Alumni

Veteran sees Vietnam the country beyond the war

Anonymous — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 17:30:37 +0000

Veteran sees Vietnam the country beyond the war Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 10/25/2024 - 11:30

Rachel Sauer

CU Boulder alum and regent emeritus Peter Steinhauer shares Vietnam experiences with students, to be featured in the in-progress documentary Welcome Home Daddy

Peter Steinhauer joined the U.S. Navy because that’s what young men of his generation did.

“I was brought up to finish high school, go to college, join a fraternity, get married, spend two years in the military, then work the rest of my life,” he explains. “Of everybody I went to high school with in Golden, most of the boys went in (the military).”

So, after graduating the University of Colorado Boulder in 1958—where he met his wife, Juli, a voice major—he attended dental school in Missouri, then completed a face and jaw surgical residency, finishing in 1965. And then he joined the Navy.

Peter Steinhauer (left) and Steven Dike (right) after Steinhauer's presentation during the Oct. 18 class of The Vietnam Wars, which Dike teaches.

He had two young daughters and a son on the way, and he learned two weeks after being stationed at Camp Pendleton that he’d be shipping to Vietnam, where he served from 1966-67.

“How many of your grandparents served in Vietnam?” Steinhauer asks the students seated in desks rimming the perimeter of the classroom, and several raise their hands. Steinhauer has given this presentation to this class, The Vietnam Wars, for enough years that it’s now the grandchildren of his fellow veterans with whom he shares his experiences of war.

Even though Steinhauer had given the presentation before, the Oct. 18 session of The Vietnam Wars, for students in the Honors Residential Academic Program (HRAP), was different: It was filmed as part of the in-progress documentary Welcome Home Daddy, which chronicles Steinhauer’s experiences during and after the war and his deep love for the country and people of Vietnam.

“Pete told me once that he dreams about Vietnam all the time, but they’re not nightmares,” says Steven Dike, associate director of the HRAP and assistant teaching professor of history, who teaches The Vietnam Wars. “He’s spent his life as a healer and an educator, and I think one of the values (for students) is hearing how his experiences in the war informed his life after it.”

‘An old guy there’

Steinhauer, a retired oral surgeon and CU regent emeritus, served a yearlong tour with the 3rd Marine Division, 3rd Medical Battalion in Da Nang, Vietnam. Lt. Cmdr. Steinhauer was a buzz-cut 30-year-old—“an old guy there,” he tells the students—with a Kodak Instamatic camera.

He provided dental care and oral surgery to U.S. servicemen and servicewomen as well as Vietnamese people, and he took pictures—of the rice paddies and jungles, of the people he met, of the nameless details of daily life that were like nothing he’d experienced before.

“This was the crapper,” Steinhauer tells the students, explaining a photo showing a square, metal-sided building with a flat, angled roof. “There were four seats in there and no dividers, so you were just sitting with the guy next to you.”

When the electricity went out, he and his colleagues worked outside. When helicopters came in with the wounded, it was all hands on deck.

Left image: Pvt. Raymond Escalera holds the since-deactivated grenade that Peter Steinhauer (to Escalera's left) removed live from his neck, in a photo that made the front page of The Seattle Times; right image: Peter and Juli Steinhauer (on right) visit Raymond Escalera (white shirt) and his wife in California.

“They’d be brought off the helicopter and taken to the triage area,” Steinhauer says, the photo at the front of the classroom showing the organized chaos of it. “A lot of life-and-death decisions were made there, catheters and IVs were started there. The triage area is a wonderful part of military medicine.”

Steinhauer also documented the casualties, whose starkness the intervening years have done nothing to dim. One of his responsibilities was performing dental identification of bodies, “one of the hardest things I did,” he says.

Then there was Dec. 21, 1966: “A guy came in—it was pouring rain, and we had mass casualties—and he came in with trouble breathing,” Steinhauer recalls. “We discovered he had an unexploded M79 rifle grenade in his neck. We got it out, but a corpsman said, ‘Doc, you better be careful with that, it can go boom.’”

Not only did Marine Pvt. Raymond Escalera survive a live grenade in his neck, but about 12 years ago Steinhauer tracked him down and visited him at his home in Pico Rivera, California. “We call four or five times a year now,” Steinhauer says.

Building relationships

Steinhauer and his colleagues also treated Vietnamese civilians. “One of the most fun parts of my year there was being able to perform 60 or 70 cleft lip surgeries,” Steinhauer tells the students, showing before and after photos.

Peter Steinhauer (left) and medical colleagues in Vietnam, with whom he worked during many of his 26 visits to Vietnam since the end of the war.

He then shows them a photo of the so-called “McNamara Line” between North and South Vietnam—a defoliated slash of brown and gray that looks like a wound that will never heal.

Healing, however, has happened, and continues to. “I was blessed by the ability to go back to a place where so many horrible things happened during the war and make something beautiful of it,” Steinhauer says.

In the years since he returned from war—and met his almost-one-year-old son for the first time—Steinhauer has gone back to Vietnam more than two dozen times. Acknowledging that his experience is not all veterans’ experience, he says he has been blessed to learn about Vietnam as a country and not just a war.

“How veterans dealt with the war, how they’re still coming to terms with it as we’re getting further away from it, are really important issues,” says Mark Gould, director and a producer of Welcome Home Daddy. “It’s not just a war that we quote-unquote lost, but it was the most confusing war the United States has ever fought. We never had closure, but that didn’t stop Dr. Steinhauer from reaching out. Our tagline is ‘Governments wage war, people make peace,’ and that’s what he stands for.”

The idea for the documentary originated with Steinhauer’s daughter, Terrianne, who grew up not only hearing his stories but visiting the country with him and her mom. She and Gould served in the CalArts alumni association together, and several years ago she pitched him the idea for Welcome Home Daddy, which they are making in partnership with producer Rick Hocutt.

Peter Steinhauer with his children upon his return home after serving in the Vietnam War; the "Welcome home daddy" message inspired the title of the documentary currently being made about Steinhauer's experiences during and after the war.

The documentary will weave Steinhauer’s stories with those of other veterans and highlight the relationships that Steinhauer has built over decades—through partnering with medical professionals in Vietnam and volunteering his services there, through supporting Vietnamese students who study in the United States, through facilitating education and in-person visits between U.S. and Vietnamese doctors and nurses. At the same time, Juli Steinhauer has grown relationships with musicians and other artists in Vietnam. Both parents passed a love for Vietnam to their children.

An ugly war, a beautiful country

The stories of Vietnam could fill volumes. In fact, Steinhauer attended a 10-week course called Tell Your Story: A Writing Workshop for Those Who Have Served in the Military in 2008—offered through the Program for Writing and Rhetoric and the Division of Continuing Education—and wrote Remembering Vietnam 1966-67, a collection of his memories and photographs of the war that he published privately and gives to family, friends and colleagues.

91��Ƭ�� 10 years ago, Steinhauer asked to audit The Vietnam Wars—“wars” is plural because “we can’t understand the American war without understanding the French war,” Dike explains—in what was only the second time Dike had taught it.

“So, I was a little nervous,” Dike remembers with a laugh, “but he comes in and is just the nicest guy in the world. I asked if he’d be interested in sharing his experiences, and he’s given his presentation during the semester every class since.”

In the Oct. 18 class, Steinhauer shares stories of bamboo vipers in the dental clinic, of perforating vs. penetrating wounds, of meeting baseball legends Brooks Robinson and Stan Musial when they visited the troops, of a since-faded Vietnamese tradition of women dyeing their teeth black as a symbol of beauty.

“It was an ugly war, but it’s a beautiful country,” Steinhauer says. “Just a beautiful country.”

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CU Boulder alum and regent emeritus Peter Steinhauer shares Vietnam experiences with students, to be featured in the in-progress documentary Welcome Home Daddy.

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Flying with the man behind the capes

Anonymous — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 18:44:03 +0000

Flying with the man behind the capes Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/18/2024 - 12:44

Doug McPherson

CU Boulder alumnus Patrick Hamilton discusses his new book on influential comic book artist George Pérez during Hispanic Heritage Month

When alumnus Patrick Hamilton was growing up, he, like many kids, found comfort in comic books. “I’m an almost lifelong comics fan, and specifically a fan of ‘Avengers’,” Hamilton says.

