EMU’s cross-cultural program is intentionally different from that of almost every college in America, says Vernon Jantzi ’64, who became a faculty member at EMU after earning his PhD in the sociology of development from Cornell University in 1975.

Jantzi, who has held a number of key administrative positions at EMU (and who passed up a chance to work at Harvard to come to EMU), was one of the founding faculty members of EMU’s and served as its second director for seven years, after its founder John Paul Lederach.

“We have slightly different ways of measuring success and what a program gives back to the students than a secular college or university,” explains Jantzi. “Our cross-cultural is not just an education for the intellect but it is a life-changing experience that is spiritual and changes students’ entire educational experience.”

EMU’s aims to improve the communities in which students spend time, while cultivating a sense of humble respect in the students for the wisdom, knowledge, and culture of the people they meet.

“There certainly are benefits in the professional world in doing a cross-cultural,” says Jantzi, “but our focus is on how it is going to change your life and outlook. This has been the goal since the program was implemented in 1982.”

As a case in point, Jantzi wrote his master’s thesis on Chile, but had never actually been to that country before leading a cross-cultural trip there in 1990. “I wrote my paper about how the government influences the Pentecostal Church. But when we actually went to Chile I saw a lot of that information in a different way.”

One of Jantzi’s criteria for a successful trip is for students to live within typical households. “I want students to be exposed to the cross-generational experience in that country and the things involved in family life in that country. . . .

“[In Chile] some of the students even lived with families who had been tortured or had family members killed by the military. They experienced families with very different political views than they had ever seen before. Some things can’t be learned from a book.”

Jantzi and his wife, Dorothy ’62, lived over 12 years in Latin America, notably Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Peru; he has been a consultant on development and restorative justice matters in a number of other countries.

(The Jantzis’ son, Terry ’87, also earned a PhD from Cornell in international and community development. Fluent in Spanish, he taught full-time at EMU from 1999 to 2010 and co-led, with his wife Elizabeth, a Peru cross-cultural in 2007. He then moved to international work with World Vision.)

In the mid-1980s, Jantzi spoke wherever he could – in churches, other universities, Congressional hearings – on the disastrous impact of U.S. military support for the “Contra” militias in Nicaragua. Alternatively, Jantzi advocated U.S. support for dialogue between the opposing factions and for development efforts to alleviate poverty.

At the time, he expressed amazement at Washington’s ignorance about Central America, adding that Mennonite Central Committee volunteers working there at the grassroots seemed to be much better informed than the policymakers were.

Jantzi, who speaks Portuguese and German in addition to Spanish, led a nationwide adult literacy program in Nicaragua in the late 1960s. In the early 1980s in Costa Rica, he was director of Cornell University’s program on worker-owned and -managed enterprises in collaboration with the Instituto de Tierras y Colonizacion. In New Zealand in the last decade, Jantzi helped found peace centers at two universities.

In 2009, Jantzi was tapped to coordinate a feasibility study for the now-established Center for Interfaith Engagement, under which EMU invites Christians, Jews, Muslims and others from diverse streams to build relationships based on mutual respect and understanding. He now works as a facilitator for EMU’s Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (better known as “STAR”).

Reflecting on his early-career decision to pass up a position at the Harvard International Institute of Development, Jantzi says, “It was a struggle, not an easy choice, because there was sacrifice involved.

“But EMU has been good. I estimate that 75 to 80 percent of faculty members have made those same kinds of choices. We choose to stay because there’s something about EMU that you don’t find anywhere else. It’s worth the sacrifice.”

—Rachael Keshishian & Bonnie Price Lofton

And when, a decade later, that cornfield on the east side of campus sprouted a science building, capped with a prominent white dome to accommodate a then-state-of-the-art planetarium, those chemicals were carted down to the new laboratory supply closets, in the characteristic spirit of Mennonite thrift.

And when, many years later, Spicher returned to EMU to work as the chemical hygiene officer, he began a process of general inventory and cleanup of the no-longer-new laboratory supply closets, cluttered over the years by Mennonite thrift and other forces of entropy. And it was then with a sense of nostalgia that Spicher discovered some of those very bottles procured 50 years earlier when Spicher was an undergrad, and the Suter Science Center (where the bottles had sat just-in-case, like twist-ties in the kitchen drawer) was still a cornfield.

