The Scripps Voice

By Ina Herlihy ’14
News Editor

A personal financial literacy program will be coming to Scripps College in the fall. Ina Herlihy (‘14) and Maddie Ripley (‘14) are forming the program in consultation with Scripps’s Financial Aid Director David Levy and Economics Professor Sean Flynn, as well as Pitzer’s Financial Aid Director Margaret Carothers.

“I became interested in promoting financial literacy as a result of talking with lots of students over the years in financial aid who didn’t understand how to use a checking account, how to budget their money so they could manage their expenses or how to use a credit card wisely,” said Carothers. “A financial literacy program can help students develop important financial skills they can use throughout their life.”

The program will consist of monthly workshops on personal finance topics including personal budgeting, saving & investing, student loans and credit cards. The program will also have Money Wise Women Mentors (MWWM) to educate students by holding office hours in dorms every two weeks.

“The dorm office hours will be a casual environment for students to ask their peers questions,” said Ripley.

Carothers and Levy submitted a proposal to the Scripps College Fund for Innovation and Sustainability in order to make their vision of a personal financial literacy program financially feasible. The funding money will cover costs ranging from publicity materials, flash drives and refreshments.

The average debt of a Scripps student by the time she graduates, according to the funding proposal, is over $11,000. Seventy-six percent of college students desire assistance planning for their financial future, while 24 percent of students claim to be fully prepared for the financial responsibilities after graduation, according to a study referenced in the proposal and published in the Hartford Journal’s February 2007 issue.

Ripley asked students about their interest in the program when the Scripps Student Investment Fund hosted tea.

“I was shocked at the initial amount of interest students expressed in this program,” said Ripley. “Every student we spoke with had some question or some area of financial insecurity. I hope that this program will change that.”

Students have also expressed an interest in financial literacy with the selection of their classes.

“The first time it was offered, hundreds of students from the 5Cs applied to be in Professor Dillon’s personal finance class, and then it had to be restricted to only senior Scripps students because too many people wanted to take the class,” said Flynn.

Tess Sadowsky (‘11), currently enrolled in Dillon’s class, expressed a wish that more students could benefit from taking it.

“It [offers] an invaluable lesson,” said Sadowsky, who is also the founder of the Claremont Colleges’ chapter of MoneyThink, an organization which teaches financial literacy to high school students. “I wish it was a required course for everyone. Finance has become an indecipherable code that no one can make sense of. The class demystifies the language. It is a language. If you don’t practice it, you won’t understand what is going on. You wouldn’t throw someone into Russia without teaching them the language. Too often that’s what happens to students. They go out into the world without learning this new language. That is how people get into massive debt.”

Since Dillon’s class is capped at 25 students, the personal financial literacy program and the MWWM will expand the understanding of personal finances to a larger number of students.

Already working to help facilitate financial awareness, Scripps has subscribed to portions of a website which offers students detailed personal finance mini lessons. USA Funds Life Skills, the provider of these mini lessons, has been praised as a useful tool for addressing students’ financial concerns.

“The website offers comprehensive lessons about specific financial topics, some of which will be covered in the workshops,” said Ripley. “It is a great resource for students to have their financial questions answered, who cannot necessarily come to the workshops.”

“The USA Funds Life Skills course has been available for several years,” said Carothers. “In the last 18 months or so, with the transition to Federal Direct Lending, USA Funds has made a significant effort to expand the reach of the Life Skills course. David and I, along with Sean Flynn, reviewed the program and decided that it was a good beginning for a program at Scripps.”

The creators of the College’s financial literacy program plan to expand it to the 5C community after first establishing it at Scripps. “My hope is that this program will take root at Scripps and grow over the next few years into a useful, effective program assisting students not only from Scripps but from the other Claremont Colleges,” said Carothers.

Students interested in applying to be mentors for the program are urged to apply. MWWM applications can be found at the Student Union and the Scripps student updates page and are due on April 15 to mwwm@scrippscollege.edu.

