Feature

It got dark quickly around noon on August 10 at the Elm Street house in Grinnell rented by brothers Jackson Breshears ’21 and Kort Breshears ’23 and their roommates.

“At first we thought the fast winds were super cool,” Jackson says. “But then it kept getting more intense. Out of nowhere we all got a little quiet. We had the same thought: Perhaps we should go to the center of our house in case there’s a tornado. We hadn’t heard of a derecho before.”

A derecho (pronounced duh-RAY-cho) is a wide line of severe thunderstorms with high lateral winds, comparable to a hurricane but without the advance warning. One look outside in Grinnell and other parts of Iowa showed just how much destruction a derecho can leave behind. For Grinnell College alone, the storm caused an estimated $2 million in structural and tree damage. For the Breshears brothers and many others, it caused a week or longer without power.

While the storm took a physical toll on Grinnell, it also sparked an emotional outpouring of camaraderie. From campus to every corner of town, Grinnellians bonded together to assist one another in countless ways, says Sarah Smith, director of outreach programs and events.

“It’s been really awesome to watch what I always knew was here in Grinnell — the great community spirit and caring for each other,” she says.

While compassion and volunteerism are important factors in storm recovery, it also takes coordination, preparedness, vision, and dedication. A dose of luck also helps.

“There were so many moving pieces to our storm recovery; it was absolutely crazy,” says Heather Cox, associate director of emergency management. “But somehow everyone fell into their niche and was able to make it all happen. I’m thankful that people came together and showed a lot of care for each other. It made me proud to be part of the Grinnell College team and to live in Grinnell.”

Trees and roofs take a beating

Of the 95 structures the College owns on campus and around town, about 80 had some type of roof damage. Most had minor damage with a few shingles missing. Neighboring trees hit a few structures, such as Chinese House, which had damage to its north roof gable. A tree branch punctured the roof of a guest house at 1002 Park Street. A fallen tree smashed railings at the golf course clubhouse. Two trees fell onto the Forum’s roof. On the north side of Herrick Chapel’s pitched roof, 75 percent of the shingles are gone.

With very few students living on campus, online courses, and little damage to residence halls and the Joe Rosenfield ’25 Center, the storm’s main impact was pushing the start of the term back one week.

“The damage shouldn’t have much impact on operations going forward,” says Rick Whitney, assistant vice president for facilities management. “Most of the buildings affected were auxiliary buildings.” Still, repairs may take months.

The College lost a large number of trees, which is particularly noticeable on central campus. Facilities management staff removed trees on the ground and on streets around campus first and then dealt with hanging trees. The last step is taking down old trees that have been destroyed, a process that could take six months or more. The College will submit separate insurance claims for the trees and structures. The damage estimate for each is about $1 million, Whitney says.

“My team [in facilities management] is really stepping up,” Whitney says. “As soon as they got off work, they had their own emergencies to deal with. It was double duty for a lot of folks.”

A natural disaster within a pandemic

Shortly after students departed campus in March to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, College leaders participated in a simulation to practice responding to a tornado in a pandemic. Cox says that made-up scenario involved limited damage and power outages, so it wasn’t a direct comparison to the derecho. But it was helpful.

“The scenario helped quite a bit in just thinking about what services we need to make available,” she says. “How would we make sure students would be fed if the power was out? How do we make sure people have access to an air-conditioned place? What we didn’t anticipate was the expansive internet outages across town and that a remote workforce would not have the ability to communicate because of cell and internet outages.”

After the storm hit, the first order of business was making sure students were safe. Without cell service, residence life coordinators went to residence halls to check in on them. Student Affairs staff began reaching out to off-campus students as well. Faculty and staff mobilized to check on each other. Dining Services staff members worked to determined how they would prepare meals.

“My team is really stepping up. As soon as they got off work, they had their own emergencies to deal with. It was double duty for a lot of folks.”

Cox says they put together an emergency operations center as best they could in a pandemic.

“We found a space where people could be together and still be socially distant,” she says. “We had President Anne Harris, Dean Elaine Marzluff, and Chief of Staff Angela Voos together so they could quickly make decisions. People could pop in and ask a question and get the answer very quickly and then go out and disseminate the information.”

When it became evident that the power was going to be out for a significant amount of time, county officials reached out to Cox about opening a community shelter at the College.

“As an emergency operations team, we had already thought about what spaces made sense as a shelter,” Cox says. “That changed a little bit in a pandemic when we are trying to think about how to set up a shelter in a way that we can easily sequester it from the main campus and not have it right in the middle of where students and employees are coming and going.”

Putting the community in community shelter

The field house inside the Charles Benson Bear ’39 Recreation and Athletic Center opened as a community shelter two days after the derecho, becoming an example of community solidarity and preparation.

Eleven members of the Grinnell Fire Auxiliary — spouses of Grinnell firefighters — went through a Red Cross certification in January to become emergency shelter helpers.

“We didn’t realize that we would be setting up a shelter so soon, but it turned out to be perfect timing,” Aundi Smith, a shelter volunteer, says. “We were able to get people’s phones and laptops charged up and provide hot showers.”

Several College staff members in facilities management, athletics, and campus safety helped get the field house ready. Local companies donated food, water, and supplies. Volunteers staffed the shelter 24 hours a day. In the first week, the shelter served 345 people. While it was a difficult time, Smith said those coming to the shelter were in high spirits.

“They were happy to have this facility open,” Smith says. “We had a lot of people come in and ask to volunteer. One student who stayed the night in August volunteered the next day and threw two other volunteers our way as well.”

Organizing volunteers

The community spirit also was evident in Grinnell neighborhoods. Hailing from Tucson, the Breshears brothers — who play basketball and run track at the College — were quick to check on neighbors and clear branches. Sarah Smith noticed a Facebook group that had many posts asking for help with yard cleanup or chainsaws. She asked if she could help get volunteers organized.

“It was pretty much a question of asking who needs help and who can help,” Smith says. “We had over 230 volunteers. The response was incredible.”

Adds Aundi Smith, “It’s a spirit of ‘you help me, I help you, and we will get through this together.’ ”

At a Grinnell College presidential search committee meeting more than a decade ago, as the committee members debated whom to select as the institution’s next president, Paul Risser ’61 (who, sadly, passed away in 2014) stood in front of a whiteboard, uncapped a marker, and suggested an exercise to rank the top 10 candidates.

The group, including Risser’s presidential search committee co-chair, Clint Korver ’89, went down the list, scrutinizing candidates’ strengths. “One of them was ambition — ambition for Grinnell and what Grinnell could possibly be,” says Korver, recalling the group’s interest in an outsider who could push the organization. “That was the sea-change moment.”

Raynard S. Kington was not the conventional choice to lead a small liberal arts college. Rather than arriving from another higher education environment, he came to Grinnell with decades of experience managing studies, people, and budgets at federal agencies — the National Institutes of Health, and, earlier, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He was methodical and data-driven. He observed things differently. He thought differently. And he pushed.

But if there were ways in which he seemed like an outlier, there were also ways that Kington could not have been a better fit. “My entire career to date has been a reflection of three core values,” Kington says. “The pursuit of academic excellence, the advancement of a diverse community, and the promotion of social responsibility. I thought Grinnell was undervalued in the community of higher education, and I thought there were opportunities to change that.”

Over the course of his 10 years with the College, those were the strengths that would help Kington make the difficult but essential decisions that would align the daily work of the institution with its most deeply held values.

“My entire career to date has been a reflection of three core values: the pursuit of academic excellence, the advancement of a diverse community, and the promotion of social responsibility.”

Meeting the financial need of students

Grinnell has long offered generous financial support to its students. Its twin policies of offering both needblind admission to domestic students, and meeting 100 percent of financial need for all students, are exceptionally rare in higher education.

Soon after arriving, Kington asked an essential but provocative question: Is the policy pair sustainable? Declining net tuition revenues and giving levels required Grinnell to rely heavily on a fluctuating endowment to meet operational costs. Could Grinnell continue to bring in such a significant share of students with financial need and afford to meet 100 percent of that need?

The question raised hackles. Abandoning the policies, said many students, faculty, and alumni, would mean abandoning part of the College’s identity. Failing to achieve a balanced funding model, countered Kington, would also mean abandoning the commitments.

Kington didn’t back away from the tension. He’s never been afraid to challenge the status quo, and he doesn’t think Grinnellians should, either. “I truly believe in the notion that colleges and universities should be marketplaces of ideas,” he says. “Especially ideas that people don’t like. They learn to deal with uncomfortable ideas, wrestle with those ideas, and have their assumptions tested.”

