This event is cosponsored by the Israel on Campus Coalition, the Avi Chai Foundation, Stand With Us, AEpi Fraternity and Vermont Students for Israel.

Information: jay@uvmhillel.org, (802) 318-5139.

By all accounts a brilliant student, Ebalu says she came to UVM unprepared for the transition to college. "My freshman year I didn't have many resources," she says. "But I met some great people who helped and guided me."

Ebalu was born in the U.S. of Nigerian parents who took her and her four siblings back to their homeland when she was two, before they became acculturated as Americans. “I’m really glad they did,” she says, “because I got to experience the beauty of Nigeria and the glory of being an African.”

At 12, after losing a sister from sudden illness who was just a month away from starting medical school in America, Ebalu’s father brought the remaining children back “to fulfill our dreams because life doesn’t go according to plan.” Despite difficult circumstances in New York City, her mother behind in Nigeria, Ebalu says it was in high school that she came to love psychology (her major) and German (her minor, which took her to Austria for a semester abroad).

Time for Africa                                                                                                                     

As she settled into UVM, becoming heavily involved with the ALANA and Women’s centers, Ebalu was walking through Dewey Hall when she passed Karen Fondacaro’s open door, caught a glance of a clock in the shape of Africa and stopped short. Fondacaro, clinical professor of psychology and director of the Behavior Therapy and Psychotherapy Center (BTPC), invited her in. “She started looking around,” Fondacaro recalls, “and she said, “’I feel like I’m home, what do you do?’ And we just had this immediate connection to each other. That was it.”

Fondecaro explained that the clock and other African influences were related to her work directing Connecting Cultures through BTPC, a program providing mental health services to refugees. Ebalu was in from that moment, pouring herself into projects in the New American community through academics and personal service, all the while solidifying a focus for her long-term career goals in clinical psychology.

From her first year Ebalu became aware of the McNair Scholar program, designed to help advance first-generation, limited-income and/or underrepresented undergraduates who are academically competitive and have the intention of earning a doctoral degree. She prepared herself early she says, knowing the opportunity would serve her well. Named a McNair research fellow in 2012, Ebalu, under Fondacaro’s guidance, chose to study the relationship between post-migration stressors such as unemployment, lack of social support, language and education barriers and their impact on mental health outcomes in refugee populations (she had noticed that the research tended to focus on prior trauma).

If statistical analysis tends to be the least engaging task for most scientists, it wasn’t for Ebalu, hungry to expand her knowledge. “I just think of her,” Fondacaro recalls, “smiling through her multiple linear regressions. She was so excited to learn the statistical procedure. It was wonderful."

Gratitude in action

Despite Ebalu's intellectual strength, it's not what makes people effusive. “Her mind is constantly going but really and truly,” says Candace Taylor, coordinator of programming and leadership development at the university’s Women’s Center, “what I connect most with Tracie is this guiding moral compass, this heart... She is constantly thinking about how she can give back, I think it really is the lens through which she walks this world.”

One of Ebalu’s big personal initiatives this year was spearheading a coat drive for the refugee community -- a project Burton (through a connection with Taylor’s husband) enthusiastically supported -- collecting some 500 coats and other winter wear. Ebalu is a fan of the phrase, “pay it forward.” Because she knows.

It was Taylor, Ebalu will tell you, who gave her a coat when she needed one. But ask Taylor about it, and she tells you that Ebalu turned around and gave it to her little sister. “That’s Tracie,” she laughs. “She will hear that somebody needs something, and she will literally take it off of her own back.”

“The reason she did the coat drive,” says Beverly Colston, director of the ALANA center, is because she knows what it’s like for a family to not have coats. How do you function when you’re cold? Tracie is committed to making sure that it will be better for people than it was for her.”

The success of this effort in a sense represents the culmination of Ebalu’s growth at UVM. According to Colston, Ebalu has always sought out leadership roles, even ones that may have been a bit beyond her at the time. “But the truth is,” Colston says, “she just soaked up those experiences and used them to get wise and go to the next level.”

Now Colston calls her a community connector, an activist who is passionate about issues that face women of color, a leader who uses her voice to speak up, educate others and bring them in.

Quirky, authentic, almost uncensored are among the descriptions of Ebalu that make her real. At times, they say, exuberant to a fault.

“She’s so compassionate and she cares so deeply,” Taylor says, “to the extent where you have to reel her in a little bit and say it’s okay for her to take care of herself too. But she’s got a big vision, big dreams and I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone who has that energy that you know they’re going to accomplish it.”

Ebalu, too, has no doubt what she’ll do. For herself, for her mother, maybe for her older sister.

“I tell (my mom) I’m really certain I’m going to get a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and one day my name is going to be Dr. Tracie Ebalu.”

Diving in

For senior Peter Grunawalt, who conducted field research in India's Himalayan region through the Brattleboro, Vt.-based School for International Training (SIT), one uncomfortable moment came when setting out on a research excursion to a village with no pre-arranged shelter. Eventually, housing was secured with the help of his translator, and Grunawalt was able to spend time in the area, speaking with residents about the factors affecting youth migration. His presentation, "Why are Cities the Only Place for Dreams? Rural to Urban Migration in India," delved into the farming practices and educational structures, among other considerations, contributing to the growing influx of youth to urban areas in the northern Indian region.

Senior Sarah Gallalee, who also studied abroad through SIT, spoke on "Analyzing the Barriers that Prevent Access to Diagnosis and Treatment for Tuberculosis in Dehradun, India." Tuberculosis, a treatable and curable disease, is still among the deadliest agents in the country. Gallalee conducted interviews with patients, officials and health workers and pursued spatial analysis research using geographic information systems to look at reasons why tuberculosis persists as a public health problem even when India has taken measures to improve its policies regarding treatment and reporting. One barrier became apparent to Gallalee when speaking with young women who reported the stigma surrounding the illness -- one that "could destroy chances of a proper marriage." This factor and others, such as religious misconceptions and loss of working time, she said, are among the barriers that still exist to both diagnosis and treatment.

Sophomore Benjamin Ryan discussed two independent trips he's taken to Bangladesh, one during high school and one during a gap year prior to enrolling at UVM. Ryan discussed the fledgling research he conducted in slums that sparked his decision to found a non-governmental organization, the Foundation for Climate Change Refugees. Conducting surveys among residents of slums, Ryan learned that many of its inhabitants had been displaced due to the effects of global climate change. Bangladesh, with its sea-level elevation and geography that makes it prone to typhoons, is considered "ground zero" of global warming, and its people, Ryan said, all already feeling the effects. "Climate change is not something we have to be concerned about in the future," Ryan said. "It's something that impacts people every day. It's a contemporary issue."

Reflection

The four students had met last fall about their mutual interest in contemporary issues in South Asia. Rosenblum organized the research forum, with support from the Anthropology Department, as a way to share their work with a broader audience as well as with each other. After their presentations, they answered questions from Steinberg as well as attendees, and spoke with each other on issues ranging from their personal health and safety while traveling to areas of common findings among their work.

Rosenblum's research on street children focused on agricultural antecedents to childhood migration, so his work, although dealing with a different region of India, had strong overlap with Grunawalt's. He was also particularly interested in Ryan's findings regarding climate change as a cause for migration since their areas of focus share a river system, similar weather patterns, and increased occurrence of natural disasters, Rosenblum explained.

Rosenblum has plans to pull his notes and interviews together into a research paper and hopes to one day return to India. "I definitely think I'll go back," he says. "I have a lot of connections and ties there now."   

In the meantime, he'll continue his global research on this side of the hemisphere: he departs this week with SIT for a semester abroad in Buenos Ares, Argentina.

The popular media-driven theory purports that because monarchs enjoy traditional religious and tribal legitimacy, their citizens feel an intense loyalty and believe monarchs have an advantage over republics because they can spearhead controlled reforms that defuse public discontent. Many academics agree and consider it the primary reason why royals from the eight Arab monarchies – Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the Persian Gulf littoral states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates – remain in absolute power.

Gregory Gause, professor of political science and Middle East expert, isn’t one of them and questions the focus on monarchies by those trying to come up with an answer to why countries with kings fared better than those with presidents. “It’s kind of an obvious question and the simple answer has been, ‘Well, it must be something about monarchies.’ It’s the kind of one-step removed, news analysis accounts that have been developing in the Middle East. I don’t mean it in a derogatory way, but I think it was kind of an easy answer. Such explanations do not hold up under scrutiny. That’s what I wanted to push back.”    

Gause’ self-described "counterpunch" came in the form of an article he co-authored with Sean L. Yom, assistant professor of political science at Temple University, in the October issue of the Journal of Democracy, a publication produced by the National Endowment for Democracy. In “Resilient Royals: How Arab Monarchies Hang On,” Gause predicts the prospects for popular revolution in Arab kingdoms to remain slim as long as their leaders continue to maintain the following advantages: broad-based coalitions; access to hydrocarbon rents; and support from foreign patrons.

