The College Magazine: Winter 2002: Around the College

Teach for America is a private, Peace Corps-style program that recruits recent college graduates to teach for at least two years in an urban or rural school. According to the April 15, 2001, Education Week article, "TFA's founding itself underscores a kind of outside-the-box mentality. Wendy Kopp, a Princeton University student with no experience in schools other than her own education, used her senior thesis in 1989 to propose a program to help schools in poor communities that were hard-pressed to find enough teachers. The idea of a service-oriented venture that sought out the best and the brightest among non-education majors struck a chord, and a year later, the program placed its first cohort of recruits."

In the 2001 recruiting season, Teach For America accepted 15 students from Indiana University Bloomington. Eleven of those students were graduates of the College of Arts and Sciences. As the Education Week article points out, "Teach for America is channeling a wealth of talent, energy, and creativity into educational leadership that might otherwise have wound up in such fields as medicine, law, or business. Many corps members do leave the classroom, but a significant portion of them become movers and shakers in education."

Bruce M. Cole, distinguished professor in the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts, has been confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve as the next chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He replaces William R. Farris. Previous chairs include Lynne V. Cheney and William J. Bennett.

Butch Brodie, professor of biology, was featured in the PBS series "Evolution" during the week of Sept. 22. Brodie and his father, chair of the Department of Zoology at Utah State University, talked about coevolutionary interactions, specifically the relationship between a toxic newt and the western garter snake. The skin of the newt secretes enough toxin to kill 12 adult humans, yet the lowly garter snake can eat it without harm. As variants of the snake evolved that could eat the newt, variants of the newt evolved that were even more poisonous … an amphibian arms race.

Professor Keith Clay was named director of the new preserve recently designated by the university for research, teaching, and environmental education. The preserve consists of two sites: Griffy Woods, an 185-acre site adjacent to the city of Bloomington's Griffy Nature Preserve north of campus, and Moore's Creek, a 261-acre site in southern Monroe County adjoining Lake Monroe and contiguous with federally owned land managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Aneil Agrawal, a fourth-year graduate student in the Department of Biology and the Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior, published sole- and first-authored papers in Nature and Science, the two most prestigious general science journals. Agrawal's Nature paper offers a novel theory for one of the classic and still unsolved problems in biology, the evolution of sex.

Dean Subbaswamy announced the College's establishment of the Arts and Humanities Institute, whose goal is to further the research, creative activity, teaching, and outreach of the many College faculty working in the arts and humanities. "At a time when the influence of the arts and humanities may seem in doubt, the institute stands as a visible symbol of their persisting importance in the intellectual and curricular life of the College and the university. The institute provides faculty the time, space, and community to pursue their intellectual and artistic projects. It is especially intended to promote investigation and collaboration across the range of disciplines and across the boundaries between the arts and humanities. The College envisions the institute as a place for faculty to test new curricular and programmatic ideas - a critical proving ground for future College graduate and undergraduate programs. As a visible focal point for innovative work in the arts and humanities, the institute will serve as an ideal base for College faculty to join in creative partnerships. The institute will seek to join with the system-wide Institute for Advanced Study to carry out projects of mutual interest. In addition, the Arts and Humanities Institute will serve as a base for faculty outreach to state of Indiana teachers.

IU and IBM announced in late October that IU has acquired the nation's largest university-owned supercomputer. The IBM SP supercomputer, which has been expanded to triple the university's previous supercomputing capacity, will support IU researchers in a broad range of areas, including life sciences and the Indiana Genomics Initiative, archaeology, astronomy, and computational physics.

More than 36 percent of the Collins Living Learning Center community attained the Dean's List last year. On Founders Day, 180 residents and family members celebrated the students' academic achievements.

The Department of Sociology was selected for the Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award by the American Sociological Association - an honor usually given to individuals.

The ASA recognized the department, which recently was ranked 11th in the nation by U.S. News & World Report, for its excellence in training graduate students to become teachers. The department has produced many quality graduates who have gone on to faculty positions at prestigious universities and colleges throughout North America.

WIYN telescope attracts faculty

Caty Pilachowski isn’t indifferent to the charms of wooded dells, the power of music to soothe the savage breast, or any of the rest of it, but they are, for her, just the icing on top of the cake. The cake itself — what brought her to Bloomington — is actually an object on top of a mountain some 50 miles southwest of Phoenix, Ariz.

That object is a 3.5-meter telescope designed, constructed, and operated by the WIYN consortium, which comprises the University of Wisconsin, IU, Yale, and the National Optical Astronomy Observatories. It is, according to Pilachowski, "probably the very best telescope in that size range," having outstanding image quality, reliability, and range.

Without IU’s participation in the WIYN consortium, Pilachowski, who holds the Daniel Kirkwood Chair in astronomy, would not be here at all. When astronomy chair Kent Honeycutt first broached the possibility of her coming as the Kirkwood Chair, she says, "I was immediately tempted because besides the excellent faculty and the chance to teach and work with graduate students, I’d be able to play a role in using that facility."

"If the university had not been part of the WIYN partnership," she adds, "coming would have been less attractive, the possibilities for research limited."

The three schools that are part of the WIYN partnership — Wisconsin, Indiana, and Yale — provided the initial capital for the design and construction of the telescope. Researchers from each of the schools have access to around 20 percent of its operating time — in other words, approximately 40 nights out of the year, IU astronomers can use the telescope for their own projects. The remaining 40 percent of the time is granted to NOAO, which covers the facility’s operating costs and allocates its nights on the basis of peer-reviewed proposals from the astronomy community at large. The NOAO’s telescope time, Pilachowski points out, is typically oversubscribed by two or three times, making it extremely difficult for non-consortium researchers to get access.

Her current project, in collaboration with astronomers at Wisconsin and NOAO, involves studying star clusters to look for planets and investigate the evolution of solar systems. One of the advantages of looking at clusters, says Pilachowski, as opposed to individual stars, is that their similarities — in age and chemical composition — allow researches to start their work "automatically knowing a bunch of things" they wouldn’t otherwise know. But without the WIYN telescope’s multi-object capability, which allows the viewing of almost 100 stars at once, it would take a lifetime to amass a statistically significant sample. Before, Pilachowski says, research in her area was hampered by the small number of stars that could be studied; one atypical result could seriously skew the data.

There is a certain symmetry in Pilachowski’s coming to IU from Arizona in order to take advantage of IU’s participation in the WIYN consortium. Half a century ago, IU astronomy Professor Emeritus Frank Edmondson was one of the "founding fathers" of AURA, the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, a group that petitioned the National Science Foundation to build a national observatory. The result, Kitt Peak National Observatory, is now home to the WIYN telescope. "The astronomical community owes Edmondson an enormous debt," says Pilachowski. "He has had an enormous impact on American astronomy."

Before Kitt Peak, only the handful of schools that had their own telescopes and the right conditions for using them could sustain really excellent astronomy departments. Most places, like Indiana, were not high enough, not dry enough, and not far enough away from city lights. Edmondson’s efforts with AURA resulted in a research facility that still stands as a testament to the innovative vision and cooperative spirit necessary for the advancement of astronomy. Almost half a century later, the WIYN telescope represents a new model — in the service of the same end — for institutional partnership.

"Indiana is fortunate to have this access," Pilachowski says. "It’s absolutely critical to maintaining a good faculty." She pauses, then corrects herself, "I shouldn’t say fortunate, but foresightful."

— Leora Baude