College of the Liberal Arts Electronic Magazine, Issue 9

Issue 9, 10/30/02

Contents:

$3 Million Gift from George and Ann Richards

Elizabeth King—Penn State Alum Gives the Buzz on Starbucks

Beyond the Sports Page

Events

Do You Know?

New York Times to Sponsor Penn State Speech Competition

A Tradition of Education

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Alumni Relations and Development

MacArthur Fellow Lee Ann Newsom, in a Nutshell

  In Lee Ann Newsom’s lab in Carpenter Building, you can catch a glimpse of pirating history. But you’d really have to squint. She has splinters taken from the hull of legendary pirate Blackbeard’s ship, and from her analysis of them she will be able to tell other researchers what woods were used, and with help from others, from which forests in Europe the boards were cut and milled. The findings will advance what historians know about the pirate, turning lore into something close to fact.
   “But that’s sideline stuff,” Newsom says. “That’s not the real work. It’s certainly interesting, but it’s not what really moves me.” Her “real” work, paleoethnobotany, the work that won her a much-coveted and mysterious MacArthur “genius” grant, involves investigating ancient plant life in Southeastern North America and the Caribbean.
   One of a small number of paleoethnobotanists worldwide, Newsom analyzes fossilized plant and wood remains (fragmentary waterlogged or charred remains excavated from archeological sites) and gleans valuable new insights into subsistence strategies and the use of natural resources by prehistoric populations. She is widely credited with identifying and analyzing ancient gourds, some as old as 31,000 years, and developing new interpretations of human cultivation of the earliest domesticated plant in North America.
   To understand better what she does, however, one needs mentally to leave the controlled air of Carpenter and head south to the muck of Florida’s swamps, to an 8,000-year-old burial site submerged in what was an ancient pond. Under the surface, people had buried their dead under teepee-style wood structures. On finding the burials, the team working the site contacted Newsom.
   While difficult to access, submerged sites have great benefits for some scientists because organic specimens are so well preserved. The bottom sediments, a sealed anoxic environment, make the environment practically oxygen free, while at the same time discouraging animal traffic from scattering remains. Brain tissues are preserved, as are last meals within bodies and any plant offerings or wooden artifacts. “We even found shrouds, tunics and blankets woven from palm and similar plant fibers,” Newsom says. “We really had no prior evidence of clothing in the period due to fibers disintegrating and the loss of technology over time.”
   One body, a woman who had died at around age 35, proved compelling. Newsom examined the woman’s stomach contents. In roughly 1 cup of sediment from her lower abdomen, Newsom counted over 3,000 seeds. She rattles off the numbers from memory. “2,275 alone were elderberry” she starts. “There were others. By calculating the number of seeds per fruit, we figured she consumed, shortly before death, 550 elderberries, forty grapes, at least two prickly pear cactus, at least one deadly nightshade, and one holly berry.”
Of the 3,000 seeds, only nine were fragmented, a phenomenon inconsistent with chewing. The majority would have been fragmented had the woman eaten the fruit. Newsom researched Cherokee and other Native American ethnomedicine and learned that all of the plants identified were often used separately and together for medicine. Thus, Newsom’s analysis provided evidence of potential medicinal practices 8,000 years ago.
   Newsom grins and shakes her head slightly. “You just can’t do that normally,” she says. “To get at something as ephemeral as medicinal use is very difficult. People crush, steep, and pulverize the plants to use them as medicine. So remains aren’t left behind much.” To use the plant medicinally, it is destroyed.
   She continues to elaborate on what 1 cup of 8,000-year-old intestinal contents reveals. “From the period of ripening for those plants, I can tell that the time of her death was late August or September. Plus, looking at the anatomy of the wood used in the burial structures, noting the bark beetle channels, I could tell when the wood was cut: late summer. We were looking at a summer burial.”
   Because all or most of the individuals in the cemetery were buried at approximately the same time, Newsom says the site supports estimates that ancient people in Florida migrated as part of a seasonal round. “Otherwise,” she says, “you would have people buried from other times of the year.”
   Newsom has applied her unusual expertise to studying the environment of Ice Age Florida as well as plant remains on a whole range of sites in the Caribbean Islands to track the migration of Amazonians and their colonization of the islands. Her evidence has opened a window on to how they settled the islands and brought the first maize there, as well as new horticulture practices. Her work provided some of the first archaeobotanical evidence of diet in the Caribbean.
   The word “first” echoes throughout Newsom’s personal history. In 1980 she went to school for archaeology, with a specific interest in paleoanthropology. After volunteering at the Florida State Museum of Natural History, she started working at submerged archaeological sites: ancient lakes, ponds, cypress swamps, any wet basin that collected sediments. Examining plant remains—whole gourd squash seeds, hickory nuts, hazelnuts, reams of wood—led her to seek better means to identify what she found. She obtained training from a wood anatomist to identify wood through its vascular structures (xylem, primarily), took courses across such fields as botanical science and anthropology, and worked to become among the few experts in ancient wood anatomy.
   Wood anatomy is identified by examining cross sections and longitudinal sections of its structures. Newsom points out that every species has a distinct vascular structure, and that the development of those tissues, as in any organism, are affected both by genetics and environment. The result is that wood anatomy is roughly analogous to fingerprinting.
   She says, “I can see wood, see the anatomy. If you tell me a type, I can visualize it immediately.” When the degrading effects of time are added, the work grows exponentially more difficult. But with her uncanny ability time and again to decipher the evidence piled on by millennia, Newsom has earned the acclaim of her peers.

