In presenting the award, President John Bravman noted that Balakian is the first Bucknell graduate to be named a Weis Fellow. The honor recognizes the highest level of achievement in the craft of writing within the realms of fiction, nonfiction or biography. Previous recipients include Edward Albee, David McCullough, Derek Walcott, Tom Wolfe, Salman Rushdie, John Updike and Toni Morrison.

The Weis Fellow honor is the latest of many for Balakian, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He also received the Service to Humanity Award from the University at Reunion this June. Balakian is the Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English and director of creative writing at Colgate University.

Before Ken Burns’ Bucknell Forum appearance April 9 — where he shared insights from his career chronicling the American experience, discussed the challenges of portraying a subject as multifaceted as war, and brought the crowd to its feet — the documentary filmmaker sat down with Bucknell Magazine to discuss his 10-part series, The Vietnam War, which aired on PBS stations last fall. Following are edited insights from that conversation.

On lessons from a gold-star mother
“We are all so dialectically preoccupied right now. Everything is red state or blue state, white or black, male or female, gay or straight. Whatever division we want to make, we’re certain to superimpose that over everything. And actually what a gold-star mother — and I hope the experiences of the soldiers, and of the people who were protesting — shows you, is that sometimes they cancel each other out. That it’s not really that dialectic. There’s something bigger.”

Colleagues and neighbors, Kline and Brouse often shared stories of the kittens and cats they rescued. Brouse kept hearing about cat cafés in major cities and mentioned it to Kline, thinking they’d laugh it off, but Kline had recently started her own nonprofit, Cherished Cats Rescue Alliance, and saw it as a great adoption platform.

“The Board of Trustees unanimously believes that, under John’s continued leadership, Bucknell will capitalize on its forward momentum and advance its position as one of the nation’s premier institutions of higher education under his direction,” said board chair Ken Freeman ’72.

The meeting marked the last for Freeman, who will step down from the board in June following 17 years of service, including nine as board chair. During their eight years together, Freeman and Bravman have led Bucknell through a number of historic accomplishments, including the completion of the $513 million WE DO Campaign, the establishment of the Freeman College of Management and a number of significant construction and renovation projects designed to strengthen Bucknell’s residential education.

Geomorphology

Bucknell distance runner Colleen Buckley ’19 is approaching a future career with animals as fast as she does the finish line at her track & field and cross-country meets.

Since childhood, Buckley has dreamed of becoming a veterinarian. This made Bucknell and its distinctive Animal Behavior Program an attractive choice.

“At a lot of schools you can only take biology, but I wanted something that would get me in with animals in my undergrad,” says Buckley, of River Edge, N.J.

Buckley splits her time between running and working hands-on with animals as a research assistant at the primate lab. She also studies the impulsivity of dogs belonging to Lewisburg residents and Bucknell professors for her Research Methods in Learning course.

When Norman Weber ’54 made the journey from Maplewood, N.J., to Lewisburg in 1950, he brought along his love of photography as well as a desire to excel in his major, commerce and finance. But his first room assignment seemed destined to doom his study plans. How could one concentrate in a room occupied by 30 to 40 other first-year men?

What was then known as Steel Dorm — now the site of the Animal Behavior Lab on the west side of Route 15 — was a 40 foot by 100 foot steel building provided by the federal Public Works Administration in 1947.

Norma Skow Smayda ’55 is pictured here with Fuller Stanton Blunt ’55, her date to the Homecoming dance. Smayda graduated from Bucknell with a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry, but her second career took her from science into the arts and crafts. While living in Norway with her first husband in the late 1960s, Smayda saw a flyer for a local weaving school. She became fascinated with the craft and learned all she could while in Norway. Smayda returned to the United States and pursued an MFA in visual design at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. In 1974, she established the Saunderstown Weaving School in Rhode Island, where she teaches beginning and advanced weavers. In 1982 she married Andrew Staley, who helped her develop the school into the unique place it has become.

The current craft-beer renaissance is the most recent step in a long recovery from the effects of Prohibition, which left only 331 breweries on its repeal in 1933, compared to 669 when it was enacted in 1920. In the 1940s and ’50s, most surviving breweries followed the market trend that called for beer with an American identity. This led to the dominance of one style of beer — the yellow, fizzy liquid now referred to as American adjunct lager, typified by Budweiser and Miller — and a market consolidation that dropped the number of breweries below 100 in the late 1970s.

The couple later discovered the property was adjacent to nearly 2,000 conserved acres, which support needed wildlife corridors and also contain the increasingly rare vernal (seasonal) pools where amphibians breed.

Born with cerebral palsy, Marshall had six operations as a youngster. “They enabled me to eventually walk with a pronounced gait,” he says. “My dad, Dan, was a New York City fire captain — a big man — who taught me to strive to be like everyone else. Growing up, I always saw myself as just one of the guys, part of the team.”

For the CRS, Lipiec studies ecosystem restoration and coastal resilience. (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates there are 95,471 miles of shoreline in the United States, a figure that includes the edges of lakes, bays and rivers.)

LOYALTY TO BUCKNELL AWARD
Joann Golightly Brown ’48: The 1948 Class Reporter for the last 70 years, Brown has attended every Reunion since graduation and is a perennial volunteer for her Reunion committee. She established a scholarship in memory of her late sister, Eleanor Golightly McChesney ’46, and annually attends the Scholarship Day Luncheon to meet the recipient. After graduation, Brown worked at the Newark office of the FBI, where she met her husband, Jim. In 1957 they launched the insurance agency James A. Brown Agency Inc. in Roselle Park, N.J., where she was the office manager and bookkeeper for 58 years.

I have in front of me a pen-and-ink drawing sketch by the artist Alex Close of the Ellen Clarke Bertrand Library. That’s my favorite because it’s the prettiest building on the campus. It brings back memories from the late ’50s, when there were more restrictions on the women than the guys in mid-week. Freshmen women had a 7 o’clock curfew to be back in the dorm, unless they had had a scheduled activity or if they were at the library, which was open till 10 p.m. I’d go study there, and when people were taking breaks, you could socialize.