- Jonathan Landman ’74 is elected alumni trustee
- Lisa A. Raskin Named John William Ward Professor
- Nine receive honorary degrees
- Women’s lacrosse wins NCAA title
- From the Folger
- Verbatim
 Jonathan Landman ’74 |
Jonathan Landman ’74 is elected alumni trustee
From a field of three candidates, the alumni have elected Jonathan Landman ’74 as alumni trustee. Landman is the metropolitan editor at The New York Times,where he has worked since 1987. After graduating from Amherst with a degree in history, Landman earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and worked at a series of major newspapers, including The Chicago Sun- Times, Newsday and the New York Daily News, before moving to the Times. Since joining the Times, he has served as deputy Washington editor and was editor of the “Week in Review” for five years before becoming the metropolitan editor in 1999.
As metropolitan editor, Landman has been pivotal in two of the Times’ most notable recent events. He emerged as something of an editorial hero in the recent scandal over Jayson Blair, the young reporter who was found to have been fabricating facts and plagiarizing other writers over several years. Landman warned the newspaper’s senior management about Blair well before the scandal became public.
He was also responsible for overseeing the Times’ “Portraits of Grief,” the widely acclaimed series that profiled each of the victims of the terrorist attacks of September 2001. The pieces were not conventional obituaries, but life portraits, and gave all the victims equal coverage regardless of their jobs or accomplishments. Held up by other publications as exemplars of creative and insightful journalism, they provoked a remarkable reaction in the public. “It was really the most extraordinary response I’ve ever seen to anything in a newspaper,” Landman said. “We got scores of letters and e-mails from readers, all couched in the language of gratitude, which, if you’ve been around a newspaper, is stunning, because when most people [write], it’s because they’re mad about something. Some of the letters are as full of poetry as the portraits themselves.” The series was cited as a significant element of the post-attack coverage that won the newspaper seven Pulitzer Prizes in 2002.
Landman credits Amherst with preparing him for success in his job: “The New York Times . . . is a room full of smart, accomplished, independent-minded people. They are confident types; proud to be ornery. Respect for authority is not high on the list of qualities they admire. To lead them, which has been my job as the head of the newspaper’s largest department since [1999] . . . is to be reminded daily of the central lesson I gratefully took from Amherst 29 years ago. That is the lesson of intellectual humility: the certainty that no matter how deep your knowledge and powerful your convictions, you had better be ready to be wrong.”
Landman and his wife, Bonnie Van Gilder, have two children. Rachel, 19, recently completed her first year at Amherst, and Aaron, 14, will enter Stuyvesant High School in the fall. Landman is a marathon runner, cello player and a self-described “incorrigible New Yorker and Yankee fan.” His six-year term as alumni trustee began July 1.
Lisa A. Raskin Named John William Ward Professor
The trustees have appointed Lisa A. Raskin to the newly established John William Ward Professorship. Raskin joined the Amherst faculty as a professor of psychology and neuroscience in 1979, and became dean of the faculty at Amherst in 1995; she stepped down from that position at the end of June to return to teaching and research.
Raskin earned a B.A. degree from Skidmore College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University. She concentrated her research on the biological correlates of childhood disorders. Now she is expanding her focus a bit, to teach a course in 2004 on the history of psychiatry. To prepare for that course, Raskin will spend the next year traveling and studying in Europe.
In her eight years as dean, Raskin concentrated on faculty well-being and departmental integrity. She increased support for faculty research and led the college through a reassessment of its student honors program. Under Raskin’s leadership, the college improved its use of classroom technology, increased funds available for student research and received many grants—from the Mellon Foundation and elsewhere—in support of teaching, pedagogy and keeping retired faculty active in Amherst’s intellectual life.
Before becoming dean, Raskin had been a Trustee Faculty Fellow at Amherst, a Harold W. Dobbs Fellow at Princeton, a guest researcher in child psychology at the National Institutes of Health and a research affiliate in pediatric neurology at the Yale University School of Medicine.
The John William Ward Professorship, established in 2003 by grant from an anonymous member of the Board of Trustees, recognizes a senior faculty member at Amherst who is an accomplished scholar and teacher and who has served the college community with distinction on a key committee or in an administrative post. “I met Bill when I was being interviewed at Amherst in 1979,” Raskin says of former Amherst College president John William