UChicago News

Philip Roth, award-winning author and UChicago alumnus, 1933-2018

Wed, 23 May 2018 15:19 -0500

Philip Roth, one of the iconic voices in American letters who credited his debut novella to a conversation he had while a University of Chicago graduate student, died May 22. He was 85 years old.

Over a career that spanned six decades, Roth, AM’55, received almost every major literary prize, including the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, PEN/Faulkner Award and National Book Critics Circle prize. Other honors included the National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal, as well as the Man Booker International Prize for his contributions to literature in English.

Roth received his master’s degree in English from UChicago in 1955 and taught in the College’s writing program from 1956-58.

In media interviews, Roth discussed the impact of his time at UChicago, where he took classes with former Dean of the Humanities Napier Wilt, became a protégé of Nobel laureate Saul Bellow, and studied alongside noted writer and editor Ted Solotaroff.

In a 1983 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Roth said of Chicago: “I’ve never felt as close to any other city I’ve lived in,” in part because of the young talent he met at the University—“the competition, the ambition, the stimulation, the talk.”

Also in that interview Roth said he owed his debut novella Goodbye, Columbus to Richard Stern, the late Helen A. Regenstein Professor Emeritus in English Language and Literature. Over hamburgers at a Hyde Park tavern in 1955, Roth told Stern of his middle-class upbringing in New Jersey. “Dick got a kick out of the stories. ‘Why don’t you write that down?’ he said. My head was so full of The Golden Bowl, I thought he was having me on. But when I went home, I did it.”

His talks with Stern, Roth said, “helped me to see that what was in front of my nose, though not as resounding as Conrad or as convoluted as James, qualified as fiction. That’s what I learned in Hyde Park, how to talk back to all those great books.”

Roth’s time at UChicago influenced his work in other ways as well. Nathan Zuckerman, the protagonist of several Roth novels, is a UChicago alumnus, while Roth described former Dean Wilt as his “greatest supporter.”

“I loved the University of Chicago,” he said in 2011 upon winning the Man Booker International Prize. “[It] was in a great city and had great faculty and it had very, very smart students.” Roth said Bellow’s writing had a deep influence on his work and experience of the city. “[Bellow’s novel] Augie March was my guide book, I read it like Fodor's guide to Chicago, y’know? Also it was so glamorous—it seemed to me, that I should be in this city that nourishes this guy.”

Roth’s debut collection, Goodbye, Columbus won the National Book Award in 1960. He is perhaps best known for his 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint, a comic novel that attracted both praise and controversy for its frank discussion of sexuality. His other novels include The Counterlife, for which he won the 1987 National Book Critics Circle prize for fiction; American Pastoral, for which he won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; and Operation Shylock, The Human Stain and Everyman for which he won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1994, 2001 and 2007, respectively.

Playwright Martyna Majok, AB’07, wins Pulitzer Prize for Drama

Tue, 17 Apr 2018 12:44 -0500

Editor’s note: Playwright Martyna Majok, AB’07, was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play, Cost of Living. In the award, the play is described as “an honest, original work that invites audiences to examine diverse perceptions of privilege and human connection through two pairs of mismatched individuals.” The play appeared Off-Broadway in 2017 and was called ‘immensely haunting’ by The New York Times.

The Polish-born Majok spoke with UChicago News in 2014 about another of her works, a comedy entitled Ironbound that appeared at the Steppenwolf Theatre, as well as her experience as a performer and playwright while at the University. The original story appears below:

Martyna Majok’s “Ironbound” is the story of the relationship between Darja, a struggling Polish immigrant, and three very different men. The play, she says, was inspired by the work of Marxist theorist Slavoj Zizek.

It’s also a comedy.

Despite its weighty subject matter, the last thing Majok wants is “for the audience to sit there for the next hour and a half thinking this is just drama. You have to give them permission to laugh.”

“Ironbound” emerged as Majok was preparing to marry her then-fiancé and reflecting on “who has the privilege to marry for love.” Both Majok and her husband grew up poor and chose to pursue careers in the arts. Majok says they feared they would never have economic security. “We know how hard it is to get out of a cycle of poverty.”

She began to reflect on the romantic choices made by her mother—like Darja, a working-class immigrant from Poland.

“She would make what ended up being the wrong decisions for all the right reasons, trying to do the best thing that she could for her children and for herself,” Majok explains.

Around the same time, Majok was reading Zizek’s Violence during long commutes between a residency and teaching position at a theater in New Jersey and Connecticut, where her fiancé was in graduate school. “What I took away from that is that capitalism makes us treat each other as commodities,” she says. “‘What can you do for me, what can I do for you’ doesn’t exactly equal love.”

With Zizek’s writing, her mother’s experience, and her own impending marriage all simmering in her head, Majok dashed off the first draft of “Ironbound” in just a week. The play follows Darja over 22 years, depicting her at different points in her three marriages and showing her fierce struggle to survive and provide security for her son.

After two workshop productions, she submitted “Ironbound” to Steppenwolf at the suggestion of the company’s literary manager, who had mentored Majok during an internship after college.

“Part of our deal was that if I came to Chicago, I had to bring him Polish food, so I just brought him three pounds of kielbasa and some pierogi. Hopefully he liked it. I haven’t heard back from him, so maybe it was too much,” Majok jokes.

Becoming a playwright was never Majok’s plan, although she always showed a flair for writing. She didn’t see her first play until high school, when she won $45 playing pool and decided to treat herself to a production of “Cabaret” on Broadway.

As a University of Chicago undergraduate, she tried out for a play and fell in love with the strong bonds she created with her castmates. “I loved the communities that you form—these little ridiculous, inside joke-y families,” she says.

Her love of theater flourished as she studied with David Bevington and Nick Rudall at UChicago. She delved into playwriting during a quarter studying abroad in Paris.

She describes her first play as “the 22-year-old play that you write about your family. It was a super dark and ungenerous and emo play.” University Theater ultimately produced the piece, and Majok decided she wanted to make playwriting a career.

“It’s the thing that I found challenging and exciting and I felt it had worth,” she explains. “Leaving some sort of permanence was attractive.”

Supported by a fellowship from the Merage Foundation for the American Dream, Majok spent the first two years after graduating from UChicago immersing herself in the theater community by watching, studying, reading and writing as many plays as she could. She went on to study playwriting at the Yale School of Drama.

Over time, she says, she’s worked to make her plays funnier and less self-serious than her earlier efforts, and to write rich, complex female characters. “Women with strong appetites and flaws—I would like to see these women on stage, and if I were an actor, I would want to play these women who go after something hungrily,” she says.

Her next project focuses on the women and families that continued to live near Chernobyl after the nuclear disaster, despite the risks to their health and safety.

Even when tackling the weighty topic of Chernobyl, Majok’s darkly comedic sensibility still shines through. “It’s a musical,” she says.

UChicago names recipients of Diversity Leadership Awards

Tue, 09 Jan 2018 10:55 -0600

Advocating for the concerns of those whose voices aren't heard is a hallmark of diversity leadership. The University of Chicago’s 2018 Diversity Leadership Award recipients have dedicated their lives to helping support underrepresented communities: Faculty member Randolph N. Stone, alumna Sunny Fischer and staff member Scott Cook have their own areas of public service interests, but are united in their passion for equality and justice.

Regina Dixon-Reeves, assistant vice provost for diversity and inclusion, praised the commitment of this year’s awardees, who will be honored Jan. 16 during the University’s annual MLK commemoration. “We are extremely proud of this year’s recipients as their collective years of work and sustained engagement in support of marginalized populations demonstrates the inclusive excellence valued by the University of Chicago.”

Defending all communities

A lifelong advocate for the underrepresented, Clinical Professor of Law Randolph N. Stone is dedicated to supporting and representing disadvantaged individuals and groups in the Chicago area. As founder of the Criminal Juvenile Justice Project, he works with law and social work students to defend children and young adults who have been charged with criminal behavior, reform juvenile and criminal law policies, and improve the criminal justice system. He continues his child advocacy as a board member of the Youth Advocate Programs, Inc. and the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice.

“We started the CJP because we wanted to help stop the movement to criminalize African-American children,” Stone said. “Illinois was a leader in transferring children out of juvenile court to the adult criminal court by curtailing judicial discretion, lowering the age of transfer, and increasing the number and types of crimes for transfer. Moving forward, we want to continue to help children and young adults be treated with compassion and fairness.”

In addition to working on programs devoted to fair child sentencing policies, Stone also serves on the advisory board of the Federal Defender Program and served on Chicago’s Police Accountability Task Force. Throughout his career Stone has mentored hundreds of minority students, chaired the American Bar Association’s criminal justice section and served as the public defender of Cook County, where he helped increase the number of minority and women lawyers hired to the office while improving the quality of representation.

Confronting stereotypes

Sunny Fischer, AM’82, has worked as a teacher, social worker and executive in philanthropy. After earning her master’s degree at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, she went on to work with abused women in the community. Learning how women-focused organizations were under-resourced, she helped start the women’s funding movement, serving as executive director of The Sophia Fund, the first private women’s foundation solely devoted to women’s issues. She also co-founded the Chicago Foundation for Women, and had leadership roles in the Women’s Funding Network and Chicago Women in Philanthropy.

Later in her career, Fischer served as executive director of the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, where she focused on historic preservation, the arts, and architecture and design, especially in low-income neighborhoods. While at the foundation, Fischer helped start a public housing museum in Chicago. Fischer was enthusiastic about this opportunity, as it combines her commitment to social justice and the arts, and it challenges stereotypes of public housing residents and the role of public housing.

After 10 years of exhibits and programs as a “museum in the streets,” the National Public Housing Museum is expected to open in 2019 in its own building in Chicago. A former resident of public housing, Fischer knows how damaging stereotypes can be, and she hopes that the museum will raise important questions about race and poverty, and the true meaning of “home.”

Fischer reflects on her perseverance: “These years of labor have been worth it,” she said. “If you believe in social justice and that art and culture can bring deeper understanding and can be a call to action, then the belief is motivation enough.”

Bridging political and social gaps

A clinical psychologist who spent much of his life working to improve health care services for minority populations, Scott Cook works at the University of Chicago Medical Center and Biological Sciences Division to help achieve culturally competent health care and reducing health care disparities across all communities.

“Health care disparities are immediate for me because the physical and emotional suffering that they create harm the people that I love the most in this world—my family, community and friends,” said Cook, who is a quality improvement and clinical transformation strategist. “I try to use the power afforded to me by my privileged identities to address these problems and the problems of others in groups that I may not belong to.”

Cook also serves as the deputy director of Finding Answers: Solving Disparities Through Payment and Delivery System Reform, a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation geared toward identifying and reducing health care inequities. Throughout his career, Cook has worked with underrepresented communities in rural Missouri, as an intern at Chicago Cook County Stroger Hospital and at the Howard Brown Health Center. At Howard Brown, Cook worked directly with the LGBTQ community to create health care programs and interventions, including a smoking cessation public health campaign.

At these organizations Cook said he “learned so much about how bias, discrimination and oppression play out in people’s lives and damage their health and well-being.” Cook uses this knowledge along with personal experiences to continue working toward health care equality.

University honors alumni for exceptional professional achievements

Fri, 27 Oct 2017 12:01 -0500

The University of Chicago Alumni Association has announced honors for six distinguished alumni who have influenced both the University of Chicago and the global community.

