Young Women of Color Invited to Participate in Wells College Program

Twenty-first & Wells participants will stay overnight on the Wells campus and experience life firsthand. Workshops offering valuable information on college planning and life as a college student will be presented to the high school guests by Wells students, faculty, and staff.

High school students from Cayuga, Onondaga, Ontario, Seneca Tompkins, and Wayne counties and the cities of Auburn, Corning, Elmira, Ithaca, Rochester, and Syracuse are encouraged to apply. Young women who meet the outlined criteria will be accepted into this free program.

Applications are available at area high schools or by contacting Leadership Programs, Wells College, Aurora, New York 13026. Telephone: 315/364-3311.

The application deadline is Friday, March 20.

March, 1998

New trustee appointment

Williams is a retired partner from the Syracuse, New York, office of Coopers & Lybrand, where along with significant client responsibilities he served as the associate chairman of the firm's National Higher Education and Not-For-Profit Industry Group. He is recognized as an expert in college, university, and not-for-profit organization accounting and auditing.

He has served as chair of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants Not-For-Profit Organizations Committee during the development of the Not-For-Profit Audit Accounting Guide, the authoritative reference source for all accounting and auditing issues affecting the Not-For-Profit industry. He has authored a number of articles and papers and frequently speaks at conferences.

Williams has served as treasurer, president and chair of the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra and on a number of other cultural and civic organization boards.

March, 1998

Book gives new angle to poetic form

The poems "An Astrologer Awaits Your Call" and "What Makes a Song" are trademark Bennett pieces that maintain his identity as a leading satirist and fabulist in the world of contemporary letters. It's Hard to Get the Angle Right also offers many poems that abandon irony and poetic artifice in favor of direct experience. References are made in the collection to contemporary events, relationships, learning, and all are connected to a process of degeneration that paradoxically and relentlessly keeps the world in motion.

While the range in content is a notable achievement, many readers will probably be most intrigued by the poet's masterful, sometimes playful, use of form. A villanelle is a 19-line poem consisting of five, three-line stanzas and a four-line conclusion. There are only two rhymes. The first and third lines of the poem are repeated throughout the poem at regular intervals.

A form which originated in France centuries ago, the villanelle has been revisited by many modern poets. Bennett says he has noticed more interest lately in writing in all different traditional forms. "For myself," he explains, "I love the way villanelles repeat phrases and lines with a subtly, or maybe not so subtly, different meaning with each repetition, and also the way they build toward a conclusion. It's very satisfying when it all somehow falls into place. I guess I just have a fondness and affinity for the form. I haven't even considered writing a lot of sonnets, for instance, though other contemporary poets have written whole books of them."

He says he admires and often teaches the villanelles familiar to most college English majors: Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," Theodore Roethke's "The Waking," Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art," and W. H. Auden's "If I Could Tell You."

As an editor at State Street Press in Brockport, New York, Bennett has had the opportunity to read many chapbooks. This experience has made him keenly aware of the ways shorter sequences of poems can be arranged to enhance meaning and develop themes. "I did try to arrange the villanelles so that the separate poems talk back and forth to each other and also lead somewhere. They're related by mood as well as by theme, and I hope they work well as a group, so the effect of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It's lots of fun to put them into a meaningful order," he says.

However, the poems in It's Hard to Get the Angle Right were not all written with a sequence in mind. Bennett says the oldest of the pieces is "Somehow," written as early as the beginning of the 80's. "Then I don't think I wrote any villanelles, or very few, for at least 10 more years. Some were written within a few weeks of the completion of the manuscript. I find that if I'm working on a specific manuscript, poems tend to come to fill in the blanks. Or they get written in a particular form because I'm already working in that form."

While Bruce Bennett will no doubt continue to work in the modes that have established his reputation, It's Hard to Get the Angle Right stands as a fascinating view, as the title suggests, from a different poetic perspective.

It's Hard to Get the Angle Right was published by GreenTower Press, Maryville, Missouri. Copies can be obtained through the Wells College Book Shop, Aurora, New York 13026.

Other books by Bruce Bennett include Taking Off (Orchises, 1992) and Straw Into Gold (Cleveland State, 1984). He co-founded and served as an editor of Field: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, a ground-breaking literary journal, and was also editor of the journal Ploughshares.

A sampling from It's Hard to Get the Angle Right: Bruce Bennett's villanelle "Spilled."

March, 1998

Wells women help create new definition of competition

In the book Nelson, also author of The Stronger Women Get, The More Men Love Football, urges women to stop denying their competitive spirit. She presents a model of female competition that she believes can contribute to increased success at work, home, and in sports as well as enhance intimacy.

Her claims are built on an impressive foundation of 200 interviews she conducted and a survey involving 1,000 girls and women nationwide. Included in the book are interviews with Lisa Marsh Ryerson, president of Wells, and Victoria Muñoz, assistant professor of psychology at Wells.

Additionally, Nelson presents a tribute to her mother, Sarah Burton Nelson, who entered her first swim meet at the age of 70 and won Gold medals in the 1996 Arizona Senior Olympics and went on to compete in the 1997 National Senior Olympics. Sarah Burton Nelson graduated from Wells in 1946.

Mariah Nelson presents two models of competition: the "Conqueror's way" rooted in domination and a single-minded quest for victory and the "Cheerleader's way" where competitors are sidelined and celebrate the triumphs of others, not their own. Then she offers an alternative, the "Champion's way."

"The Champion competes openly, aggressively, joyously, with respect for her opponents, and without apology for her own desire for excellence," writes Nelson. "She competes honestly and ethically. She refuses to conquer anyone, but she also refuses to accept the second-class status of Cheerleader."

