EXAMPLE PAGE - SCHOOL BROCHURE - DEMOCRACY - Flipbook - Page 8
WHAT YOU
HAD TO SAY
“One Student at
a Time” (Summer
2020) did a nice job highlighting changes being made in the
College of Education for the preparation and for the professional recognition of teachers. These efforts are long overdue in my uneducated opinion. Keep it up! My background
is in engineering and business. However, for the last three
or four years I have been a Junior Achievement volunteer
teacher in eighth grade Title I classrooms. This has been an
eye-opening experience for me as my only K–12 experience
for myself, my children, and my grandchildren has been
in private schools. My Title I experience has moved me to
have a lot of conversations with principals, school superintendents, and teacher educators. We must help these children! Kudos to Dean Marchand-Martella and best wishes
for your work.
—Jim Muehlbauer (ME’63, MS M’64), life member
Evansville, Indiana
Thank you for a very good Summer 2020
Send your
letters to
alumnus@purdue.edu
edition. I’m sure that the coronavirus situation has affected
everyone in ways that we cannot know about, and that
includes the ways in which you pull together the Alumnus.
It has surely been difficult. The feature story about teachers
(“One Student at a Time”) addresses a complex question to
ask and try to answer — how to stem the declining number
of teachers in the state. I enjoyed reading all of the pandemic bits covered (“A Semester in Sequester”). The quote
at the end of the short piece on the 1918 pandemic was an
excellent one to highlight. Kenda Resler Friend’s piece on
Brad Ruder (“Humanism in Building”) was a good read. “The
Gendered Bathroom” story raised provocative ideas, was
handled well, and I was glad to see Purdue, the Alumnus,
broaching the subject. I like seeing profiles of a student, the
alumni profiles, and the pages about recently-published
books, the bit of nostalgia that’s inserted, no matter the era.
It was a very good edition.
—Reah (Landes) Smolek (LA’73), life member
Indianapolis, Indiana
6 P UR D U E A LUMNUS
Is the Alumnus actively trying to alien-
ate ... well, people? In the Summer 2020 edition (“Traditions:
The Rivet”), Mary Monical and S. Katherine Braz resurrect
an abhorrently titillating, misogynistic rag periodical that
should have been left to rot at the bottom of the rubbish
heap under which it was conceived. Monical writes that
from 1947 to the early 1970s, “a group of serious, hard working intellectuals published” the “university-sanctioned”
“humor magazine.” The photos accompanying the article
are not funny; instead, they make me wonder what photos were deemed too trashy, racist, or mean-spirited (think:
hate crime) to avoid censorship. How do two women at the
Alumnus exist amidst the social movements of 2020 and yet
think that this smut is worth reminiscence? When choosing a lost Purdue tradition to uphold, the Alumnus could
choose one that does not denigrate most of the population.
—G. Klimeck (ChE’90), life member
West Lafayette, Indiana
I was delighted
to read the article
about Don Paarlberg in the Summer 2020 edition of the
Purdue Alumnus. Don was my mentor at Purdue and following. He was an excellent teacher and inspired me to
become an agricultural economist and start my graduate
work at Cornell University where he earned an MS and
PhD. At Purdue back in the 1940s and early 1950s there was
an organization called the Yellow Dog Society. It was all
male and seemed to be composed primarily of majors in
agricultural economics as the faculty in attendance were
in that department. Once a year, there was a fish fry, and
students made fun of faculty. I have a story about the event
which I am putting in my memoirs:
