Alumni Gazette

Arts Leader The arts are part of everyday life, says Nancy Uscher ’72E. As the new president of ’s Cornish College of the Arts, she works to keep it that way. By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD) she felt, especially having spent the previ- would go ‘bump bump bump bump.’ He ous year at the Royal College of Music in said, ‘You have to start without a conduc- Nancy Uscher ’72E says she’s had a cou- London, an experience she describes as tor. You just have to remember the pulse ple of epiphanies during her career, and “glorious.” and start it.’” the first was at Eastman. It was 1972, the “Then I remember this incredible ex- “I’ve thought about this many times,” year of her graduation and also the school’s perience,” she continues. The concert fea- Uscher says today, and the lesson she draws 50th anniversary, a celebration that ran tured a premier of Partita for Harpsichord from it is that leaders can be drawn from the course of the 1971–72 academic year and Orchestra, a piece written especially for anywhere. Even the sixth chair. So, she tells and culminated with a performance by the the occasion by Polish composer Krzysztof young artists: “Be ready.” Eastman Philharmonia at ’s Penderecki. Inaugurated in October as the new pres- Carnegie Hall. “We’d been rehearsing, and I see that I ident of Seattle’s Cornish College of the Uscher, a violist in the Philharmonia, was alone begin the piece for the entire orches- Arts, Uscher says the experience guides her told she’d play sixth chair. tra. As the sixth chair.” approach to leadership. “Everyone can be a “I thought I was going to be disregard- Uscher describes how Penderecki would leader in his or her own way. I really believe ed almost,” she says, recalling the letdown approach her and sing the rhythm. “He that leadership should come from different

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sectors, and I don’t like micromanagement.” “Everyone can be a “Some of the faculty were pretty straight Uscher has herself come from many about what they were doing. Their attitude different sectors of the arts world. After leader in his or her own was, we’re doing composing, we’re playing, graduating from Eastman, she pursued way. I really believe and the rest of this stuff”—such as Uscher’s scholarly and performance paths simulta- activities at the center—“is just sort of neously, pursuing a doctorate in music at that leadership should weird. Nancy has a broad vision of the arts.” New York University and advanced study come from different Indeed, Uscher says if there’s one thing in viola at Juilliard. A series of guest teach- she wants to communicate to young art- ing assignments and residencies took her sectors, and I don’t like ists, it’s that “they have a huge role in our around the world. And for six years, she micromanagement.” world.” And lest anyone think that’s mere was coprincipal violist in the Jerusalem platitude, Uscher has an illustration of ex- Symphony Orchestra. actly what she means—her second epipha- She returned to the in 1984, ing visibility in the Seattle arts community ny, which occurred while she was in New eventually focusing on scholarship and ac- and beyond. Mexico. ademic leadership, working her way up to With these changes, Uscher says, “Now She was on a town hall tour, in which the associate provost of academic affairs at the we’re in a position to really fulfill our new president of the university and other University of New Mexico, then provost of promise.” leaders ventured far from the flagship Al- the California Institute of the Arts (or, Ca- Paul Nathanson, who’s the executive buquerque campus into the mostly rural lArts), before being tapped as president of director of the National Senior Citizens state, to see how the University could meet Cornish. In 1999, she returned to Eastman Law Center and helped Uscher establish the needs of the state’s far-flung communi- and delivered a talk, “The Artist’s Leader- ship Challenge: Defining Career Opportu- nity for a Changing World,” as part of the Arts Leadership guest speaker series. Uscher says Cornish offers “a very un- usual model.” It was founded almost a cen- tury ago by Seattle pianist and educator Nellie Cornish, who wanted her students to experience the “interrelatedness” of all the arts. In 1977, the school became an accred- ited college, offering bachelor’s degrees in visual arts, design, theater, music, dance, and performance production. With the ex- ception of only two arts colleges she can think of—her previous employer, CalArts, and Philadelphia’s University of the Arts— Uscher notes that colleges of the arts are ei- ther colleges of the visual arts or colleges of the performing arts. “It changes the context in which you learn,” she says, adding that at CalArts, the tendency of visual artists to articulate the concepts behind their work encouraged her a Center for the Arts in Society when they ties. In one of the towns, a young university to do the same as a musician. were both at the University of New Mexi- doctor who had been offered a job to be- In the 1930s, the Cornish faculty includ- co, thinks she’s well poised for the role. He come that town’s only physician stood up ed the dancer Martha Graham and was recalls her success in designing innovative and said, according to Uscher’s recollec- the place where the avant-garde composer programs to bring arts into the community, tion: “You’ve offered me a really high salary, John Cage and the dancer and choreogra- and in finding funders to help them thrive. and I thank you, but I can’t come here, be- pher Merce Cunningham met one another “She’ll be able to push an agenda that cause my daughter can’t take ballet lessons, and began their lifelong collaboration and shows the interconnectedness of the arts, and I can’t go to a museum, and I can’t go to partnership. and of the arts in society,” he says. In the the theater and have my ideas challenged.” Nonetheless, the school floundered for music department at New Mexico, he adds, It was a powerful illustration to Uscher decades following Cornish’s retirement as of the centrality of arts to thriving president, and its accreditation as a col- uuUSCHERED IN: Violist Uscher (opposite) communities. lege in the 1970s failed to revive it. In the was inaugurated as president of Cornish “This is not separate,” she says, referring past decade, however, the college has ex- College of the Arts this fall, a celebration to the arts, and to her life’s work in helping perienced a notable turnaround, securing whose guests included Seattle Mayor Mike to bring them to as many places and people a move downtown, the integration and im- McGinn (above, right) and John Gordon Hill, as she can. “It’s integrated into the way peo- provement of physical facilities, and grow- the chair of Cornish’s board of trustees. ple are thinking about their lives.”r