By Ethan Ritz HMC ‘12
Contributing Writer

PHOTO BY ETHAN RITZ. The Formalist String Quartet perform at Bridges Hall of Music.

The concert “Schoenberg and more…” was held on Feb. 13 at Pomona College’s Bridges Hall of Music. The concert featured work by Wadada Leo Smith, Alfred Schnittke and Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg was a pioneer of atonal music, which was the theme uniting all five of the pieces played. Schnittke and Smith’s pieces are presented as evolutions of the principals set down by Schoenberg about fifty years prior to their own.

To give you some aural reference points, atonal music sounds discordant and nauseous and screechy and jumpy. If the definition of tonal can be compressed to “each note is placed in a traditional, time-tested manner designed to enhance consonance and pleasure,” then atonal music is music where painstaking effort has been taking to ensure that the next note is not the note you want or expect to hear. It’s a system that initially appears chaotic but is governed by strict rules.

The first piece was Smith’s “String Quartet #4, ‘In the Diaspora: Earthquakes and Sunrise Mission.’” Smith is better known for his free jazz than his neoclassical, and there was significant improvisation in this performance. The piece opens with competing, erratic violin, which eventually sync up together in an off-key whine which serves as the backbone of the piece. Two violins play counterpoint and edge towards catharsis, but they are disrupted and the piece then descends into chaos. This descent is a common theme in the piece, and Smith resolves the piece with the whine theme held by all three violins. The rest of the piece is basically an exercise in “grating noises that stringed instruments can make” (including the first violin whamming his bow down on the strings like a hammer), and finishes up with a good minute of whine before each musician drops out one by one. What impressed me most about Smith’s piece was the use of a theme not based on a phrase, but on a single dissonant chord. It was minimalism at its finest.

The next piece was Schnittke’s “Piano Quintet,” which he wrote shortly after the death of his mother. The piece starts off with some devastated, hollow piano, which eventually gives way to a six note theme that Schnittke plays with throughout- stretching, compressing, adding chords and cutting notes, but still remaining true to form. Strings enter with a long, uneasy drone and the piano retreats to high register plinking. The second epoch is punctuated by some nauseous on-theme violin, and the piano migrates to a shortened three note theme and vicious striking. In the last section, the piano picks up yet a new theme, which is an inversion of the first and integrated with a melodic, tonal execution. The strings are stabbing, shrill, and at times overpower the piano, but the melody doesn’t quit. The piece as a whole acts as an insightful expression of grief and devastation, though the piece interestingly ends on a happy (or at least defiant) point.

After intermission, three Schoenberg pieces were played. The first, “Phantasy for Violin and Piano,” is a canonical twelve-tone composition. This approach requires each of the twelve notes on the chromatic scale to be played exactly the same number of times by the end of the piece. The piece is played by piano and one violin and involves a lot of staccato counterpoint. The violin moves to tremolo chords, and the piano is disgruntled and all over the place. The violin gets progressively furious, to the point where the threads of his bow started snapping.

The second piece, “Six Little Piano Pieces,” was comprised of minimalist, one to two minute long piano solos played in succession. “Six Little Piano Pieces” was one of Schoenberg’s first explorations of atonality, and it was readily apparent that he was putting forth effort to construct the most disjointed sounding piece he could while maintaining organizational rigor. Each piece winds around a theme consisting of three or four notes at most, inverting and compressing them seemingly at random.

The last Schoenberg piece was “Ode to Napoleon,” written in 1942 and released on the same day Goebbels publicly announced his “final solution to the Jewish question.” It was Schoenberg’s first political work, consisting of a string quartet and piano with a narration of Byron’s “Ode to Napoleon,” a poem decrying the tyranny of Napoleon Bonaparte (which can be read in the context of Hitler). The instruments played to reflect the words of the speech in a predictable fashion. In my opinion, this piece stands out more as a political statement than a work of music.