In her interview Ryerson talks about women in the workplace: "For women the perception is, if you want to go off and have a career, you must be a bad mother. Or you must be a workaholic. I say I want both, and I'm going to have both. It is a lot of work. But what I'm showing my three daughters is that they too will have many options."

Professor Muñoz talks about Hispanic culture and competition: "I have a hunch that Latina women can redefine the concept of competition but still be successful. We want to be the best we can be, but not at the expense of other people," she tells Nelson.

Embracing Victory is published by William Morrow and Company. Mariah Burton Nelson, a former Stanford and professional basketball player, has written for the New York Times, U.S.A. Today, and Ms. magazine. She has appeared on Good Morning America, Dateline, and Larry King Live.

March, 1998

The Seneca Falls Seminar at Wells

Following in this spirit, women college students will gather at Wells College from Saturday, June 13 through Thursday, June 18, 1998, to participate in The Seneca Falls Seminar: A History of Women's Leadership in the Public Arena. The seminar will give students the opportunity to:

• Visit historic sites including various locations associated with women's history in Seneca Falls and Susan B. Anthony's home in Rochester, New York.
• Meet with women leaders in communities, the state house, and the Congress.
• Learn from women scholars, both historians and political scientists, about women's past and present public leadership goals.
• Network, share experiences, and voice a vision for the future with women college students from across the country.
• Return to their campuses to organize an observance of the 150th anniversary of the first women's rights convention at Seneca Falls.

Wells is offering the seminar with the support of the Public Leadership Education Network (PLEN) which is celebrating its 20th anniversary. PLEN is a consortium of women's colleges with headquarters in Washington, D.C., working together to prepare women for public leadership.

PLEN was created in 1978 by Frances Tarlton "Sissy" Farenthold who was then serving as Wells' president. Wells President Lisa Marsh Ryerson was recently named the PLEN board chair.

For registration material and information call 315/364-3399 or e-mail conferences@wells.edu. The registration deadline is May 15.

March, 1998

Wells responds to AAUW report

Ironically, many recent public school experiments in single-sex education for girls were inspired by the AAUW's 1992 report which drew attention to the plight of girls in coed schools. "Girls and boys begin school with equal skills, the [1992] report said, but by high school girls fell behind, particularly in science and math," wrote Tamar Lewin in the March 12 issue of the New York Times.

The new AAUW report is an analysis of numerous studies on single-sex education. "Where research cited in the report did find evidence of positive effects from single-sex settings, it tended to be in single-sex schools, not just in single-sex classes within coeducational schools. But in many cases the difference dwindled or disappeared when researchers took into account the family income and educational levels of the girls in single-sex schools," reported Lewin.

In a statement released nationally on March 13, President Lisa Marsh Ryerson stated, "As the president of one of the nation's oldest women's colleges, I must voice my concern about the recent AAUW report. The authors, reversing a six-year trend in their own research, claim that single-sex classroom experiences for girls do not provide a remedy for gender equity problems.

"It seems to me very likely these findings will have repercussions for single-sex learning environments at the higher education level and in the private sector of education. An impressive body of research points to the fact that women's colleges are more beneficial to students when compared to the coed setting. How are we to resolve the contradiction between the higher education research and the new AAUW findings?

"Single-sex 'experiments' throughout our educational system offer a diversity of choice. While the vast majority of students will continue to receive an education in coed settings, the single-sex classroom offers a life-changing option for girls and women when the 'fit' is right.

"I believe the conclusions stated in the AAUW report encourage us, no doubt unintentionally, to turn our attention away from issues of gender equity in education and away from searching for creative solutions. If anything, teachers and professors today need greater awareness of gender in teaching, and parents need more strategies and options when it comes to educating their daughters.

"I encourage educators, parents, and students to continue exploring single-sex learning options. By offering alternatives, we will improve the education system for everyone. Only after we have tested these approaches much more thoroughly will we generate the research that truly and accurately measures their effectiveness."

March, 1998

Commencement speaker announced

Dr. Pericak-Vance was named one of the 100 people to watch in the next century in the April 21, 1997 issue of Newsweek magazine. She and her team at Duke University have built one of the world's largest DNA data banks and found genes for three major diseases: Lou Gehrig's, Huntington's, and Alzheimer's, according to Newsweek.

Her team's research on Alzheimer's disease, published in 1993, received widespread media attention. They reported discovering a connection between a gene, previously identified as having a role in heart disease, and the most common form of Alzheimer's disease.

Scientists have searched for more than a decade to find genes linked to Alzheimer's. They have concluded the disease exists in several forms with distinct genetic attributes that can be inherited.

Dr. Pericak-Vance and Jonathan Haines of Massachusetts General Hospital have been searching for genes related to other forms of Alzheimer's disease. In 1997, they unveiled further discoveries indicating they are close to isolating another gene believed to be responsible for the type of Alzheimer's disease that strikes people very late in life.

An article in the February 5, 1997 issue of the Wall Street Journal reported: "The researchers said they have discovered the gene's existence and have tracked down its approximate location after four years of tedious sifting through DNA gathered from 52 families in which Alzheimer's disease often strikes those in their late 70s."

One of Dr. Pericak-Vance's important contributions to the research is computer software she developed that reveals inheritance patterns in families from data previously considered too weak to indicate the presence of the gene.

These discoveries will most likely lead to the creation of a genetic screening test that can indicate who may run a higher risk of developing the brain disorder after age 75.

Dr. Pericak-Vance was a biology major at Wells. She received her Ph.D. in medical genetics from Indiana University in 1978. She is a founding fellow of the American College of Medical Genetics and serves as editor of the journals Genetic Epidemiology and Neurogenetics.

March, 1998