What Bronx Community College Students Can Do!

The dominant discourse in faculty spaces with respect to student performance too often focuses on what community college students, in need of developmental courses, can’t do. Deeply inspired by the work of Robert Glaser, Lev Vygotsky, bell hooks, and Bagele Chilisa we (Monique Guishard, and four intermediate psychology students) have collaborated using student podcasts to theorize back to deficit, damaged centered theories of student underperformance.

Gay and Lesbian Life at Colby 1969-1974

The history of a gay and lesbian student community at Colby seems to point to the difficulty of visibility. For students who were able to find others like themselves, their group of lesbian and gay friends had to remain underground. For students who were grappling with their newly found, socially stigmatized sexuality, the experience was isolating if they did not know where to find others like themselves. This paper seeks to address the social forces that kept sexually variant students from expressing their sexual identities openly on campus. Part of this difficulty is attributable to the compulsory heterosexuality assumed by general American society at the time, manifested in the silence or outright hostility directed against homosexuals. Naturally, Colby students replicated this assumption. Some of the students we interviewed seemed to internalize compulsory heterosexuality, while it was forced upon others. Religion and psychology were two methods of enforcing heterosexuality that were relevant to the people we interviewed. Another significant obstacle to visibility was Colby's location and the nature of Colby's student body. Waterville, unlike more urban cities, did not have a history of gay life, and thus an established gay community or gay identity into which one could be socialized. Colby, as a small, homogeneous and isolated space, posed difficulties in establishing a gay community as the population to draw from was small and regulated.

DEVELOPING A MODEL FOR PEDESTRIAN ROUTE SELECTION AT COLBY

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SOLAR PANEL MODELING ON SUITABLE ROOFS AT COLBY

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Monitoring Surface Displacement of the Colby Green Retaining Pond Dams

The Colby Green is a campus expansion project which began in October of 2003. The construction would result in three new buildings, additional parking, and an elliptical 75,000-squarefoot green southeast of Mayflower Hill Drive. There were also plans for the construction of three run-off management and sediment ponds below the green, to manage flooding of the green. Three drains in the green transport water to the three retaining ponds which slowly disperse water into the surrounding environment. The ponds were created by constructing earthen dams around the drain outlets. The dams are composed of soil, cobbles, and boulders procured from the surrounding excavation site. Unfortunately, earthen dams are susceptible to many types of erosion which result in their failure. In this case the potential for clay and silt from the underlying Presumpscot Formation to mix with the soil in the earthen dams raised concerns with regards to frost action. In order to monitor the surface displacement of the dams I drove 92 poles into the ground in 8 straight lines across the faces of the dams in the fall of 2005. I returned to the sites during and after the spring thaw of 2006, to check for any signs of movement resulting from frost-heave, surface creep, or any other form of mass wasting. Fortunately, there was no recordable sign of movement in the stakes across any of the retaining ponds. The dams appear to be functioning as designed.

DETAILED MAP AND RECREATIONAL SUITABILITY ASSESSMENT OF THE COLBY TRAIL SYSTEM

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Evelyn Levine Gold Scrapbook

Evelyn Mae Levine was born April 11, 1907 and died on February 6, 1957. She was one of the children born to William and Sarah Levine. The scrapbook includes photographs, family memories, negative copies of grade sheets from Coburn Classical Instituteand Emerson College.

WIND TURBINE VISIBILITY ON THE COLBY CAMPUS

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You know how I know you're gay? : masculinity and homophobia in mainstream comedy

You Know How I Know You're Gay?: Masculinity and Homophobia in Contemporary Mainstream Comedy is a three-part senior scholars project that consists of a critical analysis of homophobic humor in contemporary mainstream comedy, an original feature-length comedy script entitled Don 't Be that Freshman, and a DVD of selected scenes from Don't Be that Freshman. The critical analysis first establishes the existence of homophobic humor in mainstream comedy and then links this homophobia to masculine anxiety, applying the ideas set forth in Michael Kimmel's essay, "Masculinity as Homophobia," to contemporary, mainstream, homosocial comedies. The paper goes on to examine audience reactions to this homophobic humor, focusing on audience members who enjoy these movies, yet consider themselves to be accepting of homosexuality and against homophobia. I discuss ways of resistance and the importance of opposing homophobic humor, and finally, I look at comedy as a potentially transgressive medium that could be used to fight homophobia and social inequality. The critical analysis, therefore, leads into Don't Be that Freshman, a film that uses progressive humor to oppose homophobia and expose the potential dangers and pitfalls of conforming to social constructions of gender. Don't Be that Freshman is a film about three pairs of college roommates in their first semester at college who become each other's first friends on campus. It is a character-driven comedy that attempts to normalize non-heterosexual sexual orientation and gender non-conformity, to advocate a type of living that does not conform to problematic social constructions and cultural ideologies, and at the same time to appeal to a mainstream audience. The film version is twenty-five minutes long and consists of ten scenes from the script.