The Alumni Medal recognizes achievement of an exceptional nature in any field, vocational or voluntary, covering an entire career. The Professional Achievement Awards, which the Public Service Award was merged into in 2016, recognize outstanding achievement in any professional field. The new Early Career Achievement Award recognizes alumni aged 40 or younger who have made an impact in their chosen career path.

The recipients of the Alumni Medal, Professional Achievement Awards and Early Career Achievement Award are the first to be announced in the academic year, with the recipients of the Alumni Service, Young Alumni Service and Norman Maclean Faculty Awards announced in the spring. Nominations for all alumni awards are accepted year-round.

Alumni Medal

Rochus “Robbie” Vogt, SM’57, PhD’61, is the R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Service Professor and Professor of Physics Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology. Since 1962, he has served as chair of the faculty, vice president, provost and other positions at Caltech. His research has focused on astrophysical aspects of cosmic radiation, gamma-ray astronomy and gravitational wave astronomy.

Vogt received the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for his work as a principal investigator on the Voyager mission, and was chief scientist at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1977–78. He led the construction of Caltech’s Owens Valley Radio Observatory’s mm-wave interferometer, had a lead role in bringing about the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and served as vice chair of the board of directors of the California Association for Research in Astronomy. From 1987 to 1994 he served as the director and principal investigator of the Caltech-MIT Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory project, becoming a co-recipient of the 2016 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

Professional Achievement Award

Mikel Arriola, LLM’06, was appointed general director of the Mexican Institute of Social Security in February 2016 by the president of Mexico, a position he currently holds. His professional career developed mainly in the public sector.

In 2002 he was appointed litigation coordinator at Banrural. From 2003 to 2005, he held several positions at Financiera Rural, including regulatory compliance manager and deputy corporate director to the general director. In 2007 he joined the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit, where he served as adviser to the minister; income planning general director of the undersecretary of revenue; and, since 2009, head of the tax legislation unit of the undersecretary of revenue. In March 2011 he was appointed federal commissioner for the Protection Against Sanitary Risks of the Ministry of Health, a position in which he was ratified in December 2012.

Herminio Blanco, AM’75, PhD’78, is the president of IQOM Inteligencia Comercial, a foreign trade intelligence company, and its subsidiary, IQOM Strategic Advisors. He is also the president of the board of Arcelor-Mittal Mexico and a member of the board of directors for Banco Latinoamericano de Comercio Exterior, CYDSA and Fibra Uno, as well as a member of the Trilateral Commission.

Blanco served as secretary of trade and industry of Mexico, undersecretary for international trade and negotiations, and chief negotiator of the North American Free Trade Agreement. He was also responsible for the negotiation of a free trade agreement with the European Union, the European Free Trade Area, various Latin American countries and Israel. Blanco also launched the process that lead to the negotiation of a free trade agreement with Japan.

Charis Eng, AB’82, PhD’86, MD’88, is the founding chair of the Genomic Medicine Institute, founding director of the Center for Personalized Genetic Healthcare, American Cancer Society Clinical Research Professor and the Hardis Endowed Chair of Cancer Genomic Medicine in the Cleveland Clinic, among other positions.

As a physician-scientist for more than 20 years, Eng has dedicated her life to patient-oriented research in genetics and genomic medicine. As founding chair of the Genomic Medicine Institute and founding director and staff physician in the Center for Personalized Genetic Healthcare, she implements evidence-based genetic- and genomics-enabled personalized health care, improving care for patients at genetic risk of disease nationally and globally. Eng is passionate about training and mentoring the next generation of physician-scientists, PhD clinical researchers and health care leaders and has founded a unique fellowship training program in cancer genomic medicine. She advocates for women and minorities in medicine and science and is a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

Santa J. Ono, AB’84, is the president and vice chancellor of the University of British Columbia. As a professor of medicine and biology, Ono has worked at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, University College London and Emory University. He was inducted into Johns Hopkins’ Society of Scholars, which honors former faculty who have gained distinction in their fields, in 2015, and into the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences as a fellow in 2017. Ono’s research encompasses the immune system, eye inflammation and age-related macular degeneration—a leading cause of blindness.

As a university administrator, Ono is known for his vision beyond the laboratory. He was the first Asian-American president of the University of Cincinnati when he was appointed in 2012, having previously served as provost and senior vice president for academic affairs. Prior to that, he was senior vice provost and deputy to the provost at Emory University.

Early Career Achievement Award

Megan Driscoll, AB’02, is a strategic media and communications professional with nearly 16 years of experience in health care, aesthetics and dermatology. Driscoll has cultivated relationships with physicians, consumers, key opinion leaders and tastemakers to achieve national recognition for her clients.

Driscoll has worked with Medicis, Rita Hazan, IT Cosmetics, Tria Beauty, Clarisonic, Viviscal, AstraZeneca and Roche. Previously, she served as president of Behrman Communications and held senior roles at Emanate, Lippe Taylor, FleishmanHillard and Euro RSCG Life. As founder and CEO of EvolveMKD, her public relations agency, Driscoll provides day-to-day client counsel, strategic direction and insights.

Alumnus and activist Rami Nashashibi wins MacArthur grant

Wed, 11 Oct 2017 15:00 -0500

Chicago social justice activist Rami Nashashibi, AM’98, PhD’11, was announced on Oct. 11 as one of the 24 winners of a prestigious MacArthur Foundation grant.

In its citation, the foundation honored Nashashibi for “confronting the challenges of poverty and disinvestment in urban communities through a Muslim-led civic engagement effort that bridges race, class and religion.”

Nashashibi is the founder and executive director of Inner-City Muslim Action Network, a nonprofit agency working across religious, ethnic, generational, income and other boundaries for social justice and human dignity on Chicago’s Southwest Side. IMAN was incorporated in 1997 and now has a $3 million annual budget. It operates a free community holistic health clinic, provides job training and transitional housing for formerly incarcerated men, develops youth leadership and civic engagement skills, and incorporates arts and cultural programming to inspire growth and change.

Unlike most winners who receive a phone call, Nashashibi was actually invited to the MacArthur Foundation offices under the pretense of a meeting on criminal justice. MacArthur President Julia Stasch then informed him he had won the award.

“I think then I went into a fog,” Nashashibi said. “It was very surreal disbelief that it was really happening. But I had a range of emotions—from not quite understanding the extent of it, to feeling profoundly grateful and humbled to be even considered.”

Nashashibi said he will use the $625,000 prize for a number of projects, including increasing national awareness of IMAN as well as expanding the nonprofit to other urban centers. In the coming year, Nashashibi also is committed to making the Hajj, the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, as well as completing a longstanding project to write a book about the work he has been doing for the last 20 years.

“IMAN is very deliberate in its own ability to both be rooted in this large, broader American Muslin experience, but also broadly informed and inclusive of the many different traditions that we interact with every single day,” Nashashibi told the MacArthur Foundation. “We believe we have the possibility of being a catalytic force of igniting that passion to do this type of work in urban centers across the country.”

Graduate experience shapes community-driven approach

Nashashibi said his graduate studies at UChicago “forever shaped” his approach to community outreach, allowing him to step away from the day-to-day duties of running a nonprofit to think more critically about the “layers of community life” and to gain “a better understanding of the failures” of communities.

“It’s where I learned to embrace the discomfort that comes sometimes with social change,” he said.

Nashashibi said he enjoys engaging with leading experts and researchers at the University.

“I’ve always kept one foot in academia,” he said, frequently teaching as an adjunct at several Chicago institutions. Currently he is a visiting professor of sociology and theology at the Chicago Theological Seminary.

Omar McRoberts, UChicago associate professor of sociology and a faculty member on Nashashibi’s dissertation committee, recalled Nashashibi’s academic and community work.

“Rami Nashashibi was a brilliant graduate student who produced a remarkable dissertation on ‘ghetto cosmopolitanism,’ which explains how poor urban communities participate in broader metropolitan and global cultural currents,” McRoberts said.

“What is more remarkable is that during his time as a doctoral student,” McRoberts added, “Rami was emerging as one of the most important community organizers of his generation. Through his work with the Inner City Muslim Action Network, Rami has brought his sociological learning about urban inequality, religion and inter-group conflict and cooperation into the realm of active social change, and has made a tremendous impact.”

Nashashibi acknowledged the indelible mark his time as a UChicago graduate student made on his career.

“There are people and institutions along the last 20 years that have a had profound impact,” he said. “My time in sociology at UChicago profoundly impacted every part of my life and how I do this work.”

—This story is adapted from a 2016 UChicago News article.

Alumni and faculty recognized for distinguished service to the University

Thu, 08 Jun 2017 12:10 -0500

The alumni awards, presented by the University of Chicago Alumni Association and the Alumni Board, honor those who have shaped the world and strengthened UChicago’s global community.

The Norman Maclean Faculty Award recognizes emeritus or senior faculty for extraordinary contributions to teaching and to the student experience of life within the University community. This year’s recipient is Prof. Emeritus Peter O. Vandervoort, AB’54, SB’55, SM’56, PhD’60.

The Alumni Service Awards recognize the achievements of individuals working on behalf of the University through service in alumni programs, on advisory committees and through efforts made to ensure the welfare of the institution. The Young Alumni Service Awards acknowledge and encourage service to the University by alumni aged 35 and younger.

Nominations for the Professional Achievement Awards, which recognize outstanding alumni contributions to their vocational fields, are due June 16. Nominations for all Alumni Association award categories are received year-round and can be submitted online.

2017 Norman Maclean Faculty Award winner

Peter O. Vandervoort, AB’54, SB’55, SM’56, PhD’60, is a professor emeritus in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, a position he has held since his retirement in 2003. Starting in 1961 and continuing to today, he has taught and individually guided many generations of undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs and junior colleagues.

Vandervoort served as acting dean for the Division of the Physical Sciences, master of the Physical Sciences Collegiate Division, associate dean of the Division of the Physical Sciences and of the College, and associate chairman of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

2017 Alumni Service Award winners

Vincenzo Barbetta, AB’99, MBA’05, is a founding member and former president of the LGBT Alumni Network. Barbetta strengthened bonds among LGBT alumni and between those alumni and the University. In cooperation with the board of directors and steering committee, he pioneered several aspects of the chapter model now used to organize affinity groups nationally and globally. His aim was to have alumni remain connected to the academic work happening on campus and ensure that the group had a social mission.

Barbetta currently serves as the LGBT Alumni Network’s metro chair in San Francisco. From 2003 to 2010, he volunteered for the Alumni Club of Chicago in leadership roles including treasurer and vice president. He received the Dean’s Award of Distinction in 2005 upon his graduation from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Sean Singleton, MBA’08, is president of the University of Chicago Military Affinity Group and has led efforts to foster awareness and institutional support for veterans across the University community. His leadership has helped current students and alumni to connect their military service to their education, helping the University community understand the training and skill sets of its students and military-affiliated alumni.

Singleton also has given his time and talent to Chicago Booth as a judge for its Volunteer Leadership Program, presented a webinar for Alumni Career Programs titled “Navigating Career Transition for Military Personnel, and traveled to New York to sit on a panel during Volunteer Caucus.

2017 Young Alumni Service Award winners

Joe Anzalone, AB’04, is the president of the Alumni Club of Virginia. As an alumni volunteer, Anzalone began addressing questions and opportunities to reach unengaged alumni populations and help the Alumni Association meet its major engagement goals. His grassroots efforts toward building the Alumni Club of Virginia soon evolved into recruiting a diverse group of board members representing different regions, degrees, class years and industries.

