Listen in, Michigan Deborah Holdship

For many professionals, the shift to hybrid work amid the COVID pandemic opened the door to a strange new working world. Gone was the commute, the coffee break, the water-cooler chat. Gone was the actual office! How was this going to work?

Colleen Newvine, MBA ’05, had answered that question years earlier. Well before lockdown, this Brooklyn-based journalist, marketing consultant, and life coach crafted her own concept of remote work in the form of “mini sabbaticals.” Rather than cursing gridlock en route to the high rise, Newvine might be found diving into her laptop after rising with the sun in Costa Rica.

But it wasn’t always that way. For much of her career, Newvine had followed a linear trajectory, ultimately landing a dream job at the Associated Press (AP) in New York. Like most gigs, it was great until it wasn’t. When a new boss arrived, she sensed it was time for a change, so she decided to put her MBA toward launching a marketing firm. But she got pink-slipped before she could pitch herself as a part-timer. Undaunted, she responded by creating a job description for a part-time, remote position; the AP’s CEO approved. Using the argument that remote was remote, Newvine negotiated two months working from New Orleans.

“This is what one of my retired AP bosses, Tom Slaughter, called my double-bank shot: Flipping a pink slip into a part-time job with geographic flexibility,” writes Newvine in her inspiring how-to guide, Your Mini Sabbatical: Quit Your Life Temporarily.

The new release chronicles Newvine’s subsequent adventures in hopes others may embrace this version of temporary wanderlust. After that initial stint in New Orleans, she and her husband, John Tebeau, BS ’86, have maintained their home in Brooklyn while working from San Francisco, the Catskills, Ann Arbor, and more. They’ve experienced life in small towns and surf towns. They’ve lived above a coffee shop, in a converted garage, and at the corner of Haight and Ashbury. They’ve encountered setbacks, intestinal distress, and a broken air-conditioner in a third-floor walkup with sealed windows. Throughout, Newvine remained creative, productive, and employed, all while embracing new cultures, adventure, and resilience.

“Our brain wants to put as many things on autopilot as possible,” she says. “And when we go on a mini sabbatical, every single thing becomes conscious again: Which grocery store do we go to and where do they put the bread? When I'm turning on the light switch in the bathroom of our rental, is it inside the door or outside the door -- and do you have to jiggle the toilet? It's all a thought process again, which gets you paying much more attention to what's happening in your life.”

The secret to making it work? Keeping the “mini” firmly in your mini sabbatical. Newvine’s sweet spot is five weeks. That’s enough time to immerse in a new routine, make a friend or two, and endure a few unexpected hassles while knowing your home base awaits. The logistics may seem overwhelming to the uninitiated, but Newvine presents a detailed plan that can apply to multiple scenarios, locations, and budgets. She has lists and tips and hacks to share, from which kitchen essentials to pack to how to convince your boss that your mini sabbatical will benefit others in the organization.

“At first, I thought of it like our ‘cookbook’ for how John and I do it,” she says. “But as a journalist that was so boring, even to me. I wanted to find other people with other flavors of mini sabbaticals so readers could feel like, ‘That sounds like a trip I could do.’”

Newvine spoke to parents and parenting experts, life coaches, and researchers. She interviewed artists, business owners, and people between jobs who took their own mini sabbaticals. Some travelers had savings or disposable income, others were working within a strict budget. Some enjoyed flexible working environments, others had limited time off. A few worked

A self-governing democracy can’t survive in an ecosystem of disinformation, especially when the lies and propaganda are homegrown, says University of Michigan law professor Barbara McQuade, BA ‘87/JD ’91. In her new book, ‘Attack from Within,’ the MSNBC legal analyst sounds the alarm about the escalating dangers of domestic terrorism and offers tips to combat this deadly threat.

