Cider Mill in Endicott. The doughnuts are so good.”
–Michele Aronson

8. Explore downtown Binghamton. “It’s a great area to walk around, especially on ‘Gorgeous Washington Street.’ Be sure to stop by M.Y. Boutique at 134 Washington St., a student-run business.”
–Anna Dallis

9. Go gallery hopping. “On the first Friday of every month, from 6 to 9 p.m., downtown Binghamton offers art exhibits, music, and wine, cheese and coffee tasting. It’s the most fun you will have downtown prior to the bars opening.”
–Jonathan Guerrera

10. “Go star-gazing at the Kopernik Observatory or on campus on the Dickinson co-rec field.”
–Su-Ann Wong

11. Take a river walk. “There’s this cool walkway that starts from the Court Street Bridge and runs south along the river downtown toward the Memorial Bridge on Riverside Drive. It ends up bringing you to this cool park if you want to just relax. Highly recommended.”
–Kenneth Baumann

By Matthew Coleman, Class of 2011

Sekercisoy knew the University was diverse — the native of Turkey came here as a student in 1998. But during his trips abroad as Binghamton’s associate director of dual-diploma programs in the Office of International Programs, he realized just how diverse it really is.

“Last year, I traveled in 12 different countries and met with friends in Colombia, Canada, Turkey and India who graduated from Binghamton. This summer, I arranged a boat trip with three Binghamton alumni and parents of an alumna in Turkey,” says Sekercisoy, who also is a citizen of Canada.

And thus, the Traveling Bearcats project was born. Sekercisoy unfolds his Bearcats banner in a distinctive foreign setting and has a photo taken. The pictures go on Facebook for a group he created, called Traveling Bearcats.

“Wherever I went, I received a great reception and comments not only from Binghamton students and alumni but from strangers who heard about Binghamton University,” he says.

Sekercisoy hopes students and alumni will take Binghamton items wherever they travel and show how far the University reaches and how deep their pride runs.

His next stops: China, Korea and Singapore in December. Look for Traveling Bearcats on Facebook.com.

Sinicki had a portfolio of work he’d done as a sports information intern. He proved he could write, but there was no need to prove his sports aptitude. The editors already knew about that, as did anyone who followed sports in Binghamton.

Growing up in nearby Johnson City, Sinicki was a high school stand-out in football, basketball and baseball. As a Binghamton University freshman, he displayed such proficiency as a pitcher that he was named all-conference. Academically, however, he says, “I felt like I needed to explore other opportunities.”

In his sophomore year he transferred to Broome Community College, where he was named All-Region III and caught the attention of Pittsburgh Pirates scouts who tabbed him in the Major League Baseball amateur draft. Sinicki declined, however, transferring to Western Carolina. There, over the next two years, he got a bracing taste of big-time, Division I baseball. Against the kind of competition that makes or breaks, he compiled 15 wins, helping the Catamounts win back-to-back Southern Conference titles and going to the NCAA Division I championships each year.

Beyond those credentials, he brought to the Press & Sun-Bulletin a professionalism that sometimes takes years to hone — strong organizational skills and a no-nonsense work ethic. If he saw games through the eyes of an all-star, he documented them with the precision of an actuary.

“We still have record binders Skip compiled back in the 1980s,” says long-time sports reporter Kevin Stevens, who has known Sinicki as “Skip” for nearly 30 years. “When you open one, you instantly know it’s his work. The penmanship is perfect. The lines are carefully drawn. And his stats were always flawless.”

The neophyte reporter, notes Stevens, “was probably the most competitive individual I ever met. In those days we’d play charity basketball games against the local TV station. I remember him dunking behind his head in warm-ups. He was the same way in softball.”

For Sinicki, though, merely writing about sports would never satisfy his competitive hunger. His playing days might be over, but he had another goal in mind.

“I was drawn to coaching,” he says. “At Western Carolina I carefully studied Coach Jack Leggett,” now head coach at Clemson. “Not just the way he managed games, but the way he ran his whole program. How he mentored his players. He had the biggest influence on my philosophy of coaching.” 

When a baseball coaching job opened at Binghamton in 1992, no one was surprised that Sinicki leaped for it, Stevens says. Nor was anyone surprised with the success that ensued, beginning with the 1993 season when Binghamton was still playing Division III, and his team, though finishing 12–14, won six of their last nine games.

Competitive and compassionate

Ask anyone who knows Binghamton’s longest-tenured head coach to describe him, and his athletic record is probably not the first thing they’ll talk about. Former players, close associates, even competing coaches — they always start with his character.

“Tim’s as classy a person as you’ll find,” says Matt Senk, head baseball coach at Stony Brook for nearly 25 years. “He really respects the game. Win or lose, he’s always gracious.”

“He’s as tough a competitor as you’ll find,” says Albany Head Coach Jon Mueller, against whose team Binghamton won the conference championship in 2009, “but he’s also been my closest friend in the business. When I lost my brother to cancer last summer, he was there for me. Tim’s a stand-up guy.” 

Sinicki gives his parents, Stephen and Barbara Sinicki, credit for that. “His mom, especially, was a powerful influence,” says former Binghamton Coach Dan McCormack, who knew the family well. “She insisted on doing things right. ‘No shortcuts!’ she would tell him and his brother. ‘Nobody gives you anything in life. You have to earn it.’”

“When my brother, Chris, and I were playing, my folks never missed a game,” recalls Sinicki. “Even when I went away to college in North Carolina, they made trips as often as possible. They taught me all the values that have helped me succeed.”

They are the values he, like all great coaches, expects of his players: never miss a practice, be on time, respect people, be there for your teammates.

Measuring success

Those values and the skills that made Sinicki a first-rate statistician had an impact on the Bearcats right from the start. In 1994, his second season, his team went 17–15, recording its first winning season in six years. In 1995, they made it to the Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference Division III semifinals, a feat they repeated in 1996. And in 1997, they posted an unambiguous 26–10–1 record and won the conference championship.

It was no guarantee of success in Division I, though. Sinicki tackled the tough transition, helped by a staff that, he declares, “does an outstanding job.”

The secret of his success, he says, is players that remind him of, well, him. “I look for young men who have the talent to succeed in Division I and hopefully help us win the championship,” he says. “When I find them, I talk with a lot of people in their lives. I’m looking for more than just talent. I want to know how they handle success and adversity, especially the latter.”

Finally, he looks at their educational records. It’s no accident that the Bearcats have maintained the highest team grade-point average in the America East for six of the past nine years, achieving a 3.0 or higher cumulative GPA in 17 of the past 21 semesters. Players who do well in school, he says, usually know how to maintain balance in their lives.

By 2004, Sinicki’s Division I team had a 22–21 season, third in the nation in win-lose improvement. Three years later the team won the first of three consecutive America East regular-season championships. In 2009, the team captured the conference crown, going on to its first NCAA appearance and victory.

In May, the Bearcats (30-23) captured the program’s second conference title in the past five years with a 4-0 win over top-seeded Maine in the deciding game of the America East championship. That put Binghamton at the 30-win plateau for the third time in the past seven years. The team’s next stop was the NCAA regional championship series.

Four times since 2005 Sinicki has been named America East Coach of the Year. Yet, a more compelling stat is the number of athletes he’s coached who have signed professional contracts — 17 since 2006. And it’s instructive to hear what they have to say about him.

“Tim was far and away the most knowledgeable baseball guy I’d ever met,” says former Binghamton pitcher Murphy Smith, who was drafted by the Oakland Athletics in 2009. “He’s also a big character guy. He stresses how you represent yourself, your family, your school.”

Former pitcher Scott Diamond ’11, a starter for the Minnesota Twins last season, concurs. “He’s very driven and very smart,” Diamond says. “You always know he’s got a plan for every game. He wants to win, but he also cares very much about his players. From day one he talked to us about the importance of education.” 

