UMass Magazine Online

Winter 2003

Departments

Around the Pond

Features

All my best friends are here

One giant molecule

I learnt to dream of Sicily

The Landscape Beautiful

Around the Pond

...and a remarkable, joyful noise

Faye Wolfe




	MAKING YOU want to go back to school: Stella Volpe, nutrition.

IN INTRODUCING LYNN MARGULIS on February 6, Dean Leon Osterweil described in dazzling terms Biology 290H, the course covering 12 billion years of evolution that Margulis, a Distinguished University Professor, and Biology Professor James Walker teach. Then he said, “If that doesn’t make you want to go back to school, I don’t know what would.” In fact, any of the day’s offerings might have triggered such a desire.

The Academic Symposia, held on the eve of the chancellor’s inauguration, offered a tantalizing sampling of what UMass Amherst professors, graduate students and undergraduates are up to. Besides Margulis’ talk, which she framed with Emily Dickinson’s poetry, there was “Life and Death in Lymphocytes,” “Harnessing Microbial Electronics for Energy Generation and Environmental Restoration,” “Teaching Compassion in Health Care,” “The Impact of Law on Sports,” “Reading Class: Disrupting Power in Children’s Literature,” “Adventures in Ghana,” “Diversity in Engineering,” “Scholarship Through Service,” and other sessions on intellectual capital, nutrition, linguistics, entomology and marketing.

Unjust as it would be to try to sum up in a phrase or two what the speakers had to say about research, teaching and learning, it’s fair to say that there were many thought-provoking moments: Stephen Nissenbaum said second-rate novels are fascinating because “they allow the seams to show”; Derek Lovley described how geobacters could just about save the world; Barbara Osborne referred to the “yin and yang” of cell death and Karin Plotkin, to “stolen adolescence”; Cynthia Jacelon asked, “How do you measure dignity?”; Maria Botelho said, “Class is a cultural tagalong”; Alice Nash talked of the marvelously animated universe of the Wabanaki; and Stephen Harris practically sang the seventh-century “Caedmon’s Hymn.”

For those lapsed intellectuals needing a breather, there were healthy and/or tasty treats (strawberries, mini coffee cakes) in one room, a raft of department displays in another, student displays in the Campus Center auditorium, a row of tables featuring faculty books in the lower-level concourse, even free hearing screenings sponsored by the communication disorders department. Those who rode the up escalator and stepped beyond the Campus Center could take in several open houses: festive (chemistry’s on the 16th floor of the Graduate Research Center, complete with arcane diagrams and balloons); multimedia (economics); digital (the library); and a “herbarium” at Morrill. If you got as far as the Fine Arts Center, the gallery had “Contemporary Drawings from a Private Collection” for contemplation.

In other words, that day, the university was tooting its entire horn section, and as exhausting as all the listening, looking and thinking might have left anyone who tried to take it all in, it was a remarkable, joyful noise.

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A truly defining moment

...and a remarkable, joyful noise

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