Joe Bagnoli, vice president for enrollment and dean of admission and financial aid, says when it became clear these policies were bedrock values, Kington offered a new way to think about achieving them. “Raynard took the position that what we’ll need to do is invest in our programs and increase demand among students and their families,” he says. “Charging a higher net price to those who can afford it will help us fund our commitments.” The plan included strengthening fundraising efforts and seeking greater market returns on endowment investments.

The ambitious effort, guided by a strategic planning process and 1,000 submitted suggestions, paid off. In 2012, Grinnell received about 2,900 applications for admission. For 2020, Grinnell received more than 8,100. Along the way, the academic profile of the student population improved — SAT scores rose almost 100 points — while the share of domestic students of color applying for admission and enrolling increased even more dramatically.

These days, with significant economic uncertainty and a challenging environment for college enrollment, such efforts have put Grinnell in an enviable position compared to its peers.

Building a cohesive global identity

When Kington arrived, the College already had a Center for International Studies and a Global Development Studies concentration. It also had regional studies, internationally focused courses, language programs, and international internships.

What it didn’t have was a way to harness all those strengths to create an institutional pillar, embedding “global” into Grinnell’s identity.

Todd Armstrong, faculty chair from 2018 to 2020 and professor of Russian, also served as the first director of the Center for International Studies from 2001 to 2008. He was appointed by Kington to co-chair a task force to address the College’s global identity.

“When I first came to the center, I was charged with creating an inventory of everything international,” he says. “And it became an impossible task, because it was almost everything.”

Kington helped guide a process that led to significantly more collaboration among the College’s divisions, academic units, off-campus study, and the Office of International Student Affairs. The result, the Institute for Global Engagement (IGE) launched in 2016. It created opportunities for faculty-led learning abroad, off-campus study, language exploration, visiting scholars, faculty collaboration, and strategic partnerships

“Raynard supported and helped facilitate a process that resulted in something new and visionary,” says Armstrong. “His leadership has helped us foreground the global as an essential and central part of what we do as an institution.”

Bringing together the humanities and social sciences

The success of IGE mirrored a similar effort to bring together the humanities and social sciences.

The divisions had a history of academic and physical separation, with departments and disciplines scattered across buildings and across campus, explains Mike Latham, former vice president for academic affairs and dean of the College. “We looked at the future of education and said, ‘The world’s moving in a much different direction. The big problems our students have to solve are inherently interdisciplinary in nature.’”

Faculty members asked what might happen if departments were intermixed, if professors collaborated in new ways, and if students and faculty pursued research in different ways.

The new Humanities and Social Studies Center (HSSC), which opened in January 2019, is the result of this philosophy of collaboration and connection. It preserves and renovates two historic campus buildings — Carnegie Hall and the Alumni Recitation Hall — and joins them with new construction to create new classrooms, inquiry labs, faculty offices, and research space for five interdisciplinary “neighborhoods.”

HSSC's four pavilions and central atrium foster synergies within through what Latham describes as “intellectual collisions.”

“Raynard saw this as an opportunity for Grinnell to do something pathbreaking, to allow our faculty to do something truly distinctive in higher education,” he says. “He framed those values in a way that was very powerful.”

Creating a more inclusive environment

In 2009, before Kington arrived, Grinnell conducted a campus climate survey, which revealed room for improvement to ensure that all members of the campus community were supported and engaged.

“The College was struggling to understand how various constituencies experienced being at Grinnell,” recalls Lakesia Johnson, assistant vice president of diversity and inclusion and chief diversity officer from 2015 to 2020.

“We were struggling to figure out the concrete steps that needed to be made in order to improve their experiences,” she says.

Kington established a committee to examine in depth how various members of the Grinnell community experience being at the College and how diverse identities — geographic, ethnic, racial, religious, and socioeconomic — shape their experience.

Kington was open to immediate changes but also pushed the College to create a larger, more comprehensive plan.

“He wasn’t waiting for the perfect plan to make improvements,” says Johnson. “The combination of concrete action and planning made it possible for us to move quickly and establish momentum.”

Of the 70 recommendations presented in an early Diversity and Inclusion Plan, the College has completed or is implementing more than 60. Initiatives include training and workshops; salary and personnel reviews; and recruitment, hiring, and retention efforts.

“Raynard set the bar high, and it’s only going to get higher,” adds Johnson, who says Grinnell’s diversity and inclusion advances make it a national model in higher education.

Raising the profile for social responsibility

One of the first ideas Kington put forth in his tenure was the idea of a Grinnell College Innovator for Social Justice Prize. The award would honor change-makers around the world who creatively confronted society’s toughest challenges, including poverty, violence, natural disasters, refugee displacement, disparities in healthcare, and mass incarceration.

It would be distinctive, without question. But would the investment pay off?

Patricia Jipp Finkelman ’80 recalls being skeptical. Awarding $100,000 to two or three winners every year was an unexpected step from a president advancing a balanced funding model. She wondered if the initiative could really take hold.

Finkelman, who was on the board’s presidential search committee that brought Kington to campus (and served as Board of Trustees chair from 2015 to 2019), became a convert. “Part of raising Grinnell to the next level was raising Grinnell’s profile nationally and internationally,” she says. “The caliber of people who have won the prize, the process Grinnell goes through to make the award, and the way the College integrates prizewinners — they come to campus, students do internships with them — has transformed student experiences.”

Opeyemi Awe ’15 was one student who had such an experience because of the Grinnell Prize. While she had grown up mostly in Nebraska, she was keenly interested in West Africa. Her possibilities and purpose came into focus when Grinnell Prize winner James Kofi Annan came to campus.

Annan established Challenging Heights in 2003 to support Ghanaian children escaping slavery and child labor and to work with at-risk families. He came to Grinnell and taught a two-week course on African development.

It was exactly what Awe wanted from her Grinnell experience. “It connected my domestic, American education to the rest of the world, which is where I really wanted to be,” she says.

Awe applied for a summer internship with Challenging Heights and witnessed Annan’s holistic approach to helping children: exploring economic forces that lead parents to sell their children into slavery and offering community support to children who get out of slavery. When she returned to campus, she was able to reflect on what she’d learned.

“I found that high-touch engagement to be incredibly effective,” she says. Today, she is participating in the Schwarzman Scholar program that gives talented students the chance to develop leadership skills and build professional networks in China.

Helping Grinnellians find a meaningful “what’s next”

Although Grinnell’s individually advised curriculum has long set it apart from other schools, its career services have not always risen to the same standard. The College had established itself as a top producer of graduates who go on to earn doctorates. It was not as successful at launching graduates straight into the job market.

Kington saw that the moment had come to develop services that would help students thrive not just at Grinnell, but in all the things Grinnellians might do after graduation.

“Employment opportunities were being missed from both sides,” says Finkelman. “Students weren’t being exposed to job opportunities, and employers were not aware of Grinnell.”

That belief that Grinnell had a responsibility to support students in all their future endeavors led to the creation of Center for Careers, Life, and Service (CLS), which could not have been launched without significant philanthropic investment from alumni and friends (see leadership donor recognition list above).

A combination of experiential learning and facilitated exploration is now part of every incoming student’s Grinnell experience as soon as they arrive on campus. The experiences and resources are designed to help students connect their personal, civic, and professional identities to purpose, pathway, and meaning.

It’s worked: According to a Gallup-Purdue report, most college students visit their career services office only once or twice prior to graduation, often waiting until their senior year. During the 2018–19 academic year, more than 84 percent of Grinnell’s student body connected with CLS an average of 5.6 times. Nearly 5,100 employers targeted more than 20,000 internship and full-time job opportunities to Grinnell students.

“Grinnell is now being viewed as a leader in this space because of innovative things CLS is doing,” Finkelman says.

Even at a time of extreme uncertainty for new graduates, the work students have put in with the support of the CLS gives them an advantage. “These are extraordinary times to be a student and to graduate from college,” says Kington, “but I think Grinnellians are up to the task.”

Leading in a crisis

If many of the big changes that Kington helped implement were the result of careful, long-term processes and decision-making, Kington’s final major acts as president were the swift, decisive moves he made in the face of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic.

In the early months of 2020, COVID-19’s grip was just starting to take hold in the United States. Kington drew on his extensive scientific background, along with the data gathered by a small team of administrative leaders, to make the decision to close down campus and move to online learning. Grinnell was among the very first colleges to commit to this extraordinary step (see “They Moved Mountains,” Summer issue, page 20). In the coming weeks, nearly every college in the nation would follow suit.