In Binghamton, Sinicki has found something he might have missed as a professional athlete. It’s a place where he can invest himself in the lives of both of his families — the three youngsters he and his wife, Tina, are raising and all of the young men who come under his guidance. Therein lies his truest success.

“Tim’s a true family man, with a heart of gold,” observes Associate Athletic Director John Hartrick. “In the past three years he lost both of his parents. During their lengthy illnesses, Tim was always there for them. But he also continued to work, taught and coached his players, and set an example of compassion and professionalism. It was a very emotionally taxing time, and all the while he remained an involved husband and father to his own three children. I consider him a real role model.”

As a huge generation of Americans age, they’ll pack hospitals with a variety of gerontological ailments, from acute bronchial infections to broken hips. Big boon to a hospital’s bottom line? No.

Under the Affordable Care Act, Medicare won’t reimburse hospitals for the cost of treating an aging patient if that patient is readmitted within 30 days. The patient could be treated for pneumonia, go home and break a hip, but the rule remains. With hospitals spending between $10,000 and $31,000 (averaging about $18,000) for a typical stay, and readmissions hovering around 35 percent, that’s a big loss.

So Binghamton University researchers from the College of Community and Public Affairs (CCPA) and the SUNY Upstate Medical University have teamed with a local hospital to seek new, low-cost ways to keep seniors from needing readmission while improving their quality of life.

The two-year study, now in its final year, was designed to collect data from 100 or more patients at high risk for hospital readmission but able to live independently, says Laura Bronstein, interim dean of CCPA, professor and chair of the Department of Social Work, and director of the University’s Institute for Intergenerational Studies.

Her task was to create an interdisciplinary training program so social workers understand the medical factors that can complicate recovery and so medical providers understand the everyday living issues that can cause hospital readmission.

Making contact

Social-work students were assigned to follow up with patients released from United Health Services’ Wilson Medical Center in Johnson City, N.Y.

Engineering a better outcome

The interdisciplinary study by social workers and medical practitioners isn’t the only effort at the University to reduce hospital readmissions. Engineers are getting involved.

Mohammad Khasawneh, associate professor of systems science and industrial engineering (above), and Assistant Professor Sang Won Yoon began a project at United Health Services similar to a Six Sigma process used to reduce defects in manufacturing processes.

They faced some resistance from medical practitioners, Khasawneh says. “They’re not trained in these tools. They say ‘We’re not making widgets here, we’re treating people.’”

But he explains the logic: “Every discharge is an opportunity for a defect — in this case, it’s a person coming back.”

So Khasawneh and Yoon introduced to the healthcare process a variety of analytical tools normally used for manufacturing and engineering. While analyzing hospital data from 2009 to 2011, they found a number of correlations between demographic data — from medication compliance to ZIP code — and readmissions.

Already the data have led to improved results from health-assessment models already in use, and Yoon says other models are even more likely to predict who will be readmitted.

“The main issue we found was medication compliance,” he says, adding that patients with whom social workers had difficulty following up were more likely to have a readmission.

Yoon and Khasawneh say their statistics have a 95 percent confidence level — strong enough to conclude the models work.

The monthlong follow-up begins with a phone call to make sure the patient is recuperating, says Kris Marks, LCSW, manager of clinical social work at UHS. A home visit follows, and the assessment starts outside: Are the sidewalk and driveway shoveled during a cold upstate New York winter? Are steps to the door difficult to navigate for someone who may have mobility problems? Is the garage door easily opened?

Inside, the examination continues. How does the patient feel? Are there any pain- or medication-related side effects? Is the patient making follow-up appointments? If not, why not? Does the patient have adequate support — friends and relatives who can help with everyday chores such as cooking or driving?

Gaps in the recovery process can lead to a complication that can require a hospital readmission.

“A big piece of making this work is making sure people follow up with their primary-care physician,” Bronstein says. “There are so many conditions that people have, it’s hard to tease out [what can lead to readmission].”

Sometimes all that’s needed is a tweak of available services, Marks says, such as arranging for Meals on Wheels or a short-term home-health aide. “I think some people just benefit from the contact they get,” she says.

The model works

Data collection will continue into the spring, says Dr. Shawn Berkowitz, medical director of the study, director of geriatrics at UHS and a clinical assistant professor at SUNY Upstate Medical University. Analysis will follow and publication in academic journals, with luck, will come by the end of the year. Preliminary analysis of the first 96 participants is promising.

UHS has a readmission rate of 18 percent, he says, about half the national average, and reflected in the control group. But only 7 percent of program participants have been readmitted to the hospital, compared with 15 percent of the control group.

If other hospitals can duplicate that, they would save hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars a year. Berkowitz calculates that a social worker could create savings equal to his own salary and benefits by preventing just seven readmissions a year.

And it’s a different approach than other studies have suggested, Berkowitz says. Health providers tend to adopt an education model — teach patients to care for themselves and they will. But this is a social empowerment model. “Social workers are trained to empower people,” he says. “They encourage people to take
ownership of their own care.”

But Berkowitz would like to see another 1,300 participants in similar studies at other hospitals.

Also, Marks notes that participants were selected for a variety of reasons, including the ease with which a social worker could visit. Most participants were from the 125,000-resident urban core of Binghamton, N.Y., the rest from outlying areas. More urban hospitals could see greater savings, but rural hospitals may suffer because of
increased travel times and distances.

Larger, urban hospitals serving poorer patients are a good target, according to several studies published in January’s Journal of the American Medical Association. They, and large teaching hospitals, are the most likely to lose Medicare reimbursements, as are hospitals with poor coordination of post-release care — exactly the sort
of thing the Binghamton study is examining.

“It starts here at the hospital,” Marks says. “There’s a very strong sense of empowerment.”

The power needs to come soon. In the time you spent reading this story, 20 more people became eligible for Medicare.

“He said, ‘I’ve been here a long time, and very few things shock me or get my attention, but this does,’” says Frazier, distinguished service professor of geography.

What the dean saw was more than a grid of streets; he saw distinct neighborhoods, identifiable by characteristics drawn from census data, such as the distribution of housing and income. And he understood its potential.

The map was created with geographic information systems (GIS) technology. Since then, GIS has blown the dust off traditional geography and turned it into an indispensable tool for nearly every discipline. GIS software takes raw numbers (think data, stats, GPS coordinates) and attaches them to a place, creating sophisticated, multilayered digital maps that can reveal relationships and patterns among discrete sources of information.

“It’s not just hitting a button and getting a pretty picture,” Frazier says. “You have to learn to ask which technique is appropriate to the data, or what data are required if a particular technique is used. It allows you to visualize and analyze information quickly and easily that you couldn’t do before,” he says.

Frazier helped create the GIS Core Facility at Binghamton University in 2001 and is its part-time director.

One of the first GIS maps that Frazier created shows where students live off campus, which helps determine bus routes. It is updated every few years and shows a trend of students moving to Vestal (Frazier says no names are associated with addresses in the data).

Beyond bus routes, GIS allows the University to track its economic impact on Broome County and its communities. “We’re using raw data, survey data and campus data and converting it to geography to illustrate, in real-dollar terms, the impact of the changing location of students,” he says.

Kevin Heard, MA ’02, is assistant director of the facility and its only full-time employee. “I get the data and make it talk,” he says.

On campus, the GIS facility has helped myriad groups: alumni relations, student affairs, nursing, political science, public archaeology and computer science, to name a few. David Sloan Wilson, professor of biological sciences, used it to map Christmas lights on Binghamton streets as a means of judging how cohesive a neighborhood is.

Off campus, GIS has helped environmental groups, museums and law enforcement, and it helped implement Broome County’s recycling program. In 2005, Heard was asked to create a map of cell-phone towers and call transmissions between Binghamton and Baltimore for evidence in a murder trial.

“GIS made the information into something the jury could visualize. You could tell them when and where cells were activated, but a picture speaks a thousand words,” Heard says.

