Yale Bulletin and Calendar

March 19, 2004|Volume 32, Number 22

In the News
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"Now, companies are thinking that being a faith-friendly employer is a natural follow-on to being a family-friendly employer."

-- David Miller, executive director of the Center for Faith and Culture at the Divinity School, "Religion in the Media: A Look at Recent Books, CDs and Web Sites," The Dallas Morning News, March 4, 2004.

"What is lost when a language is lost is a world."

-- Stephen Anderson, "Languishing Languages Carry Whole Worlds of Ideas; Experts Lament That Native Tongues of Many Are on the Way Out," The Dallas Morning News, Feb. 23, 2004.

"What's missing now is this sense we had in the 1990s that American companies had become ultracompetitive. But it's more than that: politically, both sides are pandering to voters who feel more insecure, and both sides feel that extolling America as an exporter is incredibly unsexy as an election strategy."

-- Jeffrey E. Garten, dean of the School of Management, about politicians' reluctance to focus on the effect of globalization, "Campaign Focus: Old Jobs, Not a New Economy," The New York Times, Feb. 22, 2004.

"As the competition for skilled workers intensifies, the world is becoming a more urban place. In 1950, only 30 percent of the world's population lived in urban centers. By 2000, city dwellers represented nearly half of the global population. Canada is mirroring this trend by becoming one of the most highly urbanized nations."

-- Nalin Sahni, graduate student at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and Jordan Petty in their article "Talent Magnet: Young People Want To Be in the Centre of the Action," Calgary Herald (Alberta, Canada), Feb. 22, 2004.

"The World Trade Center site is a special case. Here you had a bunch of terrorists who murdered 3,000 people. You can't put just anything on this site. You have to show those terrorists that we will come back better than before. Of course, not every building in every city can be iconic; we'd go crazy in that kind of world. You also need ordinary buildings that help create places that people want to be in."

-- Alexander Garvin, adjunct professor at the School of Architecture, about the resurgence in modernist architectural designs, "Be Innovative, But Cherish the Old Things," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Wisconsin), Feb. 23, 2004.

"There cannot be human development without economic growth, and a fundamental ingredient of growth is the private sector."

-- Ernesto Zedillo, director of the Center for the Study of Globalization, "Unleashing Entrepreneurship: Making Business Work for the Poor," Africa News, March 1, 2004.

"You're undiversified. Your home's value tends to be correlated to your job, so your job gets in trouble. Your house goes down in value. All your assets start disappearing. And you're already highly leveraged. You end up losing everything."

-- Barry Nalebuff, the Milton Steinbach Professor of Management, on the need for protection for homeowners, "Bubbleproof Your Home," Money, March 2004.

"French politicians are quick to suggest the law [banning ostensible religious items in public schools] only contains language that purports to protect students and young women, and that presumably it is not anti-Muslim. What such reasoning does is emphasize that before Muslim girls began to become very visible with their head scarves, other students were wearing religious signs such as skullcaps, stars of David, crucifixes, or images of the Virgin Mary. Yet there was never a pressing need for a pro-secularist law in a country where school vacations remain based around Catholic holidays."

-- Farid Laroussi, assistant professor of French, in his article "France Can't Abide 'Threat' to Its Culture," New Haven Register, March 10, 2004.

"The rights of gay people is a moral and civil liberties issue. It is ironic that members of some black churches would discriminate against homosexuals given the black church's historical role in fighting for a more just, beloved community and society."

-- The Reverend Frederick J. Streets, University chaplain, in his letter to the editor "Gay Marriage: A Variety of Lenses," The New York Times, March 1, 2004.

"By definition, the unforeseen, the unpredictable makes the outcome of an election hard to know, especially when we are eight or nine months from Election Day. The things that tend to happen are the things that are hard to think about in advance."

-- David Greenberg, lecturer in political science and history, "X Factors; Post-9/11 Dangers from al Qaeda, Iraq, Economy Could Jolt Bush-Kerry Race," ABC News, March 5, 2004.

"There is a great synergy between teaching bankruptcy law and doing bankruptcy appellate work. When you teach, you're explaining what can be very complicated concepts to students and helping them understand them. That's not all that different from what you're doing when you're arguing in the Court of Appeals or arguing in the Supreme Court."

-- G. Eric Brunstad, visiting lecturer at the Law School, "G. Eric Brunstad: Hashing Out Tomorrow's Bankruptcy Law," BCD News and Comment, March 5, 2004.

"In Athens, people without property, status, or proper breeding were part of the governing system. Every citizen thought of himself as a decision-maker."

-- Cynthia Farrar, lecturer in political science and ethics, politics and economics, on the goal of the modern-day Citizen's Forum, "Beyond Opinion Polls: Athens Comes to New Haven," The Next American City, Feb. 2004.

"The analogy I use with patients is, you hit your hand with a hammer, and the injury is done, but you look at your hand and it looks the same, even if it hurts. But 48 hours later, it's black and blue and swollen."

