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Faces
November
2000
At
its September meeting, the Yale Corporation appointed former
Stanford University president Gerhard
Casper '62LLM a successor trustee. Casper, a native
of Germany, is a legal scholar. Before beginning his eight-year
term as president of Stanford in 1992, he was at the University
of Chicago, where he began as a law professor and later served
as dean of the law school and provost. He recently chaired the evaluating team that reaccredited Yale, and he was awarded an
honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University at this year's
Commencement. |
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Speaking to an audience
of students born well after her 1973 novel Fear of Flying was published,
author Erica Jong told of the prefeminist literary world she was reacting
against in her writing. "It seemed that only the voice of a male protagonist could
be taken seriously," Jong said at an Ezra Stiles master's tea on September 26.
"I wanted to show everything going on in a woman's head." It was during a three-year
stint in Heidelberg as an Army wife, she said, when she found her voice. "I began
to write with a kind of passion and panic, as if my life depended on it." |
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Annette Walton, a homeless woman who for six years has sold flowers on campus,
was arrested on July 27 by Yale Police for disorderly conduct and warned not to sell flowers
again without a vending license. Police said she was "aggressively
panhandling" and interfering with pedestrian traffic. Walton
pleaded not guilty, and prosecutors dropped the charges on October
5. Yale students held a fundraiser at Rudy's to buy Walton a
$200 vendor's license. |
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At a conference to
inaugurate the Howard
Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders on September
9, environmental activist Andy Kerr was one of a panel
of speakers on the American national park system. Kerr, founder
of Alternatives to Growth Oregon, defended President Clinton's
recent executive orders creating national monuments. "For those
who criticize the use of executive power to create national
monuments, my question is, which ones were mistakes?" said Kerr.
"If we were to say it was a bad idea because it wasn't popular
locally, we wouldn't have a Grand Canyon." |
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Donald Gallup '34, '39PhD, longtime curator of the American literature collection
at the Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, died on September
6. He was 87 years old. Gallup was best known in the literary
world for his admired bibliography of T.S. Eliot. He spent almost
all of his career at Yale, and in addition to his scholarly
work, he collected nearly 400 works by the British artist Edward
Lear, which he donated to the Center for British Art in 1997.
Gallup's gift is the centerpiece of the current Lear exhibit
at the BAC (see Calendar). |
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Close-Up: In the Palm of her Hands
When Donna Dubinsky '77 first
came to Yale from a high school in Michigan, she remembers, "I really struggled.
It was a sink-or-swim environment for me." Little did she know that she would
one day return as the doyenne of tech toys, the business half of the team that
launched both the Palm Pilot and its new competitor, the Handspring Visor. Dubinsky
spoke to the Yale Entrepreneurial Society and at a Jonathan Edwards College master's
tea on September 20, drawing at both events an audience of admiring undergraduates
bearing their own personal digital assistants (PDAs).
"Hey, is that an M100? Wow!" said
Dubinsky as she stepped up to the lectern at the YES event, spotting the latest
from Palm in the hands of a student. To a tea-goer who was taking notes on his
vintage 1994 Palm Pilot she noted, "That one's in the Smithsonian already." And
the student fortunate enough to have bought Dubinsky's latest product, the Visor,
was given the opportunity to try out some new plug-ins for the machine, including
an MP3 music player.
Dubinsky was not a technical type
in college -- she majored in history, then went to work for the Philadelphia National
Bank before going to Harvard Business School. After working for Apple Computer
and helping launch its software subsidiary Claris, she teamed up with product
developer Jeff Hawkins and started Palm, the company that would put the PDA into
the hands of five million consumers. After Palm was acquired by 3Com, Hawkins
and Dubinsky went out on their own again and started Handspring, whose Visor has
changed the market with its expansion port, which will allow the device to morph
into a camera, pager, global positioning unit, or Internet access tool.
Dubinsky offered generous amounts
of advice to the students about the technology world, about business, and about
life in general. She also talked about the future of her business, predicting
that PDAs will begin to merge with cellular phones and become increasingly versatile.
At prices as low as $150, she said, "I believe this will be the first kind of
computer to get to a billion people." 
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