Mellon Foundation Grant Supports K Presidential Initiatives

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Kalamazoo College a three-year, $100,000 grant to support presidential initiatives including its institutional strategic planning process.

Mellon Foundation Grant Supports K in Five
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Kalamazoo College a three-year, $100,000 grant to support presidential initiatives including the College’s strategic planning process.

Kalamazoo College, under President Jorge G. Gonzalez, has begun a strategic planning process that will address some of the greatest challenges and opportunities facing the institution. Referred to as K in Five, the process is coordinated by a planning committee appointed in March 2017. The committee includes faculty members, students, alumni, administrators and staff. The committee has begun gathering input through a number of on-campus forums as well as electronic surveys.

The committee, supported by The Clarion Group, will synthesize these results with an objective of producing a strategic plan to be vetted by a number of stakeholders before being offered to the College’s Board of Trustees for approval in March 2018.

Previous Mellon grants to Kalamazoo College have supported curricular initiatives such as the Shared Passages seminar program and the development of a critical ethnic studies major.

“The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is an invaluable strategic partner to liberal arts colleges such as K,” Gonzalez said. “Their support and guidance enables us to better engage across our institution in responding to issues including the macroeconomic forces impacting liberal arts colleges, fostering greater diversity and collaboration within our faculty ranks, and supporting effective teaching and scholarly communication.”

2017 Commencement Scheduled for Sunday

Kalamazoo College’s 2017 Commencement will take place at 1 p.m. Sunday, June 11, on the campus Quad. A total of 418 members of the class of 2017 will receive Bachelor of Arts degrees. A livestream will be available.

Kalamazoo College 2017 Commencement Speaker Kevin Lobo - Stryker Chairman and CEO
Stryker Corporation Chairman and CEO Kevin Lobo will receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree and serve as the 2017 Commencement keynote speaker.

Kalamazoo College President Jorge G. Gonzalez will welcome graduates – along with about 2,500 family members and friends, faculty, staff, trustees, alumni and community members – in what will be his first commencement as president. This year’s class includes:

  • 263 Michiganders;
  • students from 33 states and 14 countries; and
  • 116 double majors and three triple majors.

The College departments graduating the most students are biology, business, chemistry and psychology.

Stryker Corporation Chairman and CEO Kevin Lobo, the 2017 Commencement keynote speaker, will receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree.

Lobo joined Stryker in April 2011 and was named its chief executive officer Oct. 1, 2012. He was appointed chairman of the board July 22, 2014, and serves on the Board of Directors for Parker Hannifin Corp., a global leader in motion and control technologies.  He is also a board member of the Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed), the Business Leaders for Michigan and United Way for Kalamazoo/Battle Creek regions, and is a member of the Business Roundtable.

Lobo has a broad business career that includes executive positions in general management and finance with organizations such as KPMG, Unilever and Kraft Canada. He spent eight years with Rhone-Poulenc, with roles based in Europe as worldwide corporate controller of the chemical spin-out Rhodia and general manager of Specialty Phosphates EMEA.  He then spent eight years at Johnson & Johnson, where he was the chief financial officer of McNeil Consumer Healthcare and Ortho Women’s Health & Urology, the president of J&J Medical Products Canada and president of Ethicon Endo Surgery.

Kalamazoo College 2017 Commencement Student Speaker
Kalamazoo College 2017 Student Commencement speaker Mireya Guzmán-Ortíz.

Graduating senior Mireya Guzmán-Ortíz, of Salem, Ore., will receive a B.A. degree in critical ethnic studies and serve as the student speaker. While at Kalamazoo College, Guzmán-Ortíz served as an Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership student fellow and served other students in the College’s Writing Center.

Graduating seniors Melissa Erikson, Alyse Guenther and Chido Chigwedere will speak at Baccalaureate at 8 p.m. Saturday, June 10, at Stetson Chapel. The Baccalaureate is a nondenominational service with student and faculty speakers and musical performances.