But it was alarm, not nostalgia, that arose when Spicher came across an old bottle of picric acid – a chemical useful for staining tissue when diluted with sufficient water concentration. When insufficiently diluted, however, picric acid forms explosive crystals. (A close chemical relative to TNT, picric acid played a major role in artillery science through World War I.) Spicher backed away, well aware that uncorking a crystallized bottle of old picric acid could cost him his fingers, or more. Mennonite thrift in the Suter Science Center had taken a potentially treacherous turn.

A Northern Virginia bomb squad was called in. The fire department sent personnel for some explosives training. A hole was dug behind the science center, a fuse was lit, and the picric acid bomb, unwittingly improvised in the chemical closet, was disarmed. In the end, says Spicher, the bang was small, but it pays to be careful with the stuff.

UNDERCOVER POET
Daniel B. Suter ’40, for whom the science center was named, joined the science faculty at what was then Eastern Mennonite College (EMC) in 1948. By the time the new building opened 20 years later, his students in the program enjoyed medical school acceptance rates far above the national average. So valuable was Suter’s recommendation that, according to faculty legend, a medical school candidate who had never even attended EMU tried to finagle a letter from Suter.

Suter’s office was in the science center basement, adjacent to the secretary’s office and the lunchroom, where the faculty regularly ate together while skimming the newspapers, telling jokes, chattering and generally enjoying one another’s company. For years, on their birthdays, personalized poems would appear on the lunch table, written by a mysterious poet who published under Salvelinus fontinalis (“Brook trout” in the jargon of scientists).

From a poem on the 64th birthday of Wilmer Lehman ’57, who joined the mathematics faculty in 1959:

Forty years teaching
Is that what he said
How many functions
Are left in his head?

A teacher of Math
And The Liberal Arts
With much dedication
Gave his students some smarts.

Eventually, it came out that Salvelinus fontinalis was the pen name of Bob Yoder ’57, an enthusiastic fisher of S. fontinalis. Yoder, who taught in the biology department for more than 30 years, was the resident jokester of the science center lunch bunch; upon his death in 2005, a volume of his collected poems was distributed to his colleagues.

WOMEN NEED RESTROOMS TOO!
The Suter Science Center reflected its day and age when it opened in 1968. Science was mostly a man’s world then. There were no women on the permanent science faculty, and the college didn’t bother to put in a women’s restroom on the downstairs level; the secretary (always a woman, in those days) and female students had to go upstairs. Before long, agitation against the basic unfairness of this situation began and EMU kept pace with the changing world around it by establishing restroom equality throughout the building.

Because energy was cheap back when the building was built, insulation wasn’t much of a priority. When Lehman began to notice light streaming in large gaps that had opened up between the window frames and the block walls in his math classroom, physical plant staff came over to work at some retroactive solution. Still, the classrooms were a nice improvement over the “E Building,” a former egg processing plant on the south side of Mount Clinton Pike that housed the math department before the science center was built.

Over his four decades of teaching, Lehman taught just about every class that was offered by EMU. One of the memories that stands out was the time a student answered a test question with an unexplained Bible reference. Lehman was tickled when he looked up Psalm 139:6 – Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.

Another long-time mathematics professor, Millard Showalter ’62 loved to encourage creative approaches to problem solving, and thus, routinely offered his Math in the Liberal Arts students an alternative and deceptively simple-sounding way to earn an A in the class: fold an 8 ½ x 11 sheet of paper in half eight times. The challenge was a fun illustration of exponents; making that eighth crease was like trying to fold 256 sheets of paper at once.

RESOURCEFUL GALEN LEHMAN
For years, Showalter’s students tried and failed, until Galen Lehman ’73 marched triumphantly into class one morning, with a look in his eyes that told Showalter his game was up. It had been easy, really. Lehman was supporting his college habit with a job at the Kreider Machine Shop over the hill from campus, where he had access to a 200-ton hydraulic machine press entirely capable of folding 256 sheets of paper.

Lehman also earned an A honestly in the class and went on to become Dr. Galen Lehman, chair of the EMU department and the longest-serving member of today’s faculty. When Lehman joined the faculty, the department was inconveniently housed on the fringes of campus in the same E building that the mathematics folks had previously escaped. Looking for a more respectable location, Lehman settled on an unfinished, dirt-floored crawl space beneath the science center’s planetarium that had been presciently excavated to someday accommodate this very sort of future growth.