$3 Million Gift From George and Ann Richards Will Endow Civil War Era Center

   Penn State has taken a giant step toward securing its reputation as the preeminent center for the study of the Civil War, thanks to a $3 million gift from George and Ann Richards of Simsbury, Conn. Their gift will create a permanent endowment to support the Civil War Era Center, established six years ago in the College’s Department of History.
   Now a retired business executive, George Richards earned a bachelor’s degree from Penn State in 1954. Two of his great-grandfathers served in the Union army during the Civil War, one in an infantry unit and the other in an artillery unit.
   “George and Ann have given us the opportunity to make Penn State the epicenter of Civil War scholarship,” University President Graham B. Spanier said. “The kind of endowed support they have so generously provided fits perfectly with the aim of the College of the Liberal Arts to develop and maintain academic programs that rank among the finest of their kind at any public university. We are deeply grateful for their support.”
   In recognition of the Richards’ generosity and vision, the University will name the center the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center, according to President Spanier.
   Susan Welch, dean of the College of the Liberal Arts, said the Civil War Era Center is distinctive because it encourages innovative scholarship that goes beyond the four years of war (1861-65) and includes social, political, economic, and cultural analysis of the decades from the Mexican War through the end of Reconstruction.
   Center faculty stress that because that period brought such enormous changes to many aspects of American life, especially a new meaning of freedom and citizenship, the entire period is important to our understanding of the war’s lasting impact. The center, therefore, encourages a broad consideration of this period along with the more traditional study of the military operations during the war itself.
   “This marvelous gift is of critical importance in a time of tight budgets and declining public funding for the humanities,” Welch said. “The Richards’ endowment will support a broad range of existing initiatives and allow us to launch new ones in instruction, research and outreach.”
   Center director William Blair concurred. “Our recent graduate applications attest that Penn State ranks among the top four or five institutions in the country that students seek for furthering their understanding of this field,” Blair said. “A gift of this magnitude not only gives us the chance to become the premier place for pursuing graduate work, but provides the center a greater capacity for supporting faculty research and welcoming outside scholars to Penn State in ways that will help shape the direction of the field itself.”
   Specifically, Welch said that funds from the endowment could support such scholarship and research activities as:

—a director’s fund to recruit students, provide seed money for research projects and otherwise encourage the strategic development of the center;
—a visiting professorship in the Civil War Era to attract other top scholars to Penn State;
—postdoctoral fellowships to enable emerging scholars to work in-residence on developing a dissertation into a publishable work;
—graduate fellowships to help recruit and support exceptional advanced-degree
students;
—and a library fund to purchase relevant research and archival materials for the
University Libraries.