Read on to learn how two Binghamton professors use GIS to help communities and solve mysteries.

Feeding a need

Geography Professor Florence Margai uses GIS to study environmental hazards, health disparities and environmental justice.

Geography and backpacks don’t have much in common, but a project involving both helps put nutritious food into the homes of school-age children who might not get enough to eat on weekends or holidays.

While it’s easy for a teacher to discreetly slip a bag of food into a child’s backpack, knowing which students across six counties are most in need of supplemental food requires more than just knowing who receives reduced-price lunches.

When the operators of the Food Bank of the Southern Tier wanted to expand its service beyond stationary food pantries — by taking food to the people instead of making people travel to the pantries — they asked Professor of Geography Florence Margai for help, starting with the Backpack Program.

“They wanted us to help them identify the districts most in need so they could prioritize their efforts,” says Margai, who for more than 20 years has used GIS, remote sensing (satellites) and other technologies to examine environmental hazards, health disparities and environmental justice issues around the world.

Margai, computer cartographer Lucius Willis, MA ’83, a longtime contributor to GIS projects, and their students began collecting census and other data to help identify variables such as poverty, participation in subsidy programs and access to “summer sites,” where children can get meals during summer vacation. Multiple data sets were used to create layers on a map. Statistical analyses further sorted and refined the information, and mapping software pulled it all together.

“We brought in all these layers and created a ranked distribution of the areas of need,” Margai says.

That’s the value of GIS.

“It allows you to acquire multiple layers of data and create descriptive maps — maps that show the distribution and patterns for each of these layers. You can merge these layers to look for associations. GIS is not just descriptive, it is also analytical and it is a prescriptive tool for decision-making,” she says.

Natasha Thompson, president and CEO of the Food Bank of the Southern Tier, says the Backpack Program could have been done without GIS, but without the depth of understanding of the problems or the solutions.

“Those maps were incredibly useful when we were talking to donors and community groups,” she says, because they could visualize the problem. “We would say, this is our plan for growth: It isn’t arbitrary, it’s based on access to other services.”

The program started in 2005 at three sites and has since expanded to 19 sites in the 2010–11 school year. “It is tremendously successful,” Thompson says.

Mapping paths to discovery

For 30 years, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Randall McGuire has been studying the cerros de trincheras, literally the fortified hills, that rise out of the flat Sonoran desert in Mexico.

These hills have long intrigued scholars because of the terraces and walls built into them between AD 500 and 1450. Were they added to make the hills easier to climb or easier to defend? And why climb them — settlements were unlikely because water is not easily accessible — and what was there to defend?

Answers were speculative, at best, until GIS changed the way the professor and his colleagues could look at the hills, says McGuire, who did fieldwork on the trincheras in 2006, with funding by the National Science Foundation and National Geographic Society.

Kevin Heard, MA ’02, assistant director of the GIS Core Facility, turned McGuire’s data into a two-layered representation of a hill. One layer showed the natural features and slope. Another showed the hills and terraces. Points were plotted every 5 meters around the bottom of the hill, and lines connected the points to the entrance of a fortress at the summit.

Using least-cost path analysis (which determines how to get from Point A to Point B by expending the least amount of energy), two paths to the summit were measured: One ascent had no impediment, the other had zigzags and barriers created by the terraces and walls.

“If the terraces and walls are defensive, then we would expect that they would increase the cost [in effort] of climbing the hill, not decrease it,” McGuire says. “We also expect they would channel the least-cost paths so that defenders could easily intercept people coming up.”

The GIS analysis validated that theory, convincing researchers that defense was the reason for the walls and terraces. And ceremonial sites — as indicated by the location of artifacts such as shells on top of the hill — are what needed defending.

McGuire remembers when this kind of analysis would start with a topographic map overlaid with sheets of acetate showing different information.

“The time difference in using GIS rather than the old-fashioned way is not even comparable; you can’t do the same thing,” he says. “The people in the GIS facility are probably not even old enough to remember the old-fashioned way.”

Instruments beware: It’s time to face the music. You are no longer needed.

A cappella groups have been crooning in Binghamton since 1983, but recently, the popularity of sans-instrumental music culture has grown considerably. What started as a group of guys called Cliffs Notes — named after then-University President Clifford Clark — has evolved into nine different a cappella groups.

“I never would have anticipated nine a cappella groups on campus,” says Gary McBride ’84, a founding member of The Binghamton Crosbys.

“Our first jam was beyond sold out,” he remembers. “We knew we were onto something. It was amazing, performing in dining halls, dorm lounges. It was great because we were unique, and not many students had ever heard anything like this before.”

Because of the novelty of a cappella, McBride and his peers resorted to unconventional advertising tactics. They would barge into lecture halls, spontaneously sing during large classes and give the professor two tickets for his or her hospitality and to request that the group not be reported to University Law Enforcement Division (ULED.) “We did that morning and afternoon for one day, then opened the ticket booth in the Union, and people were talking about it all over campus,” McBride says. “We sold out in a couple of hours.”

A cappella isn’t the nerdy boys’ club it used to be. Images of men in striped vests singing a Cole Porter arrangement have been replaced by trendy-looking coeds singing contemporary music with hard-hitting performance and choreography.

Binghamton’s a cappella groups include one all-male, one all-female and seven coed ensembles. The a cappella format has become an outlet for students who are interested in music but looking to express themselves in a more informal, recreational way.

Kris Siriban, a junior majoring in electrical engineering and historian of the all-male Crosbys, believes each group exudes its own personality.

“I would say Rhythm Method is the sassy, ’80s group. The Pegs [Harpur Harpeggios] are the bouncy, girly group. The Treblemakers are the kick-ass middle child,” he says.

Aside from the strong presence they have on campus, Binghamton’s a cappella groups have made an imprint on the national scene. The Crosbys (all-male), Harpur Harpeggios (all-female), Kaskeset (Jewish), Rhythm Method (1980s) and Binghamtonics (contemporary) have all appeared in the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella (ICCA), the most prestigious annual college a cappella competition. The Crosbys hold the record for most appearances [four] in the finals of the competition and won the event in 2003. Groups have toured the country, appearing in the New York metro area, Boston, Florida and southern California.

In fact, Binghamton a cappella groups have established what is now a widely known and frequently mimicked choreography tactic. Instead of using conventional vocal percussion to keep rhythm and time, The Crosbys and other groups at Binghamton started using a combination of stomps, claps and chest-thumping to create percussion and keep time. “Body percussion,” as it is now called, has permeated the national a cappella scene.

So what’s to account for the rise in a cappella popularity in Binghamton? It’s all about expanding the social circle.

“It has a lot to do with our friends,” Siriban says. “Right now, we have nine a cappella groups, with about 15 members in each group. Each member has a group of friends that want to see them. With that alone, a cappella’s popularity has spread.”

But the groups still need to tap into the right crowd and foster the appropriate audience.

“We’re not looking to draw in people who make fun of music or think we’re lame,” he adds. “We’re looking to pull in people who are open to a new twist on music.”

Popular culture also might have something to do with it. In his 2008 book Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory, author Mickey Rapkin documented the journeys of three college a cappella groups during the 2006-07 school year.

The book was successful enough to be loosely adapted into fictional, albeit critically acclaimed movie Pitch Perfect, which starred Oscar-nominated actress Anna Kendrick.

Then there are the television shows The Sing-Off, a reality talent competition, and Glee, an undeniable pop-culture phenomenon. While Glee often has that after-school special feel, its message that young singers are cool in their own right reverberates through Binghamton University.

Elyssa Ackerman ’12 recognized a cappella’s growing popularity when she decided to ride the wave of pitch pipes and sheet music, creating Binghamton’s newest a cappella group, No Strings Attached.

