San Francisco mayor to speak
at campus events
Willie L. Brown Jr., mayor of San Francisco, will be the featured guest at two events on campus on Monday, Oct. 12. At
4 p.m., he will speak informally at a tea
in the Calhoun College master's house,
189 Elm St. Later that day, at 7:30 p.m., he will address the Yale Political Union in
Rm. 102 of Linsly-Chittenden Hall,
63 High St. Both events are open to the public. Members of the Yale Political Union are admitted free to the evening talk; there is an admission fee of $3 for nonmembers.
Brown was sworn in as San Francisco's first African American mayor in January 1996. He previously served for 31 years in the California State Assembly, to which he was elected 16 times. In 1980 he was elected the first African American speaker of the assembly, a post he held for an unprecedented 15 years. While in the assembly, Brown became known for his advocacy of civil and human rights. Newsweek magazine has called him one of the 25 "most dynamic" mayors in America. His many honors include a Presidential Award from the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, the African American Parent Council's Award of Honor and the National Conference of Black Mayors President's Award.
Equal protection is topic of Law School's Thomas Lecture
Frank H. Wu, associate professor and supervising attorney at the Howard University School of Law, will deliver the 1998 James A. Thomas Lecture on Monday
Oct. 12, at 4 p.m. in Rm. 127 of the Law School, 127 Wall St. His talk, which is free and open to the public, will be on the topic "Beyond Black and White: Now Adding Asian Americans Changes Equal Protection Analysis."
Wu has been active in fighting against the abolishment of affirmative action. He has testified before members of Congress on that issue and has debated that and other subjects on national television and radio, including the Oprah Winfrey Show, Fox Cable and National Public Radio. In 1994, he worked as a campaign organizer with Californians Against Prop. 187, an anti-immigration ballot referendum. He began an academic career at Howard University in 1995. He has written articles on such topics as affirmative action for Asian Americans and immigration reform, and is coauthor of the book "Beyond Self-Interest: Asian Pacific Americans Toward a Community of Justice, a policy analysis of affirmative action."
Pianist will present
"Un-Master Class"
Pianist and educator William Westney, an alumnus of the School of Music, will present an "Un-Master Class" on Tuesday, Oct. 13, at 7 p.m. in Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall, 470 College St. Participants at the event, which is free and open to the public, will be students at the School of Music.
Since 1989, Westney has been offering "Un-Master Classes" in music schools around the country with the goal of encouraging young musicians to shift their attention from trying to achieve technical perfection and please their teachers to communicating with an audience. He was the top piano prize winner of the Geneva International Competition and has appeared in European television broadcasts and as a soloist with such major orchestras as L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and the Houston, San Antonio and New Haven symphonies. His solo recitals include appearances at New York's Lincoln Center, the National Gallery and Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and St. John's Smith Square in London. He has been honored three times with teaching awards, including the Yale School of Music Alumni Association's prestigious "Certificate of Merit" for his "distinctive and innovative" contributions to the teaching of musical performance.
Physician to speak about
challenge of climbing Mt. Everest
Dr. John B. West, an internationally renowned respiratory physiologist, will present the fifth James D. Hardy Memorial Lecture on Wednesday, Oct. 14, at 4 p.m. in Rm. 110 of the Jane Ellen Hope Building, 315 Cedar St. His topic will be "The Physiological Challenge of Climbing Mt. Everest." The event will be followed by a reception at the Peter B. Gordon Memorial Library in the John Pierce Laboratory,
290 Congress Ave., and will conclude with a 6:30 p.m. dinner. The public is welcome to attend. For reservations and additional information, contact Catherine Maresca at 562-9901, ext. 227.
West is professor of medicine and physiology at the University of California, San Diego. He has made two treks to the summit of Mt. Everest, the first as a physiologist on Sir Edmund Hillary's Himalayan Scientific and Mountaineering Expedition in 1961. He made his second climb 20 years later with the American Medical Research Expedition. He also has acted as a scientific adviser to NASA, helping design physiological experiments that were carried out in space. He is the author of 17 books and more than 300 research articles.
The Hardy lecture series honors James D. Hardy, the fourth director of the John Pierce Laboratory and a professor at Yale 1961-74. Hardy is best remembered for his application of physical principles to the understanding of thermal physiology.
