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Faces
May 2003
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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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." |
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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. |
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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. |
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Close-Up
The death of Georges
May on February 28 came as Americans were renaming
french fries as a result of France's opposition to war in Iraq.
It brought to mind one of the many things worth remembering about
May, the witty, gracious French scholar who served as dean of Yale
College from 1963 to 1971 and provost from 1979 to 1981: his service
in two Allied armies in World War II. Born in Paris in 1920, May
served in the French army at the beginning of the war before studying
in Montpellier and then escaping to America. When he got here, he
enlisted in the U.S. Army and worked in military intelligence for
the rest of the war.
May came to Yale in
1946, where he made his reputation as a scholar of the French Enlightenment
with particular emphasis on Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
He was named a Sterling Professor
of French in 1971. But a generation of undergraduates knew May as
the erudite, pipe-smoking dean who presided over a time of tumult
and change -- most notable perhaps, the advent of coeducation, which
he strongly supported.
May's friend John Morton
Blum, the Sterling Professor
Emeritus of History, said that May "epitomized
the best of Western civilization. He combined the most distinctive
and excellent qualities of the French and American spirit." 
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