“It was very intimidating to start a group considering there were already so many groups on campus,” Ackerman says. “I feared that other groups would feel threatened by a new group because it would create more competition. It was also intimidating to know that we were going to exist among groups that had been around for more than 20 years, who have competed nationally and toured all over the country, who have legacy and traditions. We had big shoes to fill.”

Despite her trepidation, Ackerman is fueled by her passion for the artistic freedom of the a cappella format.

Still, aren’t a cappella singers just irritating, misguided, wannabe pop stars? Mechanical engineering major Daniel DeMarco ’13 doesn’t think so.

“I think that they’re just as popular, if not more, than any other student group on campus,” DeMarco says. “The difference between them and, let’s say, a fraternity is that they don’t just appeal to anyone just trying to get drunk on a weekend.”

DeMarco doesn’t belong to a group, but lived with two members of the Binghamtonics and a member of The Crosbys. “I enjoy the shows, their parties; they’re good people to be around,” he adds.

Siriban doesn’t think it’s necessarily cool to be in an a cappella group, but says it does have its perks.

“I think it’s unique,” he says. “I like to think people look at me and say ‘I’ve seen him sing and perform on campus, I want to know more about him,’ but I know that probably doesn’t happen because I’m weird. But I guess I wouldn’t be involved in a cappella if I wasn’t a little bit weird.”

Some graduates have made a cappella more than just a college-time hobby. Ted Trembinski ’10, is an employee at Sled Dog Studios, a recording/live sound production company that caters exclusively to a cappella groups.

“Has Binghamton helped me accomplish my dreams?” Trembinski asks. “If it has, it was only thanks to the efforts in extracurricular work.”

Trembinski, who was a member of both Kaskeset and The Crosbys, says he first joined a cappella to meet girls. He was just trying to be popular; he didn’t know it would pave the way for a professional career.

“After a year and a half of going on interviews with Manhattan- and Long Island-based companies in finance, economics, media and travel, I gave up on finding a real job and working in a traditional environment,” he says. “I committed to a cappella production, something I personally enjoyed.”

He started attending conferences and festivals, networked with existing professionals in the field, and got a job.

Ultimately, you don’t have to go any further than a stage to understand a cappella’s rising popularity in Binghamton. It’s what got Ackerman involved in the first place.

“I think that there’s this sense of community in a cappella groups that’s clearly evident in performances,” Ackerman says. “I always find that when I watch a cappella groups perform, the members seem very cohesive, and they work off of each other and exude positive energy.”

She also can’t get over that fun beat. “I think that’s pretty appealing,” she says.

Rabinowitz has a BA in English and a minor in sociology. He was president of The Binghamton Crosbys during his senior year. He works in the publishing department at Major League Baseball Properties.

1. In 1947, if you were a member of the Baccacians, Dionysians, Goliards or Saiens, what were you?

2. The Modern Music Club didn’t last long. Why?

3. The Radio Workshop might have been the most optimistic club of all. Why?

4. Clubs included Young Democrats, Young Republicans, Civil Rights and Young Americans for Freedom. Name the year.

5. In 1974–75, liberation and exploitation were popular causes. Name two clubs devoted to the issues of the day.

6. In 1983–84: World of Warcraft was still 10 years away, so if you belonged to the Conflict Simulation Club, what were you playing?

7. In 1949–50, the Pistol Club was shooting bullets. Two clubs still shoot; name their ammunition.

8. This activity has grown increasingly popular on college campuses since the early ’80s and, at Binghamton, at least nine groups do it. What is it?

9. Health and safety are hot topics, and groups include the Birth Control Co-op, SADD, Pro-Choice Coalition and peer education groups for safe sex, HIV/AIDS, drugs and alcohol. Name the decade.

10. All organizations have bylaws; which one is described here? “… members will participate in activities that encourage a deep-seated sense of teamwork and camaraderie that would be essential in any emergency scenario. Additionally, education will be the purpose of the club, to discuss the possibility of an infectious outbreak and subsequent disaster preparedness discussions that could be applied to any situation.”

Answers

1. You were a man. Pandorans and Thalians were women.

2. “Modern” referred to bebop and swing (c. 1949–50).

3. Because there was no radio station for at least its first decade. The club existed as early as 1949, and in the 1961 yearbook is this paragraph: “The fact that the Radio Workshop does not have a radio station does not discourage these happy souls. Many happy hours have been spent in the control room of the student center playing with microphones, tape recorders and colored lights and buttons.” WHRW went on the air in 1966.

4. 1962–63. By 1969-70, you could take one step to the left and join the Democratic-Liberal Club.

5. Possible answers: Attica Brigade, Binghamton Friends of the Farm Workers (remember the lettuce boycott?), Public Interest Research Group, Gay Liberation, Radical Arab/Jewish Alliance and Women’s Liberation. (To counter the intensity, there was the International Meditation Society for transcendental meditation.)

6. Dungeons & Dragons, Traveller and other war games.

7. Nerf darts (used by the Zombie Student Association in its humans vs. zombies game) and paintballs (used by the Binghamton Paintball Federation).

8. A cappella singing. Binghamton’s groups include Treblemakers (alternative rock), Koinonia (Christian music), Harpur Harpeggios (all-female), Binghamtonics (oldest, also does skits), Binghamton Vibrations (oldies), Rhythm Method (’80s music), No Strings Attached (Broadway music), Binghamton Crosbys (all-male) and Kaskaset (all-Jewish).

9. The ’90s. The groups mentioned are listed in the 1993–94 student handbook.

10. Bet you guessed Harpur’s Ferry. WRONG! It’s the Zombie Student Association — again. Because, in an emergency, we’ll all feel safer knowing the zombies have our backs.

It’s easy to imagine that if his sixth-floor office were any higher, the Library Tower might tilt.

“He sits behind his desk, with mounds of books and all sorts of Egyptological paraphernalia spread about the room, and you sometimes feel like you’re talking to a sympathetic colleague and other times you feel like you’re talking to the high priest of Ma’at,” says Andrew Scholtz, associate professor and chair of the Classical and Near Eastern Studies Department.

Ma’at is the ancient Egyptian concept of truth, balance, law, morality and justice, personified as a goddess who wears a single feather on her head.

“He’s fond of wearing a Ma’at feather pin,” Scholtz says.

Learning how to teach

Kadish joined Harpur College in 1963, fresh out of the University of Chicago graduate school, but with one small gap in his résumé: “When I got here, I had not had one minute of teaching experience,” he says.

But that wasn’t what raised eyebrows.

“The first thing Glenn Bartle said to me when I came for my interview was, ‘I see you’re divorced.’ I thought, what kind of opening gambit is that? I told him I was getting married again, and he was visibly relieved. He worried about predatory male faculty; I’m not sure he understood about predatory female faculty.”

Kadish taught western civilization and ancient Greek history his first semester, modeling his style on his own favorite teachers.

“He made the material come alive,” says Lawrence Berman ’75. “He was a hard teacher, and he had this aura of being so learned. But he was fair.”
Berman remembers being late for a final because he overslept.

“I was really panicky,” he says. “He put me in his office and said, ‘do your exam.’ I was so scared. He was so calm. He took away my fear.”

Today, Berman is the Norma Jean Calderwood Senior Curator of Ancient Egyptian, Nubian and Near Eastern Art with the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He is one of a handful of Kadish’s students who have made a career in Egyptology, despite Binghamton having no graduate program in it. Kadish has outlived at least two of them.

History of the historian

When Kadish the historian came to Binghamton, he already had quite a history of his own.

“I went to the Bronx High School of Science and I was surrounded by geniuses. Two of my classmates have won the Nobel Prize in physics — Sheldon Lee Glashow and Steven Weinberg. The rest are doctors, scientists, a general and very few lawyers, thank goodness. I learned intellectual humility because I wasn’t quite in that category.”
After high school, he studied chemistry (“It was not for me.”) He apprenticed as a tool and die maker. Then he enlisted in the army.

