Previous Columns

April 2003 A mayor remembered; Amiri Baraka stirs controversy.

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

History professor Donald Kagan was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush '68 and Laura Bush on February 27 at a White House ceremony. A leading authority on military history and the Peloponnesian War, Kagan was cited both for "his distinguished scholarship on the glories of ancient Greece" and his teaching. Kagan, a former dean of Yale College, was named a Sterling Professor last year; he was one of eight recipients of this year's award.

A week after Kagan was honored at the White House, it was Ming Cho Lee's turn. On March 6, the Bushes presented Lee, an adjunct professor of stage design at the School of Drama, with the National Medal of Arts. Lee, one of nine people to receive the medal, has been developing groundbreaking stage designs for regional theater since the 1960s, and he helped lead the field away from "poetic realism" to a more abstract modern approach. Lee has taught at Yale since 1969 and holds the Donald Oenslager professorship.

Actor Christopher Reeve blasted the Bush administration's policy on embryonic stem cell research in a talk at the Medical School on April 3 and criticized religious groups opposed to such research. "Social and religious conservatives have had undue influence on the critical debate," said Reeve, who has become a spokesperson for stem cell research since a riding accident eight years ago left him paralyzed. "In matters of public policy, no religious group should have a seat at the table." Reeve's talk was the seventh in a series sponsored by the Medical School's Stem Cell Interest Group.

Ruth Simmons, the president of Brown University, defended affirmative action in college admissions at a Chubb Fellowship talk on April 9. Simmons stressed that personal qualities, as well as economic, ethnic, or other forms of disadvantage, should play a major role in determining an applicant's qualifications. While she said that affirmative action "needs to continue to evolve," she called it "one of the most important and far-reaching government policies of our time."

Architect Robert A.M. Stern, nearing the end of his five-year term as dean of the School of Architecture, is coming back for more. President Richard Levin has appointed Stern to a second five-year term, saying that the School's faculty held "the unanimous view that Dean Stern has raised the School's profile, infused it with energy, and restored its ability to attract the very best students." In addition to his work as an architect, Stern is widely known as a scholar of architectural history and a champion of historic preservation.

At the end of the 1991 Gulf War, when President George H.W. Bush '48 called on Iraqi citizens to rise up against Saddam Hussein, Zainab Al-Suwaij was one of the first women in the streets of Karbala. "We faced soldiers' bullets with sticks and kitchen knives," Al-Suwaij said in a talk to the Yale College Students for Democracy on April 1. When the uprising failed, she went into hiding for two months before leaving Iraq. Al-Suwajj, who heads the American Islamic Congress, encouraged students to "see yourself as someone with a role to play in Iraq" as the nation builds democratic institutions.