In the end, I found that I liked the non-Schoenberg pieces more than the ones by the headlining composer. However, I realize that it’s important to respect the works by Schoenberg as the impetus for the Smith and Schnittke pieces, and all works performed (except maybe “Ode”) were presented together effectively. The reverse-chronological order was clever, putting emphasis on the ‘de-evolution” theme. On the whole, a fine show, emotionally resonant in all the ways I wanted it to be.

By Tori Mirsadjadi ’12
Editor-in-Chief

COURTESY OF WWW.MERRYSORROWS.COM. “merry sorrows (un)Happy endings” is available in both paperback and hardcover editions.

Professor Roswitha Burwick may be retiring after this year, but not before proving that she has had an indelible impact on 5C academic community. Burwick’s German course on fairy tales, and its permutations beyond the German department and in the Core program over the past four years, has been the impetus behind a newly published collection of modern fairy tales. Editors, artists and authors involved in the project will be part of a student panel on February 24 at noon in the Hampton Room (above Malott Commons). The title of the talk will be “A Fairytale Journey: The Publishing of Merry Sorrows (Un)Happy Endings.” The students, said Burwick, “are very excited to talk about their journey and their project.”

All authors in the collection are students from the Claremont Consortium. The only exception to the 5C-student status of its contributors is illustrator Olivia Vieweg, of Bauhaus Universität zu Weimar, Germany. Thursday’s panel will include Professor Burwick, Julie Lapidus (’11), Jocelyn Price (’11), Anna Loris (’11), Andi M. Renee (’11) and Devin Von Stade (PZ ’11).

Merry Sorrows (Un)Happy Endings was published through Xlibris, an independent book publishing company based in Indiana. Previous Xlibris publications that have achieved critical and commercial success come from myriad genres and include Greatest Living Poet: Strange Gods, Bulk Prophecies by Mark Chandos, Demonstrating to Win!: The Indespensable Guide for Demonstrating Software by Robert Riefstahl and Doris Washington’s poetry collection A Blessing, Caring & Sharing.

Burwick, who contributed an introduction to the collection, is enthusiastic about the fairy tale compilation’s innovative and challenging content. She provides a short history of the courses from which the collection has been culled, and offers tantalizing samples—along with critical explanations—of the rich content to follow.

Julie Lapidus (’11) and Jocelyn Price (’11) served as co-editors-in-chief for the project, managing its overall goals and message. In addition to reading and editing stories for the collection, Lapidus and Price commissioned student artists for contributions. Writing professor Kimberly Drake was also a guiding force in the project, helping students maintain a cohesive theme and voice.

Lapidus emphasized that the book was Professor Burwick’s brainchild, and Burwick led and advised the project from start to finish. Burwick’s original German course on fairy tales was redesigned as a course in translation and then integrated into the Core program as an inter­disciplinary course, team-taught with psychologist Judy LeMaster.

The German course was what Burwick’s introduction called “a philological exercise” drawing on feminist, Marxist, and psychological methodologies and including analysis of films and illustrations. The course in translation (“The Fairy Tale and the Female Story Teller”) prioritized a feminist approach. In 2006, Judy LeMaster and Roswitha Burwick redesigned the course for the Scripps Core program under the title “Once Upon a Time.” Literary and Psychological Approaches to the Fairy Tale.” Judy LeMaster, writes Burwick in her introduction to the collection, “has been instrumental in reshaping my modes of inquiry as well as my approaches to texts, films, and popular culture.” LeMaster “has become a driving force in our intellectual partnership.” This final iteration of the course as “Once Upon a Time.” Literary and Psychological Approaches to the Fairy Tale was an interdisciplinary approach to the genre through the lenses of literature, psychol­ogy, film, architecture, advertisement, pop cultures, and pedagogy.