Noted biologist to discuss 'tyranny of metaphors in biology'
Richard C. Lewontin, who pioneered the field of molecular population genetics about 25 years ago, will deliver a lecture titled "The Tyranny of Metaphors in Biology" on Wednesday, Oct. 14, at 4 p.m. at the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St. His talk is free and open to the public.
Lewontin is the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of Biology at Harvard University. He has devoted particular attention to the philosophical and social implications of genetics and evolutionary theory. He is the author, most recently, of "Human Diversity" and of "Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA." Apart from his work in the biological sciences, Lewontin has also engineered domes for Buckminster Fuller and has for many years been involved in the radical science movement.
Lewontin's talk is sponsored by the Issues in Science and the Humanities program (ISH), an interdisciplinary lecture and discussion series providing a forum for exchange between the natural sciences and the humanities. Based at the Whitney Humanities Center, ISH is coordinated by Professors Michael Holquist, Neil Ribe and Robert Shulman. For more information, call 785-6622 or send email to meko.owens
@yale.edu.
Gershon Lecturer to discuss immune responses
Dr. Ralph M. Steinman will deliver this year's Richard K. Gershon Memorial Lecture on Wednesday, Oct. 14. In his lecture, titled "Dendritic Cells and the Control of Immunity," he will discuss the role of T cells in regulating immune responses. The lecture will begin at 5 p.m. in Rm. 216 of the Jane Ellen Hope Building, 315 Cedar St. It will be followed by a reception in Rm. 208 of the Boyer Center for Molecular Medicine, 295 Congress Ave. Both events are free and open to the public.
Steinman, who is the Henry G. Kunkel Professor of Immunology at Rockefeller University, is best known as the discoverer of a novel antigen presenting cell, which he named the dendritic cell for its branched morphology. These cells account for most of the ability of antigens to activate T cells. Steinman, a Canadian native, has spent most of his career studying dendritic cells, and has received many awards for his work.
The Richard K. Gershon Lecture is named in honor of a former Yale faculty member who was a pioneer in the field of regulation of immune responses by T lymphocytes. Gershon died in 1983.
Short story writer will talk about her work at master's tea
Judy Budnitz, author of the recent short story collection "Flying Leap," will discuss her work at a tea at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 15, at the Calhoun College master's house, 189 Elm St. The event is free, and the public is welcome.
Budnitz is currently working toward a master's degree in creative writing at New York University and is a cartoonist for The Village Voice. "Flying Leap," which was published in January of this year, is a collection of 23 short stories exploring everyday life and its oddities. In a review of the collection in the New York Times Book Review, a critic wrote that Budnitz has "a bionic ear for clever dialogue and a picturesque writing style with a fearless tone that rarely wavers, no matter how quirky the conceit." A graduate of Harvard University, Budnitz received several creative writing prizes while a student there. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Story and Glimmer Train, and one of her works is included in the anthology "25 and Under." Her stories have also been broadcast on National Public Radio. Budnitz is the creator of an animated film, titled "Hershel," which premiered two years ago at the Annecy International Animation Festival and was also screened at the Atlanta Film and Video Festival.
Head Start for infants, toddlers
is topic of Bush Center talk
John Love and Ellen Kisker, researchers at Mathematica Policy Research in Princeton, New Jersey, will talk about their evaluation of the nation's new Early Head Start program for infants and toddlers on Friday, Oct. 16, at noon in Rm. 119 of the Hall of the Graduate Studies, 320 York St. Their talk, titled "Evaluating Dynamic Early Childhood Programs in Changing Times: The Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project," is sponsored by the Bush Center in Child Development and Social Policy. It is free and open to the public.
Love, a developmental psychologist, has 27 years of experience conducting research, program evaluations and policy studies with Head Start, other early care and education programs, as well as family programs. He has devoted much of his career to understanding issues in providing comprehensive services to low-income families and their children, and is currently directing the national evaluation of Early Head Start.
Kisker, an economist, is deputy project director of the Early Head Start evaluation. She directed the Profile of Child Care Settings Study for the U.S. Department of Education and also played a key role in evaluating the Teenage Parent Demonstration, a mandatory work/welfare program targeted to teenage parents. She and her colleagues assessed the long-term impacts of the program on the economic self-sufficiency of teenage parents and on their children's well-being in early elementary school.
For further information, call 432-9935.