As Kington departed Grinnell for a new chapter as head of school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, he left Grinnell at a time that felt especially tenuous in the world. But the foundational work of his presidency leaves the College in a strong position.

When Risser uncapped his marker a decade ago to ask the presidential search committee members if they were ready for an ambitious president like Kington, they knew that they would be choosing someone who was unconventional.

But then again, so are Grinnellians. During his presidency, Kington pushed Grinnell to make the hard decisions and big commitments that brought the College greater recognition among its peers, better outcomes for its students, and closer alignment with its highest aspirations.

Kington wasn’t like the others. But his 10 years at the College have proven that he was exactly right for Grinnell.

 

Q&A

Anne Harris joined the Grinnell community in 2019 as vice president for academic affairs and dean of the College. She became interim president of Grinnell upon President Raynard Kington's departure and was named the 14th president of the College on July 14, 2020.

In her first few months in this position, Harris has demonstrated her collaborative approach to leadership as the College has been forced to navigate a global pandemic, face a long-overdue national reckoning with racial injustice, and recover from a derecho that caused much physical damage to campus.

In the pages that follow, Harris shares what guides her as a leader and an individual, and what the Grinnell community might expect from her in the coming years.

What drew you to higher education?

My parents put education above everything else. My father went to college through the GI Bill after serving in World War II and believed in the transformative power of education. My mentor,

Donna Sadler, art history professor emeritus at Agnes Scott College, showed me, through the example of her teaching and her life, the enduring connections between people and within communities that art and learning could make. Teaching, learning, and research — and how these three practices connect people and produce knowledge — are all connected to the drive of inquiry, which I think will always keep me going.

At some point, in graduate school at the University of Chicago, as we really became aware of how knowledge was produced, I came to see higher education as one of the fundamental institutions of democracy. The whole idea of critique, of deliberation and debate, of collaboration, and of arriving at shared understanding are the fundamental practices of a democracy — and I’m drawn to how our colleges and universities foster that practice.

What are the principles and values that guide you as a leader?

There are three primary ideas that drive me:

• Collaboration, especially as it builds shared understanding, and enables engaging in worthwhile endeavors.
• Curiosity, in what drives an individual and in what makes a community function (or not).
• Stewardship, the knowledge that there are resources to tend to so as to foster the talents and ambitions of individuals, a community, and an institution.

All of those principles and values guide my actions and I would want to work to have them be important in how we all relate to each other as well. As Professor Kesho Scott so beautifully put it in an interview about her being a 2020 Women of Influence honoree, “Leadership is a relationship.” In all that we do at the College, I think of partnerships and projects and how to foster and support both.

“The shared endeavor of being Grinnell College within adverse circumstances has created many new partnerships between faculty and staff, students and faculty and staff, and alums and all.”

Who are some of the people you admire or who have influenced your life?

The people who have most influenced my life are students — for 17 years, those with whom I was in the classroom and, since joining administrative work, those for whom I advocate. Faculty and staff colleagues, for the same reasons, also continue to influence and shape my life.

In terms of individuals: certainly John Dewey, who wrote in 1916, “Democracy must be born again with each generation and education is its midwife.” And Dolores Huerta, who said in 2016, “Education is the new civil rights movement.” Both of those quotes are vibrant inspirations for me, and I return to them again and again. The author Iris Murdoch is a favorite of mine; I read her book The Sea, the Sea at a time of great sadness in my life, and her meticulous descriptions of everyday life in the midst of grief stayed with me as a treasured way of understanding how the mundane can actually sustain us through the monumental.

The medieval mystic Julian of Norwich is another. She wrote several works, but the phrase that stays with me is “All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.” It’s not just a repetition of wishful thinking; it’s an insistence upon a possible future, even in hard times, and that approach to life resonates powerfully with me.

I am also very influenced by Toni Morrison’s resistance to one monolithic language, which she delineates in her 1993 Nobel lecture: “Whose heaven [the protagonist of her story asks]? And what kind?” Toni Morrison’s call to “take the time to understand other languages, other views, other narratives period” as the dynamic of the Tower of Babel is a lasting inspiration.

“There are tremendous opportunities to learn from ourselves as a community. I learned early on … just how much students value being together on our campus, just how much faculty sustain the highest standards in connection through teaching and research, just how much staff foster belonging and empower problem-solving, and just how much alums want to be involved.”

What have you learned about Grinnell since coming here last year?

I knew, and learned more fully, that Grinnell was a welcoming community, filled with vibrant and brilliant people. What the pandemic and the derecho taught me is just how simultaneously vulnerable and undeterred we could all be — living out these disruptions in our full humanity and talking through the experiences everyone was enduring, and at the same time, designing and producing and implementing an educational experience that will connect students meaningfully to knowledge and to each other.

The standards of excellence that have been set by faculty and staff have sustained us as well as driven us — I learned a great deal about how the love and excellence of what we do have made it possible for us to do it in the most adverse circumstances.

I also learned that we are a community that is ready to engage in anti-racist work, with the full realization of the commitment and change that this crucial work will take.

How have you adapted to deal with the unprecedented circumstances we currently find ourselves in?

I now operate within a dynamic in which compassion and resolve are in much closer connection. Where, before our society was overtaken by a pandemic, resolve might have been reserved for some projects (initiatives, for example) and compassion for others (e.g., relationships and community), the two come together for the tremendous number of decisions and logistics in which we are consistently engaged.

Has it changed the way in which you lead?

I do think that what we’re enduring as a society, as a community, and as individuals has made me even more aware of everyone’s labor, of how present everyone at Grinnell (truly, everyone) is to the work at hand. When there are difficult decisions to be made or complex logistics to work out, I now approach them knowing that there is both fatigue and creativity in the room; and I do my best to hold space for the former and foster the latter.

“… we build the sense of belonging so that more students feel that powerful connection to the College all the way through to graduation, and so that all faculty and staff and alumni have it as well, both for the College and for each other.”

How might the challenges we are facing now also pose opportunities for growth and development?

The shared endeavor of being Grinnell College within adverse circumstances has created many new partnerships between faculty and staff, students and faculty and staff, and alums and all. I’ve heard variations of the statements “When we return, I don’t want to give up this new relationship” or “It turns out, there was another way of doing things” many times.

The growth and development of new relationships, new appreciations of each other’s expertise and talents, and finding out what matters to people outside your immediate work has been noted; and now we need to understand how we have been irrevocably changed by the past six months.

What new opportunities might arise for Grinnell from the current situation?

There are tremendous opportunities to learn from ourselves as a community. I learned early on — during those very first town halls in March — just how much students value being together on our campus, just how much faculty sustain the highest standards in connection through teaching and research, just how much staff foster belonging and empower problem-solving, and just how much alums want to be involved.

In all of those lessons, I see our learning and living community under a new light that reveals the interconnectedness of our experiences. It makes me think about our identities and the spaces in which they are nurtured and sustained.

What are your immediate goals for the College?

Rebuilding from the derecho and enduring the pandemic while championing and living our mission are the most immediate goals I have. Then: that we build the sense of belonging so that more students feel that powerful connection to the College all the way through to graduation, and so that all faculty and staff and alumni have it as well, both for the College and for each other.

Some of that work will entail how we think about how spaces and identities are connected to belonging. For that, how we are thinking and moving forward with student housing will be crucial, especially the projected renovations on campus and the downtown student residence hall.

In the next year or two, I also look forward to the glad return to in-person collaboration and travel that energize teaching and research after the major disruption of the pandemic. We’ll be thinking about community both locally and globally again. Locally, we have so many great connectors between the College and the community through our centers (Prairie Studies, Humanities, Wilson, Rosenfield), which is another area of expansion I’m eager to explore. Globally, the Institute for Global Engagement has positioned us for connections all over the world, and we will be ready to form relationships with institutions and partners globally.

What would you like to see happening at Grinnell 10 years from now?

I hope that our sense of how we come to be a community of inquiry would be visible and accessible to all, so as to create a sense of belonging that sustained all of the constituents of Grinnell College.

We would have blurred the boundary between the campus and the community, starting with the downtown residence hall and the multiple points of contact and shared action that our centers provide; our definition of civic trust — of what we hold in trust for each other as a community — would have grown; our teaching and research would continue to reach wide audiences; and our practice of sharing the knowledge that faculty, staff, and students have created would benefit communities.