“Ruling monarchism flourishes in the Arab world, but the reasons for this do not stem from any mysterious essence of kingship,” writes Gause. “They stem, rather, from historical choices and physical resources amenable to matter-of-fact analysis. To be sure, culture and institutions are central forces in the politics of any state. Yet they do not constitute convincing explanations for the resilience of royalism in the Arab world.”

Permissive international environment linked to successful monarchies  

Gause provides a strategic explanation for monarchical exceptionalism linking the historical legacy of domestic choices with a permissive international environment.

“First, many of these royal houses have historically mobilized cross-cutting coalitions of popular support, coalitions that have helped to forestall mass opposition and to bolster the ruling family against whatever opposition has emerged,” claims Gause. “Second, most have also reaped ample rents from oil or foreign aid, allowing them to pay for welfare and development programs meant to alleviate public discord. Finally, when all else fails, these kingdoms have enjoyed the backing of foreign patrons who assist them through diplomatic assurances, economic grants, and military interventions. For a long time, the United States played this role.”

Gause gives historical examples of inherent qualities of Arab monarchism that are “hardly safeguards against deposition.” In the postcolonial era, for example, monarchies were overthrown in Egypt (1952), Tunisia (1957), Iraq (1958), North Yemen (1962), South Arabia (1967) and Libya (1969). If Muslim (albeit non-Arab) countries are included in Southwest Asia, then Afghanistan (1973) and Iran (1979) join the list. “If royal authoritarianism has intrinsic cultural legitimacy, how could so many Arab kings have lost their thrones? If kings by nature wisely handle opposition with visionary reforms through institutional manipulation, then why did so many fail to do so?”

Another reasons revolt may not come as intensely in some monarchies, according to Gause, is because even though people living in the Middle East may not necessarily believe in them philosophically, they might prefer them to republics, where life doesn’t always look so good.

“If you are a Jordanian or a Saudi and you look around at Iraq, Egypt and Syria you might say, ‘Hey, we’ve got it a lot better than those guys do,'” he says. “And that might not have anything to do with a profound belief that monarchy is culturally consistent with your world view or the way you live your life. It could just be a very practical thing like, ‘Places with presidents seem to screw up while places with kings seem to be better off.’ One of things we should have learned from the Arab Spring is that just because people didn’t rebel doesn’t necessarily mean that the regime is popular. All these regimes that fell were pretty quiet, stable regimes – and then all of a sudden they weren’t.”

Two of the “houses” in the Living/Learning Center’s Global Village challenged one another to a friendly yet competitive cook-off in an effort to raise money for an orphanage in Kirov, Russia. Commonly referred to as the Epic Food Battle of 2012, the “food fight” took place in the Fireplace Lounge of the Living and Learning Center Nov. 7 (ironically, the anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution). The German House’s Stephanie Forristall, an exchange student from the University of Augsburg, and the Russian House’s Kristen Rousse organized a widely attended culinary evening along with fellow students from their respective residential learning houses. 

Nine members of the German House (Bruce Barger, Tracy Guion, Samuel Janidlo, Kara Pratt, Patrick Ryan, CharlieDan Sheffy, Erin Skelly, Allie Sullivan, and Stephanie) as well as an equal number of Russian majors from the Russian House (Veronica Rock, Nicolas Chlebak, Dalina Ceku, Tatiana Rumsey, John Mauran, Corey Pariseau, Rubin Goldberg, Jake Pelland, and Kristen) organized themselves into small “kollektivs” for purposes of preparing a wide array of national dishes for the event.

With the help of faculty director Professor Dennis Mahoney, German House students prepared käsespätzle (cheese noodle casserole), two kinds of apfelkuchen (apple cake), sauerbraten (pot roast), kartoffelpuffer (potato pancake), schwarzwälder (Black Forest cake) brownies and apple twists. They also served apple sauce for the potato pancakes and some rather tasty non-alcoholic drinks.

As faculty director of the Russian House, I made my contribution to the evening’s “cook-off” by staying out of the kitchen; but under Kristen Rousse’s direction Russian House students prepared a delicious array of борщ/borscht, пельменные/pel’mennye (fried dumplings), блины/bliny, шарлотта с яблоками/ sharlotta s yablokami (apple cake), салад столичный/salad stolichnyi and, of course, Russian печения/pecheniya (cookies). 

Katie Boynton, former UVM Russian House student director and, now, UVM grad (class of 2012), was the guiding force for this event in suggesting that the Russian and German Houses work together in raising much-needed funds for a cash-strapped orphanage in Kirov, Russia. Since graduation Boynton has been working for a non-profit organization, Bright Connections, in the Philadelphia area, where she assists in fund-raising efforts for Russian orphanages to repair buildings, provide toys for the kids, and provide other basic services.

While the Germans once again went down in defeat to the Russians in this food-fight, a total of more than $330 was raised in contributions to the Kirov Orphanage: a most worthy undertaking with no victims or casualties to report! Judging by the unusually healthy (and hungry) turnout of UVM students for the event (approximately 90-100 in number), the evening was a “большой успех” and no one awakened “wurst” for the experience the following morning. Delighted by the turnout and even more so by the money raised, Professor Mahoney (the founding faculty director of Global Village in 2006-08) was most of all impressed by the enthusiasm and cooperation displayed by the students in both houses: an example of Residential Learning at its best!

Two main ideas will heavily influence the forum schedule – Brazil’s relevance in terms of environmental sustainability and the importance of Portuguese as the third most common language in the western world after Spanish and English, spoken by more than 230 million people (190 million in Brazil). Forum sessions range from a talk by Rubenstein School professor Joshua Farley, “Forests, Ecosystems Services and Small Family Farms: Overcoming Irreconcilable Conflicts in Brazil and Vermont;” a keynote speech by Professor Maria Luci Moreira from the College of Charleston and the Middlebury Summer Language School, “The Importance of Portuguese in the World as a Strategic Language for Global Communication;” and a movie screening of A Convenient Truth: Urban Solutions from Curitiba, Brazil.

For more information and a detailed schedule of events see the forum brochure.

This profile is part of the story "The Newest Americans" in the summer issue of Vermont Quarterly magazine. Read the full article.

Just two years out from graduation, alumna Sasha Fisher '10 has wasted no time putting her self-designed major to use. If "human security" sounds abstract and philosophical (just the sort of lofty, idealistic concept that bright, optimistic undergraduates might enjoy probing during their four years in college), Fisher has found a way to bring her choice of study back down to Earth.

Spark MicroGrants, the non-profit she's co-founded, has already helped humans in eastern Africa achieve security of one kind or another, by funding projects to improve access to education, clean water, healthcare, food and more.

Before college, Fisher "was very interested in global development and all these efforts to eradicate poverty, but," she says, "I, like a lot of people in my generation, didn't feel like they were going well."

When she arrived at UVM from New York City, her plan was to investigate aid work with a multidisciplinary approach. "I ended up realizing that in economics, the goal is to have poverty reduction -- that's not actually my goal. In political science, it's about the state -- that's not actually my goal either," she says. "What I want to do is to enable all the humans on Earth, even if they're in an illegitimate state or a corrupt state, to meet all their basic needs. And that doesn't necessarily mean money -- that means that they have food, that they have health care, that they have a house, that they have access to clean water. And so while that sounds very obvious, it's a whole other paradigm and a whole new way of thinking about aid and about what our goals are in the world."

Enter the "human security" major (one half of her double-major; Fisher also studied studio art), a term introduced to her by Ted McMahon, research associate professor of community development and applied economics. "It's a way of addressing those needs and addressing them in a non-state-based way and accepting there's a rising legitimacy in non-state actors such as NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and communities," she explains.

"Sasha's engagement and focus on real-world problems is always what struck me about her," says Peter VonDoepp, associate professor of political science, who this spring invited Fisher back to campus to speak to his students. "When she was a student, she took my African policies class, and what continued to strike me was not just her level of intellectual engagement and real enthusiasm for the material but also her applied understanding of the material and capability for thinking about real-world problems. Sasha's not stuck in the abstract, it's all about this world for her."

After finishing her senior thesis on the topic and graduating, Fisher, inspired and educated by her work as an undergrad with the New Sudan Education Initiative, another non-profit created by UVM alumni, co-founded Spark MicroGrants with Georgetown and Columbia University graduate Teddy Svoronos, who conceived of the organization as a Fulbright Scholar in Tanzania, and computer scientist Neal Lesh, who specializes in using information technology to address poverty. With an initial $10,000 investment, Fisher moved to Rwanda two months after graduating and began putting the model into action.