Ted Kaczynski, known to history as ‘the Unabomber,’ was a violent genius who terrorized the U.S. for nearly 20 years. When University of Michigan archivist Julie Herrada learned of his 1996 arrest, she put aside her personal feelings and initiated a prison correspondence that would land one of the Labadie Collection's most popular, albeit disturbing, acquisitions.

The history of Ann Arbor’s film scene unspools like one of those epic historical dramas, the kind that opens with Model Ts and cloche hats and ends in the uber-future with gleaming skyscrapers and self-driving cars. Of course, there's the mod period in the middle -- all hippies and rebels and rockers.

For now, film fans will have to settle for the book version of this saga in "Cinema Ann Arbor" (University of Michigan Press/Fifth Avenue Press, 2023). Frank Uhle, BFA '83/MILS '92, delivers 334 pages jam-packed with anecdotes and memories culled from more than 80 interviews with film industry alumni as well as the faculty, students, and local iconoclasts who pioneered this vibrant scene.

Legendary professors Marvin Felheim, Joe Wehrer, and Robert Sklar are covered, as well as George Manupelli and the ONCE Group. The beloved Hugh Cohen (who is still teaching film at 92) was the Cinema Guild's faculty adviser in 1967. He was arrested for screening the experimental film "Flaming Creatures, deemed obscene by the Ann Arbor police, and offered up his mugshot for Uhle's book.

Cohen's personal scrapbook was just one treasure trove that Uhle discovered through his years of research, writing, and production. He tracked down performance artist Pat Oleszko, familiar to patrons of the Ann Arbor Film Festivals in the late '60s. He connected with Seattle-based artist Buster Simpson who photographed an early Velvet Underground performance at the 1966 film festival when Andy Warhol screened his “Up-Tight with Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground.” And he met journalist David Margolick, one-time Michigan Daily photographer, who still had his negatives from 1973 when director Frank Capra spoke to Felheim's class.

The author took advantage of several campus archives, from U-M's Labadie Collection of anarchism to the Screen Arts Mavericks & Makers Archive, featuring the work of Robert Altman and John Sayles. He mined The Michigan Daily digital archives and combed through the Bentley's photo collections of Daily alumni and others who were on the scene.

The ads, calendars, mugshots, flyers, receipts, notes, and schedules will transport one back to an analog era when film canisters traveled from screening to screening on trains, planes, and automobiles. The Cinema Guild schedules, once taped on virtually every refrigerator in town, offer a newsprint snapshot of the culture. The list is long, the films are diverse, and the screening rooms were all over campus and town.

In short, our little college town got in on the action pretty early in the game -- 1929 if you consider that an events coordinator named Amy Loomis screened films at the newly opened Michigan League. But 1932 is the year students and faculty created the Art Cinema League, officially marking their territory on this new celluloid terrain. A number of societies and guilds would crop up through the years, eventually succumbing to Hollywood trends that emphasized home entertainment.

Any film lover or history buff -- especially the members of Ann Arbor’s longstanding cinema guilds, film societies, and festivals -- will delight in this trip through time. Read more at michigantoday.umich.edu.

A 'daughter' at 37

Most visitors to the University of Michigan Biological Station return with tales of the lush woods, rustic cabins, and beautiful beaches of Douglas Lake. But for the bookish and artistic daughter of the late-U-M botanist/biology professor Howard Crum, it was the mid-century library in Pellston, Mich., that would capture her imagination.

Mary Crum Scholtens, BM ’84/MM ’86, spent each of her childhood summers with her father and family at U-M’s Biological Station. She was always intrigued by the bust of a man who seemed to watch over the camp’s library 24/7. She never knew who he was, but the statue’s constant presence in her life left an indelible impression.

The bust disappeared in the mid-’70s and when Scholtens enrolled at U-M she discovered the subject was Chase Salmon Osborn (1860-1949), a U-M regent from 1908-11 and the state’s governor from 1911-13. She also learned Carleton Angell, the artist behind the pumas standing guard at the Museum of Natural History, was the sculptor.