As Hamilton continued enjoying comics and learning more about the people behind them, he eventually came across the name George Pérez. It’s a name you may not immediately recognize, and that’s a key point Hamilton makes in his new book, George Pérez, which hit shelves earlier this year.

“The main argument of the book [is] that Pérez had a larger impact on comics than he’s generally been given credit for,” says Hamilton, an English professor at Misericordia University in Pennsylvania who earned his PhD in English at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2006.

CU Boulder alumnus Patrick Hamilton (PhDEngl'06), a lifelong comics fan, highlighted the groundbreaking work of Marvel Comics and DC Comics artist George Pérez in an eponymous new biography.

But in the comic book world, the name George Pérez and his work turn heads—not just for his impact on the art, style and story structure of comics, but because he was one of the first Hispanic artists to become a major name in the industry and helped pave the way for greater diversity in the field.

Pérez, who worked both as an artist and writer starting in the 1970s, played a significant role in blockbuster series such as Fantastic Four and The Avengers for Marvel Comics. In the 1980s, he created The New Teen Titans, which became a top-selling series for publisher DC Comics. And he developed DC Comic's landmark limited series Crisis on Infinite Earths, followed by relaunching Wonder Woman.

Hamilton says Pérez is also “pretty synonymous” with large event titles, most prominently DC Comic’s Superman revamp in 2011 and Marvel’s Infinity Gauntlet.

“And he developed a reputation for a dynamic and hyper-detailed style, particularly in terms of the number of characters and details he’d put into a page, that was highly regarded and ultimately influential in the … 1970s and 1980s and beyond.”

Hamilton says he sees his book as attempting to expand Pérez’s legacy.

“Despite his acclaim and prominence, he hasn’t really been seen as an artist that contributed to the style and genre of comics in ways artists before him … are seen,” he says. “I argue in the book that Pérez made contributions to the style of comics, not only in the layout of the page and what effects that could achieve, but especially in his way of building what we would call the story world around the characters, where he embraced the possibilities for the fantastic within comics.”

Paving the way

The book also speaks to Pérez’s interest in representations of race, disability and gender, the latter of which Hamilton says Pérez consciously strove to improve in his art over his career.

Artist George Pérez was reknown for his work with both DC Comics and Marvel Comics. (Photos: DC Comics, left, and Marvel Comics, right)

Hamilton adds that he believes a lot of other Black, Indigenous and artists of color working today likely see Pérez as “an influence and as carving out a space” for them within the industry.

“I think you can look at the significant number of Hispanic and Latinx creators working in comics today—many of them as artists—and see them as following, in some cases quite consciously, in Pérez’s footsteps.”

He adds that Pérez did much to help define the look and feel of modern superhero comics in the 1970s and 1980s, as did another Latino artist, José Luis García-López.

“Garcia-Lopez, who, among other things, created the official reference artwork for DC Comics that is still much in use today. So, you have two Latino creators working in the late 20th century, when the comic book industry was even more predominantly white than it is today, and shaping the look of it.”

Hamilton says one of the more interesting findings about Pérez that meshes with how Pérez has been overlooked is a kind of “invisibility or transparency” in his art.

“It [his art] is never meant to overshadow and … is always in service to the story or narrative. What surprised me is how much this was a conscious choice on Pérez’s part, that he never wanted his art to draw attention to itself in a way that was detrimental to the overall storytelling. It’s kind of ironic, and … surprising, because Pérez does have one of the most recognizable styles in comics, but his goal as an artist was always to do what’s best for the realization of the story first.”

Perez died in 2022 at age 67. You can see examples of his Marvel Comics art here and his DC Comics art here.

Top image: A group scene of DC Comics characters drawn by George Pérez (Photo: DC Comics)

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CU Boulder alumnus Patrick Hamilton discusses his new book on influential comic book artist George Pérez during Hispanic Heritage Month.

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Professor Mary Rippon led a secret, separate life

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 21:31:39 +0000

Professor Mary Rippon led a secret, separate life Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/17/2024 - 15:31

Silvia Pettem

In book, CU Boulder alumnus Silvia Pettem details a little-known chapter of the trailblazing faculty member's story

As a student at the University of Colorado, I often passed through the Mary Rippon Outdoor Theater on the way to my classes. I had assumed Rippon was a woman associated with the theater department, but that was not so. I later learned that she had arrived in Boulder in 1878 and became the university's first female professor. After her death in 1935, then-President George Norlin named the theater (then under construction) in her memory.

Publicly, "Miss Rippon" was highly respected by students and faculty. However, unknown to Norlin and the others, she had a secret private life that would have been considered scandalous, had she not hidden her husband and daughter behind a Victorian veil of secrecy.

The long-concealed truth was revealed in 1986 when an elderly man donated Rippon's diaries, account books, and journals to the university's archives. He was Rippon's grandson and revealed that she had had a romantic relationship with one of her students, became pregnant in 1888, secretly married, and took a year's sabbatical in Germany to give birth.

CU Boulder alumnus and historian Silvia Pettem (left) wrote Separate Lives about a little-known chapter in the life of influential CU Boulder Professor Mary Rippon, namesake of the campus theater.

At the time, there was no rule concerning teacher-student relationships, as it never occurred to anyone to implement one. Rippon was 37, and her husband, Will Housel, was 25. When the baby, Miriam, was born, Housel was still at CU in his senior year.

After graduation, Housel joined his wife and daughter in Europe before Rippon returned to Boulder and continued to teach as if nothing in her life had changed. Housel and Miriam remained in Europe, where he attended graduate school. Initially, Miriam was placed in a series of orphanages. At the age of 4, she was taken to Rippon's extended family in Illinois.

At the time, Victorian-era society expected women with children to be supported by their husbands. If a professional woman married, she would have been accused of taking a job away from a man with a family to support. Rippon had to completely separate her public and private lives in order to keep her job. She continued to teach for 20 more years.

As a revered pioneer woman educator, Rippon appears to have valued career over family, but she may have, instead, realized that she needed to work to financially provide for her daughter's care.

Eventually, Rippon and Housel divorced. Housel remarried when Miriam was 8 years old and provided his daughter a home, but he lacked an adequate income. On a salary less than her male colleagues, Rippon continued to support her daughter, as well as her divorced husband, his second wife, and, eventually, their four children!

Meanwhile, Rippon was a role model for her female students, a full professor, and even chair of the Department of German language and literature. Except for confiding in two close friends, she took her secret to her grave in Boulder's Columbia Cemetery.

For decades, the only tangible evidence on the CU campus of Rippon's secret life was ivy that Housel had planted outside of Old Main, where Rippon held her classes. His sentiment was obvious in a poem he penned his senior year that read in part, "But the ivy is for friendship and it seemeth best of all; 'tis the rose of love and petals that will never fade or fall."

Silvia Pettem’s In Retrospect column appears once a month in the Daily Camera, where this first appeared. She can be reached at silviapettem@gmail.com. She will be signing copies of Separate Lives: Uncovering the Hidden Family of Victorian Professor Mary Rippon (Lyons Press, 2024) at the Boulder Bookstore on Oct. 22.

In book, CU Boulder alumnus Silvia Pettem details a little-known chapter of the trailblazing faculty member's story.

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Bringing multitudes to life

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 17:52:48 +0000

Bringing multitudes to life Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 08/28/2024 - 11:52

From Oprah to Wakanda, CU Boulder alum Aba Arthur has charted a career in which the most impressive thing isn’t necessarily the glow of Hollywood, but the joy of finding her voice in a new world that hasn’t been universally welcoming

Listen to The Ampersand

From a fairly young age, Aba Arthur watched movies and TV with a critical eye. If something happened in a show that she didn’t agree with, well, she just marched right upstairs and rewrote the scene.

That early confidence in her storytelling, in her writing, in her ability to breathe life into a character who previously only existed on a page in her journal has supported her through a career whose highlights include major Hollywood films, books and one-woman shows.

Arthur, who currently plays the character Samara in the show Bad Monkey on Hulu, also appeared in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and the 2023 film adaptation of The Color Purple musical.

