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Faces
October
2002
Robert
E. Apfel, the Robert E. Higgin Professor of Mechanical Engineering,
died of cancer on August 1 at the age of 59. Apfel was a leading
acoustical engineer who had led the Acoustical Society of
America and had won its Gold Medal. A graduate of Tufts with
a PhD from Harvard, he taught at Yale for more than 30 years
and served the University community in many ways, including
as a member of the board of this magazine. He is survived
by his wife Nancy Howe Apfel and two children. |
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Corporate executive Indra
Nooyi '80MPPM has been appointed a successor fellow
of the Yale Corporation. Nooyi, a native of India, worked as
a management consultant for six years before stints as a vice
president at Motorola and Asea Brown Boveri. She joined PepsiCo,
where she is now president and chief financial officer, in 1994.
She succeeds Kurt Schmoke '71, who was senior fellow of the
Corporation; John E. Pepper '60 is the new senior fellow. |
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John
Pescatore, a two-time Olympic rower who won a bronze
medal at the 1988 Games in Seoul, has been named head coach
of the men's heavyweight crew. Pescatore is a 1986 graduate
of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was until recently
an assistant coach. He has also coached at the prep school,
club, and Olympic level. In 2000 he was named U.S. Rowing
Coach of the Year. He succeeds Dave Vogel '71, who resigned
this summer after 13 years as head coach. |
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Speaking
at the Slifka Center for Jewish Life on September 9, Hebrew
College professor Solomon
Schimmel contrasted the Jewish and Christian concepts
of forgiveness, noting that Christian theology tends to emphasize
forgiveness over justice and suggesting that the Bush administration
has sounded "very Jewish" in its response to the September 11
attacks. "In Judaism, there is no obligation to forgive without
repentance," said Schimmel, author of Wounds
Not Healed By Time: The Power of Repentance and Forgiveness. "Forgiveness can be immoral when it is at the clear expense
of justice." |
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Sterling Professor Emeritus Albert J. Solnit, whose writings with Anna Freud and the late Law School
professor Joseph Goldstein changed the way courts deal with
child custody issues, died on June 21 from injuries sustained
in a car accident. He was 82. Solnit, a child psychiatrist
who was at Yale for 54 years and directed the Child Study
Center from 1966 to 1983, argued that the legal system should
consider the needs of children -- not parents or other adults
-- in custody cases. He is survived by his wife, Martha Solnit,
and four children. |
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Celebrating
her 50th year in show business, jazz vocalist Nancy
Wilson graced the New Haven Green on August 10 for the first
night of the 22nd annual New Haven Jazz Festival. Wilson,
who says she is giving up touring, attracted thousands of
fans, as did the headliners on the two succeeding Saturdays,
saxophonist David Sanborn and Latin flutist Nestor Torres.
Yale was a sponsor of the free concert series. |
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Close-Up
Biographer and literary
critic R.W.B. Lewis, the Neal Gray Professor of Rhetoric and former master of
Calhoun College, died on June 13 at the age of 84. Lewis, who went
to Harvard as an undergraduate, started graduate school at the University
of Chicago as a Renaissance scholar, but, as he told it, he had
a conversion experience while serving in Italy during World War
II. In Florence, he read Moby-Dick for the first time, and when he returned to Chicago, he changed
his field to American literature. His doctoral thesis, The American
Adam (1955), helped define the new field of American studies.
Lewis came to Yale
in 1959 and established a reputation for "discovering" then-undervalued
American authors., including Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and Edith
Wharton. His 1975 biography
of Wharton won a Pulitzer Prize.
Lewis's other interests
included Italian literature -- his last work was a short
biography of Dante -- and the American popular song. He enjoyed
passing evenings with friends at his Bethany farmhouse, trading
lyrics from the likes of Cole Porter.
One of those friends
was author and critic Robert Penn Warren, whose daughter Rosanna
summed up his work at a memorial service in August. "It's Dick's
work," said Warren, "that has helped us frame and answer the question
'What is it to be an American?'"
Lewis is survived by
his wife, Nancy, and three children. 
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