-- Dr. Lawrence M. Brass, professor of neurology and epidemiology and public health, on the effect of a stroke on brain cells, "The War on Strokes," Newsweek, March 8, 2004.

"[S]tarting with the Carter and Reagan administrations, either engaging in or attempting to engage in a same-sex marriage has been the basis for exclusion and expulsion from the U.S. military. So in an interesting twist, the administration of Ronald Reagan was one of the first administrations in the United States to recognize same-sex marriages, except in a very perverse sense; it was recognizing them as a basis for exclusion from the U.S. military."

-- William Eskridge Jr., the John A. Garver Professor of Jurisprudence, "Professors Richard Duncan and William Eskridge Jr. Answer Questions About the Legality of Gay Marriage and Civil Unions," "All Things Considered," National Public Radio, Feb. 18, 2004.

"It's not just about marriage law, it's a matter of law generally. If I were to go to Nevada and enter into a contract for prostitution, I couldn't get that contract enforced in other states [because] they would say, 'Prostitution? Maybe it's legal in Nevada, but we don't care what's legal in Nevada.'"

-- Lea Brilmayer, the Howard M. Holtzmann Professor of International Law, on the question of the legality of a gay marriage in another state, "Senate Hearings Begin on Gay-Marriage Amendment," Salt Lake Tribune (Utah), March 4, 2004.

"Pain is a still relatively unresearched topic. It has not historically been a high priority. People don't die of it, and it has been treated as a symptom as opposed to a disease. It affects all areas of medicine, so nobody owns it."

-- Dr. Robert Kerns, associate professor of psychiatry and neurology, "Trapped in a World of Hurt," The Hartford Courant, Feb. 29, 2004.

"The classic women blues singers have always received more attention from jazz critics and historians, the folks who canonized the blues tradition."

-- John Szwed, the John M. Musser Professor of Anthropology and American Studies, "Revisionists Sing New Blues History," The New York Times, Feb. 28, 2004.

"The [provocative children's] clothing is a deeper sign that reflects a larger trend and set of issues. The stores are not the problem here. The problem is the market."

-- Alan Kazdin, the John M. Musser Professor of Psychology and director of the Child Study Center, "Trendy or Trashy? Provocative Preteen Fashions Draw Fire From Moms," New Haven Register, March 7, 2004.

"One would expect that the travel advisories from most Western embassies in Uganda's capital, Kampala, telling their citizens not to travel to northern Uganda would raise more questions than eyebrows, but they seldom do. No one wants to know what problems lurk there."

-- Norbert Mao, postgraduate fellow in the World Fellowship Program, in his article "Forget Iraq: Uganda in Tighter Spot," The Monitor (Uganda), March 3, 2004.

"Chiang [Kai-shek] did have courage and determination, and an apparently unshakable belief in his own historic role as China's leader. He did wish to be his country's moral pole star. He was temperate in his physical needs, unostentatious and not personally corruptible. On the other hand, he was wooden in speech and manner, aloof, unimaginative. Despite his courage he was a poor commander in chief, constantly meddling in his senior officers' plans, ignorant of logistics, heedless of casualties and battlefield agonies. "

-- Jonathan Spence, Sterling Professor of History, in his review of Jonathan Fenby's "Chiang Kai-shek; China's Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost," "Before the East Was Red," The New York Times, Feb. 29, 2004.

"We are rapidly becoming a plutocracy and an oligarchy. Our voters just do not know how to think. In order to think, you have to have a memory. Without having read the best that has been written, you won't have anything to work with."

-- Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, "Harold Bloom: What Books to Build on," The Hartford Courant, Feb. 29, 2004.

"You get such a sense of community, working together like this. And it's good for the farmers, too -- to associate a face with the food they're growing. We're working with them to adjust our menus to help them use what they're growing. And one farmer has agreed to grow an acre of garlic just for us."

-- James Barnett, manager of Berkeley College dining services, about Yale's Sustainable Food Project, "Blue Plate Specials; It's Easier To Get Into Harvard Than the Berkeley College Dining Hall," New Haven Register, March 7, 2004.

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

Yale scientist on team that discovered new planetoid

Robert Blocker has been reappointed to third term . . .

Center to foster research on cerebral cortex

Bulldogs' Nate Lawrie busy preparing himself for NFL Draft

Political scientist Ian Shapiro named YCIAS director

Zbigniew Brzezinski . . . to present talk on campus

Magic, comic mayhem prevail in re-telling of old tale

'Digital Cops in a Virtual Environment' will explore . . .

Conference to consider 'The Future of Secularism'

Exhibit features works by artist who combined fact and fantasy . . .

NIDA director discusses complicated causes . . . of drug addiction

Castle Lectures to explore materialism in today's culture

English faculty to present staged reading of 'Pentecost'

'Enclave' to explore architectural aspects of ports of commerce

In Focus: Office of Cooperative Research