Despite her success—the kind that justifies a certain confidence—she still sometimes finds herself in her car, staring out the window and breathing deep. It’s when she reminds herself “who I am, where I’m going. My words are valuable. I have something to say that matters, and I’m going to kill it.”

Arthur, a 2005 University of Colorado Boulder graduate in theater and dance, recently joined host Erika Randall, associate dean for student success in the College of Arts and Sciences, on The Ampersand, the college podcast. Randall—who also is a dancer, professor, mother, filmmaker and writer—joins guests in exploring stories about “ANDing” as a “full sensory verb” that describes experience and possibility.

Their discussion roamed from the red carpet to the couch with a bag of Cheeto Puffs, with stops in between for mentorship, nostalgia, the joy of making art and what it was like stepping off the flight from Ghana to Colorado.

Aba Arthur (right) on the set of The Color Purple with Oprah Winfrey (left). (Photo: Aba Arthur)

Arthur: I have such a vivid memory of getting off the plane. I'm coming from Ghana and I'm coming to Colorado Springs, Colorado. So, I had only seen on TV or in pictures these guys, and they wear jeans, and they have these big hats. But I didn't know anything about them, so they felt like fictional characters. And I remember so well getting off the plane at the airport and I saw these guys, which I later learned the term was "cowboy."

Randall: In their Wranglers.

Arthur: Yeah:

Randall: In the hats.

Arthur: And the boots. And I remember getting off the plane and just being like, something just happened. Because these people are not where I just came from, and now there are a lot of them. And I've been watching them. So, this is so cool. I've stepped into something new. I think that is the first big memory that I have, period.

Randall: Changed your life. That's incredible. You arrive in the Springs, all the things happen. Next moment, where's the next postcard to yourself that says, ah, Aba, here we go?

Erika Randall (left) and Aba Arthur (right) discussing Hollywood and mentorship and the joy of making art. (Photo: Timothy Grassley)

Arthur: Oof. Oof. It’s a tough one. My first experience with racism. A young boy in my school told me that my skin was dirty. Yeah. I went back to class, and I was crying. My teacher asked me what happened, and I told her, and then she disciplined me. I had to sit in the corner, and I had to face the wall, because she said I was being a distraction. My crying was distracting the class. Yes, this is a true story.

So, I had to sit in a corner of the room and face the wall. And I remember so vividly at some point they were just continuing with class. And I was like, what? I don’t know how old I am. Let’s pick an age.

Randall: Say, 8 or 9?

Arthur: I don’t know, 8? (Laughs)

Randall: All on the Wikipedia page I’m building for you. Age 8.

Arthur: This is still elementary school, though—too young.

Randall: Too young to hear that, to feel that, to be put in a corner.

Arthur: And I’m listening to the class continue. She’s teaching, and I’m in the corner of the room. And so, at some point I turned around and I’m watching them, and they’re just having class. Everybody’s just continuing on like everything is normal. And that was a strong memory.

Randall: Is that memory as yet in a film? Because I’m watching that movie.

Arthur: It’s just going to take a second. Probably. That’s a tough one for me. It’s going to take me a second to work through that. Because I have to watch that scene, if they’re going to do it.

Randall: And hearing that story, sharing that story, is a critical action of undoing racism. And the work that you choose, you are writing critical stories about undoing racism. You are ANDing with political science the way that you’re in theater and political science. But your body politic is your body showing up as representation. Does that feel true for you?

Arthur: Yes, I love ampersands. And multihyphenate is a term that it took me a while to sink into. So, for me, it was always “&.” This & this & this. And I’m equally all of them.

Randall: And with that is engaging those identities to then bring forth new character into worlds. I’m listening to you and I’m watching your reel, and I don’t think you need confidence. Do you need confidence?

Arthur: No.

Randall: No.

Aba Arthur on the set of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. (Photos: Aba Arthur)

Arthur: I have a lot of it. (laughs)

Randall: Where did this come from, and can we bottle it?

Arthur: I wish. It comes from so many things. It comes from being the fourth-born child of a very high-achieving family. It comes from being the new kid a lot. You have to know who you are when you’re the new kid.

Randall: And in Hollywood, you’re the new kid in every room for a minute.

Arthur: Yes.

Randall: Are you not the new kid yet?

Arthur: I’m always the new kid, yeah. I’m the new kid a lot. And so, I didn’t realize at the time—another one of those life-changing things you don’t understand—as we were moving, I didn’t realize the effect that would have on my life in the future. The positive effect it would have on my life in the future. Because when you’re a kid, it’s hard. That stuff is difficult. And I didn’t want to be the new kid and I didn’t want to have to find that confidence. But I always felt like if I come in the room and I am as wonderful and as great as I am, the people that are supposed to be in my life will come to me.

Randall: You are a galaxy. Yeah.

Arthur: I really appreciate that. And I’m going to walk with that, because I feel like you have to protect your own peace and your own space. And coming into new environments over and over and over again, if you don’t know who you are, then you’ll get lost. And you’ll go with the trends and you’ll do what other people say, because it feels better to be a part than to be an outsider.

Randall: So be the new kid.

Arthur: I excel at being the new kid now. I excel because I’m coming in as who I am. So, rock with me or not.

Randall: That’s right. That’s right. Were you a journaler?

I excel at being the new kid now. I excel because I’m coming in as who I am. So, rock with me or not.”

Arthur: Uh-huh. Oh, my gosh.

Randall: Are you going to burn those or publish them?

Arthur: I have them all, yeah. You know why I have them?

Randall: I want to know.

Arthur: So, I would watch television and the audacity of myself as a child. I think about it now, I’m like, wow!

Randall: I love it.

Arthur: I would watch television, and I would be like, hmm, I don’t like the way that ended. And then I would go upstairs and I would rewrite it.

Randall: You would actually script it?

Arthur: Yes, I would rewrite it. I would write it like, hmm, “So, Chad walked in, and he saw Sarah, and then he walked over and kissed her.” But in the show, maybe he didn’t walk over and kiss her first. Maybe they just talked for a while. So, I just would rewrite it the way I wanted to see it. And I would do that a lot. I would write myself into the shows.

Click the button below to hear the entire episode.

Listen to The Ampersand

Top image: Photos courtesy Aba Arthur

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Remembering CU’s brave one from the Red Scare

Anonymous — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 20:16:09 +0000

Remembering CU’s brave one from the Red Scare Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/08/2024 - 14:16

Bradley Worrell

Caught up in anti-communist hysteria following World War II, former CU Boulder student Dalton Trumbo today is recognized as a fierce proponent of free speech, with a fountain outside the University Memorial Center named in his honor

This summer marks the 75th anniversary of a secret FBI file becoming public—one that named well-known Hollywood figures, including screenwriter and former University of Colorado Boulder student Dalton Trumbo (A&S ex’28), as members of the Communist Party.

Although Trumbo and several of his Hollywood colleagues had been accused of being communists and forced to testify before Congress’ House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) two years prior, the existence of the FBI file had been secret until its release during the espionage trial of Judith Coplon, an analyst with the U.S. Department of Justice. The file, based on information from confidential informants, named not only Hollywood writers, directors and actors, but also academics from universities across the United States. Its release set off a period of paranoia known as the second Red Scare.

The 1949 release of the formerly secret FBI report represented a continuation of a long-term investigation by the HUAC, which was first formed in 1938 to investigate individuals for subversive activities, particularly those related to the Communist Party. Widely publicized congressional hearings beginning in 1947 and focusing on the film industry ensnared several screenwriters and directors, the so-called Hollywood 10, which included Trumbo.

Bronson Hilliard, senior director, academic communications, for the Office of Strategic Relations and Communications at CU Boulder, wrote an editorial encouraging the CU regents to rename of the UMC fountain in honor of Dalton Trumbo.

Once Hollywood’s premier screenwriter, the author of such classics as “A Man to Remember,” “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” and “The Brave One,” Trumbo was forced into the shadows after being blacklisted. He continued to write scripts under pen names for years before escaping the blacklist in the early 1960s, finally able to take credit for such famous screenplays as “Exodus” and “Spartacus.”

Seeking to recognize Trumbo for his fierce defense of the First Amendment, as well as his talents as a lauded screenwriter, a group of CU students including Lewis Cardinal and Kristina Baumli petitioned the CU Board of Regents in 1993 to name the fountain in front of the UMC in honor of Trumbo.

