It’s the thing with feathers.

It springs eternal.

It’s a waking dream.

It’s full of immortality.

Or so the great bards tell us.

Illustrations by LILLI CARRÉ

To usher in a new decade, we asked Vice President for Strategic Initiatives Robert Midkiff and our three college deans, Raquel Alexander, Patrick Mather and Karl Voss, to recommend visionary faculty members or students who could offer some thoughts on what hope means to them.

For Amal Kabalan, hope can be found in her resilient students. Kelly Knox is inspired by the legacy of the late English Professor Carmen Gillespie. Joe Tranquillo celebrates the value of taking a timeout rather than living in perpetual “run” mode. Yasameen Mohammadi ’20 rediscovers hope after family tragedy. For Chet’la Sebree, hope resides in careful use of language. Nikki Young pins her hopes on a more inclusive, equitable and diverse Bucknell. Matt Bailey looks to analytics as a solution to time-sapping problems. And John Hunter urges us to think in new ways. I hope you enjoy their essays on the following pages.

A final word: What does hope mean to you as we move into 2020? Please share your thoughts at bmagazine@bucknell.edu or on @BucknellU social media
channels.
— Sherri Kimmel, editor

My belief that I can make a difference in someone’s life gives me hope for the future. In the classroom and during office hours, close interaction with my students allows me to discover their true passions. Teaching at Bucknell is a very personal process. It is not just about delivering course material, but it is also about the process of discovering the passion of each student and helping them achieve their dreams.

At the beginning of every semester, I feel like a child in front of a Christmas tree, ready to unwrap new stories. I feel very honored and humbled when students talk to me about their passions, their struggles, what makes them tear up and what inspires them to jump for joy. Whether driven by an urge to do better because their parents worked hard to send them to Bucknell, or an eagerness to find meaning in a new life after escaping a war zone, the stories my students share inspire me.

Helping students navigate their struggles — whether social, academic or emotional — is what keeps me going. During the fall semester, I helped Emily Bayuk ’21 illustrate optoelectronics concepts for young girls interested in engineering. She has a wonderful talent for writing as well as drawing and illustrating abstract concepts. Emily published her first book, The Fundamentals of Circuits Made Easy, and plans to publish a couple more books on the electrical engineering concepts that she is learning in her classes.

I am also developing solar backpacks to help students study at night in refugee camps. This summer, funded by Davis Projects for Peace, I accompanied Shehryar Asif ’21 to refugee camps in Lebanon to pilot a solar backpack project. We offered a two-day workshop to an all-girl class. The first day we showed students how to make cars run on solar panels, and the next day we introduced the solar backpack. The experience was one of a kind, but the most inspiring thing about it was to experience firsthand how resilient young people are. The refugee students’ living conditions were harsh, but they were the happiest kids I have ever seen. They were eager to learn, playful and fun.

This spirit of resilience that I see in many students — whether in Lebanon or Lewisburg — gives me hope. No matter how gloomy our current situation is — climate change, political division, etc. — I truly believe that the youth have the power and capacity to rise to these challenges. In them lies the secret to the continuity of life. To be a part of that process inspires me daily.

— Professor Amal Kabalan, electrical & computer engineering

Carmen turned ideas into actions and individuals into communities. Her words were always kind and beautifully poetic, while she vehemently battled for justice and equality. Carmen brought groundbreaking artists/activists to campus, magically finding (despite the hard work underneath) how to share their brilliance with Bucknell. I cannot walk through this campus without seeing her indelible mark; she made tangible many noteworthy histories and untold stories. She even gave a prescient TEDx talk in 2015 that seems now to foreshadow how we must deal with our loss. I think of all the students, colleagues, family and friends whose lives are threaded with her poems, books she gave away, journeys she led and life-changing classes she taught, along with personal notes of support and encouragement. Carmen, the consummate teacher, educated the rest of us about how to live without her — with hope, grace and connection.

So I still have hope, in spite of this tragic loss. This incredible woman, poet, activist, mother, daughter, widow and friend, in her too few years on this earth, made such a deep, positive and lasting impact on so many people. She provided a map of the heart to show us how to live by making the most of our true resources: intelligence, creativity, action and community. For this lasting gift of hope, I am truly grateful.

— Professor Kelly Hope Knox, dance

If you are unfamiliar with the creative writing workshop model, here’s how it goes: A brave writer shares a work in progress and fellow workshop attendees review and critique the presented piece — offering constructive criticism. This model is the same in most creative writing programs; however, in practice, the workshop unfolds in different ways with each poem shared.

Sometimes writers presenting work are defensive of the strategies, techniques and devices they’ve used — hostile to the idea of revision. From this was born the workshop in which the person receiving criticism is not invited to speak until the end. Sometimes people offering feedback are at a loss for how to thoughtfully comment on the presented work because it’s either too polished or too obtuse. This can lead to negligible comments that result in shallow revisions or a request for a better explanation of the point of the piece, which can either lead to resistance or acquiescence (and, hopefully, major revision). When everything aligns as it should, everyone works together in collaborative, generous ways.

