Leader Committed to Reducing Risky Behavior Takes Helm at Wells College

The Honor-Code Pledge

As president of Frostburg State University for nine years, Jonathan C. Gibralter, a leading figure in efforts to curb student drinking, had to contend with a culture of defiant alcoholic excess. In July he assumed the leadership of a far quieter campus, “a true gem,” he says, among small private liberal-arts colleges, and one whose future he hopes to secure.

In contrast to Frostburg, a public institution in western Maryland, which has almost 5,000 undergraduates, his new campus, Wells College, in New York State, has only 537. He witnessed a “proud tradition” there, he says: a ceremony at which incoming students pledged to older students that they would act honorably.

“I haven’t seen that at many colleges,” says Mr. Gibralter, who at Frostburg took flak from students and alumni when he clamped down on alcohol-fueled misbehavior, required that dorm residents take an online alcohol-awareness course, and opposed lowering the drinking age. (In contrast, 136 presidents and chancellors have signed the Amethyst Initiative, an effort to persuade lawmakers to consider lowering the drinking age; Mr. Gibralter denounces such a change as irresponsible.)

As chair of a group of college presidents working with the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, he is now pitching the institute’s new manual offering close to 60 methods to reduce campus drinking.

In announcing his hiring, leaders at Wells College said the financial acumen and innovation he has demonstrated would be keys to “the task of fully restoring Wells’s greatness.” Founded as a women’s college in 1868, and co-educational since only 2005, Wells has room to grow to 700 students through national and international recruiting and other measures, says Mr. Gibralter.

He says he is confident he can know and care for 700 students. “It’s important to me to imagine, in every instance,” he says, “ ‘What would I do if it was my son or daughter? How would I want the campus to be operated?’ ” — Peter Monaghan

High Honor for a Writer

Marlon James has promised that he will “never write a campus novel,” but the Macalester College professor — and winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize for his third novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings — is quick to point out how his place in academe has nurtured his career as a novelist.

Mr. James, who is from Jamaica, knew little about the Minnesota liberal-arts college before he applied for a job there in 2007, after receiving a master’s in creative writing from Wilkes University, in Pennsylvania. “I actually Googled ‘creative writing tenure track,’ and Macalester was looking for someone,” he says. “All I knew was that it was well known among Jamaicans because it really tried to reach out, and that the weather is nothing like the tropics.”

He interviewed at the Modern Language Association conference but didn’t get the job. Instead he was invited to take a one-year appointment. After the person who received the original offer left early, Mr. James filled the position permanently. Now a tenured associate professor of English, he says the college has always been supportive of his novels, which often draw from Jamaican history.

Mr. James is the first Jamaican-born writer to win the Man Booker, Britain’s most prestigious literary award. The prize, worth about $75,000, was traditionally given only to English-language writers from Britain, the Commonwealth, Ireland, and Zimbabwe, but in 2013 became open to writers across the English-speaking world. A Brief History, which explores Jamaican politics using the true story of an attempt on the singer Bob Marley’s life, won by a unanimous vote.

At Macalester, Mr. James teaches literature and creative-writing courses, often assigning the same book — for example, Disgrace, by the Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee — for both. “It’s interesting for a writer to get out of the frame of reading like a writer, because reading like a writer and reading like a reader are totally different things,” he says. “Learning to close-read the novel is a good way of re-experiencing a work at a basic level, which is something writers need to do.”

Some writers take pride in not being part of academe, “and more power to them,” says Mr. James, but he is grateful for the ways that teaching has informed his work. One of his students became upset by the trope that mental illness causes violence, and since then, Mr. James says, he has warned students who use that formula “that it’s lazy thinking that has more to do with Hollywood than actual science.”

A few students have argued that he is trying to teach them to write just like him, but “I always tell them, ‘I’m not teaching you to write like me, I’m teaching that you can use something other than an adverb.’ ”— Angela Chen

‘A University for Students’

Richard Rush, who plans to retire at the end of the academic year, has held one of the more unusual jobs in higher education: He was, for a while, the sole formal employee of a brand-new institution. Since Mr. Rush became founding president of California State University-Channel Islands, in 2001, he has helped the campus grow to 5,200 students and 850 faculty and staff members.

He knew he faced an uphill financial battle at the start; the university’s initial funds came mostly from private sources, not the state. But he envisioned the area, rich in agriculture and marine life, as “a living laboratory,” and he led the university to develop a scientific research station in partnership with Channel Islands National Park to foster more undergraduate research.

Mr. Rush had no doubt that the campus would flourish. “For 40 years, the region wanted a public four-year university,” he says.

The university’s “clear, cogent mission” has been essential to its success, Mr. Rush says. “I said, ‘We are going to build a university for students.’ ” That goal has attracted faculty members who “want to be educators” and to work closely with students on their academic and professional development, he says.

The university aims to prepare graduates for work mainly in the surrounding area, which includes the city of Camarillo and the Channel Islands, only one of which has a significant civilian population.

About half of the students are Latino, and in 2010 the university gained status as a Hispanic-serving institution. That designation has given it access to nearly $20 million in federal funds since then, Mr. Rush says. Officials have used that money in part to develop degree programs in science, technology, and mathematics. The university also offers extensive cultural programming to support its diverse student population.

Among the successes that Mr. Rush points to is that the six-year graduation rates of Latino and white students are nearly the same.

A goal at Channel Islands is to double enrollment in the next decade, he says. There are also plans to add an engineering degree, and possibly an athletics program.

“The best days of the university are ahead of it,” Mr. Rush says.— Sarah Brown

Tracking Chicken

What is the environmental cost of a meal eaten at a student union? Thomas W. Bryan, a graduate student in environment and resources at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, sought to answer that question by tracing food-supply chains to determine the carbon footprint of each menu item.

His research project won him one of seven Sustainability Awards presented in October by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.

Among Mr. Bryan’s challenges: trying to persuade the restaurant’s chefs to divulge their ingredients. Among the surprises: White rice, in part because of water and fertilizer use, has as great a carbon footprint per gram as marinated chicken. — Ruth Hammond

Obituary: Journalism Pioneer Dies

Bonnie Bucqueroux, an emeritus professor of journalism at Michigan State University who influenced many students to embrace online journalism, died on October 13. She was 71.

Ms. Bucqueroux taught at Michigan State for more than two decades, starting in 1987 in the department of criminal justice. She later joined the journalism school, where she coordinated the Victims and the Media program, which trains journalists in how to treat victims and victim issues with sensitivity.

In her courses, she encouraged students to pursue their interests in digital journalism.

In 2005, with her students, she started an online campus publication, SpartanEdge, which had to overcome skepticism about its edgy content and form.

“Bonnie never stopped believing in us, and she never stopped thinking that this was the future,” says Diane Ivey, a 2009 graduate of Michigan State who was an editor in chief of the now-defunct publication and now works for a performance group in Washington.

Other online publications that Ms. Bucqueroux founded are Lansing Online News and Sustainable Farmer. Though she formally retired in 2009, Ms. Bucqueroux continued to work until her death and was teaching three courses this semester. — Anais Strickland

Read more about people in Gazette or on Twitter at @ruthehammond. Submit news releases to people@chronicle.com.