What is the model? It's simple, she says: let community members drive development in their villages. Rather than NGOs and other outside groups dictating what a community needs, Spark MicroGrants offers a sum of money (typically $5,000 or less) and works with the community to identify their needs and draft a proposal that ensures sustainability of the chosen project. (Watch the audio slideshow above to learn how a group of women in Uganda turned $1,600 into a school for their vilage's children.)

Don't confuse microgranting with microlending. While the latter has received a good amount of attention from the media, not all of it has been favorable. That concept, which enables individuals to loan money to help impoverished people fund a small business, has drawn criticism for failing to reach the poorest of the developing world, leading more people into the debt cycle and lacking sustainability. Spark's model of microgranting, on the other hand, erases debt from the equation, and focuses on improving quality of life for a community, rather than earning money for a single entrepreneur.

So far, Spark has funded more than 24 projects in Rwanda and Uganda, and has expanded from a full-time staff of just Fisher, then Fisher and fellow UVM alumnus Eamon Penney '09, to now employing seven full-timers and a team of part-time staff from universities in both countries. In August, Fisher says, the full-time ranks will increase to 12.

"It is so exciting to think about Spark in the long run, because one of the things we're doing is we're building a model for microgranting, and this model could be used everywhere in the world," Fisher says. "Hopefully we'll have proven that this model is the model we should be using for development."

To learn more about Spark MicroGrants and to donate, visit its website: sparkmicrogrants.org.

“UVM’s national scholarship winners represent the intellectual diversity, the dedication to research and discovery, and the commitment to public service that the university seeks to support,” says Abu Rizvi, dean of the Honors College, which houses the Office of National Fellowships. The Truman Scholarship seeks to identify and support current juniors who have demonstrated significant leadership abilities and plan to pursue a career in public service. The Udall Scholarship acknowledges sophomores and juniors who have been outstanding leaders in areas related to the environment. The Goldwater recognizes sophomores and juniors who have done outstanding work in science, technology, engineering and mathematics and who also seek to become researchers in their disciplines. The Boren is a prestigious study-abroad scholarship for critical language acquisition. “Our students have put us in excellent company,” Rizvi continues. “Their accomplishments show that we compete very well against well known and larger universities.” 

The list of universities with at least one winner in each of the four scholarships in the 2011-2012 academic year is dominated by prestigious private and large public institutions:

• Arizona State University
• Dartmouth College
• Princeton University
• University of Maryland-College Park
• University of Oklahoma
• University of Vermont
• University of Virginia

Brent Reader, ’13 was one of 55 students nationwide to receive a Truman Scholarship. A Swanton, Vt. native, Reader joined the Vermont National Guard in 2004, and was trained as a combat medic. He has received numerous military honors, including a Combat Medic Badge. Reader came to UVM in 2010 with a goal of pursuing a social work degree, and eventually a master’s degree, which he plans to use to improve mental and physical health care for soldiers upon their return from war.

Tad Cooke ’14 was one of 70 students nationwide to receive a Udall Scholarship. A Charlotte, Vt. native and a sustainable food and energy systems major, Cooke has worked to fundamentally rethink the way organic material has been used and reused in the way that society produces food and energy. In 2012 Cooke, along with fellow student Erick Crockenberg ’14, received first place in UVM's Clean Energy Fund competition for their proposal to research and then build a carbon-negative, compost heated production and research greenhouse on UVM’s Miller Farm. This would be the first greenhouse of its kind in the country. After graduating from UVM, Cooke intends to create a company that designs self-sustaining food and energy systems which will create healthy foods while producing the energy that can be used to run the system.

Susan Leggett ’13 was the first UVM student to be named a Goldwater Scholar since 2009. A biochemistry major and Honors College student, Leggett has been conducting research on lung fibrosis in the Department of Pathology at the College of Medicine with Dr. Yvonne Janssen-Heininger. She also co-authored a publication in the American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology. Her strong research background aligns with her interest in medicine; she is also a part of UVM’s highly competitive premedical enhancement program, and she is a regular volunteer at Fletcher Allen Hospital. Susan is originally from Salem, N.H. After she graduates from UVM she plans to pursue an M.D/PhD. Ultimately, she hopes to conduct research in a clinical immunodiagnostic research laboratory and teach at a medical university.

Erin Kerr ’14 was one of 131 students who received a Boren Scholarship, which will fund her study abroad experience in Serbia and Bosnia during the spring of 2013. Kerr’s long-standing intellectual interest in the former Yugoslavia is rooted in the connections she made to the Bosnian community in her hometown of St. Johnsbury, Vt. After coming to UVM, she became engrossed in the study of geopolitics through her coursework in the geography department. In addition to being an Honors College student, she has been working on an independent study with Professor Pablo Bose examining how former-Yugoslav countries have been affected by nationalism and colonialism, as well as how these countries fit into world-system theory. While in Serbia, Kerr plans to continue her research by examining how land distribution along ethnic lines was a factor throughout the Yugoslav Wars as well as the reparation and peace-building processes.

Several other UVM students were recognized in these competitions. Alma Arteaga ’13 and Eliza Kelsten ’13 were Truman Scholarship Finalists, David Bernstein ’13 and Kanita Chaudhry ’13 were Goldwater Scholarship Honorable Mentions, and Hannah Gibson ’14 and Jeremiah Rozman ’14 were Boren Scholarship Finalists.

Since 2005, when the university put a centralized fellowship outreach and support program in place, 96 UVM students have won or been finalists in the country’s most prestigious and competitive competitions, including the Fulbright, Rhodes, Goldwater, Marshall, Udall, Truman, Madison, Gilman and Boren Overseas scholarships.

Hannah Doughty '13 was awarded a Gilman to study in Russia for the fall 2012 semester. Doughty, a double anthropology and Russian major, is from Rochester, Vt. and will be spending the semester in St. Petersburg. Earlier this year she was also awarded a Critical Language Scholarship, which is a prestigious award to study at a U.S. State Department-funded language institute in Russia

Madeleine Gibson '13 was awarded a Gilman to study in Finland for the fall 2012 semester. Gibson is an environmental studies major from Kingston, R.I.

Jamie Sharken '14 was awarded a Gilman to study in Buenos Aires, Argentina for the fall 2012 semester. Sharken is from Amherst, Mass.

Amanda St. Hilaire '14, an environmental studies major from Cumberland, Me., also received an award. St. Hilaire will spend the fall of 2012 studying in Scotland.

UVM students received a total of $34,000 in study abroad scholarship money from the Gilman awards for the 2011-2012 academic year. The Institute for International Education recently ranked the University of Vermont fifth in the nation among public doctoral universities for the percentage of its undergraduate students -- 32.5 percent -- who participate in study abroad programs.

The Gilman Scholarship Program aims to diversify the kinds of students who study abroad and the countries and regions where they go. The program provides awards that allow American undergraduate students who receive federal Pell Grant funding at a two-year or four-year college or university to participate in study abroad programs worldwide.

Since 2005, when the university put a centralized fellowship outreach and support program in place, 95 UVM students have won or been finalists in the country’s most prestigious and competitive competitions, including the Fulbright, Rhodes, Goldwater, Marshall, Udall, Truman, Madison, Gilman and Boren Overseas scholarships.

Saturday, June 2, 2012

It’s our second day on the coast of southeastern Greenland, and I’m thinking of Manhattan. A sea fog is rolling in over the settlement of Tasiilaq, perched on the edge of a still-frozen bay, surrounded by mountains, about 60 miles south of the Arctic Circle.

I’m here with four geologists —  Paul Bierman, Alice Nelson, Jeremy Shakun and Dylan Rood. It’s 10:36 p.m., but the sky is still bright. The sun, above the fog, has gone behind a mountain, but it is mostly going sideways, sliding not setting. The scientists, still at work in our hotel’s dining room, drink tea and study maps of glaciers and deltas that they plan to visit in a few days.

They’re trying to find rocks and sediments that will help them solve a most important climate change question: how fast will Greenland melt in a warming world? “We want to know: how stable is the ice sheet?” Nelson told me. That’s why I’m thinking of Manhattan: if the whole Greenland ice sheet — that covers most of this not-green island — were to melt, sea level would rise more than 20 feet, inundating coastal cities around the world.

The scientists, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, want to help get a clearer picture of how quickly such a melt-off could happen. And to auger the future with greater precision, they look to the past, collecting rocks and sediment that, back in Bierman’s lab at UVM, let them measure how extensive the ice was here thousands of years ago.

I’ll tell you more about that method — it's new and a potentially transformative way to get a sense of the pulsing growth and total melt-off of Greenland that has happened over the past 5 million years or so — in another post soon.

I’m here, an embedded science reporter (armed with skis and a camera, instead of body armor, thank goodness), to write a story about the scientists’ adventures, scientific and otherwise, that will appear in the fall issue of Vermont Quarterly.

There are no roads that lead to Tasiilaq — we arrived by helicopter. It seems another world from Wall Street. But what happens in Greenland over the next centuries seems likely to affect the whole world.