As the entertainment editor of the Colorado Daily at the time, Bronson Hilliard wrote an editorial encouraging the regents to rename of the fountain. Hilliard, who has a 40-year association with the university, first as a student and then working in various editorial and communications roles with the university, now serves as the senior director, academic communications, for the Office of Strategic Relations and Communications at CU Boulder.

In a recent interview with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine, Hilliard reflected on his admiration for Trumbo, his desire to see the CU regents recognize Trumbo, his recollections of meeting actor Kirk Douglas and notable entertainment figures who attended the fountain dedication ceremony, and his thoughts on why Trumbo’s legacy remains important today. His responses were lightly edited and condensed for space.

Question: Do you think it’s fair to call Trumbo the most prominent former CU student to find big success in Hollywood?

Hilliard: It would have to be Trumbo and Robert Redford together. Trumbo was certainly the first. All through the 1940s, it’s safe to say Trumbo was not only the best screenwriter in Hollywood, but he was the highest paid and he was one of the most prolific. He was the kind of guy who could write a screenplay in a very short amount of time, which made him in high demand. He was also a great re-writer of screen scripts. He was a feisty guy, but he was a brilliant writer.

Question: In 1947, Trumbo and other members of the Hollywood 10 got called before Congress for hearings on the supposed communist infiltration of Hollywood. Others in the entertainment industry cooperated with Congress; why do you think Trumbo and his compatriots refused to do so, even when faced with going to prison?

Hilliard: Some named names, and some didn’t. Trumbo wouldn’t have it. Trumbo, his value was, he’s not going to turn his back on his friends. He was loyal to his friends. I don’t think he was loyal to the Communist Party, although he was a member at one point. But Trumbo was not going to turn his back on his friends, so he basically told the committee they could stick it. …

The fountain court outside the CU Boulder University Memorial Center was renamed in honor of Dalton Trumbo in 1993. (Photo: Glenn Asakawa/CU Boulder)

Trumbo and the other Hollywood 10 had a code of honor with each other. They had a certain set of values they believed in as writers and as creative people. That’s what I admired him for, even though I didn’t agree with them (the Hollywood 10) about everything.

One of my other heroes is (actor and director) John Huston. He formed a group called the Committee in Support of the First Amendment. In his biography, Huston talked about the fact he didn’t agree with or like all of these guys—he thought some of them were very doctrinaire—but he thought they had a right to believe what they wanted to under the First Amendment without going to prison. He believed they had the right to believe whatever they believed, even though some of them were a pain in the ass.

Question: While Congress grilled the Hollywood 10 about their supposed communist sympathies, it was actually the Hollywood studio heads who had them blacklisted, correct?

Hilliard: Yes, and there’s an interesting story there. Most of the major film studio executives in the 1940s were Jewish, and they had to go the extra mile to show that they were true Americans, because of antisemitism and anti-immigration sentiments, which were alive and well then as now.

Some of the Hollywood studio heads held out for as long as they could to try to persuade Congress to back down a little bit. And then finally it was, ‘OK, let us handle this.’ And they handled it by creating the blacklist. …

This debate is an essential American debate, and it rises up at different times. And the rise of digital media culture has resurrected a whole new set of discussions about what are the limits of free speech. What are the limits of free expression? When does expression become conduct or does expression become conduct?

The blacklist raised the question for the first time on a large scale in American history.

Question: How did Trumbo overcome being blacklisted?

Hilliard: Kirk Douglas always said he broke the blacklist by crediting “Spartacus” to Trumbo. I actually think that’s not true; I think (director) Otto Preminger did it first with “Exodus.”

But a lot of Hollywood careers never recovered. And that’s also true of academics. A lot of academics were purged at that same time and were not able to return to academia. It was tragic. And none of these people represented a threat to the United States.

Blacklist history

Former CU Boulder Department of Physics faculty member Frank Oppenheimer was called before the HUAC in 1949 and eventually forced to resign his position at the University of Minnesota. Learn more about how CU Boulder supported him in joining the physics faculty.

Trumbo was luckier than others. He took his family to Mexico and worked there, and he ghost wrote low-budget films and was able to eke out a living during the blacklist.

Question: When the CU regents officially dedicated the fountain to Trumbo in 1993, you were there?

Hilliard: I was. On the day of the event, I met Kirk Douglas in the basement of the UMC over by the bowling alley. He was coming out of the bathroom, and some people were escorting him. I had been off doing some little task, and I literally just sort of bumped into him in the UMC.

I was introduced to him by one of the organizers of the event, and he actually called me by my first name—someone had apparently mentioned me to him. He said, ‘Bronson, it’s such a pleasure to meet you.’ He looked me right in the eye and he said, ‘Thank you so much for your efforts in advocating for this.’

Dalton Trumbo was renowned for writing in the bathtub. (Photo: Mitzi Trumbo)

And he said something very funny about Trumbo. A reporter asked him what Trumbo would think about all this. And he said, ‘Well, Trumbo would completely love this. He would be holding court with reporters, and he would immediately refer to it as ‘my fountain.’ …

And incidentally, Dalton Trumbo’s widow, Cleo, was there, and his son, Christopher, and one of his daughters. So was Ring Lardner Jr., who wrote the screenplay for “M.A.S.H.” the movie and also was blacklisted, and Jean Rouverol Butler, who was a screenwriter and who was married to (screenwriter) Hugo Butler—the couple were close friends and associates with members of the Hollywood 10.

But it was a magical day. Everybody got up and made speeches about Trumbo, about the importance of free speech, about the need to be vigilant about free speech and about the role Trumbo had played, along with the Hollywood 10, in defying congressional inquisitors.

I was greatly moved by the whole thing.

Question: Hollywood recognized Trumbo in 2015 with the film “Trumbo,” which examined his life and the sacrifices he made for his beliefs. What did you think of the film?

Hilliard: I loved it. I thought (actor) Bryan Cranston did a great job, based upon the two biographies of Trumbo that I’ve read. Cranston really captured both the idealism of Trumbo and the idea of Trumbo as a businessman. He was a wheeler dealer. He knew the Hollywood system and how to make money. The film captured the way he was hustling to write screenplays for the low-budget film company (after he was blacklisted).

Trumbo was this great coming together of the practical and the ideal. He knew the ins and outs of the business of Hollywood … but he also had a tremendous set of principles and ideals that undergirded it all. It was great to see those two qualities embodied in a single person.

Dalton Trumbo, seen here in his mugshot, served 10 months in the federal correctional institution in Ashland, Kentucky, in 1950; he was convicted of contempt of Congress. (Photo: Federal Bureau of Prisons)

Trumbo is truly one of my heroes. In fact, in my office, I have a picture of him on my bookshelf, so he’s with me every day.

What are your thoughts on how Trumbo is viewed today, in retrospect?

Hilliard: He’s a reminder that it takes a really tough and resilient person to carry forward your beliefs to the point of profound personal disadvantage. … I think today we have a lot of people who are keyboard warriors, and they want to get on social media and get outraged, but they don’t put any personal principles on the line to do that.

Trumbo was willing to go to jail and to endure not only personal sacrifice for himself, but his entire family. That was an ordeal for the Trumbo family to support him while he was in jail and to make ends meet. And then he had to rebuild his career.

But that’s what’s to love about the people who are willing to put their lives and their careers on the line for what they believe in and who are not willing to sell out their friends. Those are people worth admiring.

And the sad thing is, I don’t think people think about Dalton Trumbo today. I think they should. I think every activist, of any persuasion, ought to know the life of Dalton Trumbo.

And I think we could all, as Americans, use a dose of the fortitude that Trumbo had, and the combining of the practical and the ideal the way he did to me is just amazing. We could use more of that practical mindedness. Trumbo accepted the consequences of his politics and his idealism—and he set about trying to have a great life anyway. And he did it. That’s more than admirable.

Top image: Dalton Trumbo speaks before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in Washington, D.C. Oct. 28, 1947. (Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

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For some women, STEM may not be the great equalizer

Anonymous — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 06:00:00 +0000

For some women, STEM may not be the great equalizer Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/17/2024 - 00:00

Chris Quirk

In newly published book, CU economics alumna Susan Averett analyzes whether STEM fields offer an equal path to prosperity for all women

When Susan Averett began her study of economics as an undergraduate, she recalls that the prevailing credo in the discipline was to adhere closely to the analysis of production, consumption and related topics.

