Hamilton in the News

In an opinion piece on the USA Today website, Philip Klinkner, the James S. Sherman Professor of Government , explained that although Americans have come to see the March on Washington as a turning point in our history, most white Americans saw it as a profoundly unsettling, even dangerous event, coming in the summer of 1963 in the midst of an unprecedented level of racial conflict.  He pointed out that an August 1963 Gallup poll found that 60 percent of Americans disapproved of the march.

Huffington Post featured an article titled “Mormons, Anti-Mormons, and Anti-Anti-Mormons” co-authored by Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies Brent Plate and Hannah Grace O'Connell ’14. The article also included several photos taken by Assistant Professor of Art Robert Knight.

An InsideHigherEd article titled “Majoring in a Professor,” focused on a paper, “Faculty Gatekeepers and Academic Taste in Undergraduate Students’ Choice of Major,”  co-authored by Dan Chambliss, the Eugene M. Tobin Distinguished Professor of Sociology,  and his former student Christopher G. Takacs, a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago.  Takacs presented the paper on Aug. 10 at the American Sociology Association meeting in New York City.

In its quarterly Education Life section published on Aug. 4, The New York Times featured Bret Turner ’13 and his goal of interviewing every faculty member on campus about their research. According to the article, by the time he graduated, he had spoken with 200 of 223 faculty members, a half-hour to an hour each.

The College conducted a large-scale emergency drill on campus on Monday, July 29, the fourth in a series of yearly exercises to ensure that the Hamilton Emergency Response Team (HERT) is proficient in handling emergencies utilizing the Incident Command System (ICS). News coverage of the exercise included news stories produced by WUTR (ABC/Fox affiliate) and WKTV (NBC affiliate) as well as the Observer-Dispatch.

Alan Cafruny, the Henry Platt Bristol Professor of International Affairs, was interviewed for an article titled “Student Debt: Crippling for All Ages and Not Going Away Soon” on the FOX Business site on July 29. “The problem of student debt is not just ‘economic’ in the narrow sense,” said Cafruny. “Debt has all kinds of consequences for society: it imposes social discipline, circumscribing young people’s options, making them more acquiescent and conformist in all sorts of subtle and not so subtle ways.”

“Apocalypse Now and Then: Four Rules for Watching the World End,” an essay written by Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies S. Brent Plate, appeared on The Huffington Post site on July 24. In his article, Plate discusses apocalyptic films both pre- and post-9/11 and assures his readers that “we've had apocalypses for so many years, and will continue to have them."

Studying in India for the fall 2012 semester, Anderson Tuggle ’14 couldn’t have anticipated that the research in which he was engaged would have such relevance months later. Tuggle, who studied India’s Mid-day Meal program and the role of parents, teachers, and local institutions in providing meals, referenced this research in a New York Times letter to the editor.  Published on July 20, the letter was in response to the reported deaths of 22 children in India after they ate contaminated lunches.

WAMC/Northeast Public Radio’s Academic Minute will feature William R. Kenan Professor of Biology Ernest Williams on Wednesday, July 17. The broadcast can be heard locally at 7:34 a.m. or 3:56 p.m. at 90.3 FM and on InsideHigherEd.com.

Eleven students from Hamilton College, Western Connecticut College and Selkirk College are participating in a six-week intensive archaeology field immersion course in the prehistory, history, ethnography and language of the indigenous peoples of the interior Pacific Northwest. Program director, Assistant Professor of Anthropology Nathan Goodale was interviewed on “Radio West,” a program on CBC/Radio-Canada on July 6 about the field school and its goals.