“The Korean War was over and I said, ‘Take me, I’m yours.’ And because I spoke German, they sent me to Germany, in that wonderful oxymoron called military intelligence. I spent 17 months there and that’s when I grew up.”

That’s also when he read James Henry Breasted’s History of Egypt — in German (“which I still have, up there, top shelf, last book on the left”).

It changed his life. After the army, he earned a history degree from Hunter College, then went to the University of Chicago where he studied Egyptology, which he loved, and ancient Greek and Roman history, which would get him a job.

At Binghamton, he has taught western civilization; ancient Greek, Roman and Egyptian history; the ancient Near East; hieroglyphics; and ancient law and society. An avid reader of Japanese history, Kadish began teaching it 10 years ago.

“My chair introduces me as someone who teaches everything nobody else teaches,” he says.

Kadish says his only unfinished business is that he didn’t publish much, choosing, instead, to teach as many classes as he could, edit professional journals and be a resource for colleagues.

“He’s willing to be involved in different projects and help people. He goes to people’s talks. He’s very generous about saying yes to things,” Scholtz says.

Kadish chaired the Classical and Near Eastern Studies Department from 1974 to 1979 and the History Department from 1982 to August 1984 and again, as an interim, in 1988–89 while the chair was on sabbatical. “That year was the worst year of my entire career,” he says.

There were politics. There was turmoil. “I had to reign over that nuttiness,” Kadish says, sounding still disgusted. “I vowed I’d never be chairman again.”

“Gerry has been greatly respected,” says John Chaffee, distinguished service professor of history and Asian and Asian American studies. “I see him as a kind of a mensch in the department; he has knowledge of a great deal of our history and, with a cool head, is able to see things clearly.”

Kadish was named a distinguished teaching professor in 2007.

Nothing escapes him

Kadish doesn’t speak in generalities; he dots his i’s and crosses his t’s with details:

—As a grad student in Chicago, he rented a room from a medieval studies professor whose wife, Francis Cate — “a nice Southern lady, very genteel” — said to him, “’Now Gerald, when you’re a teacher, when students come to your office, if it’s a female, do not close your door.’ It turned out to be very good advice.”

—He and his wife arrived in Binghamton $3,750 in debt — $2,500 for her student loans, the rest borrowed from her father to buy a car. “I didn’t learn to drive until it was time to come here. I passed the driving exam on my birthday in 1963, then drove to Pittsburgh, where we stayed with her aunt and senile grandmother, who was 103.” His starting salary: $6,990.

—His favorite era was the 1960s. “I had some extraordinary students. When you have someone like Camille Paglia ’68 [author and social critic] in your class, there’s no boredom. She was a piece of work; intellectually remarkable. The other person in those classes was the late Patrick O’Neil ’69, MA ’73, MA ’79, MA ’80, PhD ’93, MA ’01, this huge man. Patrick was brilliant, and those two were at loggerheads politically; she was very liberal and he was very conservative and they’d just battle, which was fun.”

And he’s known every president, he says, ticking off his opinions: Glenn Bartle had the good sense to step aside when others took his vision of a four-year liberal arts college and ran with it. Bruce Dearing was a placeholder, whose first speech to faculty reminded them that one could publish and perish. Peter Magrath was a smart fellow who left too soon (and his return was wonderful). Clifford Clark’s leadership skills came late in his tenure. Lois DeFleur moved the University ahead in many ways, but perhaps stayed too long. Harvey Stenger has good instincts; he’ll do fine.

At the dedication of the Harpur Wall of Excellence, during Homecoming 2012, Kadish spoke about the difference in scale of Harpur then and now. “We had fewer than 2,000 students … fewer than 100,000 volumes in the library.” Now the University has more than 15,000 students and the library about 2 million works.

One thing that has declined, Kadish says, is the intellectual intensity of students.

“The students today don’t excite me as much as they did in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. It’s not a dumbing down, it’s just different attitudes. There’s not so much fun in learning.
One thing that most faculty acknowledge is that students coming in these days can’t write a single coherent, clear sentence.”

Is it possible that he has changed?

“Yes,” he admits, “it’s a little of both. As I’ve gotten older, I’m a little crabbier.

“But it’s really been fun for the most part. I like talking to students. They’re very interesting.”

Kadish’s plans for retirement include traveling and writing. He still has things to say about ancient Egypt. And he hopes to visit Japan with his fiancée, Jocelyn Mallett. They met in October 1961 at her wedding; he stood up with the groom. Kadish and Mallett, both widowed, have been together the past five years and will marry at the end of May — yet more proof that for Gerald Kadish, history never grows old.

He calls it a suitcase go-kart, and the idea came to him at an airport when he was tired of walking. He discarded the idea of a motorized scooter — too awkward to transport. “Then it hit me! I could take a piece of carry-on luggage, put a motor on it, then carry it when not in use and ride it when I needed to.”

“I could also fit some clothes into it,” he adds.

Back home in Queens, the mechanical engineering student found a piece of luggage in the attic and began designing the frame that goes inside. His friend, Corbin Irvin ’11, lent his electrical engineering expertise. In three days, they were done. “All the components were parts I had around my house,” O’Grady says. “The drive motor was from an old circular saw.”

The cart has a top speed of about 7 mph and a battery life of between 15 and 30 minutes. It can carry a 150-pound person, but also can be closed and carried.

“It’s fun to ride around and see people’s faces when I go by in a suitcase,” O’Grady says. He got a lot of attention at the fair, but no interviews as a direct result of his invention. “There were no automotive companies,” he says.

Meanwhile, improvements continue, although the suitcase go-kart will never fulfill its original purpose, O’Grady says. “If you can’t bring more than 3 ounces of liquid through the door of the airport, I don’t think a bag full of wires and batteries will pass.”

She is one of just 39 U.S. scholars chosen for the 2013–14 academic year.

“It’s an incredible honor,” says Chapovalova, who was born in Russia, moved to the United States at age 5, and now lives in Pleasantville, N.Y. She has a degree in psychology.

Chapovalova’s research will examine the healing practices of the Skolt Sami, indigenous people who live in Norway, Finland and Russia. She will conduct her research through the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge and work with Piers Vitebsky, an internationally renowned anthropologist who has lived with an indigenous community in the Russian Arctic.

Established by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000 with a $210 million endowment, the Gates Cambridge Scholarship is considered one of the world’s most competitive awards. It draws 800 U.S. applicants annually; no more than 40 U.S. scholars and 50 international scholars are selected each year. The program strives to build a network of future world leaders who will work to improve the lives of others, a goal that Chapovalova is familiar with. In August 2012, she became a Harpur Fellow and created an art-therapy program for disabled children in Belarus who have suffered from the aftereffects of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident.

The researchers: Hiroki Sayama, director of Binghamton’s Collective Dynamics of Complex Systems Research Group, along with four high school students and an administrator from nearby Maine-Endwell High School.

The strategy: Sayama and the students conducted a survey of the junior class. The students were asked about their friendships, and the researchers constructed a series of social networks.

The student researchers obtained the GPAs of every student in the 160-member class and developed a hypothesis: Students whose friends had better grades than they did had a better chance of improving their academic performance than students whose friends weren’t doing as well in school.

In the second year of the study, the students — then seniors — demonstrated that this was indeed the case. “If your friends had a higher GPA than yours,” Sayama says, “you have a better chance of improving your GPA — and vice versa.”

The teenage researchers, now in college, appeared as lead authors when their study was published in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE.

“Many things are communicated over social ties,” Sayama says. “This is one of the first discoveries that shows social contagion might also be taking place in academic performance.”

–Rachel Coker

That was a tweet by Wimer Alberto ’09, resident director of Broome Hall, in Newing College.

It was four days after Superstorm Sandy, and people all over the country were looking for ways to help.

Alberto challenged his colleagues — student-affairs professionals around the country following #sachat — to help him raise money for a donation.

The Red Cross would get $1 for every retweet, he pledged.