That changed when she arrived at the University of Colorado Boulder to begin work on her PhD in economics. “I got really interested in the economics of gender, and (former faculty member) Elizabeth Peters, a true mentor in every sense of the word, was absolutely instrumental in that,” Averett says.

Peters taught courses in labor economics and economic demography that expanded Averett’s thinking. “It made me understand that economics can be used to look at questions like fertility, marriage and discrimination—things outside the purview of mainstream economics.”

CU Boulder economics alumna Susan Averett researches the economics of gender, with a focus on labor and health economics and gender outcomes.

What she learned about economics at CU Boulder informed Disparate Measures: The Intersectional Economics of Women in STEM Work, her recently released book written with Mary Armstrong.

Averett, now the Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, has gone on to become a renowned scholar in the field of economic demography, which looks at how economic factors affect various groups of people in society. Her work to date encompasses labor and health economics, with a focus on gender outcomes.

In Disparate Measures, Averett and Armstrong analyze how different groups of women have fared in STEM fields, and whether the presumption that STEM jobs broadly present a pathway to prosperity holds up.

Well-documented pay gap

The pay gap between women and men in the workplace is well documented, Averett notes. A Pew Research Center report last year found that white women earned 83% of what white men earned, and Black and Hispanic women earned far less. And while the report stated that the proportion of women in managerial positions in STEM fields was on the rise, they are nowhere near parity with men.

Averett says the idea for the book was to analyze exactly how much women had benefitted from STEM employment—sometimes called the STEM premium—and to do it in a granular way, looking at subgroups of women to identify differences in outcomes for women in varied demographics.

“The idea is that STEM is being sold as this great equalizer for women, good for innovation and good for the economy,” Averett says. “We took a different tack, and asked what actually happens once women are in the workforce.”

In the book, Averett and Armstrong, whose field is women and gender studies, worked from the massive trove of economic and demographic data in the American Community Survey, which the U.S. Census Bureau generates from questionnaires sent to a large sample of households.

Disparate Measures analyzes how different groups of women have fared in STEM fields, and whether the presumption that STEM jobs broadly present a pathway to prosperity holds up.

Averett and her colleague wrote eight case studies on different subgroups of women, four on more standard demographics (Black women, American Indian and Alaska Native women, Asian and Pacific Islander women and Hispanic/Latina women), and four on groups of women not often separated out in studies of this kind (foreign-born women, women with disabilities, Queer women, and mothers).

The approach is what Averett calls an economic analysis of the population groups in an intersectional way, meaning that the study takes into account that people belong to more than one demographic group at the same time, such as women who are Black, or a men who have a disability.

“Everybody has different identities, and the idea was to make groups that have been invisible, visible,” Averett explains. “For example, with Black women, we looked at foreign-born Black women versus native-born Black women. With Asian women, we separate out Pacific Islander from AAPI, because they are usually grouped together.”

Inequality in the STEM economy

The results of the analysis are stark. Among Black women, 2.7% work in a STEM field, as opposed to 11% of white men. “In general, Black women as compared to white non-Hispanic men are poorly represented in the fields of engineering and STEM management,” Averett says. “Furthermore, Black women do not have wage parity with white men in any area of STEM work. They earn 75% of white men’s wages in STEM management, 76% in computer or math jobs, 78% in the physical and life sciences and 79% in engineering.”

In STEM-related occupations, such as medical fields, foreign-born Black women earn more than those born in the United States, across the board, she notes.

Averett says she hopes that this granular study will prompt policymakers and those who manage personnel in STEM fields to think equality in STEM. “Our use of an intersectional lens allows us to see that economic inequality is woven into the STEM economy. STEM wage gaps should be part of our thinking about how groups fare in STEM, but a continued focus on the STEM premium distracts from that.”

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In newly published book, CU economics alumna Susan Averett analyzes whether STEM fields offer an equal path to prosperity for all women.

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Afghanistan did not have to be Vietnam 2.0, says former intelligence advisor

Anonymous — Thu, 30 May 2024 18:52:16 +0000

Afghanistan did not have to be Vietnam 2.0, says former intelligence advisor Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/30/2024 - 12:52

Bradley Worrell

Gail Nelson, a career intelligence officer and CU Boulder alumnus, advised Afghan military intelligence leaders after the United States drove the Taliban from power

It’s been almost three years since the Afghanistan government fell to the Taliban, and with the passage of time some have come to believe that America’s efforts to install and support a government that was democratic and friendly to the West were doomed from the start.

Gail Nelson is not one of them.

“It didn’t have to be that way,” he says. “If there was more respect and authority given to the Afghan leaders to take responsibility for combating the Taliban, things might have been different. I can’t say for sure the outcome would have changed, but at least the responsibility would have been more on the Afghans and less on the U.S. and NATO.”

Nelson speaks from experience. A University of Colorado Boulder graduate with master’s and doctorate degrees in political science and a U.S. Civil Service and Air Force intelligence career , Nelson served as a military advisor to top Afghan intelligence officials for two years during the early 2000s and for three years during the early 2010s.

Gail Nelson is pictured in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2013, with the tomb of the late king, Mohammad Nadir Shaw, in the background. Nelson says he was optimistic about the country’s chances during his first deployment to the country as a senior intelligence advisor from 2003 to 2005 but grew increasingly concerned about its prospects during his second deployment, from 2010 to 2013.

Those first years in Afghanistan—after the Taliban had been driven from power by U.S. and coalition forces following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on American soil—were promising, according to Nelson.

Promising early years

In December 2003, Nelson was one of about two dozen U.S. advisors—all military veterans of senior military ranks —who were hired by a U.S. military contractor to work in Afghanistan. Representing different military branches and experienced in different fields, all were hired to advise top Afghan defense and intelligence officials.

“ We and the Afghans had radically different cultural backgrounds” Nelson says, “But we all had the common goal in getting Afghans out from under their experience of Soviet occupation and civil war. They had a clear determination of moving Westward as was mine. It was a positive approach but there was much work to do in institutionalizing the change.”

Afghan intelligence leaders he worked with were Soviet-trained from the 1980s, when the Soviet Union occupied the country, so they already knew intelligence strategies and doctrine, but they wanted to embrace U.S. and NATO methods as quickly as possible, according to Nelson.

“Afghanistan’s top intelligence official personally asked me: Help us develop an organization that is Western-oriented in organization and doctrine,” he says. “They wanted our help learning to run a defense and intelligence organization aligned with the West. They saw it as important for Afghanistan to be part of the West.”

In Afghanistan, the culture grants respect to people based on their age, honoring the experiences of life they must share, according to Nelson, so the fact that he and many of his fellow advisors were older was an asset used for maximum effect.

“They decide how old you are, and then they decide if they should listen to you,” he says. “So, my fellow advisors and I had the advantage of age in our favor when offering advice to younger Afghan leaders.”

Nelson says his daily duties at the time typically involved meeting with top defense and intelligence officials to exchange ideas on military intelligence theory and practice, and to develop papers on intelligence production, collection, and counterintelligence. These matters included doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership, personnel, and facilities.

Plenty of expertise to share

Nelson had extensive strategic intelligence knowledge based upon his 26 years in Western Europe, where he was responsible for Soviet/Warsaw Pact and Post-Soviet political intelligence estimates. His master’s and doctorate degrees in political science earned at CU Boulder specializing in German and Soviet studies were invaluable reinforcements to the challenges that lay ahead.

He took mandatory retirement from the Air Force in 2001, at the age of 57, retiring as a colonel and retired from the U.S. Civil Service as well. However, after 9/11, military contractors were looking for individuals with specialized expertise, and Nelson says he believed he could put his skills to good use in Afghanistan, where national leaders were seeking to create a country free of the Taliban’s harsh rule.

Nelson is pictured recently in his library in his Boulder home. The framed photo on the bookshelf is the late CU political science professor Edward J. Rozek, who was a mentor. Nelson says what he learned in his German and Soviet area studies courses while obtaining a master’s degree and PhD from CU Boulder were invaluable to him in his job as an Air Force intelligence officer.