Within this framework of public trust, in which we are conscious of how knowledge leads to action that improves people’s lives, voices and narratives and experiences would be amplified through the shared endeavors of community projects — the inscription of names in the Alumni Recitation Hall, the expansion of student media and digital storytelling, the gathering of national conferences at the College, and an engagement with the history of the town and College, in all their complexity.

“I also look forward to the glad return to in-person collaboration and travel that energize teaching and research after the major disruption of the pandemic. We’ll be thinking about community both locally and globally again.”

One of the issues that comes up repeatedly in community conversations as well as on campus is mental health; in the Grinnell of 10 years from now, I would want to see more resources and support for mental health and well-being.

Through all this, Grinnell’s leadership will have become even more palpable within academic disciplines and within communities that seek to engage racial justice, socioeconomic realities, the activism of art and music and theatre and dance, the empowerment of civic actions like voting and voter education, and much more.

The Alumni Awards recognize individuals who embody Grinnell College’s mission of lifetime learning and service. Recipients have distinguished themselves by their service to their careers, their community, and Grinnell College.

Alumni are nominated annually by their classmates and peers, and the Alumni Council selects the recipients. The council this year selected 13 recipients. We’re thrilled to share their stories in the pages that follow.

Nominations for future Alumni Awards are accepted at any time. To nominate a fellow Grinnellian,  complete the nomination form.

They knew there would be pushback.

When Grinnell College announced on March 10 that it would require students to leave campus, transition to distance learning after spring break, and cancel all events through the end of the spring semester, it was the first Iowa college to take those steps.

“We had been working on coronavirus responses for some time, and we understood very early on what the threat was to the Grinnell community,” says Sarah Moschenross, associate vice president of student affairs. “We had three guiding principles: Protect the health and safety of our students, provide for academic continuity toward graduation, and protect the most vulnerable in our community. We knew we would face pushback in all kinds of ways. But knowing these principles and the College’s mission of social responsibility fortified us when the pushback came.”

Those early decisions by College leaders have gone a long way to mitigating the spread of the COVID-19 virus in Grinnell. But how did the plan actually become reality? How did more than 1,400 students from all over the world return home safely while students who couldn’t go home were set up with social distancing measures?

Student affairs leaders frequently referred to this action as moving mountains, and the list of what and whom it took to move those mountains was about as tall as a mountain itself.

“I have never seen a whole institution mobilize for our students like Grinnell just did,” says Maure Smith- Benanti, dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion. “We’re so lucky to work here.”

Planning Ahead

Well before the pandemic officially became a pandemic, Grinnell College was holding meetings about it.

Knowing Grinnell’s local medical facilities had limited capacity, a planning group led by Anne Harris, dean of the College and vice president for academic affairs; Angela Voos, vice president for strategic planning and chief of staff; and Heather Cox, associate director of emergency management, started meeting weekly in January and then with increasing frequency to map out plans and contingencies.

“When you are in the emergency, you are executing,” says Moschenross. “By starting in January, it allowed us to center ourselves in our mission and then execute it in action mode.”

Smith-Benanti says it was clear when the College went into emergency mode. “There was one day where I was getting so much communication at the same time that I couldn’t put down my phone long enough to get my shirt on my head.”

“I can’t possibly explain how intense it was for student affairs,” adds Jaci Thiede, vice president of development and alumni relations. “They didn’t have the time to think; they just had to execute. Those early meetings made all the difference.”

A Team Effort

The other crucial aspect to executing the plan was getting help from everyone across the College and beyond. Within student affairs, every staff member rose to the challenge.

“Our staff would identify a need and then take care of it,” Moschenross says.

Campus partners assisted in countless ways. Since the Division of Student Affairs didn’t have a designated social media manager, professionals within student affairs, the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, and the Center for Careers, Life, and Service pitched in to post information.

“Michael Sims [assistant dean for student involvement], Dennis Perkins Jr. [department head of residence life], Lauren Myers [assistant director of housing operations], and the residence life team made the moving-out process happen, aided by the organizational skills of Rachel Bly ’93 [director of conference operations and events] and numerous faculty and staff volunteers,” says Ben Newhouse, dean of students. “Guided by Meg Jones Bair, development and alumni relations staff helped re-book flights and reserve rental cars for students to get home. DAR also started the Supporting Our Students Fund to assist students with unexpected costs due to the pandemic. Financial Aid office and Information Technology Services removed financial and technological barriers. Vrinda Varia [director of intercultural affairs] and Megan Baldree [assistant dean of student success] provided direct care and case management for all students who needed or requested assistance. These were the moments where your best assets shine.

“Susan Sanning, associate dean and director of service and social innovation, and Erik Sanning ’89, technical director in the theatre department, drove their horse trailer into Des Moines to purchase totes so students could pack,” Newhouse adds. “That was something that was critically needed, but none of us had the time for it. That’s one of many examples of how people showed up in really powerful ways.”

Originally students had until March 23 to depart, but the College ultimately moved up the timeline by a week.

“That decision weighed on me for many days,” Moschenross says. “I saw the window for travel closing for some students. There was a real chance that students wouldn’t make it home to their families and that they would be here — where we knew they couldn’t access medical care in the same way they could in other places.”

Leadership Laurels

Another powerful asset in formulating a response to the unprecedented situation was having a medical doctor and public health researcher as the College’s president. Before becoming Grinnell’s president in 2010, Raynard S. Kington was principal deputy director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He also held several other roles within the NIH and was at one point a division director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“Dr. Kington has tremendous leadership with large-scale crisis management and decision making,” Voos says. “He’s a creative problem-solver, reads widely, and has a wide range of knowledge. All of those factors contributed mightily to our response to the pandemic.”

David Maxwell ’66, chair of the Grinnell College Board of Trustees, echoed that appreciation in an April 6 campus message.

“Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, [Kington’s] background as a medical doctor and a public health researcher has been invaluable in shaping our actions from the early days of this crisis,” he wrote.

Likewise, the leadership from Harris, Cox, and Voos was crucial in steering the College through troubled waters.

“Anne is a big thinker and a community builder,” Voos says. “Heather is incredibly organized and experienced at crisis management. We hired her to raise our level of preparedness for incidents, and she came here in the nick of time.”

Thiede says Voos is a problem-solver by nature.

“Angela works hard to see obstacles that could get in the way of progress and movement, and then does a superb job of removing those obstacles,” she says.

Grieving with Students

The accelerated timeline meant plane tickets and rental cars had to be reserved immediately. Past gifts to the College and the new Supporting Our Students Fund were instrumental in making it happen.

“I don’t know if all of this would have been possible without the generosity of alumni and donors who have given back,” Newhouse says. “That enabled us to do the right thing and give students emergency help to travel.”

While it was hard to demonstrate it during crisis mode, student affairs staff sympathized with students who were dealing with such an abrupt end to their time in Grinnell, especially members of the class of 2020, who lost their final weeks at college.

“We saw students helping each other,” Moschenross says. “We saw students celebrate in the ways that they could. There was real grief, and we shared in their grief, but we were so busy with emergency operations that we couldn’t take the time to grieve with them in the way that we wanted to. I think students have been adaptable. Because our students are already tuned into social justice and social responsibility, they came to understand really quickly what their role is to protect each other and the vulnerable members of the community.”

Smith-Benanti half-jokingly says that she doesn’t want to go through any emergency again without Moschenross and Newhouse.

“They would lay down their own health and safety to support our students, and so would I,” she says. “We tried to do everything we could, pushing ourselves past our physical and emotional abilities to do the right thing for our students. We believe in them. We love them.”

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Grinnell’s response to COVID-19 is rapidly evolving. See more about the College’s current response for alumni and the campus community.

What was it like to be in the shoes of Grinnellians as the coronavirus pandemic accelerated? Here, in their own words, they share their experiences.

“Included in my current tasks? Notifying people that their COVID-19 test is positive.”

Don Kraitsik ’70 practices family medicine at Gallup Indian Medical Center in Gallup, New Mexico.

My usual outpatient care of longtime patients — Navajo, Zuni, Apache — has been totally disrupted. I spend hours on the phone doing a variation of telemedicine. Many patients have no phone, poor service, no answering machine, no texting. Some are homeless. When I finally do make contact with them, they are suspicious at first, thinking I might be a bill collector. I have to convince them who I am.

The Navajo Nation has been hit hard by the coronavirus. On a per capita basis, the Navajo Nation has surpassed New York and New Jersey. When sheltered at home, many Navajo people have no running water (making hand-washing difficult) and many people live together in multi-generational large family groups. If one family member gets the coronavirus, everyone in the family gets exposed.