 

Colloquium About Blackness to Occur at Kalamazoo College

Colloquium About Blackness at KKalamazoo College will present the Physics of Blackness Colloquium on March 31 and April 1. March 31 features a lecture (7 p.m. in Dalton Theatre) by Michelle M. Wright, Professor of African American Studies and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University, and author of The Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology. Wright’s lecture is titled “Blackness by Other Names: Beyond Linear Histories.” On the next day (April 1, 5 p.m. in the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership) will follow an interactive event developed by the Beyond the Middle Passage Organizers. That group includes Justin Berry, assistant professor of political science; Nakeya Boyles ’16; Quincy Crosby ’17; Reid Gómez, the Mellon visiting assistant professor of ethnic studies; Allia Howard ’17; Bruce Mills, professor of English; and Shanna Salinas, assistant professor of English. “Wright looks at the argument of race, particularly Blackness, and the ways that argument plays out in economic, political and physically embodied ways,” says Gómez. “Her work will help us look at differences within difference and move beyond thinking in categories.”

According to Gómez, the colloquium will stress three themes, all of which relate to one another: horizontal connections instead of vertical frameworks; the inability of temporally linear progress narratives (which often structure the notion of Blackness) alone to realize the broad and complicated truth and meaningfulness of Blackness; and a “See Me-Hear Me” approach during the colloquium that will ask participants to enter each others’ lives in meaningful ways. Wright’s book uses concepts from physics to expand thinking and discussion beyond linearity that makes “it difficult to understand or accept people, places, or event that do not easily fit inside a single narrative,” explains Gómez. Toward that end Gómez has helped facilitate “The Physics of Blackness at Kalamazoo College,” a blog in the form of a mosaic that makes approaching the subject of Blackness nonlinear and dynamic.

Nonlinearity is the true nature of the physical universe, wrote Gómez in a summary of Wright’s book. Such nonlinearity doesn’t preclude all cause and effect, but instead complicates it. Gómez writes that Wright “cautions against cause and effect laws that make history solely the consequence of oppression, where Blackness only appears in terms of resistance to, or the direct result of, that oppression.” The ability to think and discuss freed from such overly narrow restrictions allows us to “reimagine choice and agency in relationship to Blackness,” says Gómez, “the choice to ’notice and wonder’ at what is left out of linear progress narratives, and to conceive of self outside those terms.”

The Beyond the Middle Passage Organizers group invites colloquium participants to help one another prepare for the event by sharing talking points, images and points of entry into Wright’s theory via Instagram _bmp._ and Twitter @_bmpo_.

Winter Term Ethnic Studies

Dr. Reid Gómez, the Melon Visiting Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies, has designed a series of winter term programs and web pages and prompts as a collective resource for a campus-wide conversations on the matter of ethnic studies. For many of these conversations the general public is welcome as well. The series begins with a lecture (Thursday, January 9) titled “What is Ethnic Studies?”  Gómez will give the lecture twice–at 4:10 PM and at 7 PM–in the Mandelle Hall Olmsted Room.

“Conversations about ethnic studies at K have been taking place since 1968,” says Gómez. “Recently a renewed movement and rising range of voices reflect the desire for a further exchange of ideas.”

Features on the ethnic studies website will serve to deepen that exchange. The features include a bookshelf, several faculty discussions, a blog for the K community, a calendar of events (programs occur every week of the 10-week term), and a series of conversations. For the latter, the campus community will be called to join several invited participants to discuss a particular theme, reading, or video prompt. Gómez will moderate. “We will sit in concentric circles (one inside, and the other outside),” says Gómez.  “The participants will take their place in the center, and we will leave several chairs open, should someone catch the spirit and chose to formally join the conversation. People may enter and exit the conversation at will, and they may choose to participate in silence, while listening. Everyone in the outside circle will have the opportunity to listen in.  Near the end, we will turn the circles inside out for the opportunity to debrief, and review the places our conversation lead us.  Opportunities for follow-up conversations will take place on the ethnic studies blog.”