Burwick’s fairy tale courses have always had the same last assignment: students created a new fairy tale to represent their critical thinking and understanding of the genre. These fairy tales have created an impressive cache of academic content, a testament to the impressive talents which Burwick’s courses over the years have helped mold, voices of perspectives honed by the influence of not only Burwick and LeMaster but of the Core curriculum and Scripps College. Indeed, Burwick said that Core was instrumental in the critical scope of the collection, and that she “pushed the students to become professionals.”

Price, who contributed a story in addition to serving as an editor-in-chief for the project, said that the experience of working on Merry Sorrows (Un)Happy Endings was “one of the most rewarding projects I’ve taken part in here at Scripps.”

Merry Sorrows (Un)Happy Endings is a fitting culminating project for Burwick; it evidences the creative power of the 5Cs. The project was made possible by a gift from William H. Rudluff. It also benefited from support from Margaret McKenzie and the Scripps Core Curriculum in Interdisciplinary Humanities program.

Burwick said that she might like to do a similar project in the future, focused more on critical essays about fairy tales.

David Kaplan, a filmmaker also on campus for last fall’s talk on film and fairy tales, produced a short film about Little Red Riding Hood with Christina Ricci. Kaplan is currently looking over the tales, and is “quite interested in making a short film from one of the tales in the collection,” according to Burwick.
Lapidus encourages “anyone interested in learning more about the publication process or about our book” to come to the Thursday panel. In addition to discussing the process, panelists plan to read selections and answer questions. Books will be available for purchase, and book signings will follow the event.

By Vritti Goel
Co-Editor-in-Chief

Hilary Duff’s song “The Math” blasted through the speakers of Garrison Theater on Friday February 11^th as members of the Harvey Mudd community—along with smatterings of the rest of the Claremont community—milled together before taking their seats. When the lights were dimmed, Gary Kelly, Associate Dean of Institutional Diversity and his associate Angelica Ibarra, took the stage to welcome the audience. Maria Klawe, President of Harvey Mudd College, also spoke a few words of welcome to Harvey Mudd students and their families and to kick off the Harvey Mudd College Family Weekend festivities. The topic of this particular evening’s event? A one-woman autobiographical play… about math.

“Truth Values: One Girl’s Romp Through M.I.T.’s Male Math Gaze” was written and performed by Gioia De Cari, the woman who had experienced difficult times at MIT because of her gender. From the get-go, Ms. De Cari commanded the stage with her loud voice and her expressive acting. She made her debut in the theater when she was an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley and worked through her life at M.I.T. As the only actor on-stage, Ms. De Cari made use of her acting experience and aptly portrayed the various characters of her 75-minute play. The audience journeyed with her through her first experiences in the male world of the MIT Math department, laughing with her as she described the outrageous fashion experiments she performed while in school, and gasping in outrage at old-fashioned comments from professors and other students at MIT. While Ms. De Cari did not receive her PhD in Math, she did graduate with a Master’s degree in Math, and held her audience spellbound as she walked through the events that led her to change her mind and pursue acting and singing instead.

The funny, touching, and very pertinent play was followed by a panel discussion in which Ms. De Cari was joined by Gary Kelly and female members of the Harvey Mudd community—trustee Jennifer Lindsay (HMC ’02), math major Sarah Warkentin (HMC ’12) and math professor Rachel Levy—to discuss further the challenges facing females in the math world.

Harvey Mudd brought Gioia De Cari and her solo show to Claremont as part of a fun event for the Harvey Mudd Family Weekend. While Scripps College’s Family weekend will not feature such an event, families coming this weekend will be able to enjoy a performance by the award-winning Claremont Colleges’ Ballroom Dance team, hosted jointly by Scripps College and Pitzer College, as well as performances from a cappella groups Women’s Blue and White and After School Specials.

By Alexandra Talleur ‘12
Staff Writer

What type of writer are you? Do you gladly share your work with friends and family, despite their grumbles over having to edit yet another essay? Or are you a closet writer, keeping even your proudest pieces shuffled away in nightstands and desk drawers? Most of us are probably the latter. Though it’s true that the trauma of pulling an all-nighter for a research paper is a memory best forgotten, what about those other creations, both creative and academic, that you felt truly satisfied with?