Although Nelson worked in Afghanistan as a private contractor, he had plenty of opportunities to observe the interactions of U.S. and NATO active-duty military leaders with their Afghan counterparts. He believes Afghans were willing to give those Western military representatives the benefit of the doubt for the first year or so that he was in the country, but things changed over time.

“U.S./NATO officers found great difficulty in adapting to Afghan culture and were not inclined to do so. They had no background in South Asian area studies, making it difficult for them to understand the political, psychological and leadership styles of Afghan military leaders,” Nelson says. For their part, Afghan officers generally found it difficult to embrace the primacy of computer technologies within their institutions preferring instead the affinity of direct human discourse.

Complicating matters, Nelson says the decision to limit U.S./NATO military personnel deployments in Afghanistan to one year limited how effective those officers could be working with representatives of the Afghan defense ministry and general staff leadership.

“Institution-building is not easy; it takes time,” he says. “And in a culture like Afghanistan, you’re not going to make changes quickly.”

What’s more, it was always clear to both U.S. military officials and their Afghan counterparts that Iraq—which the United States invaded in 2003 to remove Saddam Hussein from power and search for weapons of mass destruction—would take precedence over Afghanistan, Nelson says.

Despite these obstacles—and many others associated with attempting to assist governing a country with eight major tribal groups and more than 15 subcultures—Nelson says he still felt reasonably optimistic about the country’s prospects when he departed in December 2005.

He went on to take consulting assignments as a military advisor in the Philippines and Iraq.

Signs of a downward spiral

In September 2010, Nelson returned to Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, and he says it was immediately clear things had changed for the worse, in part because the security situation had deteriorated.

Threats to Afghanistan leaders including NATO officers were visible throughout Kabul with the construction of barriers on major roads and thoroughfares. One assassin attempted to kill the chief of military Intelligence in 2011 but failed to reach his target. Safehouses for advisors were primary targets as well, in which two guards were killed at Nelson’s residence, followed by at least two advisors killed in car bombs in 2012. Three Afghan children known to Nelson were also killed at the Gate to Camp Eggers by a suicide bomber.

Kabul had become a more dangerous place.

Meanwhile, Nelson says he was disheartened to realize that he and other military contractors were increasingly being sidelined by U.S./NATO active-duty military members, despite their deep connections with their Afghan counterparts. He says Western leaders also increasingly bypassed Afghan leaders as they took the lead on Afghan-NATO missions against the Taliban—a decision that had negative repercussions for the country’s security when Western forces drastically scaled down their presence in the country while Afghans felt disempowered to fill the vacuum

At the same time, years into the operation in Afghanistan, Nelson says U.S./NATO military planners still had not done their homework when it came to teaching U.S. military personnel about Afghan history, culture, and geopolitics.

Outside of the capital, most of Afghanistan’s population live in small, rural villages, many without electricity, that adhere to tribalism and Islamic traditions. Most of the Afghans who live in those communities never leave them, which creates a provincial attitude reinforced by complete indifference to events in Kabul, according to Nelson.

“So, a young U.S. military officer from Kansas telling a village chieftain how to run things is not going to go over well,” he says. “You can’t just march into a country like Afghanistan and think they are going to embrace a modern, computer, business-oriented model when 10 miles outside of Kabul they don’t have lightbulbs.”

For their part, the Taliban were successful in their propaganda efforts to get those villagers to see Western troops not just as foreigners, but as alien outsiders with no respect for the country’s deep cultural and religious traditions, Nelson says.

When he left Afghanistan for the last time in September 2013, he was deeply ambivalent about the country’s prospects. When the country fell to the Taliban in September 2021, it did not surprise him, Nelson says.

Marching into an area we had no real knowledge of, you see the lesson now for what it is once it collapsed in 2021, and we’re back to a Taliban regime.”

“We lost traction on the Afghan defense side,” he says. “They were no longer responsible for what was happening in the field. It was too late; they were not engaged. That had morphed over to NATO and the U.S. taking the lead in combatting the Taliban.”

What’s more, the Trump administration’s decision in February 2020 to negotiate directly with the Taliban—and to exclude the Afghan government—for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the country “effectively surrendered Afghan sovereignty,” Nelson says.

Lessons not learned

Today, three years after the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, Nelson says he is worried that America has not learned two vital lessons from its longest war.

The first is not standing by Afghans leaders who stood with the United States after the Taliban was driven from power in 2001. Specifically, Nelson says he is deeply troubled that the U.S. and NATO have made no concerted efforts to evacuate and provide asylum for top Afghan political and military leaders before or after the country fell to the Taliban in August 2021.

Of the Afghan intelligence leaders he worked with, Nelson says one was killed in the aftermath of the Taliban’s retaking of the country, at least one is in hiding in Afghanistan and one is in neighboring Tajikistan but is in limbo there, unable to gain U.S. assistance. Nelson says he is unsure about the fate is to several other top Afghan intelligence officials he knew from his time in the country.

Leaving those Afghan leaders behind was not right and sends a bad signal to U.S. allies and potential allies, Nelson notes. He says he has contacted the U.S. State Department, the White House and other government agencies advocating for asylum for those Afghan leaders but has received no response.

Meanwhile, Nelson says he believes many of the problems the United States faced in Afghanistan arose because military planners were not experts in area studies for the region, and he says part of that blame goes to universities, which he says typically do not offer master’s degrees and PhDs in area studies.

“If universities aren’t graduating MA/PhDs in area studies for various regions of the world, we are going to continue to produce people who know nothing about regional histories, cultures and geopolitics that dictate whether U.S. national security policies are a success or a failure,” he says. “We blew it in Vietnam, and we blew it in Afghanistan. I believe one of the key issues was there was a failure among the Pentagon planners, who were coming out of a background that was functional and not area-studies related.”

Reflecting on America’s war in Afghanistan, Nelson says, “Marching into an area we had no real knowledge of, you see the lesson now for what it is once it collapsed in 2021, and we’re back to a Taliban regime.”

Top image: a view of Kabul, Afghanistan (Photo: iStock)

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Gail Nelson, a career intelligence officer and CU Boulder alumnus, advised Afghan military intelligence leaders after the United States drove the Taliban from power.

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Physicist’s dissertation gets top marks from American Physical Society

Anonymous — Fri, 24 May 2024 15:05:33 +0000

Physicist’s dissertation gets top marks from American Physical Society Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 05/24/2024 - 09:05

Blair Seidlitz, now a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University, studied near-collisions of nuclear beams at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, and he did so despite having severely limited vision

Blair Seidlitz, who earned his PhD in physics in 2022 from the University of Colorado Boulder, has won the American Physical Society (APS) Dissertation Award in Hadronic Physics for his dissertation, the society announced.

Seidlitz’s dissertation research was on the ATLAS Experiment of the Large Hadron Collider, hosted at the international CERN laboratory in Switzerland. His CU Boulder research group, led by Professors Dennis Perepelitsa and Jamie Nagle, works in experimental nuclear physics—it collides nuclear beams (“ions") at the LHC to study the fundamental forces of nature under extreme conditions.

The major advance of Seidlitz’s dissertation was to use these nuclear beams at the LHC in an unusual way. “He was interested in the processes not where the beams slam into each other … but instead the cases where the beams just barely miss each other,” Perepelitsa said.

CU Boulder physics PhD alum Blair Seidlitz won the American Physical Society (APS) Dissertation Award in Hadronic Physics for his dissertation research on the ATLAS Experiment of the Large Hadron Collider.

“It turns out that in these cases, a photon emitted by one ion can strike the other, and thus result in rare and unusual ‘photo-nuclear’ collisions …. The ATLAS detector was not set up to take this kind of data by default. So Blair had to do a lot of work to develop the ‘trigger’ (the algorithms that decide which data to even record), to get access to this rare dataset.”

Perepelitsa said this kind of work is unusual for a graduate student; many graduate students work with existing infrastructure or use well-established procedures in research like this. “But Blair really took his idea from the conception stage, to implementing it himself, and helping to deploy it in person during data-taking at CERN,” a bustling scientific community at which Seidlitz spent significant time.