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Sea fog, lit from within, moves in a long band across the fjord. Behind, the mountains remain visible like pencil marks on a white sheet. Sky and water bound the fog in blue. It’s our second day in Tasiilaq, Greenland, population 2,000, where the houses perch in a pleasing jumble on the hills, brightly painted in red, yellow and electric blue. Patches of snap-white snow, umber rocks, gray rocks, and golden grass — and, everywhere, searingly jagged mountains — make a background. It’s like the landscape was done by a god of elements and the houses by Crayola.

The geologists are in a stream. Well, Shakun stands in the stream, nearly overtopping his Muck boots, dipping his hands into the “32.1 degree water,” he says, collecting sand from the bottom.

The rest of the team perches on melting snow mounds and rocks nearby, pouring the sand into plastic bags, entering GPS data into a notebook, taking photographs of a magnetic number board that will let them identify the site when they’re back in the lab — and making fun of Shakun. Pairs of sled dogs — tied up in a field full of sleds and sled-dog crap — look on curiously to this curious scientific enterprise.

In the sand the scientists have collected is quartz, and in the quartz an element called beryllium, and in one form of the beryllium hides information about how long Greenland and how much of Greenland has been covered with ice. That’s why the scientists are here: to take the measure of Greenland and its prodigious ice sheet, enough water to fill the Gulf of Mexico — one isotopic atom of beryllium at a time. In a warming climate, how long will the ice last? This research promises to give the world a clearer answer.

Monday, June 4, 2012

Time is a strange master when traveling with geologists.

Arriving here three days ago, Paul Bierman and I were looking out the window of the plane, as the gray mountains of Greenland went ripping along below. Paul pointed to a flatter, gravelly place just above sea level and said, “There was a beach there a hundred years ago, maybe two hundred.” In one frame of mind, for geologists, a hundred years is less than a rounding error. Their imaginations, by professional habit, travel often in the howling expanses of geological time, where thousands of years pass in a footstep.

Now we’re preparing to fly in a helicopter to the outwash of six or seven glaciers and Paul is a bit concerned — about minutes. The flight is scheduled for 2:45 p.m., but the last two afternoons a fog has rolled in, and the helicopter pilots can’t fly if they can’t see where to land.

The team hunches over their maps in the hotel (no surprise, geologists spend a lot of time looking at maps) trying to decide what the most important sampling sites are, if the itinerary must be curtailed, and how many minutes each stop will take. “We can just grab the sand and go,” Paul tells the team. “No need to sieve it til we get back.” The fuel and money burn rate of a chartered Air Greenland helicopter makes thousands of dollars tied into this few-hour trip.

But the day remains clear and shockingly bright, and at 3:10 the helicopter lifts, thudding and whining, while we all stare out the windows, suddenly ripped from the ground. It is loud — and an incredible,visual riot of geologic delights for the next five hours.

First the village of Tasiilaq comes fully into view, handsome red boats in the harbor, a tumbling dump of rusted snowmobiles, debris, and old plastic toys on the edge of town. Then the sage, tan and lichen-covered closer hills. Then the vast stretches of the formidable island of Greenland: far-off ragged huge ranges, blocky icebergs with azure pools on top, vertiginous peaks that remind me of Wyoming — but in an elongated funhouse mirror — plates and panels of intersecting sea ice, huge glaciers spilling down valleys.

The helicopter banks and all the world is now on its side, we circle, the machine slows, descends, its rotors so powerful that water on the ground sprays like a hurricane and rocks roll away. Down again. On ice. Here a rushing stream pours out of a glacier, milky and frothing. The landscape, transected by abstract lines of white and grey, makes the helicopter look puny and gaudy, resting, incongruous, in a ponderous snowfield.

We clamber over boulders and down to where the stream slices along a wall of snow, old gray below, fresh white above. There is a loud cheerful rushing of water.

The scientists quickly dig with a trowel in the sand on the stream edge, dump it in a plastic bag, label it with a marker, then take photos of the location. We’re about to hustle back to the helicopter. There are more sites to visit, more samples to collect that will provide months of work back in the lab and thousands of years of perspective on what is happening here.

“Listen,” says Bierman, pausing for a few seconds, “that’s the sound of Greenland melting.”

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Jeremy Shakun lifts a small sledgehammer and slams it down on a chisel. No rock comes free.

On this raw, gravel-covered hill, overlooking a frozen sea, the colors pop. Rust, mustard, purple-blue puddles, and shocking snow — super-saturated in an overwash of Arctic light. We can hear the wavering howl of many sled dogs, rising up the slope from the tiny settlement of Kusuluk. It makes a haunting noise backdrop to the metronomic clinking of metal on metal.

Shakun hits again and again, legs splayed out on a rounded lump of bedrock. “You have to be patient,” Paul Bierman says, laughing. Dylan Rood offers a stream of bogus advice about Shakun’s technique, most of it unfit for print.

Bierman, 50, has some twenty years on both Rood and Shakun, but they’ve all smacked plenty of rocks before: Shakun is a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard; Rood, a Californian, recently moved to Glasgow to take a post at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre; and Bierman has been a professor of geology at UVM since 1993.

Next to where Shakun is working, the geologists have erected a high-sensitivity GPS antenna and receiver. It gathers satellite information with enough precision to pinpoint our location and elevation to within two or three feet.

The rock that they collect here will travel back to Bierman’s shop in Vermont, one of the few cosmogenic isotope laboratories in the world, where it will be painstakingly dissolved to yield nearly pure quartz. “I was working on samples for twenty-five straight days,” Alice Nelson says, with the rueful head-shaking characteristic of graduate students.

From the quartz, Bierman and his students will extract the element beryllium and then ship it to Scotland, where Rood will test the beryllium in a specialized mass spectrometer, capable of detecting a single atom out of a million billion atoms. It’s like having a machine capable of finding a misplaced grain of sand on a very large beach.

Despite all this technological gee-whiz-ness, for these geologists trying to collect a few good field samples, there seems to be no advanced tool better than a hammer.

Shakun makes a huge, grunting hit and, finally, a chip, the size of a quarter, comes free. Rood gingerly picks it up and drops it in a bag.

Why, you may be asking, would four geologists — interested in understanding climate change — want to collect chips of ancient metamorphosed granite in order to count the atoms of beryllium in its quartz?

Because of cosmic rays. Really. This radiation, born at the beginning of the universe, rains down on you, me, sled dogs and rocks. It penetrates the top few meters of the earth’s surface. And where it does, ever so rarely, it smashes into oxygen within the quartz, knocking a chunk off.

What remains from the busted oxygen is a special form of beryllium, the rare isotope 10Be. The longer the quartz is exposed to the sky, bombarded by cosmic rays, the more 10Be accumulates within its crystals.

But buried under snow and ice — shielded by, say, the Greenland ice sheet — no 10Be accumulates in the quartz. So the amount of beryllium in a grain of sand can reveal how long it was exposed, versus how long buried under ice. Collect enough of these grains, from enough spots in Greenland, and you could begin to sketch a picture of when and where ice rested here in the past.

That’s why Jeremy Shakun keeps clinking away with a sledgehammer, while the rest of us eat granola bars and wait for him to prize out a tiny chunk of knowledge.

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

We wake to bad news. Air Greenland has called to say our flight to Nuuk, the capital, is cancelled.

I can see why: white on white, a heavy fog sifts over the snow. Or, rather, I can’t see the airport that is only a few hundred yards from our hotel. The combo freight/passenger Dash 7 propeller planes that ferry people across the ice sheet are well-suited to descending steeply over the mountains to land here — but this ain’t O’Hare. The runway is dirt.

We’re stuck in one of the most remote airports in the world and the next scheduled flight to where we need to go isn’t for three more days.

Not only does this jeopardize the scientists’ several days of planned field work, but it means we may not be able to catch our military flight back to the U.S. on Saturday, from Kangerlussuaq, with the NY Air National Guard. “We might not get home until next week,” Paul tells us as we sit in the dining room.

I’m working my third cup of coffee. The forty Taiwanese tourists who arrived here yesterday make the dining room as loud as it was quiet last night — when I could hear the snuffling of three arctic foxes that came poking out from under the melting ice and went prancing around outside the hotel, wrestling in the 12:30 a.m. sunset.

The hotel is pleasant and clean. It’s run by tall, blond men from Denmark who serve delicious food: tender pork loin, warm chocolate cake, pickled herring (ok, Paul doesn’t think this is delicious), and lots of other pickled stuff, including one item that we debated whether it was an onion or pear, but agreed was tasty.

In front of the hotel, a rutted dirt track leads in one direction to the airport and in the other through a fifteen-foot deep canyon of snow to the village of Kulusuk. I read in Smithsonian Magazine that only 75 miles of roads have been built in the entire 836,000 square miles of Greenland. I doubt if this counts as one of them, but, in any case, neither direction goes nearly as far as we’d hoped to go today.

