Museum head elected to Corporation
July/August 2007
by Mark Alden Branch '86
Thirteen years ago, Mimi Gardner Neill (now Mimi Gardner Gates) '81PhD
resigned as director of the Yale University Art Gallery to run the Seattle Art
Museum. Since then, she has doubled that museum's attendance, tripled its
endowment, and presided over the creation of a new building and a highly
acclaimed waterfront sculpture park.
Now, Gates is coming back to Yale, if only for a few weekends a year.
In May, she was elected by Yale alumni to a six-year term on the Yale
Corporation, the university's board of trustees. (She defeated former J. P.
Morgan chair Douglas Warner III '68.)
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"At Yale I learned how a museum can advance knowledge and celebrate excellence in the arts." |
Gates went to Stanford for college, then studied Chinese language and
culture in Paris before coming to Yale for her PhD in art history. She started
as a curator at the Yale Art Gallery in 1975 and was appointed director in
1986. "Much of what I learned at Yale -- about how a museum can advance
knowledge and celebrate excellence in the arts -- I applied at the Seattle
Art Museum," she says. She has served on the Art Gallery's governing board
since 2002.
In 1996, Gates married William H. Gates Sr., father of Microsoft
billionaire Bill Gates and co-chair of the $33 billion Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation. She acknowledges that her link to the Gates family was likely "a
very attractive factor" for alumni voters who made the connection. But she
emphasizes that she is separate from the Gates Foundation and adds with a soft
laugh that she can offer "no guarantees" of largesse to Yale.
Remembered
Professor Emeritus of Biology Charles Lee Remington, who built a
world-class collection of insects as curator of entomology at the Peabody
Museum, died on May 31 in Hamden, Connecticut. He was 85 years old. Remington
joined the Yale faculty in 1948, soon after earning his PhD at Harvard, and was
an active faculty member for 44 years. His research focused on the evolutionary
history of insects, particularly butterflies and moths. Remington was a founder
of Zero Population Growth and of the Lepidopterists' Society.
Appointed
Deputy provost Kim Bottomly, an advocate for women in the sciences, has
been named president of Wellesley College. A professor of immunobiology,
Bottomly was appointed in 2005 to the provost's office, where she has led
efforts to improve faculty diversity. She will take office at Wellesley on
August 1.
Medical school professor Michael Cappello is the new director of the
Yale World Fellows Program, which brings 18 mid-career leaders from around the
world to Yale every year for a semester of seminars, study, and other
activities. Cappello studies the global impact of parasitic diseases in
children. He founded the Yale Program in International Child Health in 2002.
Honored
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has elected eight Yale
faculty members as fellows: law professors Akhil Amar '80, '84JD, and Henry
Hansmann '74JD, '78PhD; music history professor Margot Fassler; internal
medicine professor Bernard Forget; chemistry professor William Jorgensen;
English professor Lawrence Manley; political science professor Frances
Rosenbluth; and architecture dean Robert A. M. Stern '65MArch. The academy's
203 new fellows will be inducted in October.
Also electing new members was the Philadelphia-based American
Philosophical Society, which chose three Yale faculty: Harold Hongju Koh, dean
of the Law School; David Mayhew, Sterling Professor of Political Science; and
William Odom, adjunct professor of political science. They were inducted at the
society's annual meeting in April.
An award to music history professor Ellen Rosand will mean more opera
for Yale. Rosand will use a $1.5 million distinguished achievement award from
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to create a Baroque opera company for Yale
undergraduates. She plans three productions over the three years of the grant,
along with symposia, postdoctoral fellowships, and publications. The foundation
said Rosand has opened "important new ways of understanding seventeenth-century
music and opera." 
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