Before his tenure as president of the Alumni Club of Virginia, Anzalone volunteered for the Alumni Club of Washington, D.C., serving as program chair and vice president. Additionally, he has held leadership roles for Phoenixphest DC and Participate Chicago, and has supported the alumni efforts of the Alumni Law Society and the Institute of Politics.

Jennifer Glickel, AB’08, has held various leadership roles as a board member of the Alumni Club of NYC over the past nine years, including Phoenixphest co-chair, programming committee co-chair, and most recently, engagement and outreach co-chair. She is a strong advocate for UChicago alumni and is credited with recruiting many of the current volunteers in the region.

Before graduation, Glickel was a leader with the Senior Class Gift Committee. She has since also acted as a leader for her class reunions, promoting alumni spirit and participation as co-chair for the Participate NYC events.

Tyehimba Jess, AB’91, wins Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

Tue, 11 Apr 2017 13:30 -0500

Tyehimba Jess, AB’91, has won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Olio, his collection of original verse.

Jess’ poems examine the lives of African-American performers from the Civil War up to World War I, revealing the history of America’s blues, work songs and church hymns. Jess was praised by the Pulitzer committee “for a distinctive work that melds performance art with the deeper art of poetry to explore collective memory and challenge contemporary notions of race and identity.”

A native of Detroit, Jess studied public policy while at UChicago and received his MFA from New York University. Jess is currently the poetry and fiction editor of African American Review and is an associate professor of English at the College of Staten Island.

This is Jess’ second book of poetry. His first, leadbelly, received the 2004 National Poetry Series award. Jess read from Olio this past December at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore.

David Rockefeller, University trustee and descendent of UChicago’s philanthropic founder, 1915-2017

Tue, 21 Mar 2017 12:07 -0500

David Rockefeller, PhD’40, a prominent philanthropist, banking executive and University trustee whose grandfather, John D. Rockefeller Sr., was the philanthropic founder of the University of Chicago, died on March 20. He was 101.

Rockefeller’s ties to the University spanned a lifetime, from touring Egypt and the Middle East as a teenager with distinguished University archaeologist James Henry Breasted to the endowment of a professorship in UChicago’s economics department, from which he received his doctorate. Rockefeller was associated with the University’s Board of Trustees for seven decades, providing a strong connection to the institution’s founding in 1890.

David Rockefeller was a leader in finance as chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank and was a prominent philanthropist, serving as chairman of such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, the Council on Foreign Relations and Rockefeller University. His global work included the founding the Trilateral Commission, a non-partisan group to foster closer cooperation between the North America, Europe and Asia, and providing leadership and support for the International House Association, including International House at the University of Chicago.

“David Rockefeller led a truly remarkable life, characterized by his keen intellect, an understanding of global issues and a deep appreciation of the responsibility that his family’s legacy had given him,” said President Robert J. Zimmer. “He was a generous supporter of the University and offered the benefit of his experience and good judgment. He will be remembered here for his prominent role in the University’s history.”

Rockefeller was born in New York City on June 12, 1915 to John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. He attended the Lincoln School in Harlem, which featured progressive teaching methods influenced by John Dewey. As a child and young man he knew his grandfather, the former leader of Standard Oil, who was one of the most influential corporate figures and philanthropists in American history, but whom David Rockefeller knew as a “benign, indulgent” patriarch who gave out dimes to children. “He was the least dour man I have ever known; he was constantly smiling, joking and telling shaggy dog stories,” David Rockefeller wrote in his 2003 book, Memoirs.

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David Rockefeller

Rockefeller remembered a youth filled with art and travel. In 1929, at age 14, Rockefeller and members of his family toured Egypt and the Middle East at the invitation of Breasted, whose work fascinated Rockefeller’s father. Such excursions “made us feel the excitement of the opportunities open to us and recognize the role the family was playing in so many areas. These experiences gave us an education that transcended formal learning,” Rockefeller wrote about the experience.

Rockefeller graduated from Harvard College in 1936, and after a year at the London School of Economics, arrived at UChicago to pursue a PhD. The school “boasted one of the premier economics faculties in the world…the fact that Grandfather had helped found the university played a distinctly secondary role in my choice,” he recalled. His thesis, “Unused Resources and Economic Waste,” was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1940.

“David was proud of his Chicago degree and spoke often of his admiration for the great economists he had encountered here,” said President Emeritus Hanna Holborn Gray. “He liked to reminisce about his boyhood trip with James Henry Breasted, which happened as the Oriental Institute and Chicago House in Luxor, Egypt became objects of the Rockefeller family’s philanthropy.”

While working on his dissertation, Rockefeller met Margaret “Peggy” McGrath. The couple were married for 55 years until McGrath’s death in 1996.

Service and leadership on a global stage

After completing his graduate work, Rockefeller began in government service, working for New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. During World War II, he served as an intelligence officer in North Africa and the south of France, achieving the rank of captain. With the return of peace, Rockefeller embarked on his career at Chase Manhattan and worked to continue his family’s tradition of philanthropy—what John D. Rockefeller Sr. called “the art of giving.” He was first elected as a trustee of the University of Chicago on May 8, 1947. He served as a trustee until 1963, became an honorary trustee until 1966, then was a life trustee until 2007 and was a trustee emeritus at the time of his death.

Rockefeller became chairman and chief executive of Chase, where he focused on global banking and developed important relationships with numerous world leaders. He was part of a generation of Rockefellers who held a prominent place in American civic life. His brother Nelson Rockefeller was governor of New York and later vice president of the United States, while his brother Winthrop Rockefeller served as governor of Arkansas.

David Rockefeller’s civic work included helping New York City through its financial crisis, serving as a key supporter of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and leading Rockefeller University as chairman of its board of trustees. His many years of service to educational, civic and cultural institutions earned Rockefeller honors, including the U.S. Legion of Merit, the French Legion of Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Gray said that when Rockefeller retired from Chase, the bank’s board decided to honor him by endowing a chair in his honor, rather than through a direct gift — after all, “what could you give a Rockefeller?”

There was a competition between Harvard and the University of Chicago for the chair, which was to be in international economics. Chicago won, and Rockefeller came for the announcement and dinner that inaugurated the chair. “He always remained interested in following its progress and learning of its incumbents,” Gray said.

The chair is now held by Nobel laureate Lars Hansen, the David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor in Economics.

John W. Boyer, dean of the College and author of The University of Chicago: A History, said David Rockefeller valued what his family had begun at the University of Chicago, and he contributed to its later successes.

“David Rockefeller served with great distinction as an active trustee of the University, as a generous philanthropist in support of the University’s academic programs and as a wise adviser to several of our presidents,” Boyer said. “The gifts of his grandfather, John D. Rockefeller Sr., to the early University of Chicago were primarily responsible for the founding of one of the great new research universities in modern America, setting a model for those who would follow in advancing the well-being of American higher education and society. David Rockefeller shared with his grandfather and his father a deep conviction about the profound responsibilities that the great American universities bear in enhancing the intellectual creativity and cultural progress of American civic life.”

Rockefeller is survived by five of his children, David Rockefeller Jr., Abigail Rockefeller, Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, Peggy Dulany and Ellen Rockefeller Growald. He was preceded in death by his son Richard Rockefeller.

Prof. Thomas Gajewski honored for pioneering cancer research

Fri, 03 Feb 2017 16:37 -0600

The National Cancer Institute, a branch of the National Institutes of Health, has awarded an Outstanding Investigator Award to Prof. Thomas Gajewski. The award supports scientists who demonstrate remarkable productivity in cancer research and guarantees $600,000 in direct costs per year for seven years.

Gajewski, professor in medicine and the Ben May Cancer Institute and director of the immunology and cancer program at the University of Chicago Medicine, is a pioneer in the field of cancer immunotherapy, one of the most promising approaches to cancer treatment in decades.

Cancer immunotherapy exploits the power and specificity of the immune system to fight cancer. First tested in melanoma, immunotherapy has led to complete remissions in many cancer types, often with limited side effects.

“The Outstanding Investigator Award pulls together a number of separate but related projects from our lab and blends them into one massive, cohesive undertaking,” said Gajewski, AB’84, MD’89, PhD’91. “Such funding is necessary for our lab and many others to make continual progress toward preventing and treating cancer using the host immune system. It inspires us to be even more aggressive, to move the field forward as broadly and quickly as we can.”

By providing seven years of financial stability, these awards encourage investigators to take on long-term projects with significant potential.

“It allows funded investigators to take greater risks and be more adventurous in their research,” Gajewski said. “We can now focus entirely on doing the work and worry less about writing grant applications, making us more productive and efficient.”

Gajewski’s team studies new ways to overcome a tumor’s ability to resist immunotherapy, with a focus on drugs that help the immune system, especially T cells, gain access to tumor sites.

Their approach is multidimensional. “We have treated a large number of melanoma patients using immunotherapies,” he said, “and we now have a great deal of data about the interactions between a patient’s tumors and his or her immune system. We know who responded to treatment and who didn’t. Now we’re cataloguing genetic clues that correlate with response versus resistance. This not only should help us predict who is most likely to benefit, but more importantly identify new therapies to overcome resistance and expand efficacy.”

They are also looking at connections between the gut microbiota—the microbes that live in a patient’s digestive tract—and the immune system’s response to cancer. In 2015, Gajewski’s laboratory showed that a particular strain of bacteria in the digestive tracts of mice could stimulate the immune system to attack tumor cells. They are now refining this approach and analyzing a large cohort of human samples.

A third element is investigation of a protein complex known as STING—short for STimulator of INterferon Genes—which plays a crucial role in detecting cells in which the DNA is in the wrong place, within the cell but outside the nucleus. In 2014, Gajewski’s laboratory showed how the STING pathway signals the body’s innate immune system to attack such tumor cells. “We are now working with a small molecule drug that appears to trigger this response when injected directly into a tumor,” he said. Clinical testing is underway.

“So much of this work is collaborative,” Gajewski said. “We have a lot of faculty and trainees working together to translate these basic observations into systems we can test in the clinic. A major next step is to integrate the various components.”

Being awarded an OIA is “a significant honor and a pleasant surprise,” added Gajewski. “It celebrates and builds on a long research path, made possible by public as well as private support.”

—Story first appeared on UChicago’s Science Life blog.

Rhodes scholar to examine higher education policy in southern Africa

Mon, 28 Nov 2016 15:30 -0600

Lilian Dube, AB’15, has won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at the University of Oxford next fall. A native of Zimbabwe, Dube is the 51st student from the University of Chicago to receive the award and the second to win this year, joining Law School student Joshua Pickar.

She will pursue two master’s degrees at Oxford—one in education and the other in English—with an eye toward higher education policy and curricula in southern Africa, particularly the tensions that exist between the humanities and technical-skills education. Dube was named one of two Rhodes scholars from Zimbabwe this year, it was announced Nov. 26. She will join the Class of 2017 Rhodes Scholars, including the 32 U.S. students who were named on Nov. 19.

“Oxford has phenomenal support in both disciplines I seek to pursue,” said Dube. “I hope to give back to the education system from which I emerged.”

Dube is currently teaching high school in Hong Kong, where she has designed critical thinking and writing lessons on topics ranging from poetry to ethics.

“Lilian’s plan to integrate the humanities with the work of technical education in Zimbabwe shows great depth, reflection and insight into what humanistic study is for and what it can accomplish,” said John W. Boyer, dean of the College. “This is an example of the rich and unique perspectives that our international students bring to our curriculum, and how it can be applied after they leave the College. We commend Lilian on this great accomplishment.”

