2016 Annual Report

Dear Kirkland College Alumnae friends and colleagues,

As we move further into 2016, please allow me to introduce myself: I am Associate Professor Vivyan Adair (Women’s Studies) the current chair of your Kirkland Endowment Activities Committee (KEAC). It has been my greatest pleasure to have chaired and co-chaired (last year with Professor Michelle LeMasurier, Mathematics) the KEAC for four years now. Our goal has been to act as liaison facilitating and fulfilling your generous and innovative vision and crucial support by carefully dispersing funds supporting work that advances our understanding of issues that significantly impact a broad and inclusive range of women at Hamilton College and in the world.

Members of the KEAC include faculty and former students who are successful, engaged members of both Hamilton and the larger community and who are actively committed to fostering inclusion, rigor and innovation in theory, in scholarship, and in practice. The work of the Kirkland College alumnae through the KEAC makes a major impact on the lives, the scholarship, the authority, and our shared understanding of women. We remember always that:

“Kirkland brought women to College Hill along with a more diverse lifestyle and an innovative philosophy of teaching. Kirkland rounded out the Hamilton curriculum, adding the departments and offerings in the arts, creative writing and social sciences. The legacy of Kirkland changed the Hill and enriched the Hamilton experience.”

In doing so we work together to remember and honor Kirkland College as a remarkable, innovative and transformative college whose dedicated alumnae have worked tirelessly in “the needs and interests of women at Hamilton College". We are grateful to Kirkland alumnae and proud to carry on Kirkland College’s heartfelt, ethical, generous and productive legacy.

Please see below a detailed reflection of our work on behalf of the KEAC for the year. As you can see, members of the KEAC take our charge seriously because it is a mission we share with you, the women of Kirkland College. We are honored and grateful to be allowed to support and further your vision for innovation, cutting edge thought and productive, ethical theory, scholarship, communication and praxis. We are grateful for your leadership and we look forward to continuing to work with you to harness and focus the enormous energy, talent and commitment that is central to the Hamilton/Kirkland College Community, to all of our benefit.

We thank you sincerely and wish you well as we continue into 2016.
 
For the KEAC and my co-chair Associate Professor Michelle LeMasurier,
 
Vivyan C. Adair, PhD
Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies 
 

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KEAC Members

I would like to acknowledge and thank members of the KEAC — Danielle Roper, Barbara Stein, Carolyn Pasley, Gbemende Johnson and Michelle LeMasurier — with whom I have had the honor to work over the past four years, for their diligence, ability, engagement and (simply put) their hours and hours of hard work.  We are very grateful for their knowledge, insight, generosity, dedication and good humor. 
 
And, with great enthusiasm, I would like to introduce our current committee members.  We are unwavering in our commitment to carrying on the tradition of the Kirkland Endowment by facilitating Kirkland College’s vision, support for, and promise of inclusive, innovative, rigorous, cutting edge and productive (critical and creative) scholarship and engagement on our campus and in our world.

We would love to invite other Kirkland alumnae to join our committee.  Please let Lori Reidel (lorir@vwg.com) know if you have any interest in serving in this capacity.  Thank you.

Kirkland Endowment Activities Committee 

The Kirkland Endowment Activities Committee (KEAC) is comprised of dedicated, capable, educated and active members of the Hamilton Community who make a significant impact on the lives of a broad and inclusive range of Hamilton women. Members of the KEAC include faculty and former students who are members of both Hamilton and the larger community and who are actively committed to equity and inclusion in theory, in practice and of course in the world.

Our goal is to disperse funds that support work by the Hamilton community that specifically address issues “in the best interest of women” (understood inclusively and intersectionally). In doing so we remember and honor Kirkland College as a remarkable, innovative women’s college, that has made a profound impact on our own lives and whose dedicated alumnae have worked tirelessly in “the needs and interests of women at Hamilton College.” We are grateful to Kirkland women and proud to carry on their heartfelt and productive tradition.
 
Each year we consider and discuss the merits of funding the following:

KEAC Speaker and Travel Funds

Four times a year (July 17, Oct. 16, Nov. 30, and Feb. 19) we consider funding requests for 1) student research travel, and 2) for bringing relevant speakers to campus.  If a department or student group has a project in mind (speaker, artistic performance, research, etc.) that supports the "needs and interests of women at Hamilton," they may apply to the Kirkland Endowment Advisory Committee for financial support.  We welcome proposals from student groups and are especially interested in interdisciplinary and innovative programming.

On the same schedule, we assist women students with travel for research, service, and for presentations of creative work or research at professional meetings. (We cannot support senior project research or study abroad work and we cannot support students after graduation. Typical grants for travel within the U.S do not exceed $400 and cover up to $1000 for international travel.)

The numbers of applications for KEAC travel and speakers funding have been increasing over the past four years. In my first year as chair we received a total of eighteen proposals and funded 80% of them. This last year (2015) we received and considered (and debated the utility of funding) thirty speaker and travel proposals and funded about 75% of them. These were all very strong, focused and well thought out proposals that clearly forwarded the mission of the KEAC and brought honor and distinction to your/our work and support.
 
For example, your generous support in the past has funded: 1) women students from the Art Department touring a NYC Studio Art Tour; student Jennie Wilbur’s travel to “Parliament of the World's Religions”; student Patricia Taik’s travel to present original research on using “the COX-1 Sequence to characterize the genetic diversities of Cryptocaryon Irritans (C. irritans) and its phylogenic position” at an international genetics conference in Switzerland; Professor Mireille Koukjian’s film series on “Women in Islamic Societies”; students attending Euripides' Trojan Women at BAM in New York city; Lilly Ledbetter’s talk on gender equity and fair pay.
 
Well-attended KEAC talks over the past four years include:

• Ann Bancroft, author, polar explorer, environmental, women and gay rights activist visited campus Thursday, Feb 7, 2013 to meet with two classes and deliver a lecture. 
• Three students (Elizabeth Scholz, Susannah Wales and Chelsea Lewis) supported by a KEAC travel grant, presented research on their extensive (and impressive) work on the use and implications of using a portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) in archeological study. 
• In 2014, the KEAC supported an innovative “Women and Smart Salary Negotiation Workshop” with the goal of providing college women who are approaching the job market with the knowledge and skills to negotiate salaries and benefits so that they receive fair and realistic compensation. 
• In 2012, Supported by KEAC, student Inricka Liburd, brought speaker Juliette C. Mayers, who has researched and written about the utility of women of color and networking, to campus in September to give a talk, meet with and have lunch with students. 

November 30, 2015 funded projects:

KEAC Student Travel

• Rispur Kirui studied women’s educational leadership in Londiani, Kenya, July 1 - 31, 2015.
• Kelly Watts studied women’s international rights at conference on and human trafficking in Urbana, Ill., December 27-31, 2015.
• Emily Rubenstein traveled to present original archaeological research and analysis of the impact of women working in Anthropology, at the 2016 Northwest Anthropology Conference in Tacoma, Washington, March 23-26, 2016.
• Phillippa Schwarzfopf traveled to videograph training workshops (with Digital Humanities Initiative) that gave young women in the Ginsburg township, South Africa, the tools of archive and historical preservation. In gathering a thousand oral histories, from community leaders and prominent women activists, The BCM Oral History Project will unite two generations of women impacted by the BCM and also preserve unique stories of Black female political consciousness and activism within the community, March 2016

KEAC Speaker/Performance/Workshop

1. Travel to “Students Leading the Change for Racial and Gender Justice” Conference (Margo Okazawa Rey; WMNST Root Chair Project) March 11-15, 2016
   To enable two students to attend conference, with proposed project goal of enabling participants to apply intersectional analysis to practice through learning popular education and Participatory Action Research to  enable the facilitators—campus leaders—to understand complex lived experiences of women and design actions and recommend policies that account for both race and gender, grounded in understanding also how class differences affect students’ sense of rights and entitlements.
2. SPECIAL K CD Production
   Anna Teresa O’Keefe
   Special K to record and produce a new CD with songs they have been recording since they  produced our last CD in 2010. Originally founded in 1973 on the Kirkland College campus, Special K is Hamilton’s oldest female a cappella group, and we are a symbol of the history of Kirkland College and provide a special connection to the Kirkland piece of Hamilton’s history.
3. Speaker, Author, Performer: Josefhina Baez
   March 2016
   In “Levente no. Yolayorkdominicanyork” speaker Baez transforms vulnerability into autonomy and reverses women’s experiences in themes such as catcalling, sexuality, race, employment, tourism, and the body.  Autology workshop: Separately, the artist offers a workshop where she performs, describes and defines what she calls Autology, the act of loving and taking caring of yourself in order to be able to care for others.  The workshop runs for about four hours and would be particularly beneficial for the women at Hamilton given the fact that many of our female students are far from home and this workshop offers a long term companion that women can take with them everywhere they go and that is confidence.

The Kirkland Endowment Essay Prize

Each year we select an interdisciplinary essay written and submitted by students. We award the “The Kirkland Endowment Essay Prize in Interdisciplinary Studies” for “an outstanding genuinely interdisciplinary essay” related to issues “in the best interest of women” at Hamilton College and in the world.  Essays should be no more than 10 pages. We usually get about 5-8 submissions to read through and choose from and have had the great honor of selecting really ground breaking superb and thought provoking essays to be recognized with this honor.
 
Last year's “Kirkland Endowment Essay Prize” was awarded to Lauren Howe ’14 for her superb essay entitled “Past, Present and Future: The Effects of the Death of the Swift River Valley and the Birth of the Quabbin Reservoir on Local Residents” written at the intersection of her work in Environment Studies, Public Policy, Government, Women’s Studies and International Relations. This years prize was unanimously awarded to Crystal Kim for her superb interdisciplinary essay entitled “The Fall and Rise and Fall again of the Haleminis: the Comfort Women Redress Movement.”
 

The Samuel F. Babbitt Kirkland College Fellowship

Each year the KEAC funds one or two students with fellowships that support graduate work through The Samuel F. Babbitt Kirkland College Fellowship “awarded to the female graduate who best exemplifies the spirit of individual learning that was associated with Kirkland College, to assist her in meeting expenses of pursuing an advanced degree."  In 2015 we received eight superb proposals (with faculty letters of support) for graduate students support. We were able to support two students with this fund. 

• Recent fellowship recipients

Kirkland Scholars

The Kirkland scholarship recognizes students who demonstrate a commitment to the needs and interests of women. It perpetuates the legacy of Kirkland College, which was the women’s college, coordinate with Hamilton, from 1968 to 1978.

• Recent Scholars 

KEAC Summer Associates and Internships

The Kirkland Endowment Advisory Committee sponsors up to four students in its program of Summer Associates and Internships. Students and their advisers do ten weeks of full-time work on a research or creative project of their own design. The program is designed to support students who wish to do rigorous, focused research or creative work that fits under the mandate of the Endowment, "to support the needs and interests of women at Hamilton." Working closely with a faculty supervisor KEAC Summer Associates produce an essay or creative piece and report on their work to the community in the following academic year.

• Summer Associates and Internships

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The enduring legacy of Kirkland College and the KEAC 

This recap represents the significant work of KEAC this year at Hamilton College. We are of course enormously grateful for your support, guidance and inspiration. We also recognize and support the possibility of continuing this support through a focused, nationally recognized legacy of ongoing research and writing addressing issues related to the betterment of other women and girls in higher education and in the world.
 
With the support and guidance of (for example) The Kirkland Institute for the Study of Women and Higher Education a team of scholars (comprised of a Hamilton faculty member, Kirkland alumna, Hamilton students and an outside researcher/analyst/writer) committed to rigorous, innovative, collaborative, interdisciplinary, critical and creative thinking and scholarship could allow us to use the enormous privilege of our own educations to both more fully understand and to support other women and their children as they attempt to forge lives of security, health, fulfillment, responsibility and dignity for generations to come. 
 
I have attached my own proposal for such a research and book project, presented in conjunction with another proposal for a book on the women and legacy of Kirkland College and with suggestions for addressing the question of women and girl refugees in the Utica area and access to higher education.  As an inaugural series, and/or as part of an institute, these three books would beautifully highlight the breadth and the depth of Kirkland College’s legacy of commitment to women in higher education on individual, community, national and global stages.  I would of course be happy to meet with you, at your convenience, to discuss this initiative or others. 
 
Thank you so much for a wonderful, productive and very fulfilling year. Members of the KEAC and I look forward to our continued collaboration with you throughout the year.
 
All my best,
 
Vivyan