   Welch also said that the Richards’ endowment could boost outreach programs through support of partnerships with battlefield parks, museums and other institutions; the publication of Civil War History, the nation’s preeminent Civil War publication, now housed at Penn State; undergraduate internships at museums, historical societies and the like; and the center’s Summer Public School Teacher’s Institute, a popular program aimed at keeping school teachers from around the country apprised of the latest Civil War era scholarship and thus enhancing what their schools can offer students.
   “The possibilities are so vast that it is really difficult to categorize the impact that George and Ann’s gift will have on the Civil War Era Center and the thousands of people who are touched by its activities,” said Welch.
   “Perhaps most importantly, the Richards’ gift will allow the center to find new and innovative ways of sharing its findings with the public,” said Blair.
   The Richards’ previous philanthropy to Penn State includes a 1994 endowment of the Bart Richards Award in Media Criticism in the College of Communications. The award honors George Richards’ father, who served as editor of the New Castle (Pa.) News, and is given annually.
   George and Ann Richards were owners, and George was CEO, of Vitex Packaging, a manufacturer of materials for the world wide tea bag industry. At Penn State, he was president of Sigma Nu fraternity, chairman of the Spring Week festival, and a member of the boxing team.

Elizabeth King — Penn State Alum Has The Buzz on Coffee

   Over the sounds of soft classical music and the foaming of the espresso machine, a barrista wearing a green apron repeats, “Grande vanilla latte!” Or you might hear “Tall no whip mocha, grande skim cap,” or any other variation of coffee orders available at Starbucks. The operation is seamless, each partner moving as though in a waltz. Elizabeth King ’79 political science works to make sure the experience stays that way, both for those who function behind the counter and the clients who come into Starbucks jones-ing for caffeine.
   As vice-president of business systems at Starbucks in Seattle, Washington, King and her team in human resources develop strategies to ensure that partners in Starbucks not only feel valued, but also understand that their jobs are more than just weekend forays. “We want to be looked at as a company people really want to work for.”
   Even partners who work twenty-hours a week receive full benefits, a Starbucks Logo practice that is unheard of in most part-time service jobs. King explains the other work incentives. “After a short tenure, new partners automatically receive stock options in Starbucks and a chance to advance from the front line, to shift supervisor, assistant manager, store manager; all the way to the top of the corporate ladder.” They also receive significant training, attend a “coffee college,” and are eligible for health, dental, and vision insurance. “It’s important for Starbucks to hire individuals who are committed to the personal learning required to advance their status.”
Sign inside of Starbucks at State College, PA    King remains an active fan of Penn State football. Her parents, who live in Bellefonte, hold season tickets, and when King can’t be in State College for a game, she makes sure her usually full calendar is clear to allow her to watch the Nittany Lions play football (our interview was scheduled on a Saturday, well ahead of the Penn State vs. Wisconsin match). “I have tremendous respect for Joe Paterno. My brother and sister also attended Penn State. The University is really a part of our family.”
   If you happen to be on College Avenue any time soon, stop by State College’s new Starbucks coffee shop. That’s what King plans on doing next time she’s in town. The only difficulty will be deciding which of her three favorite drinks to order: Caffe Verona coffee, caramel machiatto, or the caramel frappachino.

Beyond the Sports Page

photo of Chris Korman Chris Korman writes about sports, mostly football, for the Daily Collegian, but his articles reveal an interest beyond the statistician’s fascination with numbers and rankings. In a recent article on Joe Paterno and former Nebraska head coach and current politician, Tom Osborne, Korman wrote about character, about American history, political imperatives, and art. Not typical sports page stuff.
   “I am interested in writing about all of it,” Korman, an English major, says. “I love sports, and I know I’ll always be involved in it, but I see it as a way of approaching all of American culture, of observing everything I might write about.”
   Despite his newspaper experience, Korman did not look to major in journalism. “You learn how to write on the job, and I had been doing the job for a while,” he says. “So I looked at the English major. I would learn more about writing, but I would also learn about history, literature, politics, much of the stuff that would enhance writing.”
   Chris’ writing beyond the Collegian—for the Reading Phillies (a minor league baseball franchise in eastern Pennsylvania), his hometown newspaper, The Reading Eagle, and in the classroom—has garnered favorable attention. This year, it also earned him scholarship support from the College of the Liberal Arts. The particular scholarship he earned matches well his interests.
   Korman was awarded the Milton B. Dolinger Endowed Scholarship in the College of the Liberal Arts. Milt Dolinger, himself a former journalist and public relations professional, is also a World War II veteran and a lifelong student of history and American culture. The two met and talked at length earlier in the semester, and Korman said of the meeting, “It was great to connect with a man who has been around for so long and seen so many things. He was kind, wise and caring and clearly has a special place for the University in his heart. It’s nice to know the college turns out men like him.”
   Korman’s plans are to keep writing and to search for ways to match a career with his interest in writing, with an eye to features, essays, perhaps even a novel. “The writers I admire in sports journalism are the ones who bring everything else in. That’s the kind of writer I’d like to be.”