Around 1980, Lehman spearheaded the renovation of the space into what still serves as the psychology department. He personally poured the concrete floor, built a large table still in use in the seminar room, and, while breaking through a block wall to run some plumbing, discovered an empty whisky bottle in the wall cavity, likely hidden by a worker during the building’s original construction.

EARRING STUNTS & MORE WITH DEAD ANIMALS

But let’s return to Showalter’s paper-folding assignment. Outmaneuvered by Lehman and his machine press, Showalter learned a lesson that science center faculty have been learning over and over since the building opened: never underestimate the dedication and creativity undergraduates will apply to various capers, tricks and other antics. The famous “Head Room” – SC 104, its walls lined with the mounted heads of various mammals – has been the scene of repeated pranks, often involving the dandying-up of these animal heads with different eyewear, headwear, jewelry and other fashion accessories.

Some of the faculty found this amusing. D. Ralph Hostetter, a professor of biology from the very earliest days of the Eastern Mennonite School until his retirement in 1966, did not. After retiring from teaching, Hostetter curated the natural history museum, now housing more than 6,000 artifacts and specimens (and now bearing his name). With hardly any acquisitions budget to speak of, he paid for most of the stuffed heads out of his own pocket. A highly meticulous man, he simply didn’t find it funny to discover the dik-dik (a tiny African antelope) wearing glasses and earrings.

For years, the sheer size and weight of the 300-lb. American bison specimen on display at the Hostetter Museum of Natural History seemed sufficient to keep it in place in the science center, though this too was an underestimation of the undergraduate determination to prank. In 2007, a posse from Oakwood made off with the stuffed bison and attempted to hoist it up to the three-story residence hall’s roof. When things went awry mid-hoist, however, both the bison and a 19-year-old freshman fell from the roof. The student was airlifted to the University of Virginia medical center with a concussion and fractured hip.

The freshman healed and the bison was none the worse for the experience. Now he stands in his old position at the entrance to the science center on a thick concrete platform, anchored with tamper-resistant bolts.

MASKED PRANKSTERS
On another occasion, while lecturing in the Head Room, physics and mathematics professor John Horst ’60 raised one of the sliding blackboards to discover the one behind it had been covered by a high-resolution enlargement of a Playboy centerfold. After the class regained its composure, Horst made a mental note to check for sliding blackboard surprises thenceforth.

That was not the most memorable sliding blackboard surprise of his career, however. For years, Horst and several colleagues team-taught a general humanities class covering art, music and literature in history. The large classes were held in SC 106, the biggest classroom on campus; it also saw frequent use as a recital hall, theater and general performance space before other buildings specifically designed for those purposes were built.

Hidden all the way behind several layers of sliding blackboards in SC 106 was a chemical hood, a relatively large space where professors could safely demonstrate various experiments and reactions. For some time, Todd Weaver ’87 had been aware that the chemical hood could also be accessed from behind, through a storage room, and early in the second semester of his senior-year humanities class, he and a classmate “hatched a brilliant plan,” as he remembers it.

Wearing nothing but boxer shorts and monster masks, and armed with loaded super-soakers, Weaver and his accomplice climbed into the chemical hood from the storage room and waited for class to begin, hidden behind the blackboard. Horst was lecturing in front of the class when the two sprang into action. One by one, the sections of blackboard begin sliding up, eventually revealing the water gun bandits crammed in the chemical hood.

“We caused total chaos,” says Weaver, now a dentist active in EMU’s alumni association. They sprayed at least two of the professors in the room, and unloaded their super-soakers on their classmates as they fled up the auditorium’s two aisles. “The goal was to empty the water by the time we reached the back of SC 106 and sprint out the doors and run for the dorm,” says Weaver, who lived in Oakwood and therefore stands proudly in a long and distinguished tradition of campus mischief.

In what turned out to be a serious lapse of judgment, however, Weaver had let a few other friends in on the plan. And when Weaver and his accomplice reached the back of the room, their prank complete except for the get-away, they found the doors barred with two-by-fours.

“I will never forget Doug Geib ’87 with a big smile on his face unwilling to unbar the door. I was screaming [at him] to give in and let us out, but he only laughed,” Weaver remembers.

Language and literature professor Carroll D. Yoder ’62, one of Horst’s co-teachers in the room that morning, marched slowly up the steps and unmasked the pranksters, who could do nothing but stand with heads hanging, trapped with empty squirt guns at the back the room in their underwear. Ashamed, they walked back to Oakwood, changed clothes, and returned to catch the end of the humanities class. (Horst got one last hurrah. When Weaver approached Horst and asked humbly for one extra point to make a much-coveted “A” for the term, which was needed to maximize his chance of dental school admission, Horst made him squirm in his office for some long moments and then declared he would receive one more point in recognition of his “energetic class participation.”)