This, it seems, is how polar science often works: months of intensive careful planning from the comfort of home, followed by frantic calls on a satellite phone from the field. At least that is what Bierman is doing right now — to the National Science Foundation contractor in charge of logistics. He’s hoping to fend off chaos, and discussing the possibility of returning to Iceland on the same flight as the tourists, to get at Nuuk by another route — but that doesn’t look promising.

Alice Nelson, Jeremy Shakun and I play a round of Scrabble, using the set in the hotel. Except it’s a Russian edition, so we use the Cyrillic letters as best we can to proxy for our alphabet. Dylan Rood and Bierman feverishly sketch and re-work numerous scenarios about how they might get some of the geology fieldwork done on an interrupted schedule. Perhaps a return trip later in the summer?

Hours later, we still don’t know what's going to happen. The fog has cleared — but it’s also clear we’re not getting on the Iceland flight and that no trip to Nuuk is happening today.

“Let’s go skiing,” Bierman finally says. I’ve been skiing with him every day since we arrived in Greenland. Our daily outings have put him over a hundred days on skis for the year  — making it to 100 for twelve years in a row. Alice Nelson, who captained the Williams College cross-country ski team, decides she’s going to walk the road to Kulusuk with Rood and Shakun. Her boots are still wet from yesterday.

An hour later, we all re-gather in the village of Kulusuk, population 300. Local people, with coppery Inuit complexions, push their babies in baby joggers. A dead seal sits in a wheelbarrow. A giant Volvo forklift trundles by. Piles of candy-bar wrappers and Tuborg beer cans litter the snow and dirt paths that wind between the red houses. Then a man shouts, and I can see his sled dog team huffing past the grocery store where I just paid about eight dollars for two bananas. The dogs pass between a traditional wooden sled and a snowmobile resting on the edge of the frozen bay, and disappear behind distant icebergs.

“There is a lot international attention to climate change," Jesper Krough, 29, told me. "People are concerned about Greenland because they’re worried about their end of the world — not this place.”  Krough is the Danish manager of the hotel, who has lived in Kulusuk for four years, overwintering alone in the hotel. “It’s easy to forget," he says, "there are actually people living here in Greenland.”

Krough talks to us from a jeep as we come down the road out of the snow canyon. Air Greenland called, he says, to tell us our flight to Nuuk has been rescheduled for tomorrow at noon. Phew. Things haven’t completely melted down yet.

Thursday June 7, 2012

Paul Bierman and I are heading uphill on skis toward a mountain that overlooks Kulusuk. He’s looking for the beach. At least he thinks this gravelly spot might have been a beach about 8,000 years ago. He picks up a rounded rock, eyeing it quizzically. Was this dumped here by a glacier or tossed by the sea?

Prior to this trip, my sense of Greenland came largely from the schoolroom maps of childhood. The traditional Mercator projection stretched Greenland into a huge blank white wedge, larger than Africa -- a timeless fortress of ice resting at the top of a rectangular world.

But Greenland is smaller, more complex -- and its ice, perhaps, more fragile than those old maps suggest.

A few days ago Alice Nelson patiently walked me through a PowerPoint about the research she and the team are doing here. They’re trying to get a sharper picture of how the extent of the Greenland ice sheet has changed over the last six million years.

They know it has had distinct chapters of melting and growth as global and regional temperatures rose and fell. But how big did the ice sheet get? Where did it grow first? When did it melt? “It may have been totally gone 100,000 years ago,” she said.

“It’s really hard to study ice sheets from the past,” she told me. “If it melted, it melted.”

“So the information we have on Greenland is limited,” she told me, “We know there was ice, and we can date that pretty well, but we don’t know how much ice.”

Bierman and I don’t know how much ice is under our skis as we gingerly skirt around some rotten snow near the water’s edge. Even in the few days we’ve been here, the landscape has changed. New pools form on the surface and a sudden four-foot wide torrent sliced through the road.

We make it back to the hotel and a few hours later, we’re rising above the “big ice,” as people here call the ice sheet, breathing sighs of relief. Our delayed plane got off the ground from Kulusuk. We’re on our way to Nuuk.

The team has had to abandon one leg of the trip, to Narsarsuaq, where they planned to collect elevation data. I’m disappointed we won’t get to visit Viking ruins there. (You know, Erik the Red named this place “green” land to attract settlers from warmer climes. It might be the first great real estate scam.) But the second day of helicopter work tomorrow should be do-able, if the weather holds.

As we’re flying along, the flight attendant passes around a basket of homemade cookies while Jeremy Shakun tutors me on a paper he published in Nature this April. It shows clearly that as global carbon dioxide levels rose at the end of the last ice age, global temperatures followed.

“It’s pretty hard to explain that -- if it’s not causal,” he says.

And I’m thinking about how all this is more than an academic exercise.

The probable effects of global warming are largely predicted by computer models. And these forecasting models look to the future by benchmarking from the past. If past climates — that were two or three or four degrees warmer than today — didn’t have a Greenland ice sheet, there is good reason to think that future ones won’t either.

All I can see out the window are clouds, but beneath, I know the big ice rises in some spots to a 10,000-foot thickness. Some climate models project that local warming over Greenland will go up at least 5 degrees Fahrenheit and perhaps as much as 16 degrees during the next century. Melting here and in West Antarctica could very plausibly push sea level up several feet before my young children are old people.

“Carbon dioxide can end an ice age. It’s clear today, by instruments, that the climate is changing,” Shakun says, sketching a pair of rising curves in my notebook. “Exactly where and when we’re going to feel it is not that clear.”

And how many centuries it would take Greenland to retreat back to bedrock is a tough modeling problem. Some scientists are concerned that the climate — and Greenland with it — is near a tipping point where the entire ice sheet will begin to melt unstoppably, vanishing in about 2,000 years. “But it’s very complex,” Shakun tells me. These geologists I’m traveling with would like to clarify the picture.

Happily or not, there is only one earth. N=1, the scientists might say. And so the changes that people have wrought on the planet, pouring out vast quantities of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from our fossil-fuel and jet-plane-loving ways of life represent an experiment with no control group. We can’t run it again with a bigger sample.

Which is why scientists try to understand how past warm periods affected things — like Greenland’s ice sheet — as a way of guessing what will happen next. Based on what we know, buying real estate in Greenland might not be such a bad idea.

Friday, June 8, 2012

Kangerlussuaq is home to huge flying things — and not much else. A former World War Two U.S. military airfield, it’s now Greenland’s largest commercial airport, where inbound 757’s from Copenhagen touch down. Fat-bellied C-130 US military propeller planes, equipped with skis for landing on the ice sheet, sit in a motionless row on the tarmac.

And then there are the mosquitos. They’re big enough to serve an inflight meal. We drag our train of backpacks and gear — including a cooler nearly full with 150 pounds of rocks and sand, double bagged, carefully labeled, and wrapped with duct tape — out to the parking lot. The mosquitoes are on us immediately, landing with military precision all over backs, wrists and Paul’s, apparently delicious, bald head.

It’s warm and sandy here on the southwest edge of Greenland. The snow is gone. A silty river sweeps by, and the landscape looks more like Yosemite or Afghanistan than a land of ice. But the silt is a clue that, not far from here, the ice sheet remains, melting and calving, pouring down water bound for the sea.

The buildings in the villages we visited in East Greenland are in a style Paul called “permafrost utilitarian”: simple wooden houses raised on high foundations for the snowy times of year. Here, the single, desolate row of buildings look like modular Army barracks. That’s because they were.

“Heading for KISS,” Bierman says. At the Kangerlussuaq International Science Station — identical, except for its sign, to the nearby Polar Bear Inn — we dump our gear in dormitory rooms, amidst a small stream of wandering American scientists.

But no rest. We’ve got to get ready for our next outing: a head-bumping hour in a pick-up truck to make a river delta crossing in the most godawful foot-sucking mud on the planet. Results: one more sand sample, minus one boot (temporarily) and one sock (permanently). Mine.

Now we’re wolfing down musk ox pizza, hustling again to our main mission: a second afternoon of “helo time” as the scientists say. Still chewing, we cram in the back of a small AStar helicopter and float into the air. Our Norwegian pilot, with a chin worthy of Hollywood —  and a job worthy of a marriage proposal, Alice later jokes — listens on his headset to Paul’s directions as he looks at his handheld GPS, trying to match the landscape to the map. The Watson River passes underneath. We’re going toward the ice sheet and the river, carrying a massive load of sediment toward the deep ocean.

And it’s from the deep ocean that the most important insights of this research project will come.

Sediment, washing off Greenland, has sifted to the ocean bottom and piled up there, in intact layers, for millions of years.