Once Seidlitz had collected the data, he then did a very careful analysis, which necessitated developing some new methods because nobody had really done this kind of thing before, Perepelitsa added.

The surprising result was that these sparse “photo-nuclear” collisions exhibited a collective “flow” behavior among their produced particles—“something you might only expect in the collisions of large nuclei where there are many, many particles that are produced and interact.”

“His measurement has come at a time when the scientific community is asking big questions, such as: Just how few particles can one have to still exhibit many-body collective motion? Blair’s thesis work, by paving the way to experimentally access these unusual datasets, is addressing these open questions head on!”

Seidlitz is now a post-doctoral researcher at Columbia University. He still works at ATLAS, but he now also works at a new experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, in which Perepelitsa and Nagle’s group at CU is closely involved. “So we are pleased that we can continue to collaborate with Blair very closely,” Perepelitsa said.

Seidlitz said he hopes to build on his graduate school work. “There are actually distinct categories (or types) of photon-nucleus collisions. My thesis work did not sort the different types, but studied them as a whole. In principle, it should be possible to sort these, although it has never been done. That way, we could study the ‘flow’ properties of each type individually, which would be really interesting.”

Seidlitz said that he and his colleagues will be able to study these types of collisions at the Electron Ion Collider, which is scheduled to be completed in the 2030’s at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) on Long Island, New York.

Seidlitz said he was surprised to win the APS dissertation award. “They called me while I was in the sPHENIX control room (an experiment at BNL). I don't usually pick up my phone, but it seemed to not be spam, and as fate would have it, it was an official from APS saying I had won.”

Seidlitz has charted a successful academic career even though he has Stargardt's disease, a rare form of macular degeneration that leaves him with approximately 1/20th the visual acuity of average people.

A wheel in the ATLAS detector of the Large Hadron Collider. Blair Seidlitz's dissertation research focused on near-collisions of nuclear beams in ATLAS. (Photo: CERN)

His vision posed many challenges, he said. “I guess the first challenge was learning as much as I could and getting through courses without being able to see the black board or projector, where I did most of my learning through textbooks.”

Seidlitz said disability service centers at CU Boulder and at his undergraduate institution, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, “really made it possible for me to succeed, from scanning old textbooks to make PDFs, to scanning students' homework so I could grade it when I was a TA and recommending assistive technology.”

Another challenge was finding a field of research that would work for him. “Because physics that revolves around particle accelerators is so big and complicated, large collaborations are formed and the work is shared. Some people build the detectors—something I could not do—and others set up data analysis and reconstruction, which is a lot of software to take the signals from individual detectors and turn it into a measurement of a photon with a particular momentum, for example,” Seidlitz explained, adding:

“This is something I can do! I would say there are still challenges day to day, but they are manageable, and I am very grateful that I am in a place where I can contribute and do valuable work.

Seidlitz grew up in Wisconsin and earned a BS in engineering physics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. As an undergraduate, he conducted research in plasma physics with Cary Forest, applying optical emission spectroscopy techniques for measurements of the electron temperature in the Plasma Couette Experiment and the Madison Plasma Dynamo Experiment.

The American Physical Society is a nonprofit organization working to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics through its research journals, scientific meetings and education, outreach, advocacy and international activities.

APS represents more than 50,000 members, including physicists in academia, national laboratories and industry in the United States and throughout the world.

Top image: The eight toroid magnets surrounding the calorimeter in the ATLAS detector. The calorimeter measures the energies of particles produced when protons collide in the center of the detector. (Photo: CERN)

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English alum flunks grades in new book

Anonymous — Thu, 16 May 2024 01:16:22 +0000

English alum flunks grades in new book Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 05/15/2024 - 19:16

Daniel Long

Jesse Stommel compiles two decades of eyebrow-raising in Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop

It was the summer of 2023, sometime in June or July, and Jesse Stommel (PhD, English ‘10) had big weekend plans.

He said to his husband, “I’m going to write a book this weekend”—a book about grades, in particular, and all the trouble they’ve caused.

It was a tall order for such a short period of time, no doubt, but it wasn’t as though Stommel were starting from scratch. He’d been taking a critical eye to grades for two decades and had published numerous essays on the topic, several of which had been read by tens of thousands of people on his website.

Jesse Stommel (PhD, English ‘10) Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop partially in response to his realization that grades are performative.

“I was already starting to piece these things out in public and have conversations,” says Stommel, who teaches writing at the University of Denver. “That’s how my writing process always works. All of my books are adapted from previously published stuff. This is because I don't think in a vacuum. I need to think alongside other people.”

All Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Stommel toiled away, editing previously published materials, organizing those materials into chapters, writing three brand-new chapters and then bookending everything with a foreword by Martha Burtis and an afterword by Sean Michael Morris (MA, English ‘05).

“And come Sunday night,” he says, “I had a draft of the book.”

That book, titled Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop, was published on Aug. 14.

I can give you A’s

Growing up, Stommel loved school. Grades, however—grades he didn’t love.

“I did really well throughout elementary school. I was super engaged,” he says. “Then I hit middle school, where I was being graded in the traditional way for the first time, and I got almost straight D’s and F’s in sixth grade.”

His grades improved the following year, but not by much. Being graded had sapped him of his motivation, he says. “All of a sudden I didn’t want to do any of the work.”

But things changed in eighth grade, thanks to his dad and brother.

“They bet me I couldn’t get straight A’s,” he says. “And so, the first semester of eighth grade, I got straight A’s.”

His teachers couldn’t believe it. They were flummoxed, and perhaps a little suspicious. How could he turn things around so quickly? What on earth was going on?

“They sat me down and asked me what had happened, and I told them about the bet,” says Stommel.

Yet that meeting opened his eyes more than it did his teachers’, he says, because it led him to the realization that grades were performative, character traits of a role he was being asked to play. “If what you want is A’s,” he recalls thinking, “I can give you A’s.”

This discovery, and the good grades that arose therefrom, freed Stommel up, he admits, relieving him of the pressure and judgment that often came with D’s and F’s. But it also made him aware of the stakes involved in the pursuit of high marks, stakes he continues to think about to this day.

“Whenever I see a perfect grade point average, what that represents to me is a willingness to compromise yourself, because that's what we're constantly expected to do in traditional grading systems.”

From grader to ungrading

Stommel began his teaching career as a grader, evaluating the work a professor had assigned to students.

“The experience of doing nothing but grading gave me an interesting perspective on what grading is and how it works,” he says. “It had nothing to do with the relationship between me and students. It was just this abstraction of their work and the quality of their work, as though that can be separated from who they are and who I am.”

Stommel wanted to do something different when he became an instructor of record. But what?

His first source of inspiration was CU Boulder English Professor Marty Bickman, who taught Stommel a total of four times, twice when Stommel was an undergraduate and twice when he was a graduate student.

“I really admired Marty’s approach. He didn’t put grades on individual work. Instead, he had students grading themselves and writing self-reflections.”

Stommel also found inspiration in CU Boulder English Professor R L Widmann, with whom he co-taught courses on Shakespeare. Widmann encouraged Stommel to think of assessment not as a judgment laid down from on high but as a conversation between student and teacher.

“She would develop deep relationships with students and then be able to tell them exactly what they needed to hear at exactly the moment they needed to hear it. And they trusted her.”

Stommel combined Bickman’s and Widmann’s approaches in his own classes, along with what he learned about teaching and learning from books like John Holt’s How Children Fail and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. And thus ungrading, which Stommel defines as “raising an eyebrow at grades as a systemic practice,” was born.

But that’s not to say Stommel believes his ungrading practice is the only viable option. Not even close. In his essay “How to Ungrade,” a revised and expanded version of which appears in Undoing the Grade, he provides a smorgasbord of options for the ungrading-curious, including grading contracts, portfolios, peer assessment and student-made rubrics.

The goal of ungrading, he says, is not to replace one uniform approach to assessment with another. It’s for educators to develop an approach that best fits them and their students.

“The work of teaching, the work of reimagining assessment, is necessarily idiosyncratic.”

Myths and paradoxes

But in a world without grades, wouldn’t academic standards fall? Wouldn’t students lose motivation? Wouldn’t they be rewarded for learning less?