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RENEWABLE: Small industrial cities like Flint, Muncie, Youngstown, and others are often seen as throwaways, but despite their challenges, they “have a lot to work with,” argues Tumber in a new book published this fall by MIT Press.

Q&A Bright Lights, Small Cities Small industrial cities haven’t fared well. But they could thrive in a green economy, argues journalist and historian Catherine Tumber ’92 (PhD).

Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD) east and Midwest, and found healthy, in- future that land will be essential to restor- tergenerational sustainability movements ing local food systems, harvesting wind and Small-to-midsize industrial cities attempting, with some notable successes, solar energy, and producing biomass for al- with illustrious pasts have more promise to retool their communities for a green, ternative fuels. in the future than we’ve been led to be- low-carbon future. In Janesville, Wis., there’s a fight on be- lieve, argues Catherine Tumber ’92 (PhD) Tumber—who grew up near Syracuse, tween people who want to preserve some in a new book, Small, Gritty, and Green: attended college amidst the several small especially rich farmland that surrounds The Promise of America’s Smaller Indus- industrial cities of western Massachusetts, the city and those trying to develop that trial Cities in a Low-Carbon World (MIT and earned a doctorate in history at Roch- area for an eventual megaregional corridor Press, 2011). ester—is frank about her personal affection stretching from Detroit through Chica- Eclipsed by the strength of large cities for modest-sized cities. go to Minneapolis–St Paul. These are two such as New York, , and Chicago, “They can be really interesting, idiosyn- very different responses to climate change small-to-midsize industrial cities such as cratic places to live for people who don’t and globalization. Should cities grow even Syracuse, Akron, and Muncie, Ind., rarely necessarily want to live in New York or Los more concentrated into megaregions, or find themselves included in debates about Angeles. And they have a lot to work with,” should these smaller cities retain not only what the city of the future might look like. she said in an interview in October. their identities but their farmland and in- But beginning in 2008, Tumber, a jour- dustrial infrastructure for productive use? nalist, historian, and research affiliate at What are some key assets of small-to-mid- Smaller industrial cities are also home to MIT’s Community Innovators Lab, trav- size industrial cities in a low-carbon future? much of what is left of American manu- eled to those and approximately 20 other For one, they generally sit among some of facturing—in terms of both skills and in- mostly small industrial cities in the North- the richest farmland on earth. And in the dustrial infrastructure. In Muncie—a place