In 1993 and 1995, a large international effort collected two long cores of these sediments, drilled from the sea floor, off the southeast coast of Greenland. This year, Jeremy Shakun traveled to Germany to get samples of these cores stored in a huge refrigerated hangar there.

In the deepest — and therefore oldest — of these samples, the team expects to find high levels of beryllium in the sediment, revealing a time when much of the bedrock was exposed to cosmic radiation — a time before glaciers had covered Greenland with an ice sheet.

Moving up the core, the scientists expect to find decreasing beryllium concentrations as the ice sheet grew. But, punctuating this big downward trend, they expect to find short up-pulses during brief interglacial periods (“brief” to geologists being in the neighborhood of every 100,000 years) when the ice sheet was reduced.

To make better sense of these ocean core data, the team collects samples from today’s Greenland. That’s what this whole trip is for. Contemporary erosion rates, sediment transportation, ice coverage — and associated beryllium levels — provide a good picture of the recent geologic past, roughly the last 10,000 years. This picture will serve as an analogy to the deeper past, Nelson tells me, guiding interpretation of the records drawn from far down the ocean core.

In short, beryllium concentrations in ocean sediments will be a yardstick of the ice sheet stretching back six million years.

It’s a method that has worked for Bierman in studying other landscapes — but has never been tried before on ocean cores, which is a large part of why the National Science Foundation is investing in flying these four geologists out to places in Greenland where, in all likelihood, no person has ever stood before.

The helicopter hugs the terrain, roaring through a narrow rock opening with enough speed to make George Lucas happy. We turn on a bank of nothingness, and there it is. The Greenland ice sheet. Black and pale grey and brooding and dripping. A wall on a different scale than everything else I’ve seen here. We stop and collect sand, like lycra-clad ants at its base. Then the helicopter rises again, over the lip, and the ice sheet stretches, white and pocketed, a whole landscape of frozen water, toward an end that can’t yet be seen.

Saturday, June 9, 2012

On the runway at Kangerlussuaq, a half-circle of scientists, many bearded and baggy-eyed, gather around a clean-shaven officer from the New York Air National Guard. We’re getting final instructions — I guess — about what to do if our transport plane has to ditch over water. A generator nearby is so loud I can’t hear a thing he’s saying. The scientists smile and nod and then slowly, happily, climb the steps into the hold.

The C-130 — flown here to train soldiers in cold-weather combat and to aid scientific expeditions — is dark inside and full of red webbing, gray metal boxes, plastic-wrapped pallets of gear —and tired people. Some soldiers wrestle with hooks and straps in the back. Others, boy-faced in olive drab, already doze on the nylon bench seats.

Our ears stuffed with plugs, the plane lifts off. Cranium-thudding, loud experiences are getting to be a habit on this trip. Paul Bierman and Dylan Rood work on their laptops, preparing data, and writing each other notes on-screen, tired of shouting over the engines. Alice Nelson reads a novel, her third this week. Jeremy Shakun scrolls through science papers on his iPad.

Inside one of the pallets is a blue cooler, now full with dozens of bags of sand and small rocks from Greenland. They’re going to Vermont. And they’re quite heavy. These four geologists hope they’ll tell us something useful about the ways the ever-so-much-more-heavy ice that rests on this island, now passing away beneath us, is getting lighter — becoming, perhaps, for coastal parts of the world, an unbearable lightness.

Monday, April 9
Lose Yourself in India – Music and Film (Cultural Anthropology Perspective) Livak Ballroom, Davis Center. 6:30 p.m.

Tuesday, April 10
Oral Tradition of Learning Music in India (Historical and Religious Perspectives)
John Dewey Lounge, Old Mill. 4 p.m.

Wednesday, April 11
Hand Drumming in India (A Linguistic Perspective)
206 Southwick Hall. 3 p.m.

Thursday, April 12
Beatles Discover India – Rise of AR Rahman
Memorial Lounge, Waterman Building. 6 p.m.

Friday, April 13
Evolution of Indian Cinema and Bollywood (South Asian Perspective)
Livak Ballroom, Davis Center. 3 p.m.

The goal of the University of Vermont James Marsh Professors-at-Large Program is to bring to the University outstanding individuals of international distinction in the arts and humanities, sciences, social sciences, and applied fields. Professors-at-Large are non-resident faculty with six-year terms of office who come to the campus three or four times during that period, each time for residencies of one to two weeks.

To request accommodations such as seating, interpreting, etc. for these events, contact conferences@uvm.edu, (802) 656-5665.

Information: (802) 656-3186 www. uvm.edu/president/marsh

The conference is designed for students, faculty and professionals in education, social work and counseling interested in learning directly from some of the state’s 5,000-plus refugees and other immigrants about their cultures, challenges of integrating into American society and other relevant issues. The goals of the conference are to increase awareness about the experiences of refugees, immigrants and English language learners; to recognize the diversity of voices within our community; and to honor refugee, immigrant and English language learner stories without imposing the cultural values of the majority.

Dr. Andrea Green, associate professor of pediatrics and director of the Pediatric Immigrant Clinic at Vermont Children’s Hospital at Fletcher Allen Health Care, who is also Pediatric Medical Director of New England Survivors of Torture and Trauma, will serve as keynote speaker.

The conference is free and open to UVM students and faculty and community professionals. Refreshments will be provided.

Information: creyes@uvm.edu.

“They found themselves in situations that are very different from what they’re used to back home,” says Lerato Makhele, the trip mentor, a psychologist who provides counseling for the university’s 20,000 students. “We’re from a very conservative area in central South Africa.”

The group, chosen through a rigorous selection process, is part of a large-scale effort to improve campus climate at UFS. Historically a traditional Afrikaans-language university, the institution has undergone rapid integration – along with the predictable conflict, including a particularly painful racial incident in 2008. Black students now form a majority of the student body and classes are taught in both English and Afrikaans.

In its work toward reconciliation, in 2010 UFS launched Leadership for Change, a program in which 150 students, at the end of their first year, travel in small groups, such as this one, to universities from Japan to Europe to the U.S., getting a broad sense of how different races, classes and genders can live and learn together. UVM is participating along with other American institutions including Cornell, NYU, Holy Cross and the University of Minnesota. “We’re really investing in this,” Makhele says.

Breaking boundaries

The visiting students clearly didn’t find the balance of blacks and whites they are used to at home, but they did note a willingness to be open about it. “It’s not that racially diverse,” says Willem du Plooy, “but we see a lot of programs and activities that help people of different races come together. It’s great, diversity is great on this campus.”

He also noted, with interest and approval, the unisex toilets in the Davis Center (a building he would like to take back home). Yet it’s clear that issues of sexuality freely discussed at UVM were the most controversial for the South Africans. Race, for better and worse, is a more open topic in their world. But in an itinerary that included an ice hockey game and pizza-making night among classes and lectures, breakfast with ALANA students and a myriad of other possible activities, there was a required lunch with LGBTQA services.

“I’m quite a conservative person in the sense of our traditions,” du Plooy says, and yet he calls that meeting “enriching” and says he believes he has changed, that he feels more accepting.

Kanya Penxa echoes the sense of self-growth. He says he thought he was open-minded when he arrived and dismissed the idea that the experience here would test his boundaries. “I was put in uncomfortable situations,” he admits. “I was surprised how I reacted...by the second or third time around I realized I’m more comfortable than I was when I arrived.”

But if the group was willing to push their personal comfort zones, what stunned and excited them was discovering the power of the student voice at UVM. They met with the SGA president, with the peer judicial board, with a student trustee.

“The student voice is heard on campus,” Penxa says, apparently an unknown at the University of the Free State.

“It would be wild to actually have that big a say in the university, very inspiring,” du Plooy adds. Now we have to find out the boundaries of what we can do (at home). I’m hoping we’ll move forward from there.”

And that is the hope of the program. “The idea is students will take the initiative,” Makhele says. “It’s about taking ownership of your own culture, your own environment.”

Abroad view

For UVM students, who by all accounts were strikingly open and welcoming, having the South Africans on campus was a rich opportunity to glimpse a different culture – and view their own privilege. “It’s really important to just raise the international scene on campus,” says senior anthropology major Monica Johnson who helped guide the group before taking off for a semester in Istanbul. “It’s a great way for our students to interact, to get a different point of view, to learn that college in South Africa is not the given that it is here.”

Furthering the exchange – and keeping the dialogue open – UVM is invited to send a delegation of students, faculty and staff to a two-week conference at UFS in July to discuss how issues of race and gender are dealt with on campuses internationally.

As Makhele and anthropology professor Robert Gordon, who was instrumental in bringing the program here, both say in different ways, universities and students have more similarities than differences. “The way I define anthropology,” Gordon says, “is the study of solving common problems using alternative methods.”