I have been asked to serve on an oversight committee regarding ventilator rationing if we come to a major surge and need to make moral and ethical decisions about who gets a ventilator. I have previously taken care of patients with tuberculosis and hantavirus. I think the coronavirus is unlike any other disease I have ever faced in its overwhelming threat to all humans.

I am not on the front lines seeing sick COVID-19 patients in consideration of my age. Many of my younger colleagues are spending long days in full personal protective equipment providing quality medical care for very sick patients. I salute, applaud, and honor all health care workers everywhere who are on the front lines.

“We had necessary conversations about what we each would accept for end-of-life care.”

Juliet Mushi ’05 is an assistant professor in the department of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences at Yale School of Medicine and is an attending physician
in the division of maternal-fetal medicine at Yale New Haven Health System/Greenwich Hospital. She lives in Harlem, New York.

My husband, Grant, and I had always talked about signing health care proxies and a living will, particularly after we had our baby, Kanaeli, last year. But in the busy-ness of everyday life, it always ended up on the bottom of the to-do list.

The beginning of the pandemic brought on a deep fear and uncertainty on my part. It was important to me that family members had clarity and certainty about our wishes.

It prompted us to finally get those papers signed and have necessary conversations about
what we each would accept for end-of-life care.

When it became clear that the situation in New York City was serious, we encouraged our childcare provider to stay home with her family while earning her salary. That meant Grant took on primary childcare responsibilities on top of having to work from home. Meanwhile, I was working full time at a hospital job.

It was challenging for both of us. We are both very career-oriented and have strong and independent personalities. But we learned again how to lean on each other during that time. We now celebrate date night at home every Saturday by ordering food, sharing our highs or lows from the week, and drinking divine cocktails made by Grant.

What keeps me going? Grant and Kanaeli, supportive check-ins from family and friends, the
7 p.m. cheer for essential workers, Afrobeats playlists, and meditation and yoga apps.

“I was up at 3 a.m. each night combing through the published literature.”

Michael Ison ’93 is a professor in the divisions of infectious diseases and organ transplantation at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

My research focuses on respiratory viruses. I’ve been tasked with being the chair of the data and safety committee for the National Institutes of Health’s COVID-19 clinical trial. I’m a member of the Feinberg School of Medicine COVID-19 Task Force.

When the first cases in Italy and Iran were announced, I was convinced that a pandemic was upon us. We began work to convert some of our standing research projects focused on respiratory viruses to include COVID-19 so we could quickly start work on these studies.

As the epidemic began affecting our medical center, I had a week when I was busier than I had ever been. I was balancing working in our COVID-ICU with efforts to get our research up and running and putting in place a program to get our sickest patients access to an experimental drug to treat the infection. I was multitasking and working 16-hour days only to go home and continue working from home. I was up at 3 a.m. each night combing through the published literature and Twitter.

My day is spent working on Zoom and Microsoft Teams calls. When I’m not on call, I’m troubleshooting research problems for things we would never think about before. Where can we see the patients who are infected with a virus that we strive to keep away from our other patients? How do we get consent when the signed form is infectious?

I know that with the work we are doing, we will have a better understanding of SARS-CoV-2 and its impact on our patients. Being involved with a team focused on cutting-edge care and providing access to novel therapies (and vaccines soon, I hope) to our patients is very rewarding.

”My mask sometimes frightens my pediatric patients.”

Rhashedah Ekeoduru ’03 is a pediatric anesthesiologist and associate professor of anesthesiology at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic was frightening for me, because my role as an anesthesiologist requires me to get close to patients’ faces to assist their breathing, place breathing tubes, and manage their tracheostomies. I am very high risk for contracting COVID-19.

Many physicians and I began wearing N95 masks throughout the entire workday. It is very difficult to breathe naturally while wearing these masks, and they can cause tension headaches. We previously only wore these masks when caring for patients afflicted with tuberculosis, so supplies were limited and dwindled quickly.

To protect ourselves, many of us sought assistance from friends and family members who had access to N95 masks. We also wore masks obtained from hardware stores.
Today, high-risk personnel like me have been fit-tested for special N100 masks fashioned with high-efficiency air filters.

One downside is that they sometimes frighten my pediatric patients, so I have had to get very creative in order to provide a safe and comfortable clinical environment for them. We also are required to place plastic sheets over patients’ faces prior to any airway intervention. This is a change in practice and requires imagination and finesse for success.

I typically tell my kiddos that we are pretending as though we are going to go camping. One of the camp activities is to “blow up the balloon” — the anesthesia mask and circuit that will put them to sleep for the procedure. I am proud of how my colleagues and I stood strong, adapted, and collaborated during an unprecedented and unexpected crisis.

Everyone has the same common challenge right now, so we are doing our best to uplift each other’s spirits. I focus on maintaining my health and wellness by staying active (I purchased a Peloton at the start of the pandemic) and maintaining my creativity through painting. I have also taken advantage of some of my newfound free time by writing papers on the importance of ethical practice in medicine.

I am optimistic that a vaccine will become available within the next year that will allow us to regain a sense of normalcy and peace.

“I feel for my patients who are in health care or work in grocery stores. Their fear is palpable.”

Robin Cook Kopelman ’95 is a perinatal psychiatrist and women’s mental health specialist in private practice and an adjunct associate professor at the University of Iowa College of Medicine.

I did telemedicine for almost four years, providing specialized women’s mental health services in northwestern Iowa. Recently I made a transition to private practice and was excited to be returning to providing in-person care.

On Tuesday, March 10, my son, a first-year student at Grinnell, texted me that students would not be returning to campus after spring break. Grinnell’s early response was a catalyst for our group being prepared to hit the ground running with telehealth before it became a necessity. At the time, we thought we were being cautious, but it really meant we were ready to do telehealth when it seemed an important option just a week later.

I miss seeing patients in person in my office. Having experience with telemedicine has really prepared me for this moment. I know how to troubleshoot technical problems, I know how to set up my background, and, specifically for my field, I know how to accommodate for not being able to see the patient’s entire body and losing the input that your sense of smell provides.

Because I work with patients in their homes, their connectivity isn’t always the best, so we run into more disruptions than in our usual care, for sure. My favorite disruption, though, isn’t a bad one — I love seeing my patients’ children and pets.

For many, the pandemic has been a welcome slowing of a busy life that created a different kind of stress for them. This is especially true for my patients who are anxious about leaving their house or being around people. Others don’t feel so alone, now that “everyone is anxious.” This shared experience can be unifying and equalizing.

“There will be no easy solution.”

Scott Fridkin ’86 is a professor of medicine and epidemiology in the division of infectious diseases, the departments of medicine and epidemiology at Emory University.

I left the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) about four years ago after 23 years working in outbreak response, mostly related to preventing health care-associated infections and health care worker safety, which included pandemic planning.

Now I teach emerging infectious diseases at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta. In the third week of January, I was responding to several of my invited guest lecturers from the CDC, which is across the street from Emory. That afternoon, I received a call from a friend who used to work for Delta and now operates a small airline. He asked if this was going to be a big thing, as he has called me during the Ebola, SARS, and H1N1 pandemics. In those times I often talked in generalities and nuanced responses. This time, I just replied, “Yes, this is the real thing. There will be no easy solution.”

In my course, rather than juggle guest lecturers and move planned talks around, I opened up three weeks to running workshops about COVID-19, working in real time to share how the government can and should respond to this pandemic. Needless to say, we didn’t simulate how the CDC would be sidelined nor how much poor information and inconsistent policy choices would influence the pandemic in the United States.

My classes have ended now. Today, work includes visiting nursing homes to help them with infection control. I help them manage their residents and interactions with acute care hospitals. I also am launching research initiatives focused on assessing health care worker risk for COVID-19.

“Our group diagnosed and cared for California’s first known COVID-19 patient.”

Christine Thorburn ’92 is interim CEO and board chair of the Palo Alto Foundation Medical Group part of the not-for-profit Sutter Health system.

In late January, our group diagnosed and cared for California’s first known COVID-19 patient, who had been a business traveler from China.

That gave me pause, because we live and work in Silicon Valley, where there are many, many business travelers between China and California. However, the point when I realized our work and lives would fundamentally change was the day the news reported a clear community-acquired case of COVID-19 in our local area. At that point, our triage of patients into our offices for care needed to change dramatically.

We rapidly escalated a plan to divide our physical clinics into “respiratory clinics” and “other care” urgent clinics. At the same time, we developed de-escalation plans for all of our ambulatory and clinical practice patients, which we needed to do to limit physical exposure of other non-urgent patients.