At UChicago she studied English literature, winning the Elsie F. Filippi Memorial Prize in Poetry for her thesis on violence and gender in the work of the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta. During her time in the College, Dube served as course assistant for a graduate linguistics class researching Northern Ndebele, one of Zimbabwe’s 16 official languages, and translated portions of Shakespeare’s The Tempest into that language. In 2012, she participated in an eight-week summer program in Ukrainian language and culture at Harvard University, and the following year she studied Renaissance literature and Russian poetry at Oxford. She was a member of the International Students Advisory Board and the African and Caribbean Students Association, and served as a resident master’s assistant for Booth-Phoenix house.

Dube would eventually like to pursue doctoral studies in education, enabling her to one day teach literature, education and writing at the university level. “I would love to mentor well-rounded African academics who have the potential to produce regionally and globally impactful scholarship,” she said, “especially among traditionally underrepresented groups.”

Dube was assisted by the College Center for Scholarly Advancement in applying for the Rhodes Scholarship. The CCSA supports undergraduates and alumni through the highly competitive application processes for national scholarships and fellowships.

Marshall scholar to explore technology’s civic potential

Mon, 28 Nov 2016 14:30 -0600

Erin Simpson, AB’15, has won a Marshall Scholarship to pursue graduate studies at the University of Oxford next fall. The highly competitive scholarships, which were announced Nov. 28, annually enable up to 40 American students to study at the graduate level in any field of their choosing.

Simpson will pursue a pair of one-year master’s degrees in science at Oxford: one in the social science of the Internet, at the Oxford Internet Institute; followed by a master’s in comparative social policy at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention. The programs will allow her to explore technology’s civic potential from both a theoretical and practical approach.

“The British are leaders in digital government,” Simpson said. “The Oxford Internet Institute is the only major academic department in the world devoted to understanding the Internet through social science.”

Simpson, who also won a Truman Scholarship in 2014, is director of programs for Civic Hall Labs in New York, a research and development nonprofit she helped start that builds technology for civic organizations and advocates for the development of more equitable technologies.

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Erin Simpson, AB'15, wins Truman Scholarship

“Erin’s vision to improve digital government services shows remarkable creativity, energy and independence,” said Dean of the College John W. Boyer. “Her focus on civic technology demonstrates the integration of academic excellence and practice that we see in the College today at its very best. We congratulate her warmly on this achievement."

Simpson said antiquated technology in both the nonprofit and government sectors “compounds the inequities already faced by low-income communities at a number of levels.” As a public policy major at UChicago, she documented that reality in her organizing work in housing foreclosure prevention and in her case studies of Chicago welfare offices and libraries.

At UChicago, she got involved in “the civic side of tech.” Through her involvement at the Institute of Politics, she cofounded the University of Chicago TechTeam, an interdisciplinary volunteer group that remade websites and digital strategy for local government and nonprofits. She served as a fellow at Microsoft in Chicago, where she worked on civic strategy, teaching open data programs and running community-sourced innovation competitions, and spent time as a research fellow at the Georgetown Law Center on Deep Poverty studying best practices in social service delivery methods.

“Now, more than ever, we need to take a more critical approach to the ways that technology is influencing our civic life,” said Simpson, who plans to pursue a career in public service. “Social inequities are being replicated and amplified through our consumer technology, and our civic institutions need greater capacity to combat that trend.”

Originally from Menomonie, Wis., Simpson grew up in a rural community where the farm established by her family four generations ago is still in operation. She is the 23rd person affiliated with the University of Chicago to win a Marshall Scholarship in the past 30 years.

Simpson received guidance and assistance in applying for the award from the College Center for Scholarly Advancement, which supports undergraduates and College alumni through the highly competitive application processes for national scholarships and fellowships.

UChicago awards recognize professional achievements of five notable alumni

Fri, 28 Oct 2016 15:30 -0500

The University of Chicago Alumni Board has selected recipients for its 2016 Professional Achievement Awards, which honor alumni whose achievements have brought distinction to themselves, credit to the University and benefit to their communities.

Recipients will be honored at a dinner on Friday, Nov. 4 at the Drake Hotel. The event is open to the University community. Online registration is required. More information is available on the event page.

Documentary filmmaker Gordon Quinn, AB’65, is a cofounder and the current artistic director of Chicago-based Kartemquin Films, best known for the basketball documentary Hoop Dreams (1994). For more than 50 years, Quinn has been making cinema verité documentaries that focus on how social forces shape real peoples’ lives. His first film, Home for Life (1966), which depicted two seniors’ first months in a home for the aged, was praised by the Chicago Sun-Times’s Roger Ebert, EX’70, as “extraordinarily moving.” Since then Quinn and Kartemquin have told stories revolving around labor strikes, natural childbirth, gentrification, African wildlife tourism, childhood autism and the Big Brother program. Kartemquin’s most recent film, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (2016), focuses on the immigrant-owned Abacus Federal Savings, the only bank to face criminal charges in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Quinn has won two Emmys for his work, and in 2015 he was recognized with the International Documentary Association’s Career Achievement Award.

Gary Haugen, JD’91, is the founder and CEO of International Justice Mission, a global organization working to combat modern-day slavery, human trafficking and other forms of violence against the poor by rescuing and restoring victims, prosecuting perpetrators, and working with law enforcement and governments to restore broken public justice systems. Previously, Haugen was a human rights attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, where he focused on police misconduct. In 1994, he directed the United Nations’ investigation into the Rwandan genocide, working with an international team to gather the evidence that would later be used to bring those responsible to justice. Haugen has been named a Trafficking in Persons “Hero” by the U.S. State Department, and he has written several books on global injustice and violence.

An expert on American legal history, Lawrence M. Friedman, AB’48, JD’51, LLM’53, has been on the faculty at Stanford Law School since 1968. He is known for his ability to explain legal history to lay audiences and is a leader in the Law and Society movement, a scholarly enterprise that explains legal phenomena in social terms. He is the most-cited law professor in the field of legal history and the author of many books, most recently Impact: The Effect of Law on Behavior (2016). His books History of American Law (3rd edition, 2005) and American Law in the 20th Century (2003) have become classics in legal education. He holds six honorary law degrees and is a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

During the 26 years she spent as executive director of the Hyams Foundation, Elizabeth Smith, AM’71, provided leadership to numerous major initiatives in Boston in the areas of affordable housing, community development, childcare, after-school care, immigrant services and organizational diversity. Under her leadership, the Hyams Foundation became a major player in the fight for racial justice and equality in Boston and Chelsea, adopting an aggressive strategic plan in 2015 that places racial justice and diversity at the heart of its funding and other activities. This plan, in many ways, is a culmination of Beth’s vision for the foundation and the community in which it operates.

Pioneering dermatologist and skin biologist Eugene Van Scott, SB’45, MD’48, started his scientific career at the National Cancer Institute immediately after completing his residency in dermatology. He founded and became the first chief of the dermatology branch at NCI and, among other accomplishments, developed the first effective treatment for cutaneous T-cell lymphoma, an achievement that resulted in him receiving the Lasker Award. He’s trained many dermatologists both at NCI and in his subsequent career at Temple University. Along with his longtime collaborator, dermatopharmacologist Ruey Yu, Van Scott founded the entire science of alpha hydroxy acids. These compounds underlie hundreds of prescription and over-the-counter drugs and cosmeceuticals, and formed the basis for Van Scott and Yu’s commercial venture in these areas, NeoStrata. Among many other honors, Van Scott was named a Master in Dermatology by the American Academy of Dermatology in 1998 and received the Dermatology Foundation’s Distinguished Service Medallion in 2004.

Barry F. Sullivan, alumnus and trustee emeritus, 1930-2016

Wed, 28 Sep 2016 16:00 -0500

Trustee Emeritus Barry F. Sullivan, MBA’57, a banking chief and former chair of the University of Chicago Board of Trustees, died Aug. 11 at the age of 85.

Sullivan, who was elected to the Board of Trustees in 1980, served as chair of the board from 1988 to 1992. In his professional life he was a prominent banking executive and civic leader. From 1957 to 1979, he worked at Chase Manhattan Bank, rising to the level of executive vice president. From 1980 to 1991, he served as chairman and CEO of First Chicago Corporation. He then served as the vice chairman of Sithe Energies, Inc.; director of Liati Group, LLC; and vice chairman and COO of KRoad Power. He also was a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

In 1992, Sullivan joined the public sector as deputy mayor for finance and economic development of New York City and later served as the COO of New York City’s board of education. He was president of the Greater New York Chamber of Commerce. He also served as a trustee of Columbia University, Georgetown University and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Sullivan became a life trustee at UChicago in 1996 and a trustee emeritus in 2007. He served as vice chair of the board from 1985 to 1987 before being named chair of the board. In 1990 he received the University’s Distinguished Alumnus Award. In 2004, he was inducted into the Founder's Circle of the Harper Society and received an honorary doctor of laws degree. He was a former member of the Council on Chicago Booth and a former trustee of the University of Chicago Medical Center.

Sullivan grew up in the Bronx in New York City and played basketball at Georgetown University. After service in Korea in the U.S. Army from 1952 to 1954, he earned a BA from Columbia University in 1955 and an MBA from what is now the Booth School of Business in 1957.

Sullivan is survived by his five children: Barry Jr., MBA’86; Gerald, MBA’86; Mariellen, Scott and John, as well as 17 grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his spouse Audrey, who had served as a member of the Women’s Board.

In keeping with tradition, a memorial resolution in Sullivan's honor will be presented at the Board of Trustees meeting in November.

Wallace W. Booth, alumnus and trustee emeritus, 1922-2016

Tue, 19 Jul 2016 13:00 -0500

A prominent business executive and philanthropist, Trustee Emeritus Wallace (Wally) W. Booth, AB’48, MBA’48, died at home in Los Angeles last month at age 93.

Booth was the retired chairman of the board and CEO of Ducommun Inc., a Los Angeles-based company engaged in the production and servicing of aerospace-related components. Throughout his career, he held senior positions with Ford Motor Co., Rockwell International and United Brands, Inc.

Born in Nashville, Tenn., Booth was raised in Chicago. He served as an officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II before earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business from UChicago in 1948. He was elected to the University Board of Trustees in 1982, becoming a life trustee in 1991 and trustee emeritus in 2007.

He served on the budget planning, development planning and investment committees and was a vice chair of the Council on the Graduate School of Business (Booth Council). In 1986 he endowed the Wallace W. Booth Professorship. (Wallace Booth is of no relation to David Booth, for whom Chicago Booth is named).

He served on the board of directors of several companies, including Litton Industries, Rohr, First Interstate Bank and Navistar International and was involved in a number of philanthropic organizations, including The Children’s Bureau, the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists Foundation and the League for Children. Booth also was a former president of the Southern California United Way.

Booth is survived by his wife, Rosemary; his children, Ann Booth Cox and John England Booth; three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. He was preceded in death by Donna Booth, to whom he was married for 50 years.

William H. McNeill, world historian and distinguished scholar, 1917-2016

Tue, 12 Jul 2016 14:00 -0500

Prof. William H. McNeill, a pioneer in the field of world history and author of the seminal work The Rise of the West, died July 8. He was 98.

McNeill, AB’38, AM’39, was a teacher and scholar for four decades at the University of Chicago. The Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in History, he was the author of more than 20 books, from the sweeping history of human disease Plagues and Peoples to a memoir of the University during the presidency of Robert Hutchins.

McNeill was awarded the Erasmus Prize in 1996 and National Humanities Medal by President Obama in 2010. The Rise of the West, which traces civilizations through 5,000 years of recorded history, received the National Book Award for history and biography in 1964.

In a 1987 interview at the time of his retirement, McNeill said it was important for historians not to be too narrow in their outlook. “History has to look at the whole world,” he said. “And that means you have to know how the rest of the world is, how it got to be the way it is.”

McNeill was critical in launching the field of world history at a time when the discipline was narrowly focused on the history of Europe and its past and present colonies. In his work, he emphasized the connections and exchanges between civilizations rather than placing them in a vacuum.

“Bill McNeill was a scholar of extraordinary boldness, range and high creativity,” said John W. Boyer, the Martin A. Ryerson Professor in History and dean of the College. “He was able to see patterns and relationships among highly complex and disparate historical phenomena on a global level in ways that enabled him to write magnificent and courageous books of large intellectual compass.”

Boyer said McNeill provided decisive leadership during his chairmanship of the Department of History in the 1960s, rebuilding it into a preeminent site for international historical research after the department had lost much of its luster in the 1940s and ‘50s.

An early interest in history

McNeill was born in Vancouver, British Columbia. His father, John McNeill, was a historian of Christianity whose efforts to tell the story of faith through the connections among denominations inspired his son.

McNeill arrived at the University of Chicago as a 10-year-old when his father was appointed to the University faculty. He graduated from the Laboratory Schools and received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UChicago before attending Cornell to pursue a PhD in history.

McNeill’s studies were interrupted by his service in World War II, which included an assignment as assistant military attaché in Cairo. The position led to his working with Greek and Yugoslav governments in exile, making him an eyewitness to the middle stages of the Greek civil war. He wrote his first book from that experience, The Greek Dilemma: War and Aftermath, published in 1947.

In Cairo he met his future wife, Elizabeth Darbishire, who worked for the Office of War Information. She became his proofreader, critic and collaborator. They had four children together.

After the war, he completed his PhD at Cornell, and in 1947, he joined the faculty at the University of Chicago.

While in graduate school, McNeill stumbled across Arnold Toynbee’s The Study of History, which was an attempt to chart the rise and fall of world civilizations. Although he later worked under Toynbee at Chatham House in London, McNeill broke with Toynbee in his own work, seeing an interconnectedness among societies that didn’t exist in Toynbee’s writings.

A love of teaching and UChicago

At the University of Chicago, McNeill devoted himself to teaching in addition to his research. “Teaching is the most wonderful way to learn things,” he said in an interview. “You have to get up before a class at 10 o’clock the next morning and have something to say.” In 1983, he received the University’s Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

McNeill helped design the History of Western Civilization Core sequence at the University in the late 1940s and played a major role in introducing the history of other world civilizations as key elements of the College’s curriculum in the 1950s and ‘60s. He had a deep love and respect for the University and its intellectual community, dedicating The Rise of the West to “the community of scholars constituting the University of Chicago.”

“My father loved the University of Chicago wholeheartedly, its traditions and its people. A good-natured argument was his favorite form of entertainment, and he felt his colleagues and students at the University provided that in full measure,” said his son John McNeill, a professor of history at Georgetown University.

After his retirement, McNeill and his wife moved to Connecticut, where he continued to write. He completed a biography of Toynbee in 1989 and wrote The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History with John McNeill, published in 2003. In 2005, he published The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian’s Memoir.

In an essay for the American Historical Association, McNeill explained the importance of studying history. “Ignorance of history—that is, absent or defective collective memory—does deprive us of the best available guide for public action, especially in encounters with outsiders, whether the outsiders are another nation, another civilization or some special group within national borders.”

McNeill is survived by his four children and 11 grandchildren.

Abner Mikva, public servant and Law School faculty member, 1926-2016

Tue, 05 Jul 2016 16:00 -0500

Abner Mikva, one of the few Americans to serve in senior positions in all three branches of the federal government, passed away on July 4. He was 90.

Mikva, JD’51, taught at the University of Chicago Law School and served as senior director of its Mandel Legal Aid Clinic after retiring from government service.

His roles in the federal government stretched from serving in Congress in the 1970s, to sitting on the U.S. Court of Appeals in the 1980s, to being appointed White House counsel by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. Then, while teaching at UChicago, Mikva befriended and mentored a young Law School lecturer named Barack Obama.

“Abner Mikva was the Law School graduate who clearly embodied public service,” said Law School Dean Thomas J. Miles, the Clifton R. Musser Professor of Law and Economics. “Through his work in government and his teaching at the Law School, he encouraged younger people to join him in his important and honorable work. It is no surprise that he mentored a future president.”

A native of Wisconsin, Mikva graduated from Washington University at St. Louis and served with the Army Air Corps in World War II. He graduated from the Law School in 1951 and clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sherman Minton.

It was while at the Law School that Mikva got an early taste of politics. On his way home one night, he stopped by the local ward office and said he’d like to volunteer for the Democratic campaigns for the upcoming election. The committeeman asked who sent him, to which Mikva replied “nobody.” The committeeman then told the young law student: “We don’t want nobody nobody sent.”

Mikva wasn’t deterred, however. In 1956, he won election to the Illinois House as a Democrat and in 1968 was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served eight years from two different congressional districts.

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter nominated Mikva to the federal appellate court for the District of Columbia Circuit. He served on the court for 16 years, including the last three as chief judge.

Mikva left the bench in 1994 at the request of President Bill Clinton, who appointed him White House counsel. He served two years in the senior role before moving back to Chicago to start the first of his many retirements.

It was then that Mikva began to teach at UChicago. He also was appointed senior director of its Mandel Legal Aid Clinic and led the clinic’s Appellate Advocacy Project.

“It was such a memorable experience having Judge Mikva for Legislative Process,” said Adam Bonin, JD’97, one of Mikva’s first students in the course and now an election law attorney in Philadelphia. “There’s no substitute for the real-world experience he had. The stories he told were amazing, and he was always so generous with his time.”

Mikva and his wife, Zoe, started the nonprofit Mikva Challenge, a civic leadership program for young people which encourages them to get involved in political issues and campaigns. In 2014, in honor of Mikva’s long career in public service, the Kanter Family Foundation established the Mikva Fellowship Program Fund at the Law School to support a one-year postgraduate public interest law fellowship.

“He was smart as a whip, generous of spirit, and dedicated to the public good,” said Geoffrey Stone, the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law. “Our nation needs more leaders like him.”

The University in the spring of 2014 awarded Mikva the Benton Medal for Distinguished Public Service, which recognizes distinguished public service in the field of education. Later that year, Obama bestowed upon his mentor the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. Mikva called it the “greatest thing that ever happened to me.”

In addition to his wife Zoe, Mikva is survived by three daughters, Mary and Laurie Mikva, and Rachel Mikva Rosenberg; and seven grandchildren.

The burial will be a private family funeral. A public memorial will be planned for early August.

Jack W. Fuller, journalism leader and University Trustee, 1946-2016

Fri, 24 Jun 2016 12:11 -0500

Jack W. Fuller set a standard of integrity and accomplishment for a generation of Chicago journalists, rising from his first junior job at the Chicago Tribune at age 16 to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for the newspaper, and ultimately the leader of Tribune Co.’s publishing division.

Fuller, 69, who served on the University of Chicago Board of Trustees since 1994, died June 21 at his Chicago home, after a diagnosis of cancer several months ago.

“Jack had a distinguished career as a journalist, author and business executive,” said President Robert J. Zimmer. “He had a personal commitment to higher education, and his wide-ranging interests, balanced judgment and wisdom made him an invaluable presence on the University’s board. He was a wonderful colleague and friend whose loss will be felt deeply in the University community.”

“Jack was a respected voice on our board for 22 years,” said Joseph Neubauer, MBA’65, chairman of the University’s Board of Trustees. “He had an innate understanding of issues affecting Chicago, and his vision also encompassed our history and future in a national and international context. Those are among the many reasons why he will be greatly missed.”

A Chicago native, Fuller earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University in 1968 before serving in the U.S. Army as a Vietnam correspondent for Pacific Stars and Stripes. After leaving the army he received a law degree from Yale University in 1973.

For two years, Fuller worked as a general assignment reporter at the Tribune, then left to serve as special assistant to U.S. Attorney General Edward Levi, who had been president of the University of Chicago from 1968 to 1975. Fuller returned to the Tribune’s Washington bureau and became an editorial writer in 1978. He was named editorial page editor in 1981.

Fuller won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for a series of editorials on constitutional issues. He became a mentor for many writers and future leaders of the newspaper, including current editor and publisher Bruce Dold and former editor Ann Marie Lipinski, now the curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. In 1989, Fuller was promoted to vice president and editor of the Tribune. He held that role until 1997, when he became president of Tribune Publishing.

Five of Fuller’s books were published by the University of Chicago Press, including Restoring Justice (2013), an edited volume of speeches by Edward Levi that chronicled his work rebuilding a discredited Department of Justice after Watergate. He published eight novels and numerous short stories, and continued to write opinion pieces and other articles for the Tribune and other outlets. He also taught a course in creative writing at UChicago.

Fuller retired from the Tribune Co. in 2004. He was a director of the MacArthur Foundation and a member of the Special Committee on editorial standards at Dow Jones & Co. He was also a past president of the Inter American Press Association, which works to monitor and safeguard freedom of expression in the Western Hemisphere.

Fuller served on the University’s Board of Trustees from 1994 onward. He was Board Vice Chair from 2009 to 2012; chair of the Community and Civic Affairs, External Relations, and University Relations committees, and served on many other committees including the Executive Committee from 2005 to 2013. He was a life member of the Humanities Visiting Committee.

Fuller is survived by his wife, Debra Moskovits, PhD’85, and two children from a previous marriage, son Timothy and daughter Katherine Ryan. Plans for a memorial service are pending.

Charles M. Harper, MBA'50, longtime supporter of Chicago Booth, 1927-2016

Thu, 02 Jun 2016 10:00 -0500

Charles M. Harper, a University of Chicago Booth School of Business alumnus whose landmark gift in 2007 led to the renaming of the school’s main campus building in Hyde Park, died May 28 at his home in Omaha. He was 88.

Harper, who was known as Mike, earned his MBA in 1950. He rose to prominence in the 1970s when he rescued ConAgra from near bankruptcy and transformed the failing food producer into an industry powerhouse. After a 1985 heart attack forced him to change his eating habits, Harper pioneered the creation of ConAgra’s Healthy Choice brand—one of the first mainstream food lines aimed at healthful diets.

“Throughout his remarkable career, Mike was an extraordinary alumnus. Even in retirement, he remained a generous and engaged supporter of Chicago Booth,” said Sunil Kumar, Chicago Booth dean and the George Pratt Shultz Professor of Operations Management.

In recognition of his donation in 2007, at the time the largest gift in the business school’s history, the Hyde Park Center at 5807 S. Woodlawn Ave. was renamed the Charles M. Harper Center. He also sponsored the Charles M. Harper Road to CEO Series and served on the Council on Chicago Booth from 1992 to 1995. He was awarded Booth’s Distinguished Corporate Alumnus Award in 1991.

Harper was born on Sept. 27, 1927 in Lansing, Mich., and grew up in South Bend, Ind. He received a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from Purdue University and served in the U.S. Army. After earning his MBA, Harper began his career as an engineer for General Motors, followed by 20 years at Pillsbury, a unit of General Mills, where he was a group vice president.

