In the weeks between spring break and the end of school I spend quite a bit of time in classes throughout Trinity, interviewing students and faculty for articles in the annual report and magazine and creating images for use in those publications as well as in the calendar. I find that even after fourteen years at Trinity I can be amazed at the level of creativity, joy, and hard work that I see on these visits.

One class that I photographed recently was a Grade Nine biology class taught by Denise Philpotts. The students had to follow a very precise series of steps in order to extract DNA from a strawberry and from a kiwi. They worked in groups of two or three, dividing the responsibilities among each member of the group, which appeared to be the only way that the lab could be successfully accomplished as several of the steps had to occur simultaneously. I was there to photograph the events, of course, so I can’t reliably recreate all of the steps. I’ll simply say that, at various points, fruit was being mashed, mixed with various extracting and isolating fluids, strained into test tubes, agitated, and, ultimately, had clumps of DNA removed from it. The lab itself was very interesting to observe, just to watch the strawberries and kiwis change from something delicious to eat to a rather viscous fluid. Even more interesting was the way the lab, with its multiple simultaneous steps, challenged the students to find ways to organize ...

Every week I receive several requests from film production companies, location scouts, and television crews asking to use some part of Trinity as a location for whatever project they are working on. As per policy my answer is always, “Sorry, we don’t rent space to outside film, video, or still productions.” Whenever Trinity has been recently featured in the media the volume of such calls tends to increase, as they did last week when I received six requests.

Some of the requests are remarkably specific, as was one last week from HBO. The location scout was looking for a courtyard, preferably something in the Beaux Arts style. When I told her that we didn’t have a courtyard she expressed surprise. “Really?” she said. “But isn’t Trinity like 300 years old?” I concurred that Trinity is, indeed, 301 years old but decided that there was no reason to point out that there isn’t any particular connection between being founded in 1709 and having a courtyard. As Trinity didn't have a courtyard, I suggested she look into The Apthorp apartment building (I know it’s not Beaux Arts, but I figured it might be good enough to simply be ornate) but when I told her it was at Broadway and 79th Street she said it was too far downtown. “They want something between 90th and 100th and between Columbus and Riverside.” I wished her the best of luck.

Occasionally the calls are less about Trinity as a location and more about Trinity as pre-production research. Years ...

Based upon the many different e-mails, voice mails, and conversations that I had with alumni, faculty, parents, and staff at the end of last week after the Forbes ranking was posted, it seems appropriate to extend the discussion of rankings by one more blog entry. Here then, are the issues that came up with some frequency last week.

I’m really not that powerful. A number of people congratulated me on “getting Forbes to rank Trinity” so highly. The fact is that I cooperate with these media requests to the absolute minimum possible. I provide accurate, factual information as it is requested. Beyond that, I politely turn down all other requests. Forbes made several requests for interviews and for video and print journalist access and my response to each was the same: “The only access I can grant is for a discussion about how baseless, disruptive, and unhelpful such rankings are.” So, where Forbes ranked Trinity is entirely its own construct.

How meaningless is this ranking?I do really encourage everyone to look at the methodology that Forbes describes in the article. Placement into selective colleges is heavily weighted along with several other quantitative criteria like SAT averages and student to teacher ratios. If the article was titled “Schools with the best student to teacher ratios” or “Schools with the greatest number of faculty with PhDs or other terminal degrees” I might find such articles odd in their emphasis, but at least they wouldn’t be making claims of being a list of the “best.” Several ...