We needed new methods of caring for patients. Our larger system had been working on a video-visit project, which we had hoped to roll out over two years as the private insurance companies and possibly Medicare changed their agreements to allow payment for them.
Medicare said “yes” to paying for almost all care-by-video visits (except procedures and surgeries, of course) by mid-March. Within 10 days, our system rolled out a plan to allow for video visits not only for my medical group, but for all six medical groups within Sutter Health.

We are still working out the kinks, but it is humbling to see not only my clinician colleagues adapting but also our patients, including 80-year-olds using smartphones or computers with cameras.

I am motivated to work with my colleagues to develop the “new normal” way of caring for patients to remain as safe as possible, both for patients and for providers. We will need to remain vigilant about the easy spread and asymptomatic presentation of this novel virus.

What have I learned? Humans are capable of adapting to much more rapid change than we usually feel comfortable making.

“I had been in a lab at least twice a week since I was 17.”

Aurora Burds Connor ’96 is director of the preclinical modeling and testing facilities at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT.

On Saturday, March 14, the president of MIT announced that noncritical research would stop. Only one of my projects was considered critical, so I needed to terminate everything else.

I had already told my staff to stay home earlier that week, so I was alone when I realized that I would not be doing hands-on research on a regular basis. This thought was disorienting and destabilizing. I have wanted to be a scientist since I was 9. Other than my semester abroad at Grinnell and the birth of my two children, I had been in a lab at least twice a week since I was 17.

The lab I was standing in was a space that I had spent years designing when our new building was built. This is my dream job, and this lab is my home. I took a deep breath and quickly boxed up a small microscope so I could at least dissect plants and bugs with my kids, knowing it was a Band-Aid for the loss I was feeling. I took a selfie next to my favorite microscope.

Today, I am a consultant for SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 research projects and testing initiatives. Like most universities, MIT does not have a space for work with infectious materials like this coronavirus, so there is no option for me to test any of the therapies my colleagues are developing. Instead, I assist with regulatory paperwork that must be approved before any preclinical or clinical trials can begin.

“Thank goodness for virtual backgrounds.”

Nathaniel Hopkins ’98 is a senior staff psychologist and coordinator for information and systems for the University of Kentucky Counseling Center.

On Monday, March 2, I was wolfing down lunch and reading a Facebook post about what people thought about the news that COVID-19 was coming and what we were doing to get ready for quarantine.

The post gave me a moment of, “Oh crud, if someone is going to make things work in my office for this, it is me.” That is what I do in my job: think through all the ways things can go wrong so we can build ethical systems of practice.

I have spent a lot of my work time since then building out tech solutions to be able to do our work remotely. One of the biggest challenges is that health care provider licensure is fragmented both by state and by credential. The result is we are unable to continue to provide therapy to our students who have gone home to 49 other states and multiple other countries.

It has been really awful to say to a student, “Sorry you were forced to go home to Cincinnati, an hour away. I can’t continue to provide therapy to you because you’re not in Kentucky.”

My spouse and I, both psychologists in our counseling center, both need to be doing confidential therapy sessions at the same time, all while our kids are also trying to do remote school work. Every space in our house has become a meeting room. Thank goodness for virtual backgrounds.

“We wear face masks everywhere in the building.”

Michelle Raymer Joy ’96 is vice president and chief operating officer of Carson Tahoe Health system in Carson City, Nevada. Carson Tahoe Health is a not-for-profit health care system consisting of two hospitals, two urgent cares, an emergency care center, outpatient services, and a clinic provider network.

A typical workday in the office now is a temperature check, screening questions, and use of hand sanitizers in order to enter the building. We wear face masks everywhere in the building and in all meetings with more than two people.

More than 75% of the day is spent on COVID-19-related items. We have spent time on surge planning for a potential influx of patients, increasing our bed capacity from 181 beds to 481 beds. This includes making sure we have enough staff, physicians, ventilators, other equipment, and PPE [personal protective equipment] to take care of this influx
of patients.

As we have suspended elective surgeries and other non-emergency services, we have redeployed staff and are retraining others to new areas to help with a surge in patients. There has been a tremendous amount of detail in the surge plan. Where do COVID-19 patients get placed? Where do non-COVID-19 patients get placed? What about emergency surgeries and birth and deliveries? How do we increase our traditional ventilator capacity from 22 to 60? What is the morgue capacity? How do we implement crisis care standards? How do we take care of staff now and during a surge?

Health care is a calling. Everyone continues to show up each day willing to do whatever is needed.

Our frontline employees and first responders are true heroes.

“I see patients take their last breath without those who love them surrounding them.”

Bethwel Raore ’01 is a neurosurgeon in North Atlanta, Georgia.

In mid-March, we all knew COVID-19 was starting to ravage the country. My hospital was already seeing patients, but because I’m not a pulmonary critical care or infectious disease physician, I didn’t quite see myself as a frontline worker. All the elective surgeries were stopped. All we did were cases of brain and spine trauma or cancer — those that couldn’t wait.

One evening, when I was on call for neurosurgical trauma, there was a major accident on the interstate. I came in to evaluate a patient who had multiple spine fractures from that accident. His fractures threatened disability, so we had to rush him to the operating room. I knew the patient was from an accident, so I didn’t think much about COVID-19.

We performed surgery and took care of the patient with all the precautions required by the hospital at that time, but there was some comfort in my mind that he wasn’t a COVID-19 patient and he wasn’t hospitalized in the ICU that was designated specifically for COVID-19 patients.

Two days later, he was still on the ventilator, and a CT of his chest revealed findings that were characteristic of COVID-19. His test came back positive a few days later, and he was transferred to the appropriate ICU. After several days, he died.

That gave me a wake-up call: COVID-19 was everywhere, and anyone could have it.

These days, one major change for me is talking to patient families. Discussing end-of-life issues in my profession is a daily occurrence. It is the hardest and most important work I do. To be able to convey information that is not positive, but to express care, concern, and empathy, is a sacred event. It is something I cherish, given its importance.

Since COVID-19, not being able to sit with patients and their families face to face has been uncomfortable.

It breaks my heart to hear wails and cries on the other end of the phone. I can’t be there to hug them or sit silently with them as they absorb the news.

It has been difficult seeing patients take their last breath without those who love them surrounding them.

I am a believer of the gospel of Christ. I believe there is a purpose for everything, even if that purpose may elude me. At this time, I am supposed to be here. I am supposed to be making a difference. I am supposed to be making the world better.

Those are my thoughts when I wake up and go to sleep.

Joe [Rosenfield ’25] was an instinctive mentor, a tendency that was intensified by the tragic death of his only child, Jim. Joe frequently reached out to young men and women of promise. One of his mentees, Fred Little [’53], said that Joe “really relied on his intuition. He really, really trusted his intuition; some cases to his detriment, but in most cases [not]. I mean, Joe would meet with somebody, would find out a little bit about him and make a decision [about whether] this person was someone he wanted to help or not.” Fred said he didn’t think Joe was a lawyer at heart; “a lawyer would never act like that; he would want to see papers and check on people.”

Joe mentored Fred from when he was a child, so Fred was in a good position to judge this quality. Fred’s father, a 1916 Grinnell graduate and chair of the [Grinnell College] Board of Trustees in the early 1940s, was Joe’s close friend; in a Des Moines elevator conversation, he asked Joe if he would like to be a Grinnell trustee. Joe’s positive response led to his 59-year tenure as Grinnell’s greatest trustee. When Fred was 10, his father died tragically, and Joe stepped in as a mentor and surrogate father. Joe had continuous contact with Fred and on several occasions took him to Chicago for Cubs baseball games. Looking back on a time when Fred seemed “lost,” he believed Joe’s support was critical and that his mentoring was sustained into Fred’s legal career. … In 1976, Fred became a Grinnell trustee through Joe’s urging and influence, and later, when he considered resigning, all Joe needed to do was remind Fred of how he himself had become a trustee through Fred’s father’s influence. Ultimately Fred, like his father, served as chair of the trustees and testified that his devotion to Grinnell was a “mirror of Joe’s devotion.”

