On Campus
A new crop of achievers
This year's graduates of Rutgers University come from all walks of life.
Elizabeth Torrice
School: Camden College of Arts and Sciences
Degree: Bachelor of Arts in Art
While her eldest daughter was pursuing a law degree at Rutgers–Camden, she challenged her mom to take action on her dream of earning a college degree.
Lyle Preslar
School: School of Law–Newark
Degree: Juris Doctor
A former punk rocker becomes an award-winning intellectual property attorney and wins a Grammy Foundation award.
Dewan Farhana
School: Douglass College
Degree: Bachelor of Arts in Cell Biology and Neuroscience
An exemplar of student engagement draws on her passion for humanity to raise awareness of the Darfur genocide in Sudan.
Mike Alvarez
School: Rutgers College
Degree: Bachelor of Arts in Psychology
Despite struggling with depression, Mike Alvarez earned a 3.98 grade point average and straight As in his major.
Daniel Balan
School: Mason Gross School of the Arts
Degree: Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts
This former Army interrogator who served in Afghanistan creates works combining his spiritual awareness and devotion to family and public service.
Mom joins kids at college on an inspirational journey
By Cathy K. Donovan
In a sea of more than 700 black, mortarboard caps during the Camden College of Arts and Sciences commencement, Elizabeth Torrice’s sparkled with the words “Never 2 Late” in large, red and white letters.
The message is good advice, and especially appropriate for the 48-year-old Torrice, who attended Rutgers–Camden at the same time as her three children. When she ascended the steps of the Tweeter Center stage May 17, her personal flock of Scarlet Raptors rose from their seats to cheer for mom and colleague.
“Being on stage and having my children honor me was the most surreal experience of my life, Torrice said. “I have spent many years supporting them in their adventures, so this was very unusual. Many mothers don’t ever have that opportunity, to make such an impact on their children.
Her family’s aspirations had always come before her own. But when her eldest daughter Jennie Murabito-Owens was pursuing a law degree at Rutgers–Camden, she challenged her mom, who had remarried in 1990 to Pasquale Torrice, to take action on her dream of earning a college degree.
“I convinced her that because I was here it would be okay. But I told her that she had to do it now because I’d be graduating,” said Murabito-Owens, who earned her undergraduate degree in 2003, her law degree in 2006, and will serve as an attorney at Pellettieri, Rabstein & Altman in Princeton this September.
After taking a photography course at Camden County College, Torrice enrolled in the museum studies program at Rutgers–Camden in 2004. Torrice’s return to school then inspired her two youngest children, Liz and Anthony Murabito, to join their mother at Rutgers–Camden. This past spring, Torrice’s final semester, the two children and mom all took a course about human reproduction together.
“I’m sure there are days that they hated I was there, but we supported each other. I see what the kids are going through. I know what it’s like to work. It’s hard,” Torrice said.
Part of being a family meant helping each other during hard times. For daughter Liz, attending class became even more challenging when she developed a medical condition that caused her to pass out suddenly. Born with a heart problem and an inner ear disease, Liz relied on her mother and brother to support her while she was on campus. This family togetherness also benefited them academically.
“We help each other in the classroom and study together at home. I stuck with harder classes because of my family. My mom listens well and takes a lot of notes,” said Liz, a junior psychology major.
Anthony, a sophomore art major, also enjoys having his mom’s support on campus. “If Mom wasn’t here, I’d probably be lost. I owe a lot to her,” he said.
Torrice’s thesis poster presentation on artist Seymour Lipton was truly a family effort. Anthony, an aspiring graphic designer, created a slideshow set to scores by Danny Elfman on his MacBook Pro and offered insight on the poster presentation. Jennie had created a poster for her own undergraduate requirements and knew how to assemble the boards.
“Liz was my motivator. She kept telling me that I could do it,” her mother said.
But her family isn’t alone in recognizing Torrice’s academic abilities. Martin Rosenberg, chair of Camden’s Department of Fine Arts and professor of art history, joined in the praise of Torrice. “What distinguished Elizabeth is her insatiable intellectual curiosity, which leads her to follow up new and exciting insights in her work. She is a model mature, returning student.”
While crossing the stage at graduation and hugging her professors, Torrice could hear “Yeah, Mommy!” coming from the front row. “I turned and saw my three children crying, and behind them, my husband with tears in his eyes and the biggest smile ever … a moment I will cherish forever.”
Successful punk artist, former music industry executive-turned-law-student earns accolades in new arena
By Carla Cantor
Growing up in Washington, D.C., Lyle Preslar had no idea what he wanted to do with his life, but he knew what he didn’t want to become – a lawyer. Preslar, the son of an international business consultant, spent his childhood surrounded by attorneys. During high school summers, he chased faxes and copied legal briefs at district law firms.
