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Baby Boom | Under Fire | A Walk in the Woods

Baby Boom | STUDENTS SEEK A DAY-CARE SOLUTION

IN THE PAST TWENTY-FOUR MONTHS, two-year-old Anusha Yogeeswaran has been looked after by a revolving cast of day-care providers, babysitters, and relatives. But Anusha's parents, Krithika and Raazeesh Sainudin, both Cornell PhD candidates, say the worst moment in their quest for adequate, affordable day care in Ithaca came when they gave up and flew Anusha to India. There, Krithika's parents cared for the child for four months while the couple hit the books back at Cornell. "I cried the whole way back on the plane," says Krithika, a plant biologist. "But we'd exhausted all the other options."

Stringent New York State regulations on infant and toddler care (birth to three years) include a low provider-to-child ratio as well as space and equipment requirements, all intended to protect children. Yet those same regulations have created a disincentive for potential providers wary of litigation and high operational costs. In Ithaca, limited competition between the existing centers, never short on demand, has kept fees high and made it hard to find part-time or flexible slots. Nearly everyone who needs day care in Ithaca is affected by the limited options and high prices; typically, women put themselves on long waiting lists while in the early stages of pregnancy. But for many cash-strapped Cornell graduate students with kids, it's an agonizing scenario that has broad implications for their academic and personal lives--and they are increasingly speaking out on the issue.

"There is a great deal of frustration," says Alene Wyatt, information and resources manager at the Tompkins County Day Care Council. According to the 2000 census, about 860 children are born each year in Tompkins County--and that number has been rising ever since, says Wyatt. The census estimates that 55 percent of children throughout the U.S. require day care. In Tompkins County, that percentage translates to about 473 additional babies every year--a total of 1,419 children under the age of three. But the council reports only 204 slots are available in that age range.

According to a survey conducted by the United Way and Tompkins County's Human Services Coalition, local infant and toddler care options cost between $80 and $256 per week, averaging about $150. And among households with incomes under $15,000--read: grad students--half can't find child care and almost as many can't afford it.

Jessica Lazarin, a second-year law student with kids ages three and four, decided her best bet was to leave town. This summer, she's moving to San Diego, where she will complete her degree at another school while her mother-in-law looks after her kids. Carla Dee and Jason Martin, fifth-year doctoral students in applied mathematics and math, respectively, decided to swap days looking after their eighteen-monthold son, Sylvan, themselves. Doing so, Dee says, will slow both of them down by a year in finishing their dissertations--and cost Cornell an extra $26,000 in funding. A growing number of universities offer subsidized day-care centers for grad student families. Yet few can meet the demand and expenses are still high, says Mary Ann Mason, graduate dean at the University of California, Berkeley, who researches how motherhood affects the careers of women in academia. Harvard growand Yale each offer six subsidized, affiliated centers, most of which include care for infants and toddlers.Many of the Big Ten schools subsidize on-campus programs for their students. But at Cornell, multiple efforts to start an affordable, on-campus infant and toddler program have failed. The most recent general-needs survey of graduate students, performed a year ago, wasn't comprehensive enough in its assessment of day-care needs to offer much guidance, says graduate dean Alison "Sunny" Power.

Yet Power says the University does consider the issue a significant concern. Day care is "just like any other quality of life issue" the administration tackles, she says, and this one has implications for recruitment and retention. Cornell associate dean for diversity in engineering Zellman Warhaft says improving the situation could help attract female graduate students and new faculty to the maledominated field of engineering. Power and vice president of human resources Mary Opperman, who has been involved in previous efforts to start on-campus care, agree that, anecdotally, there is growing demand for such services. Opperman says the University's provision of annual child-care allowances for employees indicates that administrators take the local crunch seriously--and says she hopes helping students is the next step.

Students with families are in the minority, says Power, who acknowledges the magnitude of the issue for those seeking child care. "I'm sure that there have been cases in which students have left or decided not to come here," she says. "And for those who are just managing, I'm sure there's a cost of some kind--to their children, their personal lives, and their work."