Another mentoring connection centering on the College was Joe’s connection to Bob Noyce, a 1949 graduate who invented the integrated circuit on a silicon chip and founded Intel Corp. Joe, himself, was the best source of information about their relationship:

“I have a particular feeling for Bob, who first came to Grinnell not as a trustee [but as a student]. … I remember almost the first time I ever saw Bob, I was just highly impressed with his intelligence and pride. It occurred to me, here is the kind of guy we would like to have on the board. … I talked to a couple of other trustees about it; they got acquainted with Bob; over a period of time we got him on the board and he proved to be better than we thought he would be. …”

In the same 1998 interview, Joe reflected on the role he and the College played in the founding of Intel:

“One thing we did, several of us urged Bob to leave the company he was with (Fairchild) and go into business for himself. And Sam Rosenthal, a fellow trustee, and I took it upon ourselves to tell Bob that we would raise money or put up the money to help start the company. And he said, ‘We’re working on it. Someday we’ll do it.’ I remember one [trustee] meeting, he came to me and said, ‘Well, we’re ready to launch a new company and if you fellows are interested, we would like you as part of the group,’ which he was allowed to do. And that was a great thing for the College. We didn’t know how great; it could have been greater if we’d have kept our stock a lot longer.”

Joe further explained that he, Sam Rosenthal, and the College invested a total of $300,000, one-tenth of the Intel startup, eventually selling the Intel stock for $16 million, a remarkable profit; but the College would have been much better off had it kept the stock instead of following Bob Noyce’s urging that the College not have the bulk of its endowment subject to the fortunes of his company. …

Joe also reached out to young women who showed promise. He tried to convince Connie Wimer to run for the Des Moines City Council when she was in her thirties. She says at that time she never would have thought of running for office: “So, I look back and think what in the world did he see in me that he thought I could do that? I think he saw a passion on issues in me.” Only one woman had served on the City Council at that time (1964). Of course, Connie went on to become one of Des Moines’ most significant leaders and the founder and CEO of Business Publications Corp. [and a Grinnell College trustee in 2014].

David Clay served Grinnell College as treasurer for over a decade, and in his later years Joe and the trustees trusted him to become overall manager of the College’s endowment. Clay provides an intimate look into how Joe mentored young people who showed promise. Joe was, in Clay’s words, “a real mentor to me.” For example, when Joe was working on the transition of the portfolio as he anticipated his death, he made David feel that he, David, was the decision maker. David says Joe helped him as a young man to grow over the years into the treasurer Joe thought he could be. Often, Joe would call him asking, “Anybody given us any money today?” Dave would respond, “Well, no,” and Joe’s retort would be, “Okay, maybe we better figure out how to make some money today.” Joe would “bird-dog” the budget, and when there was an end-of-year shortfall, he would step in to make up the difference. When David began in the job, if Joe disagreed with him, he would advise David to “think a little longer,” and he knew that he had missed something. Regarding negotiations on behalf of the College, Joe advised, “Don’t take their last nickel; we want to be partners on this project. Both sides need to be satisfied to do a job well.”

David “had never met anyone in an organization you could put that much faith in,” and the board of trustees understood this as well. This was the very core of Joe’s influence on David Clay and all others with whom Joe interacted. Typical of his focus on others rather than himself, in 1999, a year before his death, Joe participated in the planning for management of the College’s investments when he would be gone. This was, in a sense, Joe’s final step in mentoring the College he loved so deeply.

 

Whether it was by luck or design, Sarah Purcell ’92 found a mentor in the first faculty member she met at Grinnell — Al Jones ’50, L.F. Parker Professor of History. In a department full of excellent professors, Jones was a legend.

In the fall of 1988, Purcell enrolled in his First-Year Tutorial on Culture and Power. That year, as interim director of the Rosenfield Program in Public Affairs, International Relations, and Human Rights, Jones was instrumental in organizing a convocation series and film series on the topic of culture and power. Purcell attended the lectures, watched films, and read novels, all through an historical lens. She even had lunch with one of the convocation speakers, Edward Said, a spokesman for the Palestinian people.

“It was a hugely formative experience for me,” she says. Purcell declared a major in history her first year and asked Jones to be her adviser.

At one point that year, he asked her, “Have you ever thought about being a professor?”

“A light switch went on,” Purcell says. Before that she hadn’t connected history to a particular career path. She just knew she loved it.

Flash forward 30-some years to a second-floor classroom in the Bucksbaum Center for the Arts. Purcell waits eagerly for her students in History of Popular Culture. They enter the room in pairs to have short peer review conferences about their research proposals.

Purcell invites each student reviewer to speak first before sharing her views. They focus first on the strengths of the student’s proposal. Then they discuss improvements the student could make, like shortening a paragraph-long thesis statement to a single sentence or correcting flawed footnotes.

“What the hell?” she says in a lighthearted way. “You’re history majors. You know how important footnotes are.” Then she smiles at them, pushes up her glasses, and says, “I yell at you with love, only with love.” But they know she’s serious about the footnotes.

Whether she’s working with students in her classes or one-on-one with research assistants, providing close attention and care is second nature to Purcell.

Talent Spotter

Purcell, who now holds the same named chair as her first mentor in history, is an enthusiastic, dynamic, encouraging mentor of her own students. In 2019, she received the Council on Undergraduate Research’s inaugural award for excellence in mentoring in the social sciences.

In his letter supporting Purcell’s nomination for the award, Michael Latham, then dean of the College, wrote, “While Grinnell has a strong culture of faculty mentorship of student research experiences, one thing that really makes Professor Purcell stand out as a research mentor is her ability to work with students as research collaborators — despite the fact that she works in a field in which collaboration is not the norm.”

One of the qualities Purcell looks for in student collaborators is enjoyment of the research process. She spotted that in Sam Nakahira ’19 when Nakahira took History 100 with Purcell as a first-year student.

“She got really deeply into sources,” Purcell says, “engaging with them on a level really beyond what was required … especially at the introductory level. She also gave an extremely good presentation based on her research, so I thought she had teaching potential too.”

Purcell asked Nakahira if she’d ever thought about being a professor. Nakahira hadn’t, and the idea intrigued her. She became a Mellon Mays Fellow as well as one of Purcell’s research collaborators and advisee.

Nakahira worked with Purcell on a summer Mentored Advanced Project (MAP) on digital history and slavery. They visited Louisiana State University’s Special Collections
to do primary research. Nakahira sought information about the interior spaces of a Louisiana
sugar plantation, so she pored over receipts for furniture, correspondence, and financial and tax records. She also learned about daily life through grocery lists and
schedules for slave workers and the tasks they were assigned.

“She really helped me feel comfortable with different research methods,” Nakahira says. For her Mellon Mays research project on Japanese American agriculture after World War II, she and Purcell discussed oral history, a technique Purcell last used herself when working
as Al Jones’ student research assistant in 1990.

“She gave me the confidence to do things,” Nakahira says. “Her support was empowering.”

Advice Not Taken

Purcell encourages all her students to take a year off before pursuing graduate school, though she didn’t follow that advice herself. “What was I going to do? Work in a bank for a year?” she jokes. “I knew grad school was the right step for me.” Winning a Beinecke Scholarship that paid for the first two years of her program was reasonable confirmation of that assessment. So off to Brown University she went for her doctorate in history.

Next she taught at Central Michigan University for three years. While she enjoyed her work there, she really wanted to teach at a liberal arts college. Then an opening in the history department at Grinnell caught her eye. She’s been teaching here since 2000.

Mentors Make a Difference

Most Grinnell grads are not destined to become professors. Other careers beckon, and Purcell is fully aware of that. The skills she teaches transfer to many other professions.

Hayes Gardner ’15 especially values her effect on his writing. Purcell gave him specific tips that helped him not only relay information correctly, but to write concisely and clearly as well.

“My writing vastly improved throughout my time at Grinnell,” he says. “I’m currently a journalist, so that’s extra important to me. She definitely morphed me into a better
writer.”

Purcell recommended Gardner for a summer internship with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which gave him great reporting experience. When he graduated, Gardner was pretty sure he wanted to go into sports journalism, but first he wanted to do a year with a service organization. Purcell encouraged him to do freelance writing on the side.

He thought it would be difficult to find the work, but after sending a few emails, he landed a gig covering high school sports for The Oregonian, the largest paper in Oregon. Without her
encouragement, Gardner isn’t sure he would have tried freelancing.

“I didn’t think it would be possible,” he says, but he wound up freelancing for years. “That was the foundation for my current career,” he says. Gardner is now a sports writer for the Courier-Journal, Louisville, Kentucky.

Even years later, Purcell shares job opportunities and connections. “It’s great to still have a mentor like that even after you graduate,” Gardner says.

Getting to know each other during a summer MAP project helped forge that lasting connection.

“It’s nice to have the luxury to know each other as people,” Purcell says.

