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Kevin Kennedy '70, life trustee and former chairman of the Board of Trustees at Hamilton and a managing director at Goldman Sachs, has been named chairman of the board of The Wallace Foundation, a national foundation based in New York City dedicated to supporting and sharing effective ideas and practices that expand learning and enrichment opportunities for all people.

Hamilton President Joan Hinde Stewart and 18 of her presidential colleagues have pledged to make available to prospective students and their families all possible useful information about their colleges, while at the same time de-emphasizing the role that rankings should play in the admission process.

Dean of Faculty Joe Urgo contributed a chapter to Willa Cather as Cultural Icon, the 7th volume in the Cather Studies series. Willa Cather (1873-1947) was a renowned author known for portraying U.S. lifestyles. Her famous novels include O Pioneers! and My Ántonia. Urgo’s chapter is titled “Cather’s Secular Humanism: Writing Anacoluthon and Shooting Out into the Eternities.” In the book Urgo describes Cather as "a great American liberator, an author who truly understood the potential of American secular and humanistic pluralism to serve art and to advance the human condition by lifitng it above the denominational.

Tim Elgren, professor of chemistry, presented a workshop at the University of Rhode Island on August 10 on "Conducting Sustainable Research at Undergraduate Institutions." The workshop was conducted for a National Institutes of Health funded consortium of Rhode Island colleges and universities. Members of the consortium include University of Rhode Island, Brown University, Rhode Island College, Providence College, Roger Williams College and Salve Regina University. This particular workshop was directed at junior faculty members and administrators. Elgren is the former president of the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) and recently co-edited a book for CUR titled Developing and Sustaining a Research-Supportive Curriculum: A Compendium of Successful Practices (www.cur.org).

The Diversity and Social Justice Project student conference will take place at Hamilton on Saturday, Sept. 8, in the Science Center. Students from Hamilton, Colgate University and Union College will be presenting their work on a variety of relevant topics. The conference will begin with a lecture by Dr. Leslie Thiele of the University of Florida titled, “You Can Never do Just One Thing; What Ecology Teaches us About Social Justice.” Both the lecture and the rest of the conference are free and open to everyone; no registration is required to attend.

Other people went tanning this summer, but for Kim Roe '08, half-way around the world, it was winter again. "I had to put a hot water bottle in my sleeping bag," joked Roe, a native of Maryville, Tenn., who spent the month of June doing geology field work in Tasmania. Roe spent a total of three weeks on the Tasman peninsula, the first two with Hamilton's geology field study program and one doing field work on her own.

Mariam Ballout '10 knows she wants to go into TV journalism. With this goal in mind, she found and applied for an internship in the newsroom of WTEN-TV, an Albany TV station. During her summer in the newsroom, Ballout learned first-hand a whole collection of new skills, from eliciting information from the grieving, to dealing with bizarre phone calls, to cutting and editing a story for release.

Dan Nye '88, CEO of networking site LinkedIn, is featured in a USA Today (9/5/07) article about his company. LinkedIn is described as "a fast-growing start-up that runs the popular professional-networking Web site of the same name." Nye, who is new to the company, is quoted in the article: "So many dot-com start-ups are flash-in-the-pan companies that weren't built on core values for the long term," he says. "If you want to build a great company, you need high-quality people and high-quality products that matter to the world." Unlike Facebook, which is a social networking site, LinkedIn is strictly for making professional connections.

The Hamilton College Performing Arts partners with Hamilton’s Diversity and Social Justice Project and the Department of Theater to open the Contemporary Voices and Visions Series with selections from Anna Deavere Smith’s play Let Me Down Easy on Friday, Sept. 7, at 7:30 p.m. at Wellin Hall in the Schambach Center for Music and the Performing Arts. Let Me Down Easy — a play about the resilience and fragility of the human body — is the latest installment in Smith's ongoing series of one woman shows, On The Road: A Search For American Character.

Hamilton is presenting a conversation about the 2006 and 2008 elections with Hamilton alumni Alicia Davis '97, and Marc Elias '90. Davis was regional political director at the Republican National Committee before joining Targetpoint Consulting, and Elias is a partner in the Perkins Coie law firm who served as general counsel for the Kerry-Edwards campaign and counsel for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The event, which is free and open to the public, will be held in the Chapel on Sunday, Sept. 9, at 7:30 p.m.