It took a desperate grad student with two kids to find a low-cost location for a potential University-subsidized center. Virginia Augusta, a PhD candidate in education, is president of Students with Families, a sixty-six-member organization she formed in 2003. Augusta spent nearly two years lobbying dozens of Cornell administrators to open a subsidized center, but "got nowhere," she says. Then she thought of St. Luke Lutheran Church, just steps away from the Law school in Collegetown. Now, some key administrators are responding warmly to the St. Luke idea. Pastor Rick Bair says the church has given verbal agreement to further explore the proposed center, which will accommodate thirty to thirty-five kids. The facility includes two adjacent nurseries full of toys and four toddler classrooms, which the church recently renovated for weekend use by its members. Augusta, who says she needs a commitment of $200,000 annually from Cornell in order to keep rates low, has proposed that the center be an independent organization in order to allay possible liability concerns.

Power, who has brought the proposal to Provost Biddy Martin, says she's hopeful, but that there are "logistical and budgetary hurdles to overcome." Augusta admits that the center still won't match needs, and that it won't help most male students because it will give priority to female students and faculty. But, she says, "at least this is a step in the right direction. I hope it will make Cornell start to think about this issue and have it in mind every time a new building is being planned, so space will be set aside for day care."

-- Tamar Morade

Under Fire | TRYING TO REBUILD EDUCATION IN IRAQ

JOHN AGRESTO Arrived in Baghdad in September 2003 with a grand plan for reintroducing professors to academic freedom after three decades of Saddam Hussein's repression. Six months later, Agresto, PhD '74--the American named to oversee the rebuilding of Iraq's higher education system--was knee-deep in problems. Student unrest was shutting down campuses, professors were resigning in fear, and classroom education was grinding to a halt.

By April, the fighting in Fallujah had sparked anti- American attacks throughout the country, and Agresto sounded frustrated about the future of Iraq's twenty-two universities and forty-three technical colleges. "I can't go into the universities. I can't go out into public spaces. I can't tell them to expel radical students," he said. "I hope I've given [the administrators] enough on paper so they can take control, but universities are fragile places that can exist only in calm and peace, when people are rational. Universities have historically been places that don't co-exist alongside people with guns."

When Agresto departed the country in mid-June, he left behind a mixed record. In his term as U.S. senior advisor to the Iraqi Minister of Higher Education, he had tried to replace Saddam's top-heavy, corrupt university administration with a decentralized, democratic system. He had also tried to stimulate an intellectual renaissance through scholarships and partnerships with American universities. Getting the Ministry of Higher Education back on its feet after its headquarters was bombed, its records looted, and its staff purged of high-ranking Baath Party members was his first task. Then Agresto and a handful of Iraqi and American staffers focused their energy on helping the newly appointed Iraqi Minister of Higher Education generate a budget and secure donor funding for bricks-andmortar projects.

Progress was slow, and Agresto blamed the pace on the Iraqi minister, Dr. Ziad Abderrazzak Mohammad Aswad, former head of Baghdad University's Department of Petroleum Engineering. A Sunni Muslim, he was appointed by Iraq's governing council and is considered by many Iraqi academics to have a religious agenda. "The Minister doesn't have any experience in dealing with international organizations like the World Bank," says Suhail Hamamah, a lecturer at Baghdad's University of Technology and Agresto's former translator."Dr. Agresto had to lead him by the hand through the process."

Agresto lived in a one-room trailer inside the "Green Zone," the sprawling U.S. compound in Baghdad, sharing his tiny living space with his deputy senior advisor. Insurgents rained mortars onto the grounds surrounding them. In January, a suicide bomber killed twenty-six people at the compound's main entrance, including a young Iraqi translator whom Agresto had befriended. Especially while traveling, Agresto often wondered if he'd also be killed.

It was a long way from Cornell, where the educator earned his doctorate in government. He held a series of teaching posts in the 1970s, and in the 1980s served as assistant, deputy, and then acting chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, where he was credited--and vilified--for joining William Bennett in pushing NEH to the right. In 1990,Agresto became president of the Santa Fe campus of St. John's College, a small liberal arts school best known for its "Great Books" curriculum.His publications include three books and scores of articles with titles like "Why Latin? Why Greek?" and "The Strange Usefulness of the Liberal Arts."