In researching Osborn, who turned out to be something of a Horatio Alger type, Scholtens learned he was an iron prospector, newspaper magnate, celebrity, and politician known for making several fortunes and giving them away. He successfully lobbied Franklin D. Roosevelt to have the Mackinac Bridge constructed and favored progressive policies like workers’ compensation. But Scholtens kept tripping over a personal fact, seemingly brushed aside, that appeared in every account of his life. Osborn and his wife, Lillian, had adopted a daughter in 1931. She was a University of Michigan alumna named Stella Lee Brunt, who’d earned a master’s degree in English. And she was 37 years old.

“I’m thinking, ‘This does not make any sense,’” Scholtens says. “How do you convince a wife that you’re going to do this?”

Listen in to find out. Read more at https://michigantoday.umich.edu/2023/03/24/episode-55-truth-is-stranger-than-historical-fiction-featuring-a-arbour/

He’s a first-generation college graduate, one of 12 children, and, at 6-foot-6, a likely cinch at college hoops. But Rob Ernst, MD ’91, U-M’s Chief Health Officer, had no desire to be a student-athlete. He always prioritized academics over athletics during his undergrad years at Notre Dame and his medical school stint at Michigan.

“I was varsity library,” says the longtime primary care physician, who recently moved his clinical practice from Michigan Medicine to the University Health Service on campus. “Physicians are problem solvers and lifelong learners and that always resonated with me. It’s no surprise I became an internist. My joy comes from knowing a lot about a lot.”

That’s a good thing, because Ernst also is the University’s associate VP of health and wellness in student life. Mental health stressors in 2023 are more extreme and overwhelming than ever. Nothing drives that point home more than the Feb. 13 shooting at Michigan State that left three students dead and five others fighting for their lives. It’s woefully inadequate to describe the modern-day student experience as turbulent in light of so many existential stressors. But if anyone understands, it’s Ernst. In the past 35 years, he has served as a U-M physician, a clinical educator, and an administrator. At Spring 2023 Commencement, he will become a proud alumni parent

Ernst credits his medical training as an internist for honing a holistic approach to problem-solving that has defined his career. While working as a clinical faculty member at Michigan Medicine, he relied on an affinity for systems-based thinking to tackle physician burnout.

“The contemporary notion of health promotion is to acknowledge an interconnectedness of people, places, and the entire planet,” he says. “And the general consensus is that you can’t fully address an issue like physician burnout through individual initiatives: You can’t ‘yoga’ your way out of it. To really move the needle, you need a systems-based approach to identify and address some of the upstream effects of stress and anxiety.”

To “really move the needle” in higher education, Ernst advocated that U-M adopt the Okanagan Charter, a framework for wellbeing that calls upon post-secondary schools to embed health into all aspects of campus culture and to lead health promotion action and collaboration locally and globally.

Popular in Europe and Canada, the charter came from the 2015 International Conference on Health Promoting Universities and Colleges at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus. Participants from 45 countries, representing educational institutions and health organizations (including the World Health Organization and UNESCO), collaborated to produce the charter. U-M is one of the first U.S. universities to sign on.

“It helps get partners around the table to talk about strategy,” Ernst says. “It forces us to ask the question: ‘If we were really living into this aspirational goal of being a health-promoting university, would we think about this issue or policy differently?’ There may be many things to consider, but [having a framework] helps to check that particular box. It provides a strategy to work toward a common purpose.”

Today’s students share the collective trauma of growing up with school shootings, anxiety about climate change, and the pain associated with institutional racism. The ongoing effects of COVID-19 further detract from a supportive learning environment. Many students grapple with social anxiety and isolation, all while a sense of belonging is critical for thriving in the community. Decision-makers have to consider context and climate when considering mental health initiatives, Ernst says.

“We can’t move the needle on mental health without focusing on equity and inclusion,” he says. We can’t center our own individual well-being if the community around us is struggling.”