The experience of doing nothing but grading gave me an interesting perspective on what grading is and how it works. It had nothing to do with the relationship between me and students. It was just this abstraction of their work and the quality of their work, as though that can be separated from who they are and who I am.”

Questions like these, Stommel says, reflect the cultural anxiety surrounding grades. And while it’s important to remember that this anxiety is itself real—“It’s based in real feelings that we have as human beings,” says Stommel—it’s equally important to remember that the problems from which it stems may not be.

Take grade inflation, or the awarding of higher grades for the same quality of work over long periods of time, as an example. Like Alfie Kohn, author of Punished by Rewards, Stommel calls grade inflation a myth, but he also believes concern over it points to a real phenomenon: the desire for education to be taken seriously.

“We're seeing all kinds of pushes on the education sector,” he says. “People are saying that education isn't doing what it's supposed to be doing, or it’s actually doing harm.”

That many teachers’ jobs lack stability, especially in higher education, doesn’t help, Stommel adds.

“When you see the utter precarity of educators—where most educators are not making a living wage; where 70% of educators in higher education are adjunct or on one-year contracts, sometimes even on one-semester contracts. When you see all of that happening, there is a desire to have some relief. And I think that’s when we talk about something like grade inflation.”

Nevertheless, Stommel argues, the claim that lower grades means better teaching is a misleading one. High standards and high grades are not mutually exclusive.

Stommel cites a former student to prove it. “Jesse’s class was one of the hardest I’ve taken in my life,” this student wrote of one of Stommel’s classes. “It was an easy ‘A.’”

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Jesse Stommel compiles two decades of eyebrow-raising in Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop.

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Forever Buffs family hails sixth generation (and counting!) of CU students

Anonymous — Wed, 08 May 2024 15:28:09 +0000

Forever Buffs family hails sixth generation (and counting!) of CU students Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 05/08/2024 - 09:28

Rachel Sauer

As Ainsley Baker accepts her integrative physiology degree this week, she joins a family history that dates back to 1886

It wasn’t so much rebellion, Debbie Baker admits now, but stubbornness. She grew up hearing endless stories about the University of Colorado Boulder, and not just from her mother, but stories going back generations.

She remembers her grandfather telling her, “Of course you’re going to CU” and thinking, “Of course?”

Ainsley Baker as a 3-year-old CU Buffs fan (left) and preparing to receive her bachelor's degree in integrative physiology this week.

So, she went to Texas Christian University in Fort Worth for her freshman year. And she loved it—had a wonderful time, made great friends, “but I never quite felt grounded,” she remembers.

She knew, in a way she couldn’t really put into words, that she needed to transfer to CU Boulder, which she did for her sophomore year. In a geology class that year, riding the bus on a field trip to the canyon, she remembers looking out and seeing the spine of the Flatirons stretching to the sky, seeing what seemed like the entire Front Range spreading before her to the horizon and “feeling a rush of ‘I’m grounded, this is where I need to be,’” she says.

In coming to CU Boulder, she’d come home—the fifth consecutive generation of her family to attend the university. This week, Debbie’s daughter Ainsley is donning a mortar board and gown to celebrate earning a bachelor’s degree in integrative physiology, becoming the sixth generation of her family to attend CU Boulder.

“At this point, I think CU is pretty much in our DNA,” Debbie says with a laugh. “My husband and I have tried really hard not to make our kids feel like this is where they have to go …”

“… but it’s where we’ve ended up wanting to go,” Ainsley adds. Her next-younger brother, Brennan, just completed his freshman year at CU Boulder studying quantitative finance.

A family history

Edith Corbin (left, with father Victor Noxon behind her) graduated CU Boulder in 1918; her son, David Corbin (right, with wife, Mary Jane, and their daughter, Nancy), graduated in 1948. Nancy would go on to study fine art at CU Boulder.

The family’s roots through CU Boulder are almost a century-and-a-half deep, stretching back to 1886 and the university’s fourth graduating class. When Victor Noxon, Debbie’s great-great-grandfather, began his engineering studies, the university consisted of one building—Old Main. His graduating class totaled six—five men and one woman.

Noxon, who was grandfather of CU Boulder alum and astronaut Scott Carpenter and who started the Boulder County Farmer and Miner newspaper, was father to three sons and six daughters—all of whom attended CU Boulder. Among them was Edith Corbin, Debbie’s great-grandmother, who graduated in 1918 and became a nurse. Her son, David Corbin, graduated in electrical engineering in 1948, and his daughter Nancy studied fine art.

“Both my parents went here,” says Nancy, now Nancy Heaney, and her daughter Debbie adds, “In fact, she was born one month before graduation.”

Nancy’s parents courted on the bridge over Varsity Pond and, after they married, lived in a Quonset hut on campus.

So, as Debbie walked around campus as a student, so many spots held memories from the stories she’s heard all her life. She’d grown up in Littleton and came to Boulder and the university campus occasionally for football games or the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, but it was different now that she was a student studying communication and pursuing an elementary education certificate. She was adding her own stories to the growing family chain of lore.

She was part of Kappa Alpha Theta, which had been her grandmother’s sorority. She met her husband, Mark, in Kittredge Hall and auditioned for women’s choir in Macky Auditorium: “I sang in women’s choir for one semester, then in co-ed choir, and we always sang in Macky for Christmas,” Debbie recalls. “That was always such a special experience, and I remember my grandfather would come and just beam.”

Mark and Debbie Baker kiss on the former spiral stairs at Old Main on one of the last nights of their senior year (left) and recreate the moment almost two decades later (right).

She and Mark, who represents the second generation of his family to graduate CU Boulder (plus a grandfather who taught in CU Boulder’s U.S. Navy ROTC program), played on champion intramural Ultimate Frisbee teams on campus. At the end of their senior year in 1996, they got an old film camera and ran around campus one evening issuing dares and taking pictures: splashing in a fountain, walking on the shelves in Norlin Library, kissing on the old spiral staircase at Old Main.

“Everywhere I look (on campus) there’s a memory,” Debbie says.

‘CU has felt like home’

When Ainsley—who is the oldest of four, with three younger brothers—was thinking about college, she considered a few out-of-state possibilities, “but not seriously,” she says. Even though her parents never pressured her to attend CU Boulder, she’d grown up hearing their stories and attending occasional football games, so by the time she needed to commit to a university, “I was pretty excited to go to CU.”

Her first year coincided with the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, so her classes were virtual. She completed chemistry labs in her bathroom and remembers concerning her roommates when she burned aluminum foil with magnesium citrate.

The nearby mountains and trails helped keep her grounded that year, and when in-person restrictions began lifting her sophomore year, she was ready to dive in: as a Young Life leader, playing intramural soccer, attending football games, playing cross-campus miniature golf with tennis balls, storming the field after CU’s win against Nebraska. She even appeared in a background shot of the documentary about Coach Prime.

Brennan, Debbie and Ainsley Baker (left to right) and Nancy Heaney (right) represent three of six generations who have studied at CU Boulder. (Photo: Kylie Clarke)

And when it was time for Brennan to consider college, he also looked into a few out-of-state options, but like his sister, it was almost a foregone conclusion.

“A lot of friends told me, ‘You’re going to CU,’ and it’s actually where I wanted to go,” he says, adding that it’s close enough to home and family in Highlands Ranch, but just far enough away “that I can have my own experience.”

“It’s been really fun to have this time with Brennan here,” Ainsley says. “We would have lunch every Wednesday, and I’d get texts from my friends whenever they had a Brennan sighting on campus.”

Like Ainsley, Brennan learned to balance school and a social life—playing intramural soccer with his sister, getting active in Young Life, riding a bike to campus in the middle of a snowstorm, getting trapped in an elevator with his friends and singing songs to pass the time until firefighters could pry the doors open. He also is part of the Dean's Fellows Program and President's Leadership Class, as was his father.

He’ll be cheering for Ainsley as she accepts her diploma this week—she actually finished class in December and is working at Boulder Community Hospital while she applies to nursing school—and trying not to pressure their two younger brothers about attending CU.

“I think our family has been really lucky to have this connection to such a wonderful place,” Debbie says. “For generations, CU has felt like home.”

Unless otherwise noted, photos courtesy Debbie Baker

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As Ainsley Baker accepts her integrative physiology degree this week, she joins a family history that dates back to 1886.

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