After retiring in 2000, Agresto started a consulting company specializing in curriculum renewal in the liberal arts. A colleague from Boston University recommended him for the Iraq post, and Agresto spoke with longtime friend Donald Rumsfeld, whose wife, Joyce, was on the St. John's board. "He was encouraging me to come, and there's no way I'd say no to him," says Agresto. "He's one of the finest people in my life."

While Agresto had plenty of experience in American university administration and politics, he had little first-hand knowledge of the Middle East--a point that offended some scholars. "Why was someone with no experience or background in the Arab world hired to administer one of the most important programs in the Arab world?" asks Keith Watenpaugh, a professor at Le Moyne College, who visited Iraqi universities shortly after Saddam was defeated. "Colleges are saying it would be great if we could give money to support Iraqi higher education, but I'm not for using the money to buy a dominant role for the U.S."

Agresto takes pride in his efforts to lay the groundwork for what he hopes will be independent-thinking universities. He points to a one-page "Statement on Academic Freedom and Conduct," which he wrote and says all the Iraqi university presidents signed. Agresto also implemented an American-style process for hiring and firing top administration that includes faculty review, and he worked toward creating humanities departments and convincing Iraqi educators of the importance of a liberal education.

University administrators in Baghdad praise Agresto for leading by example. "We have lived through a centralized regime for decades. It's deep in our mindset," says Dr. Taher Al Bakaa, the president of Mustansiriyah University."But the way John Agresto deals with the issues in meetings, no matter how hot they are, has taught us to give each issue its proper time and not stick to a certain opinion, because through debates we can find out that we were wrong."

Others are more critical, saying Agresto failed to restrain radical religious groups on campus or limit the ability of the Minister of Higher Education to make decisions for each university. "He was not strong enough," says one university dean. "The Ministry still tells us what to do,who to hire, what books the students can read."Agresto responds that as an advisor he had to leave many matters up to the Iraqi minister.

As one of his final acts, Agresto had hoped to loosen the graduation requirements at Iraqi universities, so students could explore a variety of subjects before determining a career path. "This is a country with a lot of unhappy doctors," he says. "Through a liberal education they may find they have a capacity in music or art or literature, or ask more philosophical questions in their discipline. I'm not sure what good it is to free a country without freeing their minds."

In the end, the violence made it almost impossible for Agresto to keep tabs on what was happening on Iraqi campuses. "There's not much we could do," he laments. "We had to rely on the Iraqi police, the Iraqi military, and the U.S. Army."

It will take at least a year to measure the kind of long-term impact that Agresto's term had on the higher education system. "I do think the reforms will have an impact," he says, "especially the procedures for the selection of presidents and the document on academic freedom. These are very much in the interests of the university presidents, and they will let them go only if absolutely forced."

-- Christina Asquith, reporting from Baghdade

A Walk in the Woods | ANNE LABASTILLE'S ADIRONDACK LIFE

ONE ARM DRAPED COMPANIONABLY AROUND ITS TRUNK, Anne LaBastille pats the bark of a 300- year-old spruce and gazes toward its crown."Nothing's going to happen to you as long as I'm around," she tells it. This isn't the first tree LaBastille has hugged, nor is it likely to be her last. The selfproclaimed "evangelical environmentalist" makes her home deep within New York State's Adirondack Park, but has ranged around the world, conducting ecological surveys for the World Wildlife Fund in Panama and Guatemala and consulting in the Caribbean and the Amazon. Closer to home, she's penned a four-part memoir of her life on the land, worked as a certified Adirondack guide and governorappointed park commissioner, and taught courses on nature writing and women in the wilderness at East Tennessee State University and Cornell.

LaBastille '55, PhD '69, was in her late twenties and recently separated when she moved to the woods in the mid-Sixties. She would lose both her home and her livelihood--running an Adirondack resort--in the divorce, and yearned for a sanctuary. She found it in a thirty-acre tract of lakefront property and a new career. "At the hotel, I didn't have any time to write," she recalls. "All afternoon I dragged water skiers up and down the lake, then I had to fix drinks for the guests and supervise the waitresses." At her log cabin, whose location she scrupulously protects, she rises at dawn, takes a dip, drinks an espresso, and starts writing--at her desk, on the dock, or in a canoe on the lake. The routine has yielded a doctoral dissertation in wildlife ecology, 180 articles for scientific journals and such magazines as National Geographic and Ranger Rick, and ten books.