Events

Spanier Radio/TV Call-In Features Liberal Arts Alumnus on Topic of White Collar Crime

   Securities and investment fraud was the topic of the most recent next edition of “To the Best of My Knowledge,” Penn State President Graham Spanier’s monthly call-in show airing at 7 p.m. on Monday, October 28, on WPSU-FM and WPSX-TV. Below is the program description:
   “Joining President Spanier by phone from Washington will be William McLucas, former Director of Enforcement for the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mr. McLucas, a partner in the Washington law firm of Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering, was recently retained by both Enron and WorldCom to conduct internal investigations of their financial irregularities. In 1997, he was named one of the National Law Journal’s One-Hundred Most Influential Attorneys in America. He earned his bachelors of arts in political science at Penn State in 1972.”
   “Joining Dr. Spanier in the studio will be Lance Cole, former Deputy Democratic Special Counsel to the Senate Special Committee on Whitewater. Currently a member of the faculty of Penn State’s Dickinson School of Law, Professor Cole specializes in securities regulation and white collar crime.”
   “To the Best of My Knowledge” is a series designed to explore topics of national and local interest and to allow listeners and viewers a chance to communicate directly with Penn State’s President.

Robert Bernasconi to Deliver the 2002 Richard B. Lippin Lectureship in Ethics

Robert Bernasconi will speak on “Ethical Responsibility and Globalization,” on Friday, November 15, at 4:00 p.m. at The Nittany Lion Inn Assembly Room, as presenter of the 2002 Richard B. Lippin Lecture in Ethics. The Lippin Lecture is an annual lectureship hosted by the Department of Philosophy in which a distinguished scholar addresses important ethical topics in a public forum. In this lecture Prof. Bernasconi will argue that the phenomenon of globalization highlights the inadequacy of the dominant ethical systems employed within philosophy and calls for a revolution both in our ethical thinking and in the way we think the relation between ethics and politics. Taking world hunger as an example, he will argue that Emmanuel Levinas’ conception of responsibility provides an appropriate starting point for the philosophical task that lies ahead.
Robert Bernasconi holds the Lillian and Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. Educated in England, he speaks and writes extensively on the work of Derrida, Heidegger, Gadamer, Levinas, Arendt, Sartre, Hegel, Locke, Rousseau, and others, in addition to political and ethical theory. He is author of The Question of Language in Heidegger’s History of Being and Heidegger in Question: The Art of Existing and co-editor of several books on Levinas including Re-Reading Levinas and Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. He has composed as editor several books on race including Race and the eight-volume collection Concepts of Race in the Eighteenth Century and is co-editor of the book series Philosophy and Race for SUNY Press.

Do You Know?

In the last issue of LAzine, we asked for a positive ID of the prop plane in a photograph included with the cover story of the 2002 Liberal Arts magazine. We received a number of e-mails with the correct answer (the plane is a Ryan Recruit ST, also known by the Army Air Corps designation PT-22), but the first correct answer we received was from Justus D. Campbell, a 1951 commerce and finance grad and retired airline pilot living in Boca Raton. Mr. Campbell will receive a prize, and we thank all who participated.

For this issue, the question is inspired by our lead story on Lee Ann Newsom. Dr. Newsom is actually one of two MacArthur Fellows in the College of the Liberal Arts. Who is the other MacArthur Fellow?