During his nearly two decades at ConAgra—as executive vice president and chief operating officer in 1974 until his retirement as chairman and chief executive officer in 1992—ConAgra’s annual sales increased from $600 million to more than $20 billion. After a brief retirement, he served as chairman and chief executive of RJR Nabisco from 1993 to 1996.

Harper’s wife, Josie, preceded him in death. The Josie Harper Admissions Suite at Booth is named for her. Harper is survived by his daughters, Carolyn Harper, Elizabeth Murphy and Kathleen Wenngatz; son, Charles Jr.; 11 grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren.

Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, renowned scholar of India, 1930-2015

Mon, 28 Dec 2015 14:18 -0600

Editor’s note: A memorial service for Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph will be held Nov. 12 at 1:30 p.m. in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel

Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, the William Benton Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of Political Science at the University of Chicago, died Dec. 23 in Oakland, Calif., after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease. Rudolph, 85, was a past president of the American Political Science Association and the Association for Asian Studies, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Along with her husband and close collaborator Lloyd, Rudolph published numerous influential works that earned them the 2014 Padma Bhushan, India’s third-highest civilian honor. The Rudolph’s extraordinary teaching and scholarship helped make the University of Chicago a leading institution for the study of India.

Rudolph’s work with her husband relied on careful qualitative analysis that incorporated topics and methods from other fields, including literature and psychology. The range of the Rudolph’s work was unusually broad, encompassing not only Indian politics but also comparative politics as a general field, with special interest in the political economy and political sociology of South Asia, state formation, Max Weber, political psychology, methodology, and the politics of category and culture.

Her major books include The Modernity of Tradition, Transnational Religion and Fading States; Education and Politics in India; In Pursuit of Lakshmi: the Political Economy of the Indian State; and Essays on Rajputana.

Born Susanne Hoeber in 1930, she lived in Germany until 1939, when her family fled following her father’s imprisonment for anti-Nazi activities. The Hoebers settled in Philadelphia, where Susanne’s parents, Johannes and Elfriede, were active in public service and social justice causes. Rudolph received her BA from Sarah Lawrence in 1951 and her PhD from Harvard in 1955.

Shortly after her arrival at Harvard, Susanne met fellow graduate student Lloyd Rudolph. Their marriage in 1952 marked the beginning of a 60-year partnership distinguished by its scholarly excellence and its extraordinary respect and affection, both for each other and for their students.

Their collaboration was especially noteworthy at a time when women seldom became professors. Susanne’s student Kristen Monroe, PhD’74, remembers their marriage as a source of “inspiration and hope for many young women, not sure they could successfully combine career with family. The grace with which Susanne did this, and the support Lloyd provided as an equal but liberated male were critical at a time when women lacked role models.”

In 1956, the couple embarked on their first trip to India, driving from London to New Delhi in a Land Rover. Their journey is documented in the 2014 volume Destination India, which earned praise as a model of travel writing and intellectual commentary.

The Rudolphs spent much of their adult life doing field research in India, and their scholarly work changed the field. Their first book, The Modernity of Tradition, introduced political scientists to the idea that the politics of countries outside Europe could differ from the European model and still be “modern.” It argued that many so-called “traditional” institutions—such as caste—can perform what Westerners think of as “modern” functions. Recognized as a classic in the field, The Modernity of Tradition has remained in print throughout the half-century since its publication.

The Rudolphs would author many more books together, in work noted for its breadth as well as its scholarly depth and attention to detail. Many, like Explaining Indian Democracy (2015), are mainstream analyses of Indian politics; others, like Making U.S. Foreign Policy toward South Asia (2008) address U.S. policy toward India. Their work on Gandhi, such as Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays and Reversing the Gaze: Amaar Singh’s Diary: A Colonial Subject’s Narrative of Imperial India, revealed Susanne’s concern with political psychology. These works focused attention on identity and suggest how people’s perceptions of others shape their actions toward others.

A dedicated teacher and winner of the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, Rudolph taught a popular course on the political psychology of identity at UChicago. Several of the Rudolphs’ many distinguished students mention another course taught by Rudolph, “Subjection, Equality and Domination: A Study of the Asymmetrical Relationship,” as their favorite course, precisely because of its ability to reveal new insight into issues such as race, and ethnic and religious prejudice, while forcing students to see the world in a new light.

The Rudolphs were active in the “Perestroika” movement, a loose-knit grassroots effort in the early 2000s that sought to open political science to greater methodological pluralism. The Rudolphs received the 2009 Blade of Grass Award, given by the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Conference Group of the American Political Science Association, in honor of their contributions to interpretive studies of the political world.

As pre-eminent scholars of the world’s largest democracy, the Rudolphs lived in India every fourth year for nearly 50 years. Their three children were educated in Indian schools so they would grow up bilingual in Hindi and English. Much of this time was in Jaipur, with Rajasthan their home base for studying modern politics and examining India’s princely states both in the British colonial period and post-independence.

Rudolph is survived by her brothers, Thomas Hoeber of Berkeley, Calif., and Francis Hoeber of Philadelphia, Penn., her husband, Lloyd, and her three children: Jenny, who serves on the faculty at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School; Amelia, artistic director of Bandaloop, an Oakland, Calif.-based aerial dance company; and Matthew, a political scientist teaching at San Francisco State University. Susanne also delighted in and is survived by her three grandchildren: Gia (19), Maya (9), and Ry (4).

A memorial service will be scheduled at a later date.

University of Chicago Medal honors commitment of Dennis and Connie Keller

Wed, 11 Nov 2015 09:30 -0600

Over the decades, Dennis and Connie Keller’s generosity has touched many areas of the University, from the College to the Harris School of Public Policy and the Chicago Booth School of Business, to name just a few.

On Wed., Oct. 28, the Kellers received the University of Chicago Medal—one of the highest honors the institution can bestow—for their wide-ranging philanthropic support and service to the University.

Dennis, MBA’68, is a University Trustee and cofounder and retired chairman and CEO of DeVry Education Group. Connie Keller is chair of the Field Museum’s Board of Trustees, a longtime member of the University of Chicago Women’s Board, and active in numerous educational and environmental causes.

At a dinner honoring the Kellers, President Robert J. Zimmer described the couple as “truly generous of spirit. They believe that you can change the world through education,” said Zimmer, who thanked the Kellers for their “extraordinary commitment to the University of Chicago.”

The University of Chicago Medal was established in 1976 by President John T. Wilson to recognize distinguished service of the highest order to the University by an individual or individuals over an extended period. The award is conferred by the trustees of the University “to recognize rare and exceptional friends of the University.”

“Dennis’ and Connie’s impact on the University has been widely and deeply felt,” said Joseph Neubauer, MBA’65, chairman of the University’s Board of Trustees and a previous University of Chicago Medal recipient, along with his wife, Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer. “I am delighted to honor them and all that their inspiring support of the University has made possible.”

The Kellers’ first major gift to the University established the Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professorship at Chicago Booth, named after Dennis Keller’s father and his mother, who entered the College in 1929 but was unable to finish for financial reasons. Keller House, in the Renee Granville-Grossman Residential Commons, is named for Dorothy Keller as well. Extending their philanthropy across campus, the Kellers have supported Odyssey Scholarships, the Urban Education Institute, Court Theatre, and the University of Chicago Medicine, among other areas of the University.

In 2014, they made a gift to the Harris School of Public Policy toward a major renovation and adaptive reuse project for the school’s future home, to be known as the Keller Center. An additional gift will help support collaborations between the business school and Chicago Harris.

The Kellers’ connection to the University reaches back to Dennis Keller’s business school days. Newly married in 1967, he was ready to develop his own entrepreneurial ideas and enrolled at what was then the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

After graduation, Dennis took a job in marketing with Bell & Howell’s educational division, DeVry, which offered associate and bachelor’s degrees in electronics and engineering. He shared his idea with Ron Taylor, DeVry’s controller, for a business school for working people, taught by instructors from the business world.

In 1973, he and Taylor left DeVry to found what would become the Keller Graduate School of Management. The school anticipated today’s widespread executive MBA programs with features like evening and weekend classes. In 1987, Keller Graduate School acquired DeVry Institute of Technology and became DeVry Inc.

Dennis and Connie’s relationship with UChicago, meanwhile, grew as their family did. All three of their sons had wonderful experiences at UChicago, says Dennis—Jeff, IMBA’97, a member of Chicago Booth’s first international MBA class; John Templeton, or “Temp,” who graduated from the executive MBA program in 2007; and David, JD’08. Temp’s wife, Kerry H. Keller, AM’12, studied at the School of Social Service Administration.

Since Dennis Keller’s retirement in 2008, the Kellers have enjoyed spending time with their eight grandchildren. Seeing the results of their support for the University—especially when it involves students—makes them happy.

“The promise that unfolds in front of your eyes—and the chance to just be part of making that possible,” says Dennis, “brings a lot of joy.”

Thomas J. Miles appointed dean of University of Chicago Law School

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 14:30 -0500

Thomas J. Miles, a leading scholar of criminal justice and judicial behavior and an expert in a wide range of contemporary issues such as race and immigration enforcement, has been appointed the next dean of the University of Chicago Law School.

Miles, PhD’00, who is the Clifton R. Musser Professor of Law and Economics and Walter Mander Research Scholar, has served on the Law School faculty since 2005. His appointment as dean will begin on Nov. 1.

Miles has been widely published in economics and legal journals, with extensive expertise on such varied topics as judicial diversity, immigration, mail fraud and wiretapping. He is a widely admired educator and a recipient of the Law School’s Graduating Students Award for Teaching Excellence.

“Tom’s deep experience at the Law School, along with his outstanding record as a teacher, colleague and legal scholar, make him an excellent choice to continue and expand the Law School’s legacy of intellectual leadership and interdisciplinary focus,” wrote President Robert J. Zimmer and Provost Eric D. Isaacs in a message to the Law School.

“I am excited and humbled to serve as dean of the Law School,” said Miles. “The Law School is my intellectual home. In addition to my personal connections as a faculty member and a graduate, my scholarship is steeped in ideas that were developed here. The continuation and extension of the Law School’s leadership in legal thought and education therefore have a particular personal importance to me.”

Miles’ primary research focus is in the areas of criminal justice and judicial behavior, and he has looked extensively at issues of race through a variety of legal perspectives. His work makes creative use of the tools of law and economics—an approach that originated at the Law School, which maintains leadership in the field through such initiatives as the Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics.

Frequently, Miles’ work uses the methods of law and economics to investigate social questions not conventionally thought to fall within that field. For example, he and Adam Cox at the New York University School of Law published an article in 2008 that examined how African American judges tended to decide voting rights cases differently than white judges. Their research was the first to use robust statistical evidence to show that the racial identity of judges matters in how voting rights cases are decided, and highlighted the importance of diversity on the bench.

“Quantitative evidence often provides surprising insights and can spur new ideas in law,” Miles said. “For this reason, legal scholars have become increasingly interested in such evidence during the past decade.”

Before joining the faculty, Miles was the Olin Fellow in Law and Economics at the Law School. He has served in several leadership roles during his time on the faculty, including chairing the appointments committee and the accreditation review committee.

Miles received his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago and his JD cum laude from Harvard Law School. Upon graduation, he served as a law clerk to the Hon. Jay S. Bybee of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. From 2005 to 2013, Miles was an editor of the Journal of Legal Studies. He graduated summa cum laude with a BA in political science and economics from Tufts University.

Miles succeeds Michael H. Schill, who became the president of the University of Oregon on July 1. His appointment follows a national search, led by a faculty committee chaired by Randal Picker, the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law.

