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Previous
Columns
March
2003 Meryl Streep; presiding at the Press; half an odd
couple.
February
2003 Eugene Rostow remembered; spilling society secrets.
December
2002 Yale Nobelist; Ehud Barak; Dame Edna's alter ego.
November
2002 Kofi Annan at Yale; birthday honors for Edward Bouchet.
October
2002 R.W.B. Lewis recalled; new crew coach; jazz great.
Summer
2002 New Peabody head; Garrison Keillor; Ben Carson inspires.
May
2002 James Tobin remembered; an Eli on the Segway team.
April
2002 Art collectors memorialized; new BAC chief; Rushdie.
March
2002 Cyrus Vance recalled; Sopranos shrink; a contrarian
on gender.
February
2002 The Times's literary gatekeeper; James Jeffords,
the Shah's heir.
December
2002 Donald Cohen remembered; Judy Blume visits; a "hero"
is honored.
November
2001 New Drama dean; Hart and Coffin discuss 9/11.
October
2001 A royal shutterbug; Venus shines; Bobby Seale finally
sees Yale; rhythm and blues on the Green.
Summer
2001 Beltway veteran, Survivor champ; new master.
May
2001 New dean for Divinity; plus-size model; lone bowlers;
a psychologist for Morse.
April
2001 Sandra Boynton '74 on chickens, pigs, and Yale.
February
2001 A pianist's guide to life; candidate Schiavone; farewell
to a hero on and off the field.
December
2000
November
2000
October
2000
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Faces
April
2003
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When
the Afro-American Cultural Center asked poet Amiri
Baraka to speak on February 24 to mark Black History
Month, the invitation sparked a campus debate because of his
perceived anti-Semitism. Baraka, whose talk attracted about
100 people, did little to mitigate the situation, standing
by his contention -- first made in a poem called "Somebody
Blew Up America" -- that Israel was complicit in the September
11 attacks. Baraka denied that he is anti-Semitic, adding
that "you want to know anti-Semitism, Yale is the place."
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"Indians are the
ghost riders in history. We're out of the picture," said Choctaw
author and playwright LeAnne
Howe
at a February 19 master's tea in Calhoun College. Spicing
up her talk with colorful anecdotes and even a recipe for
traditional Native American bean bread, the winner of the
2002 Ford-Columbus Foundation Book Award described how she
has tried to "tell our story without sentimentalizing." Howe
said that a lot of what she writes comes from her own experience
and intense research, but added, "All writers dream their
characters, whether they admit it or not."
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"No one should
be indispensable, and certainly not politicians," said Defense
Department official Roger
Pardo-Maurer '84 at a Berkeley College master's
tea on February 24, explaining his recent combat tour in Afghanistan
as a Green Beret. "The media sanitizes war too much," said
Pardo-Maurer, whose slide show included two images of dead
terrorists so gruesome they drew gasps from the audience.
"It should be shown as it is." But he also said that most
Afghans are "overjoyed to the point of tears to have us there."
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In 1951, poet
Adrienne Rich's
first book was chosen by W.H. Auden for inclusion in the Yale
Series of Younger Poets. Fifty-two years later, Rich has won
Yale's other major poetry honor, the Bollingen Prize in American
Poetry. Rich was honored for her latest volume, Fox: Poems
1998-2000, and for lifetime achievement. The judges praised
her "honesty" and her "continuous poetic exploration and awareness
of multiple selves." The $50,000 prize was established in
1949 by the late Paul Mellon.
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Sculptor Richard
Serra '64MFA may have opened his February 20 lecture
at the Art Gallery with a ten-minute slide show, but his talk
was all 3-D. "It's what the space engenders, how you feel
about being in a telephone booth or a football stadium," he
said. "I depend on walking and looking -- simple observation."
Serra, best known for transforming enormous sheets of industrial
metal into public works of art, is no stranger to controversy.
"You stay with it. It becomes a saga," he said. "The obsession's
half the game."
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For its inaugural
event, the Yale College Students for Democracy invited former
CIA director James
Woolsey '68LLB to lecture on February 13.
Calling the war on terror a "war of freedom against tyranny,"
Woolsey argued that peace in the Middle East will be impossible
without the installation of democratic regimes, a task the
U.S. has failed to take seriously in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"After this country wins a war, we tend to go on a national
beach party," said Woolsey. "This is as difficult a situation
as any we've seen in the post-Cold War world."
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Close-Up
Some people say that
Richard C. Lee
saved New Haven, others that he nearly destroyed it. But
there is no doubt that the savvy politician who served as the city's
mayor from 1954 to 1970 got more done than anyone could imagine.
Lee, who died on February 2 from heart disease at the age of 86,
oversaw a massive redevelopment of his home city, aided by hundreds
of millions of federal dollars and then-state-of-the-art planning
ideas.
Lee, who never attended
college, started out as a newspaper reporter before spending a decade
(1944-1954) as the head of the Yale News Bureau. When he was elected
the youngest mayor in city history, his many student supporters
saw his victory as their own, and he in turn always took pride in
his honorary master's degree from Yale, which was granted in 1961.
The theories behind
many of Lee's redevelopment projects -- including the Chapel Square
Mall and the Oak Street Connector -- have been largely discredited,
but Lee is remembered as a man who reacted with admirable energy
to the multiple ills that faced the postwar city. Even Vincent Scully,
the Sterling Professor Emeritus
of the history of art, who vigorously opposed some of Lee's later
schemes, said at his death that "he really has to be regarded as
New Haven's greatest mayor." 
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