The path to answers then is to keep traveling, keep questioning, keep the international exchanges a vibrant part of university life. “The art of conversation,” says Gordon, “is like a jam session. You should never know where it’s going to end.” Hopefully in this case, it won't.

Since the agency was founded in 1961, 801 UVM alumni have served in the Peace Corps.

“Colleges and universities prepare thousands of talented undergraduate and graduate alumni for Peace Corps service every year,” said Peace Corps director Aaron S. Williams. “These alumni go on to serve as Peace Corps volunteers, applying the skills and knowledge they acquired during their studies to promote world peace and friendship and improve the lives of people around the world. Every day, volunteers make countless contributions to projects in agriculture, education, the environment, health and HIV/AIDS education and prevention, small business development, and youth development. I would like to extend my gratitude to all colleges and universities for their continued support of the Peace Corps and public service.”

University of Vermont alumni are currently serving as volunteers in Azerbaijan, Botswana, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, Costa Rica, Eastern Caribbean, Ecuador, El Salvador, Fiji, Gambia, Honduras, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Mali, Mexico, Mongolia, Nicaragua, Philippines, Senegal, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Ukraine, Vanuatu and Zambia. They work in areas including agriculture, education, environment, health and HIV/AIDS, business development and youth development.

Eric Smith of Cream Ridge, New Jersey, who is currently serving as an education volunteer in Costa Rica, credited UVM with preparing him for overseas service. “My teachers and the university’s environment always encouraged me to think unconventionally, challenge the status-quo, and always rise to the occasion,” says Smith, who graduated with a business administration degree in 2009. “I have been working in microfinance, helping a community credit enterprise to improve their administrative and financial business applications, while encouraging local women to develop their own businesses. That work, along with the personal finance and savings classes given to the community, would not have been possible without my education at UVM.”

The Peace Corps’ nine regional recruiting offices across the United States work to recruit and provide information and guidance to prospective volunteers. Applicants are encouraged to apply for Peace Corps service one year in advance of their targeted departure date. Americans with backgrounds in agriculture, environment, teaching English as a second language, and other technical or language skills related to Peace Corps assignment areas are encouraged to apply.

You can view the entire top 25 rankings for each school size category, as well as all-time and graduate school rankings in this PDF.

Among the Fleming’s new offerings:

Persian Visions: Contemporary Photography from Iran 

This exhibit introduces nearly 60 works of photography and video by 20 of Iran's most celebrated photographers. The perspective of these artists contradicts that of many foreign photographers who often represent Iran and its people as purely exotic. In expressing different visions of their world, these artists offer a glimpse into both private and public realms. The exhibition aspires to build a visual bridge between Iran and the U.S. as it leads viewers to become aware of other ways of being and seeing.

Imagining the Islamic World: Early Travel Photography from the J. Brooks Buxton Collection

This exhibition is derived from a selection of late 19th- and early 20th-century travel photographs from the collection of J. Brooks Buxton ‘56, former resident of several of the countries represented here. Because of Islamic prohibitions against graven images, it was chiefly Westerners that made and collected these early photographs as the genre eventually gained recognition as an art form. These works offer a rare historical counterpoint to the contemporary photographs on view in Persian Visions.

Up in Smoke

Smoke is a ubiquitous part of life around the world whether from pipes, fireplaces, factories or infernos and conveys a multitude of complex and contradictory meanings. Images of cigarette smoke can signal a leisure activity and convey the glamour of an earlier time, yet also calls to mind serious health hazards. When seen billowing out of factories, smoke can be a leitmotif representing industry and progress yet also threats to the environment, public health and quality of life. Used in ritual, smoke can serve as an offering, a tangible symbol of the immaterial; it can connote transcendence into another state of being, or its plumes can indicate destruction.

These opposing themes abound in a selection of paintings, prints and artifacts drawn from the Fleming Museum's collection, ranging from 17th-century Dutch painter Aert van der Neer to elaborately carved European and African tobacco pipes to incense burners from Asia and North America that reflect the use of smoke as an offering and agent of purification.

Learn more about the Fleming Museum of Art and its upcoming events.

The Institute for International Education has ranked the University of Vermont fifth in the nation among public doctoral universities for the percentage of its undergraduate students -- 32.5 percent -- who participate in study abroad programs.

The university is ranked 32^nd among all doctoral universities in the country. There are 282 doctoral universities in the United States.

The ranking was released in November in the institute's annual Open Doors report, which collects data on international educational exchanges.

“We work very hard to find a large number and wide variety of study abroad opportunities for our students, encourage them to participate, and provide the support that will enable them to succeed,” said Kim Howard, director of the Office of International Education. “Study abroad nurtures foreign language mastery, cultural adeptness and broad-mindedness, and problem-solving, all skills that are increasingly sought after by employers. They are also the qualities we need to continue to nurture in our citizenry if we are to move toward peace in the world.”

UVM offers students 900 different study abroad locations in 80 countries and six continents. Its program includes 188 exchange programs with other universities, two UVM-run semester abroad programs and 25 shorter duration programs led by UVM faculty.

The rankings draw from the results of 33 high-profile tournaments around the world to show the comparative strength of debating societies against each other. The totals are calculated by adding the results of all the teams a college or university society fielded in the tournaments, including the largest event of the year, the World Universities Debating Championships.

"My work in Brazil is trying to figure out the big picture," Farley explains. "If we fail to restore our ecosystems, we face catastrophe, and if we fail to increase our food production for the growing population, we face catastrophe." Financing the adoption of agroecological practices in the hopes of restoring ecosystems could help deal with both problems at once. When Arisman approached Farley to advise his thesis, Farley suggested researching this possibility in another locale.

Reality on the ground

Arisman says it was important to him not just to work from afar -- conducting research at the library, and finishing the thesis without ever having touched the soil he would spend so long studying -- and instead see firsthand the practices employed by farmers in Intag.

This perspective was perhaps shaped by another travel study course he took in 2010 to the Dominican Republic. While there, he was so moved by the plight of a group of Haitian migrant workers, he returned and fundraised money by selling his photographs from the trip and art his mother, Susan Abbott, a professional painter, had created of the community. Arisman and Abbott continue to raise money to gain access to an aquifer to provide the community with clean water.

"That trip really solidified my interest in learning Spanish and got me interested in the idea of development," Arisman says. "I'm very interested in where environmental conservation and social justice meet…. Finding solutions that benefit people and the environment is a very promising idea to me."

By traveling to and living in Ecuador, Arisman was able to see how Farley's ideas could work -- and already were working -- in Intag. "The most central part of my project was already occurring on the local level," Arisman says, acknowledging the agroecological movement already growing in the region. "My thesis is a lot more about communicating their success," he says, than recommending a dramatic overhaul in the way campesino farmers engage with non-governmental organizations and the local government.

But he also saw a key difference between Brazil and Ecuador when it came to how these payments for ecosystems services should be distributed -- a finding that would inform Farley's work as well. In some areas of Brazil, payments have been distributed via municipalities, and Farley is hoping to adapt this approach to his study site. But in Ecuador, Arisman found that funds would be better distributed not by the government but through the farming cooperatives already in place.  

The cooperatives, he says, "can offer higher market prices for goods like coffee, organic sugarcane, artisan cheeses. These higher market prices will entice small agricultural producers to join the cooperative." In turn, the cooperatives can make stipulations that its producers use sustainable practices, including diversified subsistence farming, which promotes crop diversity and food security for farm families. "There is an expectation," Arisman says, "for cooperative members to produce their own food and also produce these cash crops in a sustainable way that won't negatively affect this very special ecosystem."

It's a solution that's attracted the attention of Earth Economics, a Washington state-based non-profit devoted to researching and implementing economically viable and environmentally sound solutions to problems around the world. They've helped advise Arisman's work and have shown interest in his proposal. "My hope is that Earth Economics could help fund the cooperative I studied and then apply my idea to a new area where there is no cooperative agriculture," he says. Eventually, Arisman would like to pursue a career helping cooperatives form and connect with first world funding.

In the meantime, there's the thesis to finish writing and then defend. It's clear, though, that at this point, those are just details. "I think his work will have a real impact," Farley says.

Approximately 273 international students are pursuing undergraduate, graduate and medical degrees at UVM, in addition to the 70 exchange and non-degree students that come here from all over the world each year. Jane Knodell, provost and senior vice president, said the university continues to seek innovative ways of adding to the record number of international students enrolled this fall from more than 50 countries including the fledgling U.S.-Sino Pathway Program that added 39 students from China.

Nearly 37 percent of UVM undergraduates study abroad in more than 80 countries with many of them participating in Faculty-Led Programs Abroad taught by UVM faculty. “International Education Week is an opportunity to highlight the benefits of international education and exchange and express appreciation for students and scholars who study and teach here as well as organize and participate in exchange programs,” said Knodell.