On a cool, cloudy morning in June, LaBastille motors a small boat up to a public landing at the end of a dirt road in a remote corner of the park. She wears black jeans and a tattered flannel shirt, frosted pink lipstick, and a red baseball hat pulled over her pigtails. Krispy Kreme, her nine-month-old German shepherd, rides along. The dock serves as LaBastille's front gate, the only point of access to what she refers to as her "spiritual center."After a two-mile lake crossing, she docks at West of the Wind, a 400-square-foot cabin the writer built herself in the late Sixties and has called home ever since. There is no central heating, no electricity, no bathroom. The outhouse stands a few hundred feet away, just out of sight.

In the last three decades, global warming has transformed the property from a year-round home to a seasonal retreat. Throughout the Sixties and early Seventies, LaBastille says, a thick sheet of ice blanketed the lake, making snowshoeing across its surface easy going from Thanksgiving through late April. Now rain showers in February and winter temperatures well above freezing make such ventures treacherous and unpredictable.Without a phone or year-round neighbors to call in an emergency, LaBastille no longer winters here.

Instead, she keeps an old farmhouse in a town 100 miles away. This is her first visit to the cabin since fall, and there's much to do. Inside, the propane lines haven't been checked yet, so the refrigerator and fourteen lanterns in the kitchen and study stand idle. To show off her sleeping loft, she clambers up four toeholds nailed to the rough-hewn logs that frame the cabin's interior."Mice have been up here," she announces, then collects the droppings in an old plastic deli container. Overall, though, she pronounces the place in good shape.

Several outbuildings, all constructed from logs felled on the land, dot the area near the cabin. Reaching the largest, a 100- square-foot writer's retreat the author has dubbed Thoreau II, requires a thirtyminute hike. A handwritten sign nailed to the door advises hunters and hikers that there are no valuables or liquor stored inside. Furnishings include a writing desk and three chairs "for sociability," she says, quoting Thoreau. Like her favorite author, LaBastille lives alone, far from society; even so, she has maintained close friendships with neighbors and fellow Adirondack guides, and a lively correspondence with her readers.

Each of the first three memoir installments chronicles a decade. The latest, Woodswoman IIII, released on Earth Day 2003, spans just five years. Despite the time between books, LaBastille doesn't keep a journal. "If I tell a friend about the experience, that cements it," she says. Once in a while, she posts a sticky note near the desk to jog her memory. She doesn't bother with computers or e-mail, either. Using a yellow pad and black pen, she drafts each manuscript longhand, then types it on a Smith-Corona manual. In the early Eighties, LaBastille launched her own publishing house, West of the Wind Publishing Inc., to escape "snippy-snappy" New York City editors and improve her profit margins. "I figured after five books, I knew what I needed to know," she says of her early days with E.P. Dutton, the Sierra Club, and Norton, which owns rights to the first two Woodswoman books. An additional five books, including Jaguar Totem and Woodswoman III and IIII, bear her imprint.

Krispy Kreme, who has orange tape tied to her collar--a cue to edgy neighbors who might mistake her for a coyote and shoot to kill--is the latest of five shepherds who have shared LaBastille's life in the woods. As a single woman without children, she relies on them for companionship and protection. Four graves occupy a hillock just feet from the cabin, each marked with a granite headstone and flowers. When the time comes, says the writer, her lawyer will return here with her ashes, recite poet Sara Teasdale's "Barter," and bury her with her beloved pets. Yet with two books in the works, she shows no signs of slowing down and scoffs at the possibility of retiring. Instead, she's making plans to preserve her property as a retreat for other nature writers. "This whole age thing in America is sick," she says. "It makes people seem like they're useless and dependent. I plan to keep writing and doing all the things I do until I drop dead."

-- Sharon Tregaskise

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