After 506 retweets, $1,000 had been raised.

Alberto donated $350, while $650 came from colleagues who matched his pledge.

Zella and Haugstatter also rented and learned how to use equipment such as a skid steer and excavator.

“Michael told me what to do and I just followed,” Haugstatter said. “He’s really smart and a Google enthusiast, so anything he didn’t know he looked up.”

“A lot of it was just intuition,” Zella said.

There are more benefits to living small than a low carbon footprint.

“Our total expenses every month are $1,000, including gas and food,” Zella said. “We could live in this house with a minimum wage job, plus we get to go home every day and take pride in what we have done.”

“It’s also nice to have your own space and not have to deal with a landlord,” Haugstatter added.

Because the students own the house, they also have the option to make a profit by selling or renting it in the future. Zella and Haugstatter said they hope to be able to keep the house for fun in the long run.

But all fun aside, Zella and Haugstatter’s tiny house just may be the start of a new business venture.

When Zella, a junior, began building the house, he was studying business in the School of Management. The project encouraged him to change his major to mechanical engineering, and now he is thinking of starting his own construction company.

“I would be delighted to build more houses here,” Zella said. “Small homes are great for the elderly because there are no stairs, and they probably could live on their social security. We would love to start a tiny-house village.”

Haugstatter agreed.

“There are so many people out there who couldn’t afford to pay a mortgage every month, but if we built them one of these smaller houses they could afford it,” she said.

Still, Haugstatter, a sophomore majoring in psychology, has no plans to continue in construction.

“I hope to be a nurse practitioner or go into counseling psychology,” she said. “This was just a fascinating experience for me. I’m well rounded now.”

– By Meghan M Perri

The University community has pulled together to raise money and collect goods to send to those affected by the hurricane — and done so in some creative ways. Wimer Alberto, a resident director at Binghamton, pledged $1 to the Red Cross for each time his tweet was retweeted — a strategy that was used at other universities across the country to raise money. One of the student fundraisers was called Cloudy with a Chance of Pancakes (all-you-can-eat, regular or chocolate chip!).

For more information on hurricane relief, see the Center for Civic Engagement’s flood recovery page.

Wheeler asked her University of Minnesota students how they would feel and respond if a spouse or partner brought pornography into the home.

Their answers both surprised and intrigued her, she says.

Almost all the women in her class — a seminar on pornography and hate speech — said that while they’d feel uncomfortable, they would not demand its removal because to do so would be a violation of their partner’s right to free speech.

“I asked myself how and why it is that we think of so many sexual issues in terms of rights,” says Wheeler, now an associate professor of history at Binghamton University, where she’s taught history for four years. She’s also the co-editor of the Journal of Women’s History.

In pursuing an answer, one of her first stops was the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). In a 1995 book called Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights, by former ACLU President Nadine Strossen, Wheeler found a striking similarity between Strossen’s ideas and those of her students — that sexual rights enjoy constitutional protection under speech and privacy, as well as consumer law, she says.

“This was not, I realized, because they [the students] had read her book — they hadn’t — but I wondered if it was an indication that they inhabited a civic and sexual culture profoundly shaped by values popularized by the ACLU,” Wheeler writes. “Recurring experiences like this one ensured that questions about these matters continued to gnaw at me, and they gave rise to this project.”

Thus was born the idea of her soon-to-be-published book, How Sex Became a Civil Liberty, a look at how the ACLU, openly or behind the scenes, along with its allied advocacy groups, attorneys and citizens, fought for birth-control advocates and nudists, and took on the controversial issues of obscenity, abortion, prostitution, involuntary sterilization, rape and sexual harassment throughout the 20th century.

Over time, the assumption of sexual rights and sexual expression has become a part of everyday life, Wheeler says. “Phrases such as ‘informed consent,’ ‘reproductive freedom,’ ‘the right to privacy’ and the ‘right to read’ roll easily off the tongues of many if not most American adults today, conservatives as well as liberals.”

How Sex Became a Civil Liberty, published by Oxford University Press, will be available on Dec. 1, says Wheeler, also the author of Against Obscenity: Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America, 1873–1935.

In an early review, Susan Brownmiller, author of the landmark book, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, calls Wheeler’s new book a meticulous account of the ACLU’s struggle to embrace new approaches in law while remaining faithful to its original mission of championing free speech.

“This is a thoughtful book for thoughtful people in a democracy where rights and liberties often collide,” Brownmiller writes.

Rights didn’t come without a fight

Wheeler hopes that readership isn’t limited to historians and academics, because legal battles over abortion and gay marriage continue to be passionately debated in courtrooms and political campaigns and attract debate in the media and at the dinner table. That makes it important for citizens to understand how such battles have been fought and won for rights that some of us may take for granted, such as birth control.

Today, birth control is legal and widely available. But in the 1920s, federal obscenity laws banned the exchange of birth-control information in the U.S. mail and in public venues, and some states made it a crime to sell or advertise birth-control products.
Connecticut even made it illegal to use birth control, Wheeler says.

The ACLU’s foray into battles to make birth control and information about it legal began shortly after the organization was founded in 1920 by Crystal Eastman, Roger Baldwin and Walter Nelles.

Birth control had a personal urgency for Eastman and other women founders of the ACLU, Wheeler writes, because in the early 20th century, they lived the lives of bohemians in New York City’s Greenwich Village, consorting with artists, intellectuals, anarchists and other free spirits.

They also engaged in open marriages and relationships, risking pregnancy in an era that didn’t accept unwed mothers. “Women in sexually free relationships with men could hardly hope to participate as equals without, at the very least, birth control,” Wheeler writes.

Nudity also was a personal issue for some ACLU founders and leaders, since they practiced it at a private compound in the 1920s in Martha’s Vineyard.

“In this ‘communal utopia’ of rustic cottages spread over a 40-acre private complex, ACLU leaders relaxed, threw parties, discussed current events, recruited new members, negotiated complicated love affairs and sunbathed together in the nude,” Wheeler writes.

From there, it wasn’t a great leap for the ACLU to take on the cause of nudists in the 1930s by backing the challenge of a New York law that made it illegal for more than two people to be nude in private, Wheeler writes.

That law came about after a nudist group hosted an open house at a rented Manhattan gymnasium for potential nudists in 1934. Police raided the event, and the arrests pushed the case into the legal system.

Championing nudism as a constitutional right wasn’t for the faint of heart in the 1930s, she writes.

Even Pope Pius XII got involved, calling nudism “a wanton, pagan cult.”

ACLU not shy about controversy

Such details make How Sex Became a Civil Liberty both readable and memorable.

That’s because Wheeler has a gift for digging details out of the historical record and turning them into a memorable story, says a colleague in Binghamton University’s History Department.

“Leigh Ann is extremely good at explaining things you may take for granted, and she does it in a very compelling way,” says Douglas Bradburn, an associate professor of history at Binghamton and the author of The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Creation of the American Union (2009). “I expect it to be an excellent book.”

While the ACLU continued to gain public stature and rack up victories on sexual issues through the decades, it also was selective about the cases it backed. There were internal arguments about what fights to pick and which ones to back away from, Wheeler writes. But the organization didn’t lose its affinity for colorful and controversial causes over the years.

During the 1960s, ACLU members went to parties at Playboy founder Hugh Hefner’s mansion and sought funding from Hefner’s foundation to fund causes such as fighting obscenity laws and other sexual issues.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the ACLU moved on to rape and sexual harassment as issues, Wheeler says.

But by 1980, membership started to fall off as both courts and the country became more conservative, she says. The ACLU found itself fighting with feminists over challenges to rape laws and sexual harassment, and earlier successes were sometimes a double-edged sword.

For instance, ACLU-backed laws requiring informed consent, including mandatory counseling and a waiting period for poor people seeking sterilization, would be used by anti-abortion groups to impose the same standards on women seeking abortions, Wheeler says.
“A lot of feminists were angry,” she says. “They knew it would come back to haunt them.”

