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Jason Raddatz, ’91, has worked as a nurse, a fund accountant, a marketing coordinator, a card dealer and a professional musician. But he truly loves education and his lifelong devotion to nature, and he gets to combine both as the new director of Albion College’s Whitehouse Nature Center.

“I wanted to talk about women and the attention on their bodies. I started with a satirical take—in one of my first pieces, I used my body as the figure and I held balloons in front of myself to represent breast augmentation,” says Payge Rumler, ’20, of her summer FURSCA project. “This connected on a personal level of having always felt sexualized and yet never sexy enough, but it also worked on a statistical level.”

With more than two decades of experience in higher education enrollment, Hernan Bucheli will assume duties as Albion’s new vice president for enrollment management on October 1. “[Albion] is a top liberal arts institution, it’s residential and the campus is taking a journey toward being diverse and inclusive, and that’s very attractive.”

Two well-established rankings of American colleges and universities, U.S. News and World Report and Washington Monthly, feature Albion College in their latest editions in the area of social mobility. Albion also was included in a U.S. News list of the top 101 first-year experiences in higher education, spanning universities as well as colleges coast to coast.

Groundbreaking began in mid-August for the expansion of the Dow Recreation and Wellness Center, which will significantly increase fitness and recreational opportunities for all Albion College students. A $5 million leadership gift from Joe, ’82, and Julie Serra, announced in March, kickstarted the project, which is expected to be completed by May 2020.

As the Albion College campus community settles into the fall 2019 semester, Leroy Wright, vice president for student development and dean of students, shares a message of support with all students.

Bruce and Jane Harper want to do their part to help the planet, the environment and Albion College, and they hope their $108,000 Earth Day 50th Anniversary Gift will be a meaningful step in that direction. “The envionrment has become a much more urgent issue the last couple of decades,” Bruce Harper, ’67, says.

It looks pretty easy on television, but Charlie Downey, ’20, knows that getting information from human remains isn’t something you can do during the commercial break. “We examined thousands of fragments of bone,” says the anthropology and German major and member of the Prentiss M. Brown Honors Program, who spent the summer doing National Science Foundation-sponsored archaeology research at the University of South Alabama.

“Consistency” could be one word to describe Albion’s incoming Class of 2023, which moved in August 23 in advance of the start of fall semester August 26. According to Director of Admission Mandy Dubiel, the 419 first-year students and 27 transfer students match the qualities that positively distinguish Albion’s current student body.

In addition to his studies, Chris Bell, ’20, gives back to the Albion community as part of the College’s Build Albion Fellows Program. Little did he know that he also would have a month-long opportunity this year to give back to Albion’s sister cities, Noisy-le-Roi and Bailly, France.