EXPERIMENTING, LIVING, BANKING IN THE CENTER
One damp Saturday morning an undergraduate chemistry major named Terry Jantzi ’87 was running an experiment that sent a bunch of sulfur dioxide through the lab hood. Normally it would have drifted off into the blue Virginia sky. But the cool, humid weather caused the sulfur dioxide to condense into a heavy fog that spread across the intramural soccer field – think “acid rain” recalls professor emeritus Glenn M. Kauffman, class of ’60, Janzti’s chemistry prof at the time. Folks at an auction near the dormitories thought the science center was on fire.

That same Terry Jantzi is now Dr. Jantzi, professor of practice associated with EMU’s peacebuilding and development program.

There was the time in 1976 that Millard Showalter’s Modern Geometry students got so jazzed about the non-Euclidian material he was teaching that they showed up to the final day of class wearing T-shirts that read “Millard’s Magnificent Mathematicians.” They arranged for a photo, and after class, went up to chapel and set together at the front, as proud as a bunch of athletes after winning a tournament.

Kauffman recalls his department colleague Gary L. Stucky putting money into a satellite dish on the science center roof in the early 1990s. This enabled him to watch concurrently three different TV channels late into the night in a prep room near SC-106, where he liked to pass his time outside of regular work hours. In the early 1990s, too, a dietetics program headed by Janet Harder ’73 moved into the science center and she also spent long hours at the workplace. By the late 1990s, Stucky and Harder were married, re-settling in his home state of Kansas.

The Park View Federal Credit Union began in 1969, in the Suter Science Center offices of professors Robert Lehman ’50 (physical sciences) and Joe Mast ‘64 (math and computer science), offering financial services to members in the days before easy access to credit. Many of their science center colleagues were the very earliest members. John Horst still has a single-digit account number at the credit union, and says that the credit union’s assets were said to be approaching $1 million by 1980, when it moved off of campus. (Kauffman remains the proud holder of an account number in the low double digits.)

Kenton Brubaker’s two-digit account number – between Kauffman’s and Horst’s – at the credit union gives him away as another early denizen of the science center. A 1954 grad of EMU, Brubaker returned as a horticulture and botany professor well before the science center was built. Up in the old science department, in the Ad Building basement, Brubaker secured grant funding to buy a gas flow analyzer capable of detecting Carbon-14 beta particles. With Brubaker’s help, another colleague, Merle Jacobs, used the tool to examine the low reproductive fitness of homozygous ebony Drosophila fruit flies. The resulting paper – “Beta-Alanine Utilization of Ebony and Non-ebony Drosophila melanogaster” [Science 139 (1963): 1282-1283] – was likely the first science research published in a major journal by EMU faculty.

Jacobs soon left for a job at Goshen College, and Brubaker was in the first wave of professors to work and teach in the new science center. The greenhouse had an automatic ventilation system – a big deal at the time. The planetarium was another big-ticket item. The whole building was exciting and new and fantastic. No sooner had the science department moved in then did Kauffman begin writing grants for other exciting gadgetry. A gas chromatograph and a UV-visible spectrophotometer were among the early acquisitions, allowing for undergraduate chemistry research that has continued ever since. (Students now enjoy research opportunities in a variety of science fields, usually collaborating with faculty.)

AHHH, THE MEMORIES, THE LEGACIES!

By the time Todd Weaver, of SC 106 chemical hood ambush fame, arrived on campus to pursue pre-medical studies, Daniel Suter was approaching the very end of his years on the EMU faculty. On his first visit to Suter’s office for an advising appointment, Weaver learned that Suter had also been Weaver’s father’s pre-med adviser years earlier, and they had corresponded for years while Weaver’s father was in medical school.

Between his graduation and the start of dental school, Weaver got married to Anne Kaufman ’88. Suter – then recently retired – and his wife, Grace were in attendance, and presented the Weavers with an end table.

Suter passed in away in 2006. The next year, Weaver was elected president of the Mennonite Medical Association; joining him in the leadership of the organization was Janice Showalter, the daughter of Daniel and Grace Suter.

“Life feels like it circles sometimes, especially in a community like EMU,” says Weaver.