“The last thing I wanted was to be another suit on K Street,” said Preslar, who started playing in bands at 15. So he took a different path, gravitating toward the D.C. music scene and becoming lead guitarist for the seminal, 1980s hardcore punk band Minor Threat.
“My parents were horrified,” Preslar said.
Not today. On May 25, Dorothy and Lloyd Preslar couldn't have been prouder of their son and his hard-earned degree from Rutgers’ School of Law–Newark. At 43, Lyle Preslar has an executive wife, a new baby, and a recently published article in the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law that earlier this year won an award in a writing competition cosponsored by the Grammy Foundation and American Bar Association. Preslar’s article analyzed the issues surrounding a suit brought by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against XM Satellite Radio, claiming copyright infringement.
As a recording artist who has made money from copyrighted music – Minor Threat, early advocates of the anti-substance, straight-edge movement, would have a profound impact on the punk music scene – Preslar admits he approached the case with some ambivalence. “When I read the RIAA’s complaint, I thought the case was a slam dunk,” Preslar said. But something was gnawing at him – something remembered from Rutgers–Newark law school professor John Kettle’s intellectual property law class. “I realized that the RIAA was ignoring potentially substantive law,” Preslar said. “When I read XM’s answer, there it was. These were two briefs passing in the night.”
Preslar joined Minor Threat with friends Ian MacKaye, Jeff Nelson, and Brian Baker while in high school. The band became popular regionally and released its first self-titled record and the EP “In My Eyes” in 1981. Preslar left to begin his freshman year at Northwestern University, but shortly afterwards “In My Eyes” started to take off, and Preslar got a call: His band needed him, and it didn’t take much to convince him to leave college that spring and go on tour.
Minor Threat proved to be short-lived. “We made a few records, went on tour, then egos got big, and we broke up,” Preslar said. While the other members continued to pursue music, Preslar enrolled at Georgetown and graduated with a degree in English in 1988. Preslar then spent a year in New York as a paralegal, and decided to try the record business.
He got a job as an A&R (“Artists and Repertoire”) rep, signing and working with artists like Peter Gabriel and Ben Folds, and later switched to marketing and label management, working at times for Virgin Records, EMI, Elektra Records, and Caroline Records, where he negotiated artist and distribution deals. “I realized that the company was spending 20 percent of any record deal we made on law firms, so I took over the contracts,” Preslar said. “Basically, I practiced law for four years.”
Though he swore he’d never do it, Preslar decided to take the LSAT in 2003. Living in Hoboken and married to Sandy Aloutte, an executive at VH1, he could afford law school with income from the Minor Threat LPs; although the group had broken up 20 years earlier, its music continued to sell steadily. “The band has sold 100 times as many records in the last two decades as we did when we were together,” Preslar said. He enrolled at Rutgers’ School of Law–Newark in 2004, telling everyone who wanted to listen, “I’d never do entertainment law.” 
He proved himself wrong again. All it took was a stint at the Rutgers Community Law Clinic doing pro bono work for a few singers and songwriters in New York and New Jersey. One client, an older gentleman from Newark, stopped into the clinic, saying he’d written a song when he was 16 that had been recorded by a local doo-wop group, and he’d never gotten paid. Preslar found proof that the copyright ownership had been ignored and negotiated a settlement with the publishing company. “It wasn’t a lot of money, but enough to justify in this man’s mind that he had been treated fairly,” Preslar said.
Last summer, working in the legal department at MTV Networks, a direction began to crystallize. “I realized that my real love is working with creative people,” Preslar said. “The ‘business of creativity’ can be a real minefield for creators. They need help to accomplish their goals.”
Since graduating, Preslar has been casting about for the next step. “My wife fantasizes about me standing up in a courtroom like Clarence Darrow, but that’s only because she’s heard me do it at home so often,” Preslar said. “I suspect it’s going to be a world of contracts for me. So, let’s just hope that at least once in a while I’m working on the right side of the fence – and that I get some free tickets.”
Her impact is felt in New Jersey and abroad
Douglass College student seeks to raise awareness on campus of Darfur genocideBy Ashanti M. Alvarez
Douglass College graduating senior Dewan Farhana was riding a Rutgers bus in New Brunswick when she read a newspaper story about Darfur, Sudan, where a group of armed gunmen known as the Janjaweed are largely blamed for the genocide taking place in that country.
“The Janjaweed went into a home, shot the father, and they raped the daughter for 10 days straight,” Farhana said. “It was one of the most horrible things I have ever read.”
Farhana’s commitment to women’s issues, nurtured at Douglass College
through her leadership and involvement on campus, spurred her to create the Darfur Action Project in order to
raise awareness among students of the calamities taking place in Sudan. “Women
are being oppressed in that region. It is important that women get involved,
not just in general, but also to understand things on a personal level and make
a difference,” she said.