This year, my first at Bucknell, students are primarily doing just that in my poetry workshop. They pose questions about their poems in progress — inviting scrutiny — and listen to insights offered. Meanwhile, their peers have spent time carefully considering the complexities of the work — generously commenting on what’s working and making thoughtful suggestions for revision. In addition to trying to understand what a poem says, the students are interested in understanding the mechanics of poem-making — how the poem says it. Through these conversations, students learn the language of poetry and poetic critique.

In Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook, she writes, “The best thing about workshops is that people learn there that they can change.” Although she’s speaking specifically about writing, I hope this growth extends far beyond the page. In workshops, students encourage each other to be open to change through an attention to language and experimentation. In a world of text messages and memes — in which, my students say, standard capitalization denotes a tone of severity — their attention and openness gives me hope. Language, though we use it every day in casual, careless and malicious ways, is important. As someone who has invested my life’s work in the impact of language, I’ve worried about not only its general usage but about the ideas born of it.

My students give me hope that perhaps this care they’re curating will extend not just to poems but to the words they use as they pursue careers in poetry, public policy and management. Beyond the words they use, I hope they put this much care into the ideas they formulate and the beliefs by which they stand. I hope they remain open to critique and growth, and that their rhetoric seeks to unite and understand rather than to divide.

In many ways, my hope for 2020 is that the world operates more like this, more like our 52-minute class periods.

— Professor Chet’la Sebree, English, and director of the Stadler Center for Poetry & the Literary Arts

One thing that drives hope for me is remembering that I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams. I am living the science fiction that was imagined and hoped for against all proof of reality for enslaved Africans on stolen American soil. I and my comrades, my family and my folks are all the substance of things hoped for and evidence of things not ever perceived.

This is why I know that hope is a necessary component of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) work. As a faculty member and administrator, hope is my constant companion. It helps me as I work with colleagues and students to build knowledge, develop skills, offer support, produce ideas and co-create learning and working environments for a community in which each person feels and lives with a sense of belonging. My courses as well as the DEI efforts at Bucknell are about creating a context, community and capacity in which each person can thrive. The work is about place-making and social transformation. It is about shifting the perspectives about inclusion and equity. Even more, it is about building on the vulnerability of our desires and knowing that the Bucknell for which we hope may be something not yet imagined.

We may be proud of Bucknell’s public identity as an innovative, research-focused, community-oriented, and leadership- and opportunity-driven learning community, but facing our progress on diversity, equity and inclusion can be a humbling experience. It’s hard to admit that we have work to do: relationships to repair and/or build, behaviors to shift, policies to change, an environment to reshape and more. When doing this work, we will be answerable to our past and present as an institution but also accountable to the future Bucknell that we want to exist. Sure, it is frightening and destabilizing to long for a university (and a world, for that matter) that histories of oppression and current realities of injustice suggest is not possible. Yet I know that many of us have the courage and nerve to desire and anticipate an inclusive, equitable and diverse community. This audacity fortifies our capacity to work for things beyond what we know, above what we expect and outside of that with which we are comfortable.

But we have to dare to dream.

Bucknell has lots of potential; I can perceive and feel the rumbling of possibilities. Many of us are oriented to change and poised for the shifts in culture and community that will engender both a sense and the experience of belonging for all of Bucknell’s constituents.

Hope suggests that we can (and perhaps ought to) long for different circumstances, social and political contexts, relations and more, because doing so is ethical work. And as ethical work, hope both comes out of and directs us back to virtues like humility, vulnerability, accountability, audacity and tenacity — all of which are necessary for the kind of joy-filled community transformation that can help us foster an equitable, inclusive and diverse community at Bucknell.

— Professor Thelathia “Nikki” Young, women’s & gender studies and religion, and interim associate provost for diversity, equity & inclusion

Tumble mode can provide a way forward. It invites us to question our goals, explore new opportunities and rediscover purpose. Choosing to tumble is often frowned upon, however. Tumblers are considered “lost” or “in transition.” If tumbling is triggered by something outside our control, for example a health crisis, we are expected to quickly find our way back to run mode. Yet, it is in these moments of tumbling that we often make our greatest developmental advances and find our way to a hopeful future direction.

As I look toward my own future, this feels like a good time for a planned tumble. In a short span of time, I was promoted to full professor, became director of Bucknell’s Teaching & Learning Center and began my current spring semester sabbatical in the United Kingdom. To be honest, I don’t know my next direction. I’ve experienced these disorienting moments before and treated them as frivolous luxuries or annoyances. This time I’m going to try something different — I’m going to pay closer attention, tumble a bit longer and resist the urge to run. For someone who has fallen into the habit of running, I don’t expect this prolonged tumble to be easy! But I have seen others master the art of tumbling, and I will try to follow their advice. I will sketch ideas in my notebook but not act on them. I will meet new people and reconnect with trusted mentors. I will read far outside my usual domains of interest. Maybe I will learn to play the guitar. Above all, I want to learn to savor the hopefulness of tumbling.

— Professor Joe Tranquillo, biomedical and electrical engineering, and director of the Teaching & Learning Center