In their note to the Law School, Zimmer and Isaacs extended their gratitude to Geoffrey R. Stone, the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor and a former dean of the Law School and provost of the University. Stone has served as interim dean and will continue in that role until Nov. 1.

Amy Kass, inspirational teacher who treasured a humanistic education, 1940–2015

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 12:50 -0500

During a teaching career that spanned 34 years at the University of Chicago, Amy Kass designed courses that addressed both the enduring questions of human existence and the urgent questions facing today’s young people by helping them see the relevance of classic texts to their everyday lives.

Among these was the “Ethics of Everyday Life: Courtship” course, which she co-created with her husband, Leon Kass, SB’58, MD’62. In the course she encouraged students to explore “inarticulate longings” and discover the purposes and virtues of courtship, love, sex and marriage through texts by such writers as Homer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis, Allan Bloom and even Miss Manners.

Amy Apfel Kass, AB'62, senior lecturer emerita in humanities, died on Aug. 19 at her home in Washington, D.C., after a 10-year battle with ovarian cancer and a short battle with leukemia. She was 74.

“Amy Kass was a wonderfully generous and engaged teacher of the humanities, who profoundly influenced and enriched the lives of several generations of students in the College,” said John W. Boyer, dean of the College and the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of History. “Her contributions to the theory and practice of liberal education were manifold and outstanding. She left an extraordinary legacy of excellence and dedication to the highest educational ideals of the College.”

In an article published in the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens, AB'95, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, noted that Kass was one of the best teachers he ever had. “Mrs. Kass believed that at least one aim of a higher education is to provide students with a sextant of sorts, by which they might better discover what it is they should know about life, what they might hope for it and how they might go about getting it,” he wrote.

Born Amy Judith Apfel in 1940, Kass grew up in New York City and chose, against her parents' wishes, to attend the University of Chicago because the recruitment catalogue focused on ideas and contained no pictures. "But really what was distinctive about Chicago—it was a place where you didn’t have to apologize for being serious," she often said. She met her future husband on her first day on campus. Leon Kass, a student at what is now the Pritzker School of Medicine, happened to be on the Orientation Board, responsible for orienting new students. The two were married two years later, in 1961.

During a video interview in January 2014 with Bill Kristol, founder and editor of the Weekly Standard, Amy Kass spoke fondly of her experience at UChicago. “We spent the first three weeks discussing the Declaration of Independence,” she recalled. “And I was blown away. The conversations that it generated … really converted me to a way of thinking, a way of reading and a way of speaking,” she added.

After graduating from UChicago, Kass took a teaching job at a high school in Lincoln-Sudbury, Mass. She took time off in the summer of 1965, following the passage of the Voting Rights Act, to put her strong beliefs in civil rights into action. She and her husband traveled to Mississippi, where they spent a month mobilizing African Americans in rural Holmes County to register to vote, encouraging them to organize and defend their civil rights.

“Amy’s devotion to excellence in teaching was part of a larger moral vision that guided her throughout her life and shaped her character,” said Robert P. George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, and the Herbert W. Vaughan fellow at the Witherspoon Institute. “At the core of that vision was a sense of the profound and equal dignity of the human person.”

Re-inventing the rituals of courtship

Kass joined the UChicago faculty in 1976 as a lecturer in the Humanities Collegiate Division. Her husband Leon also joined the faculty for what would be a long and distinguished tenure; he currently is the Addie Clark Harding Professor Emeritus of Social Thought and the College. Amy and Leon Kass co-founded the “Human Being and Citizen” Common Core course devoted to the questions, “what is an excellent human being and what is an excellent citizen?” Amy Kass also was a stalwart teacher and advisor in the Fundamentals: Issues and Texts undergraduate major.

“Amy was an inspirational teacher for students and staff, believing so vehemently as she did in the value of a humanistic education,” said David Bevington, the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus. “She was no less dear and wonderful as a human being and colleague.”

Nathan Tarcov, professor of social thought and political science, agreed. “Amy was a rare and beloved teacher who inspired her students not only to respect the great books she taught but to respect themselves and each other,” said Tarcov.

At UChicago, Kass and her husband learned from their observations and through conversations that many young people went along from one unsatisfactory relationship to the next, often becoming “jaded and embittered.”

“There was a lot of talk about the failure of marriage, the divorce culture, the problems of single parenthood,” said Leon Kass during an interview with the Weekly Standard’s Kristol. “But there was absolutely no discussion whatsoever about how you get married and how you go about finding and winning the right one with whom you could make a life. And there were no cultural norms, there were no teachings.”

The Kasses decided to address the problem, both in writing and teaching. In 2000, the efforts led to the creation of a course, “Ethics of Everyday Life: Courtship,” which was based on an anthology the couple edited, Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying. The book promotes what they called a higher kind of sex education designed to prepare hearts and minds for romance leading to lasting marriage.

Through the book, the Kasses sought to inspire young people to rediscover the blessings of marriage by reading classic and modern works on the subject, and re-inventing new forms of courting based on improved respect between men and women.

“Amy tried to help her students realize that what they longed for—intellectually, spiritually, even romantically—but too often felt they were denied by modern life, was only denied to them as long as they failed to really understand their longings,” wrote journalist Yuval Levin, who earned his PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at UChicago. “They could come to better understand them through the study of great works of literature.”

In 1980, after only four years of teaching in the College, Amy Kass won a Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. In 2010, Kass received the Norman Maclean Faculty Award, and the University subsequently created the Leon and Amy Kass Odyssey Scholarship Fund.

“Amy Kass was keenly interested in young people’s development as thoughtful human beings,” said Ralph Lerner, the Benjamin Franklin Professor Emeritus in Social Thought and the College, who co-taught several courses with Kass. “Her welcoming manner and easy smile never got the better of her intellectual rigor. Her success as a teacher may be measured by her many College students who strove to adopt for themselves the standard she held up before them: that when it comes to thinking, half-done is not well done.”

Kass retired in June 2010, and she discussed Herman Melville's Moby-Dick in her last class. When summarizing her UChicago career, she wrote that her lifelong mission was to teach people to “read great books slowly and critically, to refine their ideas, to enlarge their sympathies, and to aspire to a richer life beyond self-centered quests for gain, fame or power.”

Kass served on the National Council on the Humanities for the National Endowment for the Humanities, as a consultant to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Corporation for National and Community Service, and as a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

She authored numerous articles and edited anthologies on American autobiography, and on the idea and practice of philanthropy. In addition to Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar, she and her husband also produced the anthology, What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song. They also produced e-curricula on The Meaning of America and The American Calendar.

Amy Kass is survived by her husband of 54 years, Leon Kass; her daughters, Sarah Kass and Miriam R. Kass; son-in-law, Robert Hochman; her granddaughters, Polly, Hannah, Naomi and Abigail; and her siblings, Dr. Roberta J. Apfel, Dr. Franklin J. Apfel and David J. Apfel.

Donald Levine, sociologist and former dean of the College, 1931-2015

Thu, 09 Apr 2015 09:20 -0500

Whether he was teaching his students about sociology through martial arts or leading them to the Point during the University’s annual Kuvia celebration, Prof. Donald Levine believed in education without boundaries.

“[T]he intense communication that flourishes here occurs well beyond the classroom,” Levine told entering College students at Opening Convocation in 1982. In the years to come, he said, they would learn everywhere: “in the residence halls, at the supermarket, on the playing fields, inside the coffeehouses and on the streets of Hyde Park.”

Levine, the Peter B. Ritzma Professor Emeritus of Sociology, died on April 4 after a long illness. He was 83.

An adventurous and open-minded intellectual, Levine, AB’50, AM’57, PhD’57, made wide-ranging contributions to the field of sociology, alongside his lasting impact on the University as dean of the College from 1982-87.

John W. Boyer, current dean of the College, said Levine served “brilliantly” in that position.

“As an alumnus of the College and later as a prominent faculty leader, Don was a strong and passionate advocate for student rights and student welfare, and a firm believer in the power and efficacy of general education as a defining principle of the College’s educational programs,” Boyer said.

“I’m on very good terms with the dean”

As dean, Levine reaffirmed the importance of the College’s liberal arts education. “[E]ven from a practical point of view of occupational success in later life, the best thing you can do is acquire a wide range of intellectual abilities,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1982.

He used his deanship to draw attention to the non-academic aspects of College life as well. Levine worked to expand the academic advising program, strengthen the residential house system and encourage students to venture outside Hyde Park. He attracted national attention for his decision to change the school’s official song to replace “sons” and “men” with gender-inclusive terms like “children” and “us.”

With several colleagues, he created the College’s annual wintertime festival, Kuviasungnerk/Kangeiko, which began in 1983. The celebration was, in many ways, a reflection of Levine’s seemingly indefatigable good humor. “You can’t change the weather, but you can change your perception of it,” Levine said. “We wanted to blast away winter doldrums with some fun.”

Kuvia also honored Levine’s belief that education should cultivate both body and mind. A fourth-degree black belt in Aikido, Levine taught a College course that incorporated sociological theories of conflict resolution along with a weekly three-hour “lab” focused on the theory and practice of the Japanese martial art.

Levine, then dean of the College, knew the course seemed unconventional to some, but “I’m on very good terms with the dean of the College, you see,” he said.

Intellectual dialogue

In his own undergraduate days, Levine met the renowned philosopher Richard McKeon, whose work on pluralism shaped Levine’s open-minded approach to sociology and social theory.

Over his long career, Levine published several works that are now considered landmarks of sociology. His “masterpiece,” according to former student Charles Camic, was Visions of the Sociological Tradition, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1995.

In that book, Levine traced the intellectual genealogy of the social sciences and argued that different traditions of social thought could productively inform one another. “It’s a brilliant analysis of theories and intellectual traditions, but also a very thoughtful effort to bring them into intellectual dialogue with one another,” said Camic, PhD’79, now a professor of sociology at Northwestern University. “The beauty with which it’s argued and the depth of his knowledge about these different intellectual traditions are astounding.”

Levine was also influential in promoting the work of German sociologist Georg Simmel and translated several of Simmel’s works into English. “He brought Simmel to awareness in the U.S.,” said Douglas Mitchell, a longtime editor at the University of Chicago Press, who worked with Levine throughout his career.

As a young scholar, Levine spent several years doing fieldwork in Ethiopia, which resulted in his first book, Wax and Gold: Tradition and Innovation in Ethiopian Culture. In 2004, Andreas Eshete, the president of Addis Ababa University, called Wax and Gold “an Ethiopian classic.”

Levine remained interested in Ethiopia throughout his life and served as an advisor on Ethiopia to the U.S. Senate, Department of State and other federal agencies. In 1999, he published Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society, an interdisciplinary study of Ethiopian history.

Levine used his experiences as dean of the College to inform his 2006 book, Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America, in which he explored the history of undergraduate education at UChicago and proposed ways to keep liberal education relevant in the modern world. “That’s one I think people will keep coming back to, more and more,” said Levine’s former student Dan Silver, PhD’08, now a professor at the University of Toronto.

Ethiopia, martial arts, intellectual history, pedagogy—the breadth of Levine’s interest and his openness to new ideas set him apart, colleagues and students say. “He was a great believer in different approaches in the hope that each could be enriched by the others,” Camic said. “I think it also came out of a deeper moral belief in the importance of human dialogue across all lines.”

Levine brought that spirit to his work as a teacher. Rigorous but never doctrinaire, Levine encouraged students to follow their own interests wherever they led. “His goal as a teacher was to produce students from whom he could learn later,” Silver said.