Metamorphic epiphany -- 3D animation

As far back as I can remember, I have always been interested in studio art. Whether it be painting, drawing, printmaking, or photography, it has consistently been a part of my life. Upon enrolling in Colby, I became interested in computers and decided to major my undergraduate college career in Computer Science. Not forgetting past interests, I continued my studio art education, taking several classes within the Art department. In due time, I began combining interests and began studying Computer Graphics and Design. With limited resources in this field at Colby, the majority of my computer graphic education and experience has been done on my own time apart from regular classroom work. As time progressed, so did my interests. Starting with simple image manipulation of digitally scanned photographs, I moved on to Web Page design, eventually leading to Desktop Publishing. Ultimately, I wanted to take a step further and expand my overall computer graphic knowledge by learning 3D modeling and animation. With even fewer resources in 3D animation at Colby, I perceived having trouble finding the information and tools I would need to gain the necessary skills for this new field. The Senior Scholars program gave me the opponunity to find and acquire the necessary tools to pursue my interest. This program also allowed me to devote the proper amount of time required for learning these new tools.

The Old Road

The plot consists of the progression which the characters undergo. For the old man, the plot is his movement away from the earthly existence of the farm and into the physical process of the seasons. For the older grandson, it is the movement away from the past, symbolized by the farm, and into the present symbolized by his marriage and coupling with society. For the younger grandson, the movement is from childhood to the maturity which being alone demands in order for him to survive.

Medical treatment and the good death: an ethical analysis of euthanasia, physician assisted suicide, and the right to die

Frequent advances in medical technologies have brought fonh many innovative treatments that allow medical teams to treal many patients with grave illness and serious trauma who would have died only a few years earlier. These changes have given some patients a second chance at life, but for others. these new treatments have merely prolonged their dying. Instead of dying relatively painlessly, these unfortunate patients often suffer from painful tenninal illnesses or exist in a comatose state that robs them of their dignity, since they cannot survive without advanced and often dehumanizing forms of treatment. Due to many of these concerns, euthanasia has become a central issue in medical ethics. Additionally, the debate is impacted by those who believe that patients have the right make choices about the method and timing of their deaths. Euthanasia is defined as a deliberate act by a physician to hasten the death of a patient, whether through active methods such as an injection of morphine, or through the withdrawal of advanced forms of medical care, for reasons of mercy because of a medical condition that they have. This study explores the question of whether euthanasia is an ethical practice and, as determined by ethical theories and professional codes of ethics, whether the physician is allowed to provide the means to give the patient a path to a "good death," rather than one filled with physical and mental suffering. The paper also asks if there is a relevant moral difference between the active and passive forms of euthanasia and seeks to define requirements to ensure fully voluntary decision making through an evaluation of the factors necessary to produce fully informed consent. Additionally, the proper treatments for patients who suffer from painful terminal illnesses, those who exist in persistent vegetative states and infants born with many diverse medical problems are examined. The ultimate conclusions that are reached in the paper are that euthanasia is an ethical practice in certain specific circumstances for patients who have a very low quality of life due to pain, illness or serious mental deficits as a result of irreversible coma, persistent vegetative state or end-stage clinical dementia. This is defended by the fact that the rights of the patient to determine his or her own fate and to autonomously decide the way that he or she dies are paramount to all other factors in decisions of life and death. There are also circumstances where decisions can be made by health care teams in conjunction with the family to hasten the deaths of incompetent patients when continued existence is clearly not in their best interest, as is the case of infants who are born with serious physical anomalies, who are either 'born dying' or have no prospect for a life that is of a reasonable quality. I have rejected the distinction between active and passive methods of euthanasia and have instead chosen to focus on the intentions of the treating physician and the voluntary nature of the patient's request. When applied in equivalent circumstances, active and passive methods of euthanasia produce the same effects, and if the choice to hasten the death of the patient is ethical, then the use of either method can be accepted. The use of active methods of euthanasia and active forms of withdrawal of life support, such as the removal of a respirator are both conscious decisions to end the life of the patient and both bring death within a short period of time. It is false to maintain a distinction that believes that one is active killing. whereas the other form only allows nature to take it's course. Both are conscious choices to hasten the patient's death and should be evaluated as such. Additionally, through an examination of the Hippocratic Oath, and statements made by the American Medical Association and the American College of physicians, it can be shown that the ideals that the medical profession maintains and the respect for the interests of the patient that it holds allows the physician to give aid to patients who wish to choose death as an alternative to continued suffering. The physician is also allowed to and in some circumstances, is morally required, to help dying patients whether through active or passive forms of euthanasia or through assisted suicide. Euthanasia is a difficult topic to think about, but in the end, we should support the choice that respects the patient's autonomous choice or clear best interest and the respect that we have for their dignity and personal worth.