The end table that the Suters gave him has moved with the Weavers from house to house since dental school. It remains a treasured possession that has been relocated every time in the family car rather than the moving truck, and it largely owes its prominence to the many people and memories that have and continue to inhabit the Suter Science Center.

— Andrew Jenner ’04

A two-year, $20,000 grant from the United Service Foundation – an Anabaptist-rooted organization based in New Holland, Pa. – will enable eight students total to do international work, primarily in Colombia, in 2013 and 2014.

, PhD, who chairs the department of and coordinates the undergraduate major in peacebuilding and development, applied for the grant at the foundation’s invitation. It provides $2,000 each for four students each summer to cover credit hours, airfare, and up to three months’ living expenses, with remaining funds supporting administrative costs.

“This is a marvelous opportunity,” Rhodes said. EMU has 45 students majoring in peacebuilding and development, who are all required to complete practicums, or supervised practical applications of learned skills and theory. This requirement puts pressure on EMU to locate and support appropriate placements. Typically, the practicums are completed in Washington D.C.

Three recipients have been named and a fourth is yet to be announced. The grant recipients for the summer of 2013 are: Carlos Romero, Krista Rittenhouse – heading to Colombia – and Corben Boshart, who will be in Iran.

The students in Colombia will be under the direction of Terrence “Terry” Jantzi, PhD, a former professor of sociology at EMU, who is now co-director for Colombia.

Jantzi notes that following 30 years of internal conflict, “Colombia is by far the most violent country in Latin America,” ranking No. 2 worldwide both for internally displaced persons and economic disparities (behind Sudan and Haiti, respectively).

“There is still considerable violence, conflict, poverty and displacement,” Jantzi says. As a sign of progress, the Colombian Supreme Court recently ruled that victims may petition the government for reparations. “There is more work being done with local community mobilization,” says Jantzi, including thirty regional communities preparing to demand that their regional government, in Cartagena, comply with the law.

Jantzi – who moved to Colombia following a two-year leave of absence from EMU for work in Albania – expects practicum students to primarily conduct “research and documentation of both the circumstances of the violence” and “local authority compliance with the Supreme Court edicts.”

Most practicums in Colombia will require fluency in Spanish. Students will live with host families in regions where MCC works with partner organizations.

“We would like to take advantage of this grant to systematically increase the number of undergraduates coming to Colombia. The barrier in the past has always been the availability of funding,” Jantzi says. He hopes the funding from United Service Foundation will open opportunities to undergraduates that until now have only been available for older adults, typically college graduates or graduate students.

Brown, a native plant corps project leader at the , is charged with the task of working on the restoration of the , a project that brings back memories of his undergraduate work as an environmental science major.

“I’ve had flashbacks to my senior practicum at ,” said Brown, an major at EMU. “Big Meadows Swamp and Cowles Bog look nothing alike, but the underlying principals and techniques used to minimize impact and restore these areas are very similar.”

Indiana Brown and the wetland of dunes

Since graduating, Brown has explored Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky; built trails at Point Reyes National Seashore in California; and spent a winter doing restoration with the Bureau of Land Management at Turtle Mountain Wilderness in the Mojave Desert.

His current focus is on the installation of native plant species in areas of the Cowles Bog Wetland, a section that has become infested with invasive plants.

Working in a “full circle restoration” process, Brown and his team harvested seed from plants in unblemished wetland areas to maintain genetic consistency. After non-native vegetation is removed, the harvested seed is used to propagate the area with the hope they will yield more seed the following year.

“Currently, we are working to remove species from wetland areas that were left as remnants of human influence in the mid-1900s,” Brown said. “Today these species negatively impact hydrology and their removal will allow the wetland to function more like it did before human influence.”

Building bridges at EMU

Brown points to his practicum under , professor of , and courses with , professor of biology and , associate professor of , for helping to develop his theoretical and practical skill base and opening doors to his current job.

“My senior practicum provided me with a great background in wetland ecology and the unique concerns that confront anyone attempting to restore sensitive wetland areas,” said Brown. “I am a kinesthetic learner, and my courses with Roman and Terry, in addition to the experience of working with the the U.S. National Park Service at Shenandoah, tied together all the theoretical models we learned about.”

Brown also believes his practicum at Big Meadows Swamp provided him with an internal “swamp GPS,” adding, “If you can get out of [Big Meadows] without getting disoriented you can pretty much find your way around anywhere.”