There have been other consequences of sex as a civil right, including a society saturated with sexual images, Wheeler says, and not everyone appreciates the exposure.

“Disagreements about the parameters of free speech and sexual privacy abound,” she writes in the conclusion of her book.

Those battles are likely to continue in the lives of her students, whom she continues to rely on for insights and inspiration, she says.

“From all of them I learn more about how to make history matter to young people today; that makes me a better teacher and also a better writer,” she says.

But one thing is certain about teaching biology in the 21st century: Stem-cell research is changing the way scientists think about diseases. To some people, such research holds the potential for the ultimate cures — letting the paralyzed walk and the blind see. To others, it is ethically murky and morally repugnant.

That’s why two Binghamton professors created Stem Cell Biology I and II — the titles understate the content — in which students learn that besides dividing within a body, stem cells can divide people by their beliefs. Students start at the petri dish and end up discussing bioethics with a Catholic priest who has two PhDs, one each in moral theology and genetics.

“It was nothing like I expected,” says Kenneth Baumann ’11, a PhD student in biological sciences. “I expected a lecture course: This is what stem cells are, this is what they can do, this is the controversy that everyone has been talking about for years and years. But it was far more than that.”

What is a stem cell?

Because the words “stem cell” can trigger an emotional response, it is important to understand the distinctions between the two kinds, embryonic and adult.

Embryonic stem cells divide and differentiate into more than 200 different cell types in the human body, such as heart cells and nerve cells. Adult stem cells also divide, but stay true to their origins and are used to repair and maintain the tissue in which they are found. For instance, skin stem cells produce only new skin cells.

Adult stem cells can be harvested with little impact and have been used therapeutically since the 1970s. “Bone marrow transplants are a classic example of a use that has been extremely successful and saved a lot of lives,” says Robert Van Buskirk, professor of biological sciences.

When embryonic stem cells were first isolated in 1998, the news raised hopes for curing diseases such as diabetes and cancer by injecting new cells into diseased organs or even growing whole organs for transplantation.

It also reignited fears about cloning (Dolly the sheep had been cloned the year before) and intensified debates over when life begins. That’s because embryonic stem cells can be gained only by destroying embryos, most of which are donated “extras” from in vitro fertilization procedures.

Suddenly everyone, from politicians to patients to the pope, was scrambling to understand what might come next.

Mixing religion and science

In 2000, Van Buskirk was teaching a summer course in cell biology at Harvard University. It was 12 weeks of regular-semester material compressed into eight weeks. So he was concerned when he learned a student, an adult named Alfred Cioffi, was going to miss the first week.

“I figured he was a biotech guy,” Van Buskirk says. “Then he showed up and he was Father Cioffi.”

“I said, ‘Why are you taking my course?’ And he said, ‘Because the pope told me to.’”

While politicians debated funding for embryonic stem-cell research, the Catholic Church sent Cioffi, with a PhD in moral theology, back to school to become the expert it would need to help sort out church policies. Van Buskirk’s course was a refresher for the former science teacher and, over occasional lunches, the two began to understand the importance of bridging science and religion.

“He was instrumental in my being accepted at Purdue, but retaking the GREs at 50 was a challenge,” says Cioffi, who earned his PhD in genetics.

Fast forward 12 years. Father Alfred Cioffi, PhD, PhD (Van Buskirk calls him “Dr. Dr. Cioffi”), a bioethicist with the National Catholic Bioethics Center, returns to Baust and Van Buskirk’s classroom, via Skype, to talk with students about bioethics, the Catholic Church and stem cells.

Ethics and innovation

Baust and Van Buskirk have been biotechnology innovators for decades.

Baust is a cell biologist/cryobiologist who developed solutions used for shipping human stem cells for cell therapy. Van Buskirk is a cell biologist/tissue engineer who developed EpiDerm, a stem-cell-derived human skin used for product safety testing and academic research. Baust is lead scientist, and Van Buskirk is vice president, of CPSI Biotech, a private biotech company that does stem-cell research in Owego, N.Y.

“Rob and I work together, but we think very differently,” Baust says. “He has a very progressive view, I have a very conservative view of science and even politics. We’re opposite poles. But as biologists, with the growth of interest in stem-cell research, we needed to understand more.”

With a grant from New York State Stem Cell Science in 2009, they created the course at Binghamton to introduce students to stem cells not just in a laboratory but in a “real-world” environment, in which politics and ethics, religion and medicine, and capitalism and law have the potential to influence how much these biological keys can unlock.

“I’ve been here 25 years,” Van Buskirk says, “and I never thought I’d be teaching a science course that includes a mix of conflicts, bioethics and legal issues. But it makes it so much fun to teach.”

The course starts with the history of stem-cell research. Later, student teams choose a disease for which there is a potential stem-cell therapy and research biotech companies’ therapy strategies from a biological and business perspective.

“The class made me think about current topics in science,” says Sarah Frys ’12. “I took away a deeper understanding of stem cells’ political issues. It forged my ideas of how I feel about stem cells and how others would view that differently.”

Change a life, save a life

Class discussions can veer suddenly between science and speculation.

“It’s an excellent opportunity for a student to say, ‘My grandfather suffered from ...’ and you can talk about the biology of the disease and how stem cells may or may not have played a role,” Baust says.

Inevitably, the right-to-live question comes up. It goes something like this: If my child is dying from a disease for which human embryonic stem cells might hold a cure, then why is the Catholic Church denying her therapy (or why is the U.S. government dragging its feet on funding or why aren’t scientists doing more research?).

“It’s a reasonable question, but it’s one you can’t answer,” Baust says. “We were told five years ago we would have cures based on embryonic stem cells and we’re no closer now than we were five years ago. There is so much we don’t know.”

Baust and Van Buskirk guide the discussions but stay neutral.

“Like abortion, there really is no answer. Your personal answer is dictated by your beliefs or your religion or a combination thereof,” Van Buskirk says.

“Frankly, I see both sides,” Baust admits.

Cioffi, of course, is clear about the Catholic Church’s stance: Using adult stem cells is acceptable; using human embryonic stem cells is not.

“The bioethical distinction between embryonic and adult stem cells is a matter of life and death, especially for the most vulnerable and dependent amongst us: the unborn,” he says.

“Students are intrigued by Cioffi,” Baust says. “I’m surprised by how balanced the student body is with respect to abortion and other issues. I expected a heavy progressive leaning, but they reflect a cross-section of society.”

“Religion was a large point of discussion in the class. I liked when the priest gave his presentation on the Catholic Church’s view of stem cells,” Frys says. “The church was much more progressive about using adult stem cells than I thought.”

Most students may never work with stem cells, but they will know how to think about life-changing discoveries.

“I hope students take away an understanding of how science and society interact in areas of controversy because they are going to experience that for decades to come,” Baust says.

“Topics such as stem-cell research, human cloning, genetically engineered foods, bioterrorism and global warming are all bioethical issues,” Cioffi says. “What this field needs is young people who are willing to use their reason and will to the best of their capacity to make a better world and contribute to the future of humanity.”

To show Harpur College students where a liberal arts degree might lead, she relies on Harpur alumni to take them under their wing for a short time.

Neuberger runs the Liberal Arts to Careers Externship (LACE) program, which matches alumni with sophomores who are pursuing degrees similar to their own or who share their career interests. 

“An externship is a learning opportunity,” she says. While interns might work at a specific job for a summer or semester, LACE externs receive neither credit nor pay, but instead explore careers that would be possible with their degree.

The program’s success has garnered no small measure of envy from its alumni sponsors.

“When I found out about it, I was so annoyed that I didn’t get to do this,” says entrepreneur Lisa Fischoff ’10.

“This program is great because it will guide you. In this economy, you can spend a lot of time and money if you don’t know what you’re going to do,” says Jane Rosales ’09, who works for a nonprofit.

