President's Briefing Spring 2021

To broaden the discussion on racial justice and explore how we can best address this issue at Westmont, we’ve formed the President’s Task Force on Race, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. I chair this initiative with Chandra Mallampalli, Fletcher Jones professor of social sciences and professor of history, Mary Docter, professor of Spanish, Jeff Schloss, T.B. Walker professor of natural and behavioral sciences and distinguished professor of biology, Russell Smelley, professor of kinesiology and head coach of the cross country and track and field teams, Carmel Saad, associate professor of psychology, and Helen Rhee, professor of Christian history. 

A series of speakers shared important insights, experiences and perspectives about diversity and racial justice during the Westmont Board of Trustees meetings in January. They included Vince Bantu, assistant professor of church history and Black church studies at Fuller Theological Seminary, Carol Houston, Westmont trustee and senior pastor of Bethel Unspeakable Joy Church, Carmel Saad, associate professor of psychology at Westmont, Tremper Longman, distinguished scholar of biblical studies at Westmont, and George Yancey, professor of sociology at Baylor University.

 More than 2,000 participants enjoyed the 16th annual Westmont President’s Breakfast with Nancy Koehn, a Harvard historian and bestselling author of “Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times.” She spoke passionately about what we can learn from the five people featured in her book: Ernest Shackleton, Abraham Lincoln, Fredrick Douglass, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Rachel Carson. We wish we could have gathered together for breakfast as usual, but the virtual presentation helped us nearly triple participation and engage a global audience. Residents along the Central Coast watched a March 21 rebroadcast on KEYT-TV. 

To celebrate National Women’s History Month in March, Westmont hosted the sixth annual Advancing Women in Leadership (AWiL) virtual conference in partnership with the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU). Participants watched Nancy Koehn’s March 5 talk for Westmont’s President’s Breakfast and engaged in discussions about her inspiring book. On March 26, CCCU’s Kimberly Battle-Walters Denu moderated an insightful panel of chief diversity officers from member colleges who explored inclusive leadership in action. Westmont Women’s Leadership Council sponsored the virtual conference for professionals in higher education and college students, and 1,100 women registered for the event. On March 30, the college invited women in high school and college to hear from Christina DiMari, author of the book “Cultivating Pearls,” to learn how God can transform every area of their lives. 

Congratulations to two faculty members who’ve earned research grants. Anna Aboud (mathematics) received the prestigious Structured Quartet Research Ensembles (SQuaREs) research grant from the American Institute of Mathematics. She’ll collaborate with four mathematicians for three years on Fractional Laplacians on Fractal Domains. Blake Victor Kent (sociology) co-authored an article about stress, spirituality and health in the journal Religions. 

The center producing this work—Blake serves as affiliated researcher and co-investigator—received a $3 million grant from the Templeton Foundation for Investigating the Impact of Multiple Dimensions of Religion and Spirituality on Risk of Cardiovascular Disease across Diverse Racial/Ethnic Communities.

Kristi Lazar Cantrell (chemistry) and her collaborators published an article, “Catalytic Cross Talk between Key Peptide Fragments That Couple Alzheimer’s Disease with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis,” in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Written in collaboration with research groups at UCSB, the article includes the work of current Westmont students Grace Schonfeld and Ellen Trapp.
 
Michelle C. Hughes (education) contributed two teaching stories, “Phantom Joy” and “A String of Ah-Ha Moments,” to Generating Tact and Flow for Effective Teaching and Learning published with Routledge (Steeg Thornhill & Badley, 2021, p. 63 & 112).
 
Carmen McCain (English) gave an invited presentation, “God has exposed you: censorship, citizenship and cosmopolitanism unity in Muslim and Christian responses to repression in Northern Nigeria” at the online workshop Remapping the Study of Islam and Muslim Cultures in Nigeria held at the University of Florida in January.
 
Rebecca McNamara (English) and colleague Sara Torres drew from their experiences of teaching sexual assault in medieval literature for their article “Female Consent and Affective Resistance in Romance: Medieval Pedagogy and #MeToo,” published in a special issue on #MeToo of New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession in March.
 

 
Carolyn Mitten (mathematics) and her colleagues published an article, “Online Resources for Mathematics: Exploring the Relationship between Teacher Use and Student Performance” in Investigations in Mathematical Learning in April. She also shared the results of a recent study in her presentation “Comparing Preservice Teachers’ Perceptions of Math and Literacy Methods,” at the annual meeting of the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators in February.
 
Caryn Reeder (religious studies) contributed a chapter, “Insiders and Outsiders: Community Violence in Deuteronomy,” to Cambridge Companion to the Hebrew Bible and Ethics (ed. Carly Crouch; Cambridge University Press, 2021).

 
Amanda Sparkman (biology) published a research article, “Current and time-lagged effects of climate on innate immunity in two sympatric snake species” in the journal Ecology and Evolution, with former major honors student Lucia Combrink ’19 as first author. She also published “Embryonic heart rate correlates with maternal temperature and developmental stage in viviparous snakes” in Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part A: Molecular & Integrative Physiology with research technician Kelly Evans ’19 as first author. She co-authored a study, “Microevolutionary change in mimicry? Potential erosion of rattling behavior among nonvenomous snakes on islands lacking rattlesnakes” in the journal Ethology, Ecology and Evolution with collaborators from UNC Chapel Hill.
 
Paul Willis (English) published a short essay about bighorn sheep in the Sierra, “An Art of Conducting Oneself,” on the website of Wilderness Watch.


 
Sameer Yadav (religious studies) was featured on the Crux Sola blog as a “Theologian to Read and Follow," and he appeared in two podcasts: one as an interviewee for Talking politics and religion without killing each other and on Yale Center for Faith and Culture’s For the Life of the World to discuss the life and thought of Howard Thurman. He also published an article on Willie Jennings in the T&T Clark Companion to Analytic Theology and wrote a popular article on abolitionist vs. slaveholder biblical interpretation for the online publication Pax.
 
At Westmont, undergraduates work directly with professors on research projects, and we showcase their work each year at the Spring Student Research Symposium. They’ll gather April 22 in person—practicing safety protocols such as wearing masks and social distancing— and will explain the research they conducted during the past year to a small number of invited guests. Eileen McMahon McQuade, associate dean of the faculty, has organized the event to be held outside on upper campus and prospective students have been invited to attend.