Yale Bulletin and Calendar

August 23-30, 1999

Volume 28, Number 1

. . . In the News . . .

"[M]any minority parents who are serious about their child's education insist that their kids study, do homework, but the same parents are seldom seen by their kids reading a lot or doing anything studious."

-- Psychology professor Edmund W. Gordon "Reason Is Sought for Lag by Blacks in School Effort," The New York Times, July 4, 1999.

"In short, Schnitzler knew his subject only too well. Once started on his sexual adventures -- and he started early -- he never stopped. ... He was a sexual athlete whose formidable capacities never quite matched his ever-alert appetites."

-- Sterling Professor Emeritus of History Peter Gay, on Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931), whose novella is the basis of the film "Eyes Wide Shut," in Gay's article "Sex and Longing in Old Vienna," The New York Times, July 11, 1999.

"It is hard to think of any public policy less controversial than the removal of criminal aliens."

-- Law School professor Peter Schuck, "Deportation Law with Little Leniency Gives a Swift Boot to Criminal Aliens," Wall Street Journal, July 9, 1999.

"There are too many nonprofits today and the reason is simply the difficulty in getting them to merge."

-- School of Management professor Barry Nalebuff, on the growth of citizen-led organizations, "A Force Now In the World, Citizens Flex Social Muscle," The New York Times, July 10, 1999.

"You had a nice, controlled environment in the Kingdome. Now, you're going to have both wind and temperature changes."

-- Physics professor Robert Adair, about the Seattle Mariners' new, outdoors stadium. "Safeco Field: Ballpark by Design," The News Tribune of Tacoma, WA, July 11, 1999.

"If you walk around now, you see few lawns that are perfect. ... People are trying different landscaping plants and shrubbery to attract wildlife."

-- Forestry School associate dean Gordon T. Geballe, "The Bloom Is Off the Lawn," The Hartford Courant, July 10, 1999.

"[J]uries simply don't have a way of rationally figuring out punitive damages."

-- Law School professor George Priest, "Verdict Ordering GM to Pay $4.9B Not Likely to Stand Appeal," USA Today and elsewhere, July 12, 1999.

"For the past 20 years, the left has been in a rout. Whole movements have collapsed; capitalism seems everywhere triumphant. For obvious reasons, we have been doing a lot of soul-searching. And gradually, a broad consensus has emerged: Our great mistake was naive utopianism. Fixed on daydreams of a radically different, impossible society, we ignored human realities and human nature."

-- Anthropology professor David Graeber, in his article "We Are All Utopians," In These Times, Aug. 8, 1999.

"The truth is that Medicare is controlling its costs -- more effectively than the private insurance market. For last year and this year taken together, Medicare's costs will be essentially unchanged. Over the same period, health insurance premiums in the private sector will have jumped about 15 percent."

-- School of Management faculty Theodore R. Marmor and Mark A. Goldberg, in their article "The Great Medicare Debate: Round 1," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 7, 1999.

"[T]here was much less speculative investment fueled by excessive borrowing in international capital markets and much less accumulation of short-term foreign liabilities, as was the case among Taiwan's neighbors."

-- Yale Center for International and Area Studies director Gustav Ranis, "Eminent Economist Reviews Taiwan's Economic Policies," China News, July 23, 1999.

"There's not that much emotion in this country's public life, and these are opportunities for people, even in a thin way, to acknowledge an emotional response to each other. ... These events build solidarity."

-- Sociologist Joshua Gamson, on the public response to the death of John F. Kennedy Jr., "In Death, He Transcends Mere Fame," Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1999.

"What the Kennedys -- and all of us -- experience is the vagaries of life."

-- St. Thomas More chaplain Rev. Robert Beloin, "Experts Debunk Kennedy Curse," New Haven Register, July 25, 1999.

"Anyone undertaking a life of Augustine today has to cope with the double whammy of writing about the man who practically invented autobiography as a genre and has also been the subject of one of the finest intellectual biographies of our time."

-- Sterling Professor of History Jaroslav Pelikan, in his article "The Man Who Loved Words," The New Republic, July 26, 1999.

"When people write about adolescence, they remember the pain about that time, the date they didn't get, the cliques and that their face was bursting with zits."

-- Yale Child Study Center psychiatrist Dr. John Schowalter, "Life Through the Eyes of Teen-Age Girls," The New York Times, July 18, 1999.

"This field [molecular electronics or "moletronics"] is still in its infancy. But the results are starting to come in faster. Over the last five years, we've come from an incredible idea to the point where we might be able to do something."

-- Chemist Mark Reed, "Molecule-sized Switches Promise Computing Leap," International Herald Tribune, July 17, 1999.

"It might look like a blemish."

-- School of Medicine professor Dr. Robert S. Baltimore, on the difficulty of detecting bat bites, "Rabies Can Be Beaten," USA Weekend, July 16-18, 1999.

"A lot of people think that a butterfly is really delicate, but they have really strong legs that they use to grab onto flowers and twigs."

-- Peabody Museum curator Larry Gall, "Butterfly Census Tallies Record 29 Species," Connecticut Post, July 20, 1999.

"If the immune system doesn't destroy the E. coli bacteria before it releases its toxin, there's not much doctors can do. There are no antibiotics that will work against the poison."

-- School of Medicine pediatrician Dr. Norman Siegel, "Haylee's Ordeal," Reader's Digest, July, 1999.

"Japan sort of thought of itself as a country which really wasn't part of Asia for a good part of the post-World War II era. And I think now the North Korean missile shot really showed that she's not that far off the Asian mainland, and she lives in a very dangerous neighborhood."

-- School of Management political scientist Paul Bracken on why Japan may be rethinking its pacifist views, National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," Aug. 2, 1999.

"Most people would swear I'd been on a trading desk."

-- School of Management adjunct professor Frank Fabozzi, "The Boswell of Bonds," Bloomberg, July 1999.

"Shakespeare makes perfectly clear that women in general have to marry down and that men are narcissistic and not to be trusted and so forth. On the whole, he gives us a darker vision of human males than human females."

-- Sterling Professor of Humanities Harold Bloom, "In the Battle of the Sexes, This Word Is a Weapon," The New York Times, July 25, 1999.

"In the Southern Hemisphere, Chile is so much better than just about anywhere else. Anyone who wants to build anything in the Southern Hemisphere wants to put it in Chile."

-- Astronomer Charles Bailyn, "On Andrean Peaks Astronomers Find Vantage Points of the First Magnitude," Chronicle of Higher Education, July 23, 1999.

"The most important lesson of the recent suspected Chinese spy case is not that we must guard against foreign nationals who are conspiring to infiltrate our national laboratories. Rather, it's that American scientific pre-eminence is at risk because there are so few good young American physicists, and labs must fill their ranks instead with foreign-born scientists."

-- Senior research physicist Alan Chodos, "Wanted: American Physicists," The New York Times, July 23, 1999.

"Normally Indian attacks didn't come in midwinter. The letter reaffirms that it was an enormously scary time for people in outposts like Deerfield."

-- Historian John Demos, on a recently auctioned letter anticipating an attack by Native Americans on settlers in Deerfield, Massachusetts in 1704, "Predicting a Defining Moment," The New York Times, July 23, 1999.

"One difference is that in a bottle of water, once the bottle is sealed, that's it -- nothing happens to it. The bottler can tell you exactly what's in the bottle."

-- School of Medicine microbiologist Stephen Edberg, "Despite Bottled-Water Boom, Experts Question Hype," The News and Observer (Raleigh, N.C.), Aug. 4, 1999.

T H I SW E E K ' SS T O R I E S

Study finds undercurrent of anger in U.S. workplaces

Translating Shakespeare into sign language was a lesson in the art of communication

'Alternative' therapies not favored over conventional medical care, says survey

Robert Blocker to continue as dean of the School of Music

Mary E. Miller is new master of Saybrook College

Array of appointments announced at Graduate School

Emeritus Faculty

In the News

Women under 50 at greater risk of dying from heart attacks than are men

The world was a classroom for Yale students this summer

Center's creative use of computers aids medical research

Exhibits at Beinecke Library celebrate the pioneering spirit

Stanford-Yale forum will boost junior faculty's skills in legal scholarship

Psychopharmocologist Dr. Robert Byck dies; discovered properties of MSG, THC

Awards support research and outreach programs at Yale Cancer Center

Program on Nonprofit Organizations names new leaders

Hydrogeology expert joins School of Forestry

Yale Rep's coming season features broad spectrum of plays

Correction: Fourth scholar-athlete identified

Campus Notes