The organization hosted a well-attended lecture in March featuring a Sudanese refugee who addressed the United Nations about the genocide in 1999, and its coordinators have collected thousands of signatures on a petition to the United Nations, stating that Rutgers students do not accept genocide.
“When I started thinking about this project, some students didn’t even know what the word genocide meant,” said Farhana, a native of Paterson, New Jersey. “I thought that even if I can’t do something really big, the least I can do is make more students aware.”
The formation of the Darfur Action Project was the culmination of Farhana’s successful career as a Rutgers student. Rutgers College recognized Farhana’s achievements by naming her “Outstanding Student Leader” as part of the annual Rising Women of Rutgers Awards, and Douglass College awarded her the “Outstanding Individual Contribution” award at the Mabel’s Leadership Recognition Awards.
She was a resident assistant, a Scarlet Ambassador, president of the Cook/Douglass Co-op executive board, and a writing tutor. As a cell biology and neuroscience major, Farhana also pursued several research opportunities, at the W.M. Keck Center with Professor Wise Young, at the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience at Rutgers–Newark, and at Yale University during a summer fellowship.
“I went to different meetings to figure out what I may be interested in,” Farhana said. “Rutgers was a great place for someone like me who was very involved in high school.”
The social network she acquired and became a part of helped the Darfur Action Project to flourish while Farhana was a student at Rutgers. Now that she has moved on – she is looking forward to pursuing a joint M.D./Ph.D. – Farhana plans to spend one year doing intensive research in the Molecular Neurogenetics lab at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), then apply to medical schools.
What is the connection between Farhana’s global activism and life in the lab as a molecular biologist or wearing a physician’s coat? “The crisis in Darfur is a humanitarian cause,” she said. “If you are interested in being a researcher, you want to influence the world by finding cures that will help people. After being involved with so many different things, I realize that everything is interconnected.”
Farhana connected with many student groups in order to publicize the action project, most notably Women Empowered, the student organization for the Douglass College Equal Opportunity Fund Program. The group regularly arranges activities relating to female empowerment and involvement in politics and public policy.
MTVU recognized the promise of the Darfur Action Project – and Farhana learned a lot about the grant writing process – when it awarded the project a $1,000 grant. Farhana will leave the program’s organization in the hands of some of her residence life student-colleagues, but hopes to maintain involvement in the group and perhaps volunteer in Sudan, if it’s ever possible.
“That’s a very far-sighted idea, but that is the latest idea,” she said. “They don’t even accept any food donations. The only thing you can donate is money. It’s just not possible to send in aircraft and airplanes right now.”
Project organizers are hoping to raise the groups profile next year, perhaps with a large-scale fundraiser or concert. At the same time, Farhana will work with the NIH and ponder whether to get her M.D., Ph.D., or M.P.H. (master in public health) – maybe all three.
“I eventually want to do something involving medicine and public policy,” Farhana said. “I have been pretty good at balancing a lot of things.”
A graduate's personal mission: to foster understanding about psychiatric illness and suicide
By Carla Cantor
Mike Alvarez took his first class in psychology as a high school senior in Jersey City, a distance-learning course offered by a Rutgers–Newark professor to select students via video conferencing.
The course changed the life of the shy, serious boy who emigrated at the age of 10 from the Philippines to New Jersey with his mother and two older brothers. “There are other people like me,” he recalled thinking, “People who struggle with existence.”
Throughout his time at Rutgers, Alvarez has battled depression, resulting in a hospitalization last spring during his junior year. Yet he graduated from Rutgers College this May on time, with a 3.98 GPA and a 4.0 in his major – psychology. During his senior year as a Henry Rutgers Scholar, he completed an independent research project, a literary study of the lives of three artists who committed suicide. For this, he received the Charles F. Flaherty Award, given by the psychology department to the student with the most outstanding thesis and overall performance in the departmental honors program.
For Alvarez, psychology has served as both a field of intellectual inquiry and a refuge for self-understanding. He sought out therapy his freshman year, working with a psychologist at Rutgers for all four years. From that year on, he got involved with “all things psychology,” taking courses in systems of psychology, personality psychology, psychopharmacology, and even graduate-level classes in advanced statistics and psychometric theory.
He worked on a research project that examined the social and emotional influence of fragrance in female adolescent friendship. He co-authored a paper about the plight of youth aging out of mental health services, presenting the research at a national professional conference, and served as research assistant to a professor studying attitudes toward mental illness among university students.
Alvarez finds it troubling that, despite its prevalence, mental illness is so stigmatized, something he hopes to change by talking about his own experience. “Those who don’t suffer from it, don’t understand it. Those who do, don’t talk about it,” Alvarez said. “There is still so much shame.”