Once a semester we all have the opportunity to share our stories and to flaunt that paper we slaved over. That opportunity is the Scripps College Journal. Since its inception in 1999, it has progressed from being a collection of academic essays to encompassing creative short fiction, memoirs, poetry and even artwork. At first open only to Scripps students, it now accepts submissions from all the 5Cs. This alone shows the growth of the journal over the years. And it is looking to expand even more with this spring’s publication.

While past editions have been filled with amazing work, Kimberly Drake, head of the Writing Department at Scripps, said that she’s “hoping that the energy and excitement I’ve observed in this year’s editorial staff will result in more submissions than we’re used to receiving. I’d like the journal to be a little thicker.” When asked why she believes the Scripps College Journal is relevant to us now, Drake said, “It features the best creative work of our students and the best academic essays of our first-year class. It displays for the Board of Trustees, the 5C faculty, students, staff and prospective members of the Scripps family the high standards we set here for students.” Wouldn’t you like to show off a little? Besides being a resume booster—no matter what your major is—getting published is simply exciting. Each year, the Journal is a beautiful showcase of students’ hard work and imaginations, and now that it features color pages and a cover with student artwork, it’s even more of an aesthetic achievement.

Somewhat shy myself, I am familiar with the insecurities of sharing my creative and personal work with others. As a counter to this, Drake has reassuring words: “I’d encourage any shy person who would like to submit a creative or academic piece to contact one of the editors or myself. We’ll gladly look at the submission together and see what might need to be done, if anything, to make it Journal-ready. We are happy to give our authors/artists pseudonyms if needed to protect their privacy. But most students are pretty excited to have a publication credit in the journal.”

If you are interested in submitting content for the Scripps College Journal to the Writing Center, the deadline is April 21.

1952: Military overthrows monarchy. All four presidents since have been of Egypt’s army or air force.

1972: Anwar el-Sadat expels Soviet military advisers, reversing Gamal Abdel Nasser’s close ties in the 1950s and ‘60s.

1981: Sadat is assassinated. Hosni Mabarak gets presidency.

Jan. 25, 2011: Day one of protests. Tens of thousands gather in Cairo’s Tahrir (Liberation) Square.

Jan. 28: Day four. Mubarak orders his government to resign, backing attempts to contain unrest and claiming to be “on the side of freedom.” He does not step down.

Jan. 29: Day five. Mubarak names Omar Suleiman, Egypt’s military intelligence chief, the country’s new vice president.

Jan. 31: Day seven. Egyptian Army announces it will not fire on protesters.

Feb. 1: Day eight. Mubarak cancels scheduled fall elections in favor of “a peaceful transfer of power.”

Feb. 10: Day 17. Al Jazeera correspondent reports that “a lot of anger [was] generated” after Mubarak’s vow to complete his term as president. Egypt’s military declares it will take action “to protect the nation’’ and convenes a “supreme military council.”

Feb. 11: Day 18. Mubarak resigns and turns power over to Egypt’s military. Mubarak leaves Cairo for the Red Sea resort Sharm al-Shaikh.

By Liz Lyon ‘12
Staff Writer

On Feb. 10, the Pomona College Museum of Art hosted another session of “Art After Hours.” The Museum is currently displaying “China: Insights,” an exhibition of seven photographers who examine different aspects of China’s rural past and contemporary urbanization. In particular, these photographers have focused on hidden or obscure aspects of Chinese culture and subculture. From black and white photography documenting the exodus from small villages into high-density cities, color photographs showing the private lives and leisure of transvestites and transsexuals in urbanized settings, or a pocket of matriarchal society in the rural village of Lijiazui, “China: Insights” certainly produced a more intimate, intriguing look at China. Most of the photographs were portraits, showing the individuality and humanity in people who are sometimes glossed over as part of a nation which erases the individual. A prostitute weeps as a customer leads her away; an elderly Catholic woman sticks out her bulbous tongue for a wafer; airline attendants stand proudly in their uniforms.