New York Times to Sponsor Penn State Speech Competition

   On a typical afternoon in a communication arts and sciences class, a first-year student delivers a passionate, persuasive speech about the dangers of stem-cell research. Another student discusses the reasons why the campus bus should extend its summer hours. The next speech takes an analytical approach to the pros and cons of welfare reform. While the course teaches students how to be persuasive in a public forum, the difficulty is that their speeches often don’t move beyond the captive classroom audience. However, a new competition sponsored by the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences (CAS) and The New York Times promises to give students the chance to be heard on a local and national level.
   Here’s how it works: Open to all CAS 100-A “Effective Speech” students (approximately sixty sections; each comprised of a maximum of thirty students from majors across the University), the competition allows for one individual from each section to be nominated by their peers to participate. Then, on December 3, 2002, the students chosen will begin the first round of competitions by presenting a six- to eight-minute speech to a panel of judges made up of the course instructors for CAS 100A. Panels will be arranged so that no instructor will be judging his or her own students.
   After the initial presentations, judges will narrow the selection to ten students. The ten remaining students will vie for the three winning spots awarded after the second round of speeches given on Thursday, December 5, 2002. Three judges, comprised of a faculty member, a community member, and an individual from The New York Times, will determine the winners in the final round. The students receive a monetary gift as well as recognition from The New York Times. In addition, one of the speeches will be published on The New York Times on-line newspaper.
   Deann Snider, a Penn State senior with a double major in speech communications and public relations (and a minor in information sciences and technology) has been working as an intern with Lecturer Elizabeth Davis to promote the competition. Snyder explains the purpose of giving students the opportunity to compete. “We want them to be tuned in to the ‘hot topics’ of today. Also, we want students to know that what you learn in the classroom is not a waste of time but something that can be applied in a real world situation.”
   Snyder outlines several key criteria that make up an effective presentation. “The speech must be persuasive, deal with a civic issue, be thought-provoking, and illustrate that time and research have been put into it.” She wishes such an opportunity were available when she was enrolled in the CAS 100-A course. “The great thing about the competition is it shows students that what they have to say is important and they can use their voices to affect civic change.”
   The competition will be held either in the HUB-Robeson Center or Foster Auditorium and is open to the public. For more details, contact Elizabeth Davis at 814-865-1917.

A Tradition of Education

   Talking to Nik Shah ’95 labor studies and industrial relations and psychology, it’s hard to believe he left Happy Valley only seven years ago. He earned an MBA at the University of Pittsburgh, has held positions at Westinghouse Electric Corporation, CBS Television Corporation, Amazon.com, and Pricewaterhouse Coopers, has begun a successful foray into real estate in the D.C. area, and—lest we think him a slouch—is now preparing to run a marathon.
   But he was the same way as a student. He took 23 to 26 credits a semester, hardly slept, earned excellent grades. “I was passionate about school and about the subject matter, and I am still passionate about my work.” A human resources consultant whose specialty is executive compensation, Shah says the work to align human resource strategy to business strategy is intriguing. He so enjoyed learning about the field while at Penn State that, earlier this year, he set up the Dilip and Bharati Shah Award in the Department of Labor Studies and Industrial Relations, establishing himself as one of the youngest people to establish an endowment in Liberal Arts.
   “I’ve done a lot of things career-wise, and the award was something I have long wanted to do,” he says, “both to honor my parents and to give back to a department which really helped me.”
   He remembers Arlene Smith performing her “quintessential role” in advising him on how to navigate the difficulties of a double major. Mark Wardell inspired Shah academically. “Within the department, you felt like you were home, that people looked out for you,” Shah says.
   To establish his award, Shah gave an initial gift of $5,000, and Pricewaterhouse Coopers—which makes matching contributions to inspire their employers to philanthropic ends—matched his contribution. Now established, the award will be bestowed upon the student with the highest GPA in the Department of Labor Studies and Industrial Relations.
   By establishing the award, Shah is following a family tradition. His great-grandfather and grandfather each established educational systems in India, and his parents founded an elementary and middle school in India. “Education is highly valued in my family,” Shah says.
   His education at Penn State, he says, has made the critical difference in his level of success. “Liberal Arts built on my desire to learn. It allows people to communicate, to understand complexity in arguments and markets, to converse with people from a variety of backgrounds. I find professionally that there is so much value in understanding culture and language and history and a great benefit in global perspectives in education.”