He hopes to attend graduate school in clinical psychology. But Alvarez has another dream he’d like to pursue for at least a year: expanding his research on artistic creativity and suicide into a book. His thesis, under the supervision of Rutgers psychology professor George Atwood, explored the lives of three artists, the poet Sylvia Plath, the novelist and playwright Yukio Mishima, and photographer Diane Arbus.
Alvarez examined the artists’ biographies as well as their creative works, and, in both, found recurring themes of traumatic childhood experience that set the stage for lifelong themes and later death. His research suggests a tragic attempt to authenticate their existence through their art and through their suicide.
There are many other artists whose lives Alvarez also would like to examine: among them, writers Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton, and Ernest Hemingway; painter Vincent van Gogh; and musician Kurt Cobain, all of whom committed suicide.
Studies have shown that creative artists are more likely than others to suffer from mood disorders, such as depression and manic-depressive illness, and also have higher rates of suicide than the population-at-large. But Alvarez believes that too often artists who kill themselves are written off as crazy or mentally ill without an empathetic understanding of their suffering.
By exploring the demons that pursued the lives of artists, poets, writers, and musicians who chose to end their lives, Alvarez hopes to shed light on their experiential world. “The list of reasons why people from all walks of life commit suicide is endless, but those who died by their own hands share one thing in common: a feeling of being misunderstood and alone in the dark,” Alvarez said. “Reaching out to people struggling with existence requires a sincere effort at understanding, and that's the first step to lending a hand – dragging them from the voice of despair."
Truth in war, religion, and art
Mason Gross visual arts grad connects creativity and service
By Ashanti M. Alvarez
Daniel “Zeke”
Balan was always an artist: in touch with his spiritual side, wanting to
explore his cultural roots, scribbling cartoons in a sketchpad with his older
brother.
So he surprised friends when he announced that he was considering joining the United States Army.
“I would get the reactions, ‘You can’t be in the Army, you’re too much of a rebel, an individual, a typical kind of artist,’” recalled Balan, who recently received his M.F.A. in visual arts from Mason Gross School of the Arts. “I would probably be lying if I said there weren’t some small connection to the sense of wanting to disprove that because I am an artist, I am not that kind of physical person.”
So Balan joined the Army in March of 2000. He was in training on September 11, 2001. Three months after the plane hijackings and the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Balan was deployed to Afghanistan, where he worked as a Russian translator and interrogator of terror suspects and Taliban members.
Balan is still processing his time in the Army; he was honorably discharged in 2004. “I have just started to give it a place in my life history,” Balan said. He is working on incorporating his experiences into his style of art, which explores the relationship between the actual and the spiritual, mankind’s relationship with God, and truth.
Afghanistan gave him ripe opportunities to think about the meaning of truth. He spent his days seeking truth from and trying to see through the lies of prisoners in Afghanistan. And the experience gave Balan a more nuanced perspective on media narratives as truth.
“It was an amazing experience seeing politics in action,” he said. “I remember being on guard duty and hearing [a cable news] anchorman rehearse before he went live. I don’t know if it’s what he had been told by Army public affairs officers, but what he was saying – that the previous night, forces guarding the Kandahar Airport had beaten back a large assault by the Taliban – was not at all what was going on.”
Balan specializes in religious art. He was always engaged in cultural and spiritual exploration. Balan, who grew up in Ohio, Texas, and went to high school in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, converted to Catholicism as a high school student, taking the confirmation name “Ezekiel,” hence his nickname. He took a six-month internship with the Ukrainian National Committee Art Historical Commission after he graduated from the University of Dallas.
“I knew I didn’t
want to go right into school again. I wanted to spend some time overseas.
Specifically I wanted to see this land of my family’s roots,” said Balan, who
also worked as an ESL art teacher in Kiev. Now he teaches art to students at St. Peter's Elementary School in New Brunswick.
Balan’s explorations into his family history, his spirituality, and his physical and mental capabilities have led him to shift his focus as an artist.
“I think young artists think about being famous or starting a big movement in the art world, being very influential in the history of art,” Balan said. “Of course, those would still be great things, but I could chase those things my whole life and never achieve them. I could do more in service to my family and local community.”
Balan is working on designing a chapel at his church, St. Paul the Apostle in Highland Park. His M.F.A. thesis project, shown at Mason Gross Galleries, was a chapel designed as a military bunker that took 10 tons of concrete to build. He also has created works for the U.S. Army, the Ukrainian National Committee, and the Islamic State of Afghanistan. He looks to his wife, Margo, and their two young boys, as well as his octogenarian grandfather-in-law, William Schickel, for inspiration. “He’s been an artist his whole life. Never had a regular day job, he just made art. That was his career,” Balan said. “He’s not terribly famous. He designed interfaith churches, chapels for hospitals. He worked on the renovation of the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky with [prominent Catholic author] Thomas Merton. He just made art for people.”