Playing in the back, appropriately distanced from the ambient music provided by the DJ, a documentary on the tourism industry in China was running, which added a mix to the media present in the exhibition. The museum has a series of documentaries, which are on rotation during the exhibit’s open hours.

Although “China: Insights” is the centerpiece of the “Art After Hours” series this semester, the program will feature a different attraction every week. On Feb. 10, “Art After Hours” had DJ Alex Eason mixing electronic, rap and dance music, making it seem like the space was going to be used for a high-end party. The exhibit was fairly relaxed, with only a handful of other spectators wandering about the gallery space. In previous “Art After Hours” sessions, there have been documentaries played on outdoor screens and live bands.  The “Art After Hours” series has cache, because it makes use of the gallery’s space and lighting in order to create a sophisticated, artistic, even counter-cultural feel to the gallery.

Even if you have already been to the gallery and seen the exhibition, “Art After Hours” has a different performance every week, so it’s worth going multiple times. “Art After Hours” gives a touch of class to a Thursday night. It could also serve as a great launch pad to a night out. With a live band, and KSPC’s plans to bring some local talent to the museum, the exhibition could be an evening in itself.

China: Insights will be on display at Pomona College Museum of Art through April 10, 2011.

For this Thursday’s Art After Hours there will be a 4:15 p.m. lecture. The curator of China: Insights, A.D. Coleman, will present and a reception will follow. At 9 p.m. CCLA and KSPC will showcase the talents of Treasure Mammal and E&E in conjunction with extended museum hours.

By Vritti Goel ‘12
Editor-in-Chief

As David Brooks’s book signing finally came to an end, the members of the Elizabeth Hubert Malott Public Affairs Program Committee breathed a sigh of relief. Another speaker had successfully brought a different opinion to the Scripps College—and surrounding Claremont area—community.

Though David Brooks’s views are considered to be that of a moderate conservative, the 5th Annual Elizabeth Hubert Malott Public Affairs Program brought him to the College because he is of a conservative mindset. The program, named after Elizabeth Hubert Malott (‘53), aims to “bring the world to Scripps students” through speakers with politically conservative points of view and expertise in areas of public policy.

Liza Malott Pohle, trustee to Scripps College and daughter of Elizabeth Hubert Malott, said that “College campuses are perceived to be liberal environments.  My mother’s program would bring a more conservative—and different—point of view to campus.”

And the points of view brought up in this speaker series tend to be different. The first speaker, in its 2006-2007 program, was Mary Matalin. Matalin is a Republican political strategist whose career highlights include running campaigns for George H.W. Bush, serving as Chief of Staff to RNC Chairman Lee Atwater in the 1990s and working in the White House under George Bush and Dick Cheney. In the 2007-2008 academic year, the program committee brought Liz and Mary Cheney, daughters of former Vice President Dick Cheney, to campus. Liz Cheney is an attorney who worked in Middle East affairs for many years. Mary Cheney is an author, and was the Director of Vice Presidential Operations for the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign of 2004.

The 2008-2009 program brought author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose opinions on women in the Islamic world have upset Muslims, to Scripps. Ali’s visit caused significant controversy within the Claremont community as well.

David Brooks’ predecessor, the 2009-2010 speaker, was former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich.

Said Pohle, “We choose conservatively-minded people, but at the end of the day we cannot know what they will talk about.” The Committee, headed by Barbara Bice and including trustees, faculty, staff and students, will soon meet to debrief on the event and commence planning for the sixth speaker in the program. “The committee will have a conference call to discuss candidates for next year’s speaker,” said Pohle. “That’s why we ask students to suggest people, so we can also have an idea of who students would like to hear from.”

By Alka Goel
Parent of Vritti Goel’12

The scene is all too familiar – teary-eyed mothers, fathers looking hiding their moist eyes, and the young girl’s simultaneous anxiety and excitement written all over her face.

