While nearly everyone at Grinnell may know (or at least know of) Joyce Stern, my guess is that rather few of us know her official title. I didn't, before I looked it up: "Dean for Student Success and Academic Advising." It was fitting, then, that Joyce recently told my wife and me another title (a collective noun, anyway) that we didn't know: a "committee" of vultures.
In early April, after the snow melted, a large committee of turkey vultures regularly roosted overnight in the bare sycamores south of the Noyce Science Center. My subjective impression--not backed up by data, but by an unreliable, middle-aged memory--is that the campus has become an increasingly important gathering place for "TVs" on their southward fall migration and northward spring return trip. The large spring gatherings seem to have dispersed, though solitary soarers remain commonplace.
Insert academic metaphor here.