“I can’t believe it wasn’t here when I was a student.”

Externs spend three to five days during winter or summer break shadowing their sponsors in their workplaces. They also conduct informational interviews with their sponsors’ colleagues so they can learn more about career development.

“Students need to meet multiple times with multiple people because it gives them a richer overview of what it’s like to work in that environment. It also teaches them what it means to be a professional,” Neuberger says.

“Informational interviews are so valuable. The goal is to find out what you do or don’t want in a career. I tell the students, if they walk away saying, ‘I don’t want to do this or that,’ it’s a fine outcome,” she adds.

LACE’s first group of externs numbered 16 in summer 2011, with 54 in winter and summer 2012. Neuberger plans 40 externships next winter and 60 in summer 2013.

“The plan is to grow to 150 externships by 2014,” she says. “The challenge is to increase the number of Harpur alumni sponsors so we can place students who want to participate.”

Externs see big picture

Profiting from nonprofit experience

Rebecca Pepe has mixed feelings about working for a nonprofit.

“Nonprofits lend themselves to high burnouts and are not defined careers,” says Pepe, a double major in psychology and anthropology with a concentration in biological anthropology.

“I want to be secure in my career path and balance that with helping people,” she adds.

After spending the week shadowing Jane Rosales ’09 in the New York Legal Assistance Group’s Mobile Legal Help Center, the first mobile program in the nation to assist people who cannot afford civil legal services, Pepe saw another side of nonprofits.

“Nonprofits can have a corporate atmosphere, and people do choose it as a career,” Pepe says.

Rosales, whose major was political science, explored education and social services following her graduation. Time spent in AmeriCorps piqued her interest in nonprofits and public interest law, and she went on to earn a master’s in international affairs from Northeastern University.

This trajectory culminated last December, when she became the Mobile Legal Help Center’s first hire. She oversees 40 volunteers, mainly law students or attorneys doing pro bono work.

“I do a little bit of everything: fundraising; researching data for grant proposals, media and public relations; working with elected officials and lobbyists; recruiting volunteers,” Rosales says.

“There’s so much to project management, and I never thought of it for myself, but I have a passion for it.”

“For Rebecca, what’s important is not what you study, it’s the experience you gain from each job and applying it to future
challenges,” Rosales adds.

With a double major in philosophy and political science, and an interest in international relations, Marcel Bucsescu ’03 thought foreign service was a likely career. Yet his professional toolbox lacked a basic understanding of the business world, despite an internship with a Berlin-based startup organization with a U.S. presence.

The internship had him and a manager working together via e-mail and meetings in cafés to plan New York events. “It would have been more helpful to have had a more structured experience,” Bucsescu says. “While I was able to do real work … I didn’t learn some of those softer business skills. Getting to interact with colleagues in a professional setting is important. That would have been valuable to me.”

Bucsescu gained some of those skills as a meeting planner at The Conference Board, an independent research association that helps member businesses make informed decisions. He has been manager of The Conference Board’s Governance Center since January 2011.

This year, he sponsored two LACE externs with different majors and career goals, but his approach was the same.

“It’s more than sitting next to me at a desk. They need to speak to others in the organization and learn there are many ways to get to where they want to be in their careers,” Bucsescu says.

“Sponsorship forced me to think about what I have done and why I did it — it wasn’t all chance,” he adds.

Last January, he arranged meetings for Ilana Solomon, a dual major in English and human development with a minor in Hebrew, to meet senior researchers in human resources so she could make connections between her human development courses and corporate human-resource practices.

“Everyone has a view of a nonprofit as a charity organization, but The Conference Board is corporate. It gave me some perspective of the larger world of nonprofits,” she says.

“Even commuting daily into the city was part of the experience that I got comfortable with. You make the LACE program what you want.”

Solomon ended her externship by conducting an internal meeting, which gave her a valuable takeaway skill: effective meeting facilitation, Bucsescu says.

Justin Ivry has more interest in business and economics than law, despite a declared major in philosophy, politics and law.
This summer, Bucsescu arranged for him to conduct informational interviews with an economist who analyzes global business indicators, a sustainability researcher and social media consultants. 

“It’s been a great experience to meet different people and learn what they did to prepare for their careers. Their advice about graduate school and internships is most useful,” Ivry says.

Creative thinking creates jobs

Fischoff loved her geography major, focusing on urban planning, but discovered after interning in Binghamton City Planning that she hated being in an office.

Following graduation, she worked part-time jobs in New York, where a coffee shop on East Broadway caught her eye. Fischoff approached the new owner about becoming his business partner. He accepted and together they rebranded the shop as Pushcart Coffee last fall.

“It hit me one day: Owning a coffee shop is urban planning. We’re helping the neighborhood by providing a good gathering place for residents,” she says.

Her outreach includes catering community events, attending community board meetings and working to expand the business improvement district.
 
“I think about the big picture: how to grow and expand the company and make sure we are always adapting to fit the needs of the community,” Fischoff adds.

She cites the handful of new businesses — a craft beer and farmstead cheese store as well as a tavern —  as evidence that a for-profit business can promote positive social change. 

“Being a good neighborhood business has made our corner more attractive to other businesses,” Fischoff says.

Extern Stephanie Izquieta watched Fischoff do everything from delivering coffee to managing construction at new store locations. Izquieta also put in some paid hours behind the counter.

“My ultimate goal is to work in social entrepreneurship, and that means learning to run a successful business from the ground up,” she says.

“The ironic thing is, my mom had a business (a family-owned auto repair shop) and I would see her working at night, matching inventory with product. I thought she was just looking at papers, but now I understand.”

Among the administration, there were the obligatory provost jokes. What? You didn’t know that the word “provost” used to mean prison warden?

So we asked Nieman, “What does a provost do?”

“The provost is the chief academic officer of the University, and academics are our core mission.”

Nieman is one of five vice presidents; the others are in charge of student affairs, research, administration and external affairs. The eight deans report to the provost.

“The provost leads the Division of Academic Affairs, which encompasses faculty and many of our staff; the recruitment, admission and success of our students; and our research and teaching facilities. As provost, I work closely with the other vice presidents to assure that we serve students effectively and build on Binghamton’s reputation for academic excellence.”

“A provost must understand how all the schools relate to one another, where investment needs to be made and how growth in one area affects another area.”

“The mission of the Decker School of Nursing or the Watson School of Engineering is different from the mission of Harpur College, but all three schools have to talk to one another because nursing and engineering students must take courses in science and math as well as in the humanities, arts and social sciences.

“We’re investing $2.6 million in hiring new faculty in the coming year. Working with the deans, I have to decide where those faculty will be hired.”

“The provost has to create a culture in which the deans work well together.”

“That means learning as much as possible about the needs and cultures of the different schools and creating an environment where the deans collaborate. Our deans are not territorial. In some universities, if you don’t look out for your own interest, you’re a fool, but that isn’t what happens at Binghamton.”

“I work with the vice provost of enrollment management to recruit the right number of students to meet our goals and make sure that the students we admit will succeed.”

“Admissions is the lifeblood of the institution. It’s a complex and competitive business and must be in sync with our academic programs and investments. We must make sure that we have sufficient faculty, staff and facilities in those areas where student demand is high while at the same time ensuring that we have the broad academic offerings that our students need to flourish.”

“One of my priorities is to ensure that this remains a university with strength in the humanities, arts and social sciences as well as science, technology and the professions.”

“We’ve identified smart energy and healthcare as areas where we have strength and student demand. We also know that these are important issues for society, and we have an obligation to address them. But we also have tremendous strength in the social sciences and the humanities — disciplines that can help us understand and solve some of the critical problems we face.

“I am creating a faculty committee that will identify interdisciplinary areas in the social sciences and humanities where we can develop programs and address pressing social and intellectual problems. These will complement our smart-energy and healthcare initiatives.” 