The transition from school to college is a traumatic moment for the entire family; the event’s inevitability and all the planning and thinking that goes in to preparing for it just doesn’t matter when it comes down to it. The emotional cords of a life-long relationship with the kid drown out the orchestra of planning and attempts to make a “home away from home” for the young adult.

Admittedly, some parents and some kids make the transition smoothly … but most of us struggle through it traumatically. Heaven forbid if there are no siblings or if the college and home are far away from each other. It is just that much more difficult.

Paradoxically, while this is the trigger-point for kids to start transitioning in to adulthood, parents begin to feel a bit younger suddenly … not because the kid was accelerating their forces of metabolism but more on account of suddenly being thrown in to the world of teenager communications. In an effort to keep as much communications going with the kid, there is an almost holy immersion in the world of Facebook-ing, Tweeting and IM-ing. Parents learn a new communication language no matter  – overused and obscure acronyms alike such as LOL (laugh out loud) IMO (in my opinion) enter the vocabulary. Whoever said that an old dog can’t learn new tricks obviously has not been through this experience as a parent in times such as these. It’s a minor cultural revolution of sorts.

The young adults, on the other hand, learn a new language of their own – one that gets them to juggle several balls in the air. Laundry, cleaning, managing expenses, an intensified focus on their studies, new social relationships etc. are the students’ new song and dance.

In the midst of this, while the umbilical cord is further weakening (as it probably should – at least as some parents would think), the attempt is to ease the pain of physical and emotional separation. We embark on a serious journey of trying to create a “home away from home” for the child – thanks to the Silicon Valley for technologies such as Skype – at least we see each other, even though it might be in the virtual world as against the physical connection of before.

By Deborah Patton Partain ’78
Guest Writer

Motley to the View didn’t exist, there was no Scripps Store, every dorm had its own dining hall, and Claremont McKenna was still Claremont Men’s College when I began my years at Scripps. My daughter grew up hearing stories about the four-college water fight in September and the constantly stolen “No-Tell Motel” sign hanging outside of North Dorm at Harvey Mudd that flashed into my dorm window every night. I told her about the candlelight processional that spread through Scripps as women gathered to sing carols on the cold December nights and Thursday night study breaks that started at 10 p.m. in a Scripps dorm living room every week.

Reny listened in disbelief as I described the two hour shifts everyone in the dorm had to take each week, working a switchboard for incoming calls that looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Or the computer room that was a remote terminal in a windowless room in the Humanities Building where I tried to feed in hundreds of cards to get my analysis of variance to run in time for my next statistics class.

I came to Scripps with an interest in an obscure disability, autism. My interest was nurtured and became my passion—and then my profession. As a Psychology major I was able to study applied behavior analysis, children in contemporary cultures and developmental psychobiology, but still find time for classes in life drawing, Irish literature and Chamber Ensemble.

Perhaps it was my quiet comments about the diversity of intellectual pursuits available at Scripps that first caught my daughter’s interest. Maybe it was the tone of reverence in my voice when I spoke of the peace of Denison Library and the reading room that was my favorite study retreat that made her look closely at my alma mater. Perhaps it was recounting the relationships I developed with professors during my years at Scripps, sipping tea with the Writer in Residence in his office while we discussed Beckett and Brecht, where I knew my voice was heard and my opinions were valued, that made Reny choose Scripps for herself.

I never intentionally urged Reny to apply to Scripps. In fact, during her college search I was almost mute on the subject. Yet, I was thrilled when she shared that Scripps was her top choice because I wanted her to experience all the exceptionally unique qualities that made Scripps perfect for me.  Over the years many things have changed at Scripps, and the traditions have been modified to fit the times. Everyone has a cell phone and a laptop and TNC is at CMC rather than Scripps. But the relationships at the core of the educational experience remain the same; professors still care intensely about their students, the students are passionate about learning and women are empowered and respected in the Scripps Community.