At the end of his life, Levine was at work on a book on the role of dialogue in social theory, according to his longtime friend and UChicago PhD student Jonathan Baskin. Baskin was surprised that Levine was trying to finish another book during his illness, but quickly realized the project brought Levine joy in his last months. “For me, it was inspiring to see someone who really did what he loved to the end,” Baskin said.

An embodiment of the UChicago spirit

Levine’s colleagues and collaborators remember him for his generosity, thoughtfulness and positive outlook. Despite his many commitments, he was never too busy to read a former student’s work or send an email of praise. Mitchell remembers Levine making a surprise appearance at his most recent birthday party, flowers, card and balloons in hand—a memory that, for Mitchell, captures both Levine’s kindness and his game-for-anything sense of spontaneity.

“He lived in a way that expressed his commitment and love for ideas,” Baskin said. “He was one of the embodiments of the University of Chicago spirit for me. He expressed so many of its best qualities.”

Donald Levine is survived by his wife, Ruth Levine; his children, Rachel Levine, William Levine and Theodore Levine; and his grandchildren, Natanyel Bohm-Levine, Zoe Melnick and Ari Melnick.

A memorial service will be held on April 9, 1 p.m. at KAM Isaiah Israel Congregation, 1100 E. Hyde Park Blvd. Shiva will be at the Levine residence on April 9 and 11, from 6 to 8:30 p.m. with a minyan at 7 p.m. both nights. Memorial contributions may be made to the Nature Conservancy or the Jacob J. Weinstein Fund of KAM Isaiah Israel.

Former director of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory to receive Alumni Medal from UChicago

Tue, 10 Mar 2015 16:30 -0500

The University of Chicago Alumni Association and the Alumni Board of Governors announce that leading physicist, Edward C. Stone, SM’59, PhD’64, will be awarded the Alumni Medal at the 74th Annual Alumni Awards Ceremony at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, June 6, 2015, in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, 5850 S. Woodlawn Ave.

The Alumni Medal recognizes achievement of an exceptional nature in any field, vocational or voluntary, covering an entire career. In addition to the Alumni Medal, the University will recognize distinguished alumni and faculty members who have made exceptional contributions to the University, to their professions and to their communities, across five different categories. This year’s 14 alumni award recipients include a visionary in the media industry, a renowned mathematician, a pre-eminent psychologist and a benefactor of the arts in Chicago.

The awards ceremony, which is free and open to the public, is a highlight of the University of Chicago’s Alumni Weekend. The 2015 alumni award recipients include:

Edward C. Stone, SM’59, PhD’64, Alumni Medal
Edward C. Stone is the David Morrisroe Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology and vice provost for Special Projects. He was director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory from 1991 to 2001, and since 1972, he has served as the chief scientist for the Voyager Mission. From 1985 to 2009, he was a member of the Board of Directors of the California Association for Research in Astronomy, which is responsible for building and operating the W. M. Keck Observatory. Stone is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the past president of the International Academy of Astronautics and past vice president of COSPAR. He also serves on the board of the W. M. Keck Foundation. Among his numerous scientific awards and honors, Stone received the National Medal of Science in 1991.

Louis Gordon Crovitz, AB’80, Professional Achievement Award
Louis Gordon Crovitz is a visionary in the media industry at a time of rapid change. He is the former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, where he led the transformation to digital from print publishing and where he writes the weekly “Information Age” column. He is also co-founder of Press+, a software service that enables hundreds of news publishers around the world to generate digital subscription revenues.

David Eisenbud, SB’66, SM’67, PhD’70, Professional Achievement Award
David Eisenbud is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. Eisenbud’s mathematical interests range widely over commutative and non-commutative algebra, algebraic geometry, topology and computer methods. His contributions include research, mentoring students, writing influential texts and creative leadership in the mathematics community.

Paul Ekman, EX’52, Professional Achievement Award
Paul Ekman, professor emeritus in psychology at the University of California, San Francisco, is the researcher and author best known for furthering our understanding of nonverbal behavior, encompassing facial expressions and gestures. A pre-eminent psychologist and co-discoverer of micro expressions with Friesen, Haggard and Isaacs, Ekman was named by TIME Magazine in 2009 as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Harvey Levin, JD’75, Professional Achievement Award
Harvey Levin is an American television producer, lawyer, legal analyst and celebrity reporter. He is the founder of entertainment news website TMZ.com. Prior to this, Levin worked in various legal roles in the entertainment industry. He has been in front of the camera as a legal reporter and host of The People’s Court.

Paul Beaver, AM’75, PhD’76, Public Service Award
Paul Beaver is a conservationist who is best known for his work in the Amazon and the protection of habitat and the social dimensions of conservation. He founded Amazonia Expeditions in 1981, one of the most respected Amazon tour companies in Peru. His company has become a vital member of the indigenous communities, constructing a clinic and school as well as creating a foundation to provide scholarships.

Howard Gottlieb, PhD’47, Public Service Award
Howard Gottlieb is general partner of Glen Eagle Partners, Ltd., a family private investment firm. He is a major contributor to the extended community in Chicago, serving on several trustee boards, and is credited for helping shape the landscape of the arts in the city. As an accomplished violinist, much of his work has focused around music.

Juri Taalman, SB’63, Public Service Award
Juri Taalman is a partner at the law firm of Brignole, Bush & Lewis, following ten years of international experience, which included serving as the American Bar Association’s liaison to the Republic of Estonia. When Estonia gained independence, Taalman was instrumental in its development of both legal and commercial structures as the special advisor to the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Estonia.

Kathleen Abbott, AB’95, Alumni Service Award
Kathleen Abbott received the Young Alumni Award in 2005 for her service to the Bay Area Alumni Cub, and has continued to be a strong leader even as she transitioned from San Francisco back to Chicago. She held many different leadership roles for the Chicago Club, and has been a great mentor to the current board members as well as students through the Student Alumni Committee.

Christopher Rupright, AB’86, Alumni Service Award
Christopher Rupright has been noted as an alumnus who leads by example, and who takes action without seeking recognition for his efforts. He and his wife have put the University at the center of their philanthropic goals and have taken a holistic approach, from interacting with prospective students, parents and peers; sitting on the Visiting Committee on the College and Student Activities and in many other ways.

Sean Ahmed, AB’06, Young Alumni Service Award
Sean Ahmed started “Go Maroons” with several classmates during their undergraduate studies. As sports editor of the Maroon newspaper, Sean was able to leverage his close ties to the athletic teams and find a way to fill a gap in delivery of information to alumni, parents and friends, who weren’t able to watch the teams on game days, through his broadcast and commentary.

Gahan Christenson, AB’03, Young Alumni Service Award
Gahan Christenson has been a consistent leader in the alumni community in the Washington area, where she is a trial attorney for the federal government. Alumni in the D.C. area look to Christenson as a source of information for all things UChicago-related, allowing for robust and innovative programming for community members.

Leo Kocher, MBA’87, Norman Maclean Faculty Award
Leo Kocher was hired in the fall of 1979 as a faculty member in the University of Chicago’s Department of Physical Education and Athletics. At UChicago he has served as an assistant football coach, taught in the Physical Education curriculum and has been the head coach of the Intercollegiate Wrestling Program for his 35 years with the University.

William C. Wimsatt, Norman Maclean Faculty Award
William C. Wimsatt is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and is on the Committee on Evolutionary Biology and the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science. Wimsatt teaches and publishes work centered on the philosophy of the inexact sciences and the study of complex systems. He is recognized for his ability to help students contextualize problems that are otherwise too “messy” to be tractable within any one academic field, using an interdisciplinary lens.

Joseph Neubauer elected chairman of University of Chicago’s Board of Trustees

Fri, 27 Feb 2015 12:12 -0600

The University of Chicago’s Board of Trustees has elected Joseph Neubauer, MBA’65, as its next chairman. Neubauer will begin his three-year term as chairman after the board’s annual meeting on May 28.

Neubauer succeeds Andrew M. Alper, AB’80, MBA’81, who has served as chairman since 2009.

Neubauer, who is the retired chairman of ARAMARK Corporation, has served on the University’s Board of Trustees since 1992, and became vice chairman in 2012. He is also chair of The University of Chicago Campaign: Inquiry and Impact. This most ambitious and comprehensive campaign in the University’s history is targeted to raise $4.5 billion to support faculty, students, and programs of research, education, clinical care and impact across the full scope of the University’s work in Chicago and around the world.

“I’ve had the pleasure of working closely with Joe Neubauer in his many roles at the University of Chicago over the years,” Alper said. “In particular, Joe has been an active and engaged member of the board’s executive committee, and President Zimmer and I have found his advice and counsel invaluable. Joe is a seasoned leader, and the nature of his university philanthropy demonstrates a deep appreciation of what makes the University of Chicago so special. I look forward to a seamless transition of board leadership over the next several months.”

“Joe Neubauer has a deep understanding of the University of Chicago’s potential to transform and enrich lives, grounded in his own experience and wide-ranging interests,” said President Robert J. Zimmer. “His philanthropic generosity and hard work on the University’s behalf have greatly enhanced the University’s capacity to make an impact around the world. With his new role as chairman of the board, I know his leadership will make great contributions to the University’s ability to further enhance our work in research, education and impact.”

“The University of Chicago has always occupied a very special place in my life,” Neubauer said. “The intellectual prowess and the global reach of the University have inspired me personally and professionally for over 50 years. It is therefore a great honor for me to work closely with President Zimmer and my fellow board members during this ambitious period in the University’s distinguished history.”

Neubauer and his wife Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer have a long history of generous philanthropic giving. They received the University of Chicago Medal in 2013. Awarded by the Board of Trustees, the University Medal recognizes distinguished service of the highest order to the University by an individual or a couple.

The Neubauers’ major donations to the university focus on investments in human capital. Their first gift was an endowed chair in entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 1996. More recently, their 2012 landmark gift established the Neubauer Family Collegium for Culture and Society, an ambitious initiative to expand the boundaries of humanistic study. Last December, the Neubauer Family Foundation sponsored two new programs that remove barriers to admission and matriculation for academically gifted international students and students from Hispanic communities. The family also has endowed numerous student scholarships and professorships, and supports the Oriental Institute’s Neubauer Expedition to Zincirli in southern Turkey.

Neubauer’s parents fled Nazi Germany in 1938. Born in Israel, Neubauer came to the United States at age 15 to live with his aunt and uncle in Danvers, Mass. He studied engineering at Tufts University, working his way through school waiting tables and running a late-night milk and sandwich delivery service from his fraternity house kitchen.

After earning an MBA at Chicago, Neubauer took positions at Chase Manhattan Bank and PepsiCo. In 1979 he joined ARAMARK, a worldwide provider of food, hospitality and other professional services, as chief financial officer. He served for nearly three decades as ARAMARK’s chief executive officer and later board chairman. During his tenure the company grew revenues from $2 billion to $14 billion and employed more than 250,000 people in 23 countries. He currently serves on the boards of Macy’s, Inc. and Mondelēz International, and recently retired from the board of Verizon. He also serves as chairman of the board of the Barnes Foundation and is the immediate past chairman of the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans.

As noted above, he was elected to the University’s Board of Trustees in 1992 and became its vice chairman in 2012. He also serves as chairman of the Alumni Relations and Development Committee, a member of the board’s Executive Committee, and as a life member of the Council on Chicago Booth.

Neubauer has two children, Melissa Anderson and Lawrence Neubauer, MBA’95, JD’95.