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with a long history of making automotive people like Richard Florida and Ed Glae- transmissions—they’re transitioning to ser—who, while they don’t ignore smaller In the News making gear boxes and other components cities, advise them to do things like devel- for windmill turbines. They’ve attracted a op a creative class of artists, try to attract Richard Kovar ’76 is National couple of companies—unfortunately, not knowledge industries, and develop a tourist Family Physician of the Year American ones—to the area because of the trade. These are not necessarily economic The American Academy of Family skills and infrastructure there. In addi- strategies that will work in smaller cities. Physicians has named Richard Kovar tion, parts of Indiana are on a highly desir- As much as Scranton is a nice small city, it’s ’76 the Family Physician of the Year. The able wind shed. So they’re manufacturing probably never going to have a substantial award, national in scope, is given out their product near their ultimate market, tourist trade. annually to just one physician. Kovar, a a practice that will likely grow more com- In the 1960s, there had been a debate be- practicing family physician and medical mon as transportation fuel costs rise. Mun- tween Jacobs and the social critic Lewis director of the nonprofit Country Doctor cie is a great example of a city using both Mumford about different visions of urban- Community Health Centers in Seattle, its natural resources as well as its manu- ism. In the 1920s and 30s, Mumford argued serves predominantly urban, low-income, facturing legacy to plan for a low-carbon against concentrating all of our wealth uninsured patients. His medical interests economic future. and cultural riches in large cities, and for range from pediatrics and adolescent valuing smaller cities as well, including medicine to geriatrics, treatment and Why have small-to-midsize industrial cities the farmland and the ecological region in prevention of HIV/AIDS, and mental health confronted so much more difficulty than which they’re set. Jacobs basically won the and crosscultural health care. big cities in the first place? debate, which is why we don’t really hear You have to go back to the 1960s to get to about Mumford’s vision. Sports Journalist Ron Thomas the root of their trouble. That’s when dein- ’71 Earns Lifetime Achievement dustrialization and outsourcing began in You write that a localist movement has ex- Award earnest. But federal disinvestment in cit- isted “in fits and starts” since the 1970s. Ron Thomas ’71 has received a Lifetime ies and economic support for suburban Are you optimistic about its future? Achievement Award for Excellence in development also played a large role and Definitely. So much has changed since the Sports Journalism. The award, given out had consequences that were devastating 1970s. First, the environmentalist move- by the Northeastern University School for large cities, but catastrophic for smaller ment has become more urban-centered. A of Journalism and its educational and ones. lot of localist talk was cast in terms of the consulting center, Sport in Society, rec- Urban freeways, for example, were con- rural back-to-the-land movement in the ognizes journalists who examine sports structed in cities of all sizes. But while the 1970s. Second, the smart growth move- in social and cultural context. In addi- Cross Bronx Expressway destroyed specific ment has emerged. It didn’t really exist in tion to reporting for the San Francisco neighborhoods in New York City, in a city the 1970s. And the smart growth movement Chronicle, USA Today, Chicago Daily News, the size of Rochester, the Inner Loop de- tends to view cities as part of a larger eco- BlackAmericaWeb.com, and other outlets, stroyed the entire urban fabric of the cen- nomic and ecological region. And so when Thomas is the author of They Cleared the tral city. The flight of retail to the suburbs people talk about localism, they talk about Lane: The NBA’s Black Pioneers (University also disproportionately harmed smaller cit- it in a more expansive way. And then third of Nebraska, 2002) and was a researcher ies. Large, dense cities could still sustain a and more recently, the local food and retail for the HBO documentary Fields of Fire: significant retail presence, but smaller cit- movement, inspired to some extent by Mi- Sports in the ’60s (1995). ies were hollowed out by the retail exodus chael Pollan’s work, has mounted a serious and became much less appealing places to challenge to our petroleum-drenched in- Civil Engineer Priscilla Nelson live over time. That said, they also have dis- dustrial food system. All of this has broad- ’70 Honored for Research proportionately more to gain from revers- ened the appeal of localism since the 1970s. Priscilla Nelson ’70, a professor in the ing these and other ill-fated decisions. department of civil and environmental Will that be enough to reverse the fortunes engineering at the New Jersey Institute of You’re quite critical of some of the urban of small industrial cities? Technology, has received the 2011 Henry theorists and economists who’ve conceived My book is really about the promise of L. Michel Award for Industry Advancement of ways of revitalizing cities after the smaller industrial cities in a low-carbon of Research from the American Society 1960s. Why? future, and that future is not really yet of Civil Engineers. Nelson, a leader in They’ve made the metropolis the ideal ur- upon us. There’s little market incentive the design and construction industry, ban form, when that had not always been for the shift in thinking and political will specializes in geological engineering and the case. I lay much of the blame for that on that my book calls for. I wrote this book in its application to underground construc- Jane Jacobs—as much as I admire her—who the hopes that public officials, foundation tion. She served as provost at the institute framed the intellectual response to wide- leaders and an animated citizenry will take from 2005 to 2008, and previously spread urban decline, ignoring what she a longer view. Short of that, we can also im- spent 11 years at the National Science called “little cities and dull factory towns,” pose cap-and-trade, fuel taxes, or things Foundation where she served as senior and arguing that urbanism thrives only in like that. But I don’t think we have the po- adviser to the director, and in various large and growing cities. She influenced the litical will for that. Better for these places to other leadership roles. next two generations of urban theorists— quietly prepare for what’s likely to come.r