In addition to the year-round international programming organized by Global Village, the Office of International Education among others, there are many events planned during International Education Week and throughout the month of November, such as Diwali Night and a community Thanksgiving dinner provided by Apartments and Family Housing at Fort Ethan Allen on Friday, Nov. 18 at 6:30 p.m.

The Department of Community Development and Applied Economics and the Vermont Council on World Affairs will sponsor “Careers in International Development: From Vermont to the World” on Thursday, Nov. 17 at 6 p.m. in the University Heights North Multipurpose Room). The purpose of the panel is to expose undergraduate and graduate students to the field of international development and to connect them with local businesses and organizations who are currently engaged in this work on every continent in the world; all of them based right here in Vermont. Students will have an opportunity to pose questions and network with the panelists.

Learn more and see the complete schedule.

“I have two goals for the year,” Dahly says in an email interview, “to improve America’s reputation in the eyes of people who only see it through our pop culture, and to show how we’re all connected. As globalization spreads, we have to start thinking about culture: should one cling to its unique customs, or should one strive to erase boundaries? This is something I'm experimenting with here and trying to figure out where I stand. To ignore differences is naive, to emphasize them pushes people apart, and it's impossible to blindly preach, ‘it's not better, not worse, just different.’"

While Dahly faces these issues with young Russian college students (and faces cooking her first beet, a “headstrong tuber”), her classmate, Sam Vary, is building his rapid-fire Russian as a news producer in New York for Russian Television International (RTVi). During his interview he was invited along on a typical shoot, in this case to cover the trial of French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Given his command of the language, Vary was offered the job on the spot. The only American working in the bureau, his assignments range from news translations to identifying key events to cover; supervising photographers and reporters on the scene to making connections with the White House, the mayor’s office, FBI and major art institutions to gaining access across the yellow tape at crime scenes… heady stuff for a 22-year-old.

“'Foreign’ journalism,” says Vary, who double-majored in Film and Television Studies, “is something I feel passionate about. New York is such a vibrant environment, I’m making valuable connections -- I feel like I can go anywhere from here.”

Hard talk

UVM’s Russian majors have a history of success -- Joe Bowman ’01 was a founding partner of the first venture capital firm in Russia -- but as a group this year’s graduates show particular “industriousness and ingenuity” notes Professor Kevin McKenna. Oliver Chase, a Fulbright finalist with a double major in economics, landed a sales job in Moscow with a medical sports product distributor. (Chase, a high school chess champion, originally learned Russian with the dream of competing in Moscow speaking the native language. He spent a year abroad studying at St. Petersburg University while playing chess tournaments on the side.)

Peace Corp finalist Sam Mishcon, with a double major in Japanese, is awaiting his assignment in either Ukraine or Moldova. After spending a month in St. Petersburg over the summer, Ross Cunningham, also a double major in economics, is a first-year law student at George Washington University where he’s considering a career in international law.

There are a couple of things that all of these students have in common besides an incredible facility for language (Dahly has a Spanish minor, Cunningham a minor in French). Russian, as McKenna will testify, is difficult but somehow seductive.

“The harder I worked at it,” says Vary, “the more I fell in love with it.”

Dahly says she was thinking of dropping Russian after her first two semesters because it was “so miserably difficult and demanding.” But two years in, “something clicked and I became infatuated with everything Russian.”

The other thing that ties them is Professor McKenna, ambassador, mentor, tough coach and ultimate cheerleader. “Typically,” he says, “I have lines of students outside my door.” They come to continue class conversations about Russian literature, to talk about potential careers or study abroad -- all passions of his. In a small department, students tend to take one or two classes with McKenna every semester.

“He showed us all what we are capable of,” says Dahly. “He constantly pushed us far beyond what we thought were our limits and we ended up realizing, basically, ‘what we were made of!’ That’s a hugely important lesson to learn in college.” She also enthusiastically mentions, as does McKenna, relatively new assistant professor Kathleen Scollins who “provided dazzling energy and unceasing encouragement and support… What a combination,” Dahly writes, “his high expectations and her encouragement -- it was incredible.”

Outside of the classroom, McKenna sends every current major a postcard when he’s in Russia, exchanges emails with former students about their accomplishments and has plans to meet up with those he can when he’s in Moscow this fall.

In the classroom, apparently, he can talk tough. “I point out to every one of my students, ‘don’t find yourself on June 1 not having a job lined up in advance,’” McKenna says, banging his hand on the table for emphasis. Not quite Khrushchev and his shoe, but students apparently take the point.

It’s not just Vermont that’s got flooding. Something's up with the weather in Namibia too, say geologists Paul Bierman of the University of Vermont and his colleague Kyle Nichols of Skidmore College. Nichols and Bierman should know. They're just back from the western mountains and coastal plain of this sparsely populated African country.

Usually, western Namibia is a dusty place where the streambeds are sand and the "lakes" are nothing more than flats of dried mud.

Not now.

This year, rivers with names like Swakop and Omaruru and Kuiseb flowed all the way to the sea -- something they don't do often, "maybe once a decade," says Bierman. The rivers didn't just flow for a day or two, Nichols and Bierman say, they ran from the desert to the ocean for weeks on end.

"There was so much water," says Bierman, "that people went swimming, they went tubing, and the desert turned green around rivers carrying so much sediment they were chocolate-brown." The rains were unprecedented in both their intensity and duration. "There's nothing like this widespread, heavy rain in the historic record," says Nichols.

The two geoscientists have been working for more than a decade in Namibia, collecting samples of rock and river sediment and bringing them back for analysis at the University of Vermont’s Cosmogenic Nuclide Laboratory that Bierman runs.

Their goal is to understand how quickly Namibia's arid lands are eroding, "both the spectacular bedrock outcrops, and the landscape's drainage basins as a whole," says Nichols.

Science in the sediment

After the recent Namibian rains, the National Science Foundation awarded Nichols and Bierman a rapid response grant to travel quickly back to the country last month. There they collected river sediment and rock at many of the sites they had sampled in 1997, 2001 and 2010.

Their hope is to discover whether sediment carried by rivers in such "mega-floods" is coming from sources that are the same as those when sediment is transported by more "normal" events.

They work with collaborators at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, counting rare isotopes, or sub-types, of elements formed in the mineral quartz. The results provide valuable information about the samples. "The research focuses on the use of isotopes of the chemical elements beryllium, cesium and lead to measure erosion rates and determine sediment sources," says Paul Cutler, program director in NSF's Division of Earth Sciences, which awarded the grant.

"Techniques using these isotopes have become increasingly popular," says Cutler, "as ways of finding out the sources and ages of sediments and other rock deposits."

Bierman says that "there has been little testing of a fundamental aspect of the method, however -- the similarity of isotope abundance over time. In Namibia we now have huge run-off and a chance to test this assumption of consistency."

It will be months before the geologists have the first results, but the effects of the torrential rains and floods in Namibia in early 2011 are clearly evident, they say.

A landscape changed

Grass covers what should be barren stony desert, and there is water in streams, something Nichols and Bierman haven't seen before. Namibia's rains stopped months ago, but the groundwater table is so high that there is still flow in some streams and rivers.

Almost every river crossing shows the effects -- logs, mud and bridges torn asunder. In some streams, the scientists saw minnows and frogs stranded in pools. "They must have been delivered during the flood," says Bierman. In a few places, water, road damage and stream beds laden with sediment kept the researchers from collecting samples from the exact same places as in previous years.

"The riverbed four-by-four truck tracks we needed to get to sample sites were sometimes gone," says Bierman, "replaced by truck-sucking mud and soft sand." For 68 of 82 original sample sites, with the help of a GPS and maps and field notes, the scientists collected sand from within just a few meters of the original samples.

Their typical days involved getting up with the sun, says Nichols, eating a quick breakfast at a lodge, programming the GPS with the day's route, and driving off in their diesel four-by-four truck. One day they left the lodge at 7 a.m., drove 700 or more kilometers, and finally collected their last samples using headlamps just before 7 p.m. Then, by dark of night across deserted Namib "roads," they drove 170 kilometers back to the lodge.

"As we were packing samples to ship home from Windhoek, Namibia's capital," says Bierman, "we watched the predictions as Hurricane Irene marched up the eastern U.S." By the time Bierman had travelled 36 hours and arrived home in Vermont, and Nichols back in upstate N.Y., the region was reeling from the worst flooding since the epic floods of November, 1927.

"This could all be coincidence, but it's hard not to think that something's up with the weather," says Bierman. "A warming Earth equals a more intense hydrologic cycle, with repercussions for erosion rates, sediment redistribution and landscape evolution."

While people in the Green Mountains of Vermont work to clean up damaged roads and swamped houses from the worst flood in decades, the riverbeds of western Namibia, land of arid deserts, are awash in water. At least for now.

This story adapted from materials provided by the National Science Foundation, written by Cheryl Dybas.