While Grinnell faculty and students have enjoyed close mentoring for decades, one benefit
of formal programs such as Mellon Mays and MAPs is that mentoring becomes even more accessible to students. And as Sarah Purcell can attest, who knows where that may lead?

 

“Serving as a Mellon Mays mentor is not just about what you give the students,” says Valérie Benoist, professor of Spanish and Latin American studies. “What they give back to you is just as important.”

Most professors understand this sentiment. The passion that students can bring to classes, their interest in learning, engagement with the subject matter, and the drive they have to explore can inspire and motivate even the most overworked professor.

In the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, faculty mentors find this effect even more pronounced. Mentorship requires faculty members to work one-on-one with students over two years at Grinnell, guiding them in long-term research, developing as a scholar, and preparing for graduate school and professional life. It’s a major commitment on the part of faculty members already carrying full course loads, office hours, and the other day-to-day tasks associated with their work. But it comes with major rewards.

“Working with my fellow, Ifetayo Olutosin ’18, for two years was a very rewarding experience as I got to watch her grow intellectually and truly become a scholar,” says Benoist. “We met weekly and Skyped when she was not on campus. I helped her sharpen her research skills, worked with her as she crafted her research questions and wrote and rewrote her argument, and assisted her with her presentation for conferences and applications to grad school and her submission of an article for publication. She is now in her second year of graduate school at the University of Southern California, where she is completing a Ph.D. program in Latin American Studies, but our relationship did not stop with her graduating. It has grown into a relationship of scholars and will become one of colleagues.”

Karla Erickson (left) and Shanna Benjamin

Karla Erickson, professor of sociology, became involved with the Mellon Mays Fellowship program in 2009, its inaugural year at Grinnell. She now serves as the second director of the program, taking over from Shanna Benjamin, associate professor of English, a former Mellon Mays fellow herself who initiated the effort and led the program for a decade at Grinnell.

“We stay connected with our fellows for 10 to 20 years, for much longer than they are here,” says Erickson. “It’s wonderful to get them to graduation. When you hang the medal on them at Commencement, you really feel that. But when they get through graduate school and don’t just survive but thrive, it’s great to see. And it’s great for a program this young to have that kind of success.”

Shared Benefit

The Mellon program has demonstrated success, both at Grinnell and nationally, at producing scholars who enter the academic world and increase the diversity of faculty at the collegiate level, then continue to push the program forward.

Nationally, the program has produced more than 700 tenured fellows since it began in 1980. At Grinnell the program has already produced 55 fellows who’ve gone on to graduate school and three who’ve earned their doctoral degrees. Additionally, more than a dozen are currently pursuing graduate studies.

The program has gone well beyond that primary objective and created unforeseen positive consequences as well.

“The projects my fellows are working on really help me expand my own knowledge on the subject and how I teach it in the classroom,” says John Garrison, associate professor of English. “It’s really inspiring. They come in with new thoughts and ideas on the subject, and it helps me keep up with new ways of teaching and inspires me to do new things.”

Garrison is mentoring two Mellon fellows, Elijah Griffin ’21 and Saiham Sharif ’20. Both have presented at conferences on their research projects and have traveled to Cape Town, South Africa, to study with other fellows from around the country.

“The program gives them an idea of what graduate work will look like, and it also provides them a community to support them,” says Garrison. “And just as they are getting a glimpse of what graduate school will be like, I am getting a glimpse of what it is like to teach graduate students and guide them on long-term projects, which is unusual at the undergraduate level.”

With 15 years of experience teaching the ins and outs of Shakespeare to undergraduate students, Garrison welcomes the fresh ideas and inspiration he draws from his mentees.

“It really reignites my passion when I see someone else so engaged in the subject,” he says. “It keeps me from getting in a rut, and I can continue to view the subject through a new set of eyes and keep up with not only where the field is currently, but also where it might be in five to 10 years.”

One of his fellows, Elijah Griffin, is conducting research and exploring the notions of blackness in Shakespearean performance as part of his fellowship. He’s looking at adaptations of the plays to see how blackness is approached and performed within Shakespeare and how it can impact the message and meaning of the work.

“This has really helped me rethink how Shakespeare exists in a contemporary sense,” says Garrison. “I want to think about Shakespeare as it exists now, not just in the 17th century — how it is relevant today and how it speaks to contemporary audiences. This helps inform why we still teach Shakespeare and why it is still relevant.”

For Benoist, who is looking forward to taking on more fellows as a mentor, Grinnell is the perfect environment for an experience that fosters growth from both student and mentor.

“The small classes, great students, and the opportunities for interaction with them in and out of class really make Grinnell perfectly suited for a program like this,” she says. “Meeting with your fellow and exploring new ideas makes you think about your own scholarship and pushes you in directions you might not have otherwise pursued. I wish more people could take advantage of it. It’s been an amazing experience, and I really look forward to participating as a mentor again, in addition to continuing the relationship I already have as a mentor with Ifetayo.”

 

When English major Mark Couch ’87 was a senior at Grinnell, career planning wasn’t his top priority. He had vague ideas — maybe journalism, maybe law school – but little practical experience.

With help from Jo Calhoun, then internship coordinator and assistant director of the Career Development Office, he landed an internship in the Iowa Legislature with the chair of the house judiciary committee during the 1987 legislative session.

Twice a week Couch and several other students interning in Des Moines, Iowa, caught a 6 a.m. van shuttle from campus. At the state capitol, Couch handled typical intern chores, such as drafting responses to constituent letters.

His most significant project was researching other states’ laws for the legal sale of fireworks. At that time, fireworks sales in Iowa were strictly limited. The judiciary chair lived near the Iowa-Missouri border and watched Iowans cross the state line to buy fireworks.

“We collected the toughest restrictions from other states that allowed fireworks sales and assembled them into one bill,” Couch says.

To his amazement, it passed the house.

“I thought it was because we crafted the best bill ever. Really, it passed because my boss had a powerful position in the legislature,” Couch says. “The bill got killed right away in the senate.”

Although his bill didn’t change state law, the experience offered lessons to consider in pursuing a career. “I had learned how to hunt and gather useful information and how to present it clearly,” he says. “It also reminded me that the quality of the work isn’t the only — or even the decisive — factor in the ultimate outcome.”

Eventually, the experience turned out to be useful. But not right away.

His first job after graduation was stocking shelves at a bookstore in his hometown of Des Moines. After networking with friends, he landed an interview for a sales job with the Des Moines Business Record.

“If you had your druthers,” asked the sales manager, “would you rather be selling or writing?”

Writing, Couch said, figuring that would end the interview. Instead, he met the paper’s editor and got the job. “That job was like an apprenticeship,” he says. He covered three beats during his four years there, before finally landing a dream job at the Des Moines Register. “That started my journalism career,” he says.

From there, he jumped to other newspapers — the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Kansas City Star, and finally The Denver Post — “moving mostly for better pay.” He was a business reporter for most of his career, covering real estate and economic development, though he took only one economics course at Grinnell. “I read The Wall Street Journal every day,” Couch says. Grinnellians know how to learn.

While a reporter in Denver, he was assigned to cover the campaign of a prominent businessman, John Hickenlooper, who ran for mayor. “He was terrible as a debater, and I predicted he had no chance,” Couch says with a laugh. “But he won, and thus began my political reporting career.”

Couch was assigned to city hall to cover Mayor Hickenlooper. Several months later he was sent to cover state politics at the capital. “My experience in the Iowa Legislature had given me some perspective.” He didn’t want to cover predictable partisan debates. Instead, he wanted to learn how the state budget worked. From November to April, he attended budget committee hearings and learned the finer points of each department’s budget.

“To actually sit there day after day and really study it, all of that work I did at Grinnell as a student, learning how systems work and how human behavior interacts with those systems,” he says, “I got good at explaining a complicated system for the newspaper.”

But newspaper reporting as a career option was fading.

Couch’s expertise in the state budget combined with his communication skills made him a candidate for a job as a legislative liaison and public information officer for the Colorado Department of Revenue. He served as the department’s “flight traffic controller” by making sure subject-matter experts were available to testify for about 150 bills each legislative session. “It was fun but a grind,” he says.

In 2013 he moved into higher education as the director of communication for the University of Colorado School of Medicine. A few years later he was asked to be the new dean’s chief of staff, so he added that responsibility to his plate. “It’s a mix of practical and political and I still write every day,” he says.

For a student who enjoyed both political science and English but wasn’t sure how, or if, to blend those interests, his internship served as a practical launching point.