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Quiz Kid How many of the idioms, whose origins are described below, can you identify? (Source: Steven Price, Endangered Phrases: Intriguing Idioms Dangerously Close to Extinction. Sky- horse Publishing, 2011). 1. Meaning to make peace or settle differ- ences, this expression refers to a ritual prac- ticed by American and Canadian native tribes at the end of hostilities. 2. A person who’s so ignorant that s/he can’t even make Boston’s most famous dish is a person who ______. 3. Used to convey “delighted surprise at It’s Idiomatic finding someone whose appearance was un- anticipated,” this expression is the title of a Has the world gone to hell in a handbasket? If so, don’t hem and haw. 1950 hit by popular singer Eileen Barton. Hitch your wagon to a star . . . We’ll bet dollars to doughnuts you’ve heard—and even used—a few phrases 4. This expression, which means to become like these. When it comes to knowing their origins, make no bones about it: useless, refers to the fate of chickens or other Steven Price ’62, author of Endangered Phrases: Intriguing Idioms Danger- farm animals who’ve outlived their utility. ously Close to Extinction (Skyhorse Publishing, 2011), 5. Meaning “the whole thing,” this expres- is the bees’ knees. sion, originating in the early 19th century, re- Price is a writer specializing in guides, catalogs, and fers to all the parts of a working musket. collections of quotes and stories, mostly about horses. But he’s versatile—a jack of all trades, one might say— 6. Meaning “to get into an argument,” Price with a knack for creating useful handbooks on other writes that this expression “appears in an subjects, such as What to Do When a Loved One Dies, 1865 poem by Algernon Swinburne to de- also published by Skyhorse. scribe the domestic disagreement of a heifer Last year, Skyhorse’s publisher, Tony Lyons, ap- and her mate.” proached Price about creating a collection of idioms 7. An idiom of fairly recent origin, this one and their origins. Price obliged, and began to research, is used to express disgust. It originated in consulting a host of Southern California in the 1970s and was dictionaries on made famous nationally in a 1982 hit single usage, and watching quite a few mov- by father–daughter duo Frank and Moon ies and television shows. Literature, Unit Zappa. too, is a rich source of idioms, with 19th-century poets and Shakespeare 8. Used to describe “an effete and spoiled the unwitting creators of quite a few. goody-two-shoes young man,” this expression These days, Price finds that a refers to the title character of an 1886 best- major appeal of idioms is nostal- selling novel by the author and playwright gia. “As I came across any num- Frances Hodgson Burnett. ber of phrases and expressions,” 9. Meaning “subjected to a harsh scolding he writes in his introduction, “I or punishment,” this idiom refers to a device heard in my mind’s ear the voices used to remove excess water from cloth- of my parents and grandparents and ing in the days predating washing machines others of their generation. Other peo- equipped with spin cycles. ple had the same reaction, and I suspect you will too.”r —Karen McCally 10. Meaning “noisy confusion,” it appears

in this quote, from William Shakespeare’s

Fauntleroy Lord tle Lit 8. cake. a Macbeth: “When shall we three meet again /

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48 ROCHESTER REVIEW November–December 2011 iStockphoto

5_RochRev_Nov2011_Gazette.indd 48 10/28/11 4:47 PM Alumni Gazette A ‘Savvy’ Scientific American Executive editor Fred Guterl ’81 helps the 166-year-old magazine thrive in the digital age.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD) oped more recently is arguably even better. “The really exciting thing we’re doing is “We’ve got close to 3 million unique visitors getting all of our editors, including the ones Fred Guterl ’81 recalls that he was six to our website every month,” he says. who have worked mainly on print features, or seven years old, growing up in Rockland The October 2010 redesign of both the to think more broadly about our content County, New York, the son of an engineer, print and online editions changed the look of across platforms,” says Guterl. when science first lit his imagination. Scientific American, and updated several of Last January, in a sign of what’s to come, “It was the 1960s and the moon race was its departments. Science journalist Charles Scientific American launched its first special on,” he says. “That stuff was in the head- Petit praised the redesign on the well-re- edition for the iPad. lines all the time, and I was completely tak- spected blog Knight Science Journalism It drew content from two previous theme en by it.” Tracker, noting the magazine’s “increased issues—“Origins: The Start of Everything” Those headlines, of course, were the big, readability, timeliness, and savvy,” and the (September 2009) and “The End: Death, inky kind that, on major news days espe- cially—such as July 21, 1969, the morning after Neil Armstrong and Edwin (Buzz) Al- drin became the first humans to walk on the moon—soiled your shirtsleeves and black- ened your fingertips. More than 40 years later, at a time when it takes more than newsprint or grainy an- alog television newscasts to ignite general interest in science, Guterl is helping the na- tion’s oldest, and many say most authorita- tive, popular science news venue to thrive in the digital age. Guterl, who studied electrical engi- neering at Rochester, is a veteran science journalist who served in editorial roles at Discover, IEEE Spectrum (the magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), and Newsweek before joining Scientific American as executive editor in April 2010. He was hired to help spearhead the mag- azine’s latest redesign. At Scientific Ameri- can, redesigns are part of a process of what editor-in-chief Mariette DiChristina has fittingly described as evolution. “Every- American Society of Magazine Editors gave Endings, and Things that Should End” thing evolves,” she wrote in October 2010, it one of its coveted “Ellie” awards—a Na- (September 2010)—and combined and introducing the recalibrated and rejuvenat- tional Magazine Award for General Excel- transformed it to create a downloadable ed magazine. lence—at a celebration last May. collection of articles, audio interviews, vid- But the struggle for survival in the wild “That is real recognition from our peers eos, and interactive graphics called “Ori- world of media is a bit more daunting than that we’ve raised the bar here in terms of gins and Endings.” usual. “It’s no secret that print journalism editorial quality,” says Guterl. Guterl says Scientific Americanwill con- isn’t growing,” says Guterl. “Any magazine Now he and a team of editors are look- tinue to take feature articles and transform that wants to survive has got to figure out ing ahead toward creating more, and more them into digital events with three-dimen- what to do about that. You can decide to impressive, digital enhancements for the sional, interactive graphics, among other hang on to what you have for as long as you magazine. elements. can, or try to reinvent yourself, in addition Because while printed articles can be to holding on to what you have.” u uLIFE IN CYBERSPACE: Transforming static, on the web, they live. As Guterl says, What Scientific American has had for print magazine features into digital events they have “an alternative life.” And help- some time, Guterl stresses, is pretty good: gives them “an alternative life” online, ing ensure that those alternative lives have more than 500,000 loyal, highly educat- says Guterl, who is helping create digital richness in content and meaning to read- ed print subscribers. What it has devel- enhancements at Scientific American. ers will be Guterl’s job in the days ahead.r

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