Four Stars!
I have always enjoyed the Voice, but this particular issue (Spring 2025) was outstanding! I laughed, I cried, I glowed with pride. I was intrigued, I learned some new things. Well done!
—Karin Knutson Klein ’83
Carl Pride
I absolutely love the Voice. It’s inspiring, journalistically courageous, and makes me proud to be a Carleton grad. The spring 2025 issue is wonderful, beginning with the content in One North College and Alison Byerly’s column, and throughout the entire magazine. But, of course, “The Breakfast Club” was extra special. Such a lovely story, brilliantly crafted by Tim Gihring and illustrated by Jack Molloy.
—Mark Daly ’84
Kudos and a Correction
Thank you for including me in the “Pivot” article (Spring 2025). Jon Spayde managed to explain my career change more clearly than I myself have ever been able to do, and I’ve already been contacted by a Carleton alum who is a rabbi offering support. I was also impressed with the way artist Julia Rothman summarized my whole career so elegantly in line drawing—except for one thing: she drew me wearing tefillin, or phylacteries. As a Progressive Jew, I believe that the instruction to bind the commandment to love God on one’s hand and between one’s eyes—taken literally by Orthodox Jews—is meant symbolically by the Bible. Therefore, I do not wrap tefillin.
—Richard Allen Greene ’91
50+ Years of Ministry
Thank you for “A Scaffold for Spiritual Leadership” (Spring 2025). I went from Carleton to Harvard Divinity School in 1964, and so far as I know was the first to do so. The HDS dean, Samuel Miller, speaking at Carleton, “recruited” me. Mary Bjorkland McNamara ’65 followed me the next year. In 1967 I entered a 50+ year ministry in the United Church of Christ, including one year in Rome, Italy. Of course, I am now retired!
—David M. Powers, ’64
Collections by the Score
I was amused by the article on collections (“Carleton’s Curious Collections,” Spring 2025). One that wasn’t mentioned but which was (or is) of considerable value: the recording and score library in the music department. When I was a student, the music department required that most seniors studying performing music present a senior recital, or at least be one of two or three performers in a senior recital presentation, and it was also customary for faculty to present at least one recital from time to time.
All of these recitals were recorded (KARL did the engineering!) and the recordings, and copies of the scores used, were archived for other students or faculty or whoever to study. It was quite a collection—and perhaps more significantly, some of the works performed and their scores existed nowhere else, either because they were written for the occasion or because they were one-off finds by faculty. I wonder what ever happened to that collection?
—Jamie Hall ’64
Thoughts from our First ENTS Major
I found the Going Greener (Winter 2025) issue quite interesting. I might have been Carleton’s first Environmental Studies major when I received approval for an alternative degree in 1972, but I switched to geology to graduate early and save my parents a third of Carleton’s $3,800 annual fee.
Back in the early days of the environmental movement at Carleton, Zero Population Growth and the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth were key influences. Global warming wasn’t yet a concern, and carbon dioxide never appeared on the long lists of air pollutants we worried about. But when I enrolled at Carleton, the U.S. population was 200 million, compared to 340 million now. An ever-increasing standard of living seems our primary driver, and our many immigrants dramatically increase their environmental footprints when they become Americans.
Finally, instead of restricting off-campus travel, maybe Carleton should require professors to live in Northfield, rather than hiring people who commute from the Twin Cities. This would also help faculty members become part of the Carleton community at evening academic and social events.
—R.J. Pautsch ’73
On Resistance to Science
I couldn’t agree more with R. Michael Alvarez’s concise description of the problem underlying most science distrust (“Deciphering Deception,” Spring 2024), when he shared his concern about “the deep reluctance now to believe scientists who are speaking fact.” But it’s not just now that this resistance to scientific discovery has stymied even the most objective of communicators. Just ask Nicolaus Copernicus (“The sun is the center of the solar system, not the Earth”), Ignaz Semmelweis (“Washing hands kills germs”), or pretty much any climatologist since I graduated from Carleton (“Humans have caused climate change”).
The common theme isn’t that so-called skeptics aren’t convinced by facts; it’s that facts, in and of themselves, have never sufficed to convince anyone who has reason to believe otherwise. Even the most rational of humans is first an emotional creature. Conspiracists and deniers know this and use it to their advantage. And now, when the spread of false information is faster and broader than any time in human history, scientists must reach audiences with more than just true information.
Florence Nightingale’s crusade, in the mid-19th century, to convince everyone, from doctors to Queen Victoria, that sanitation could save as many lives as any medical intervention serves as an excellent model for how to do so: She presented accurate statistics in the form of meaningful stories, and she was successful. If we keep trying to treat the ailment of disinformation that is plaguing modern society with medicine that not only tastes bad but doesn’t work, we will certainly lose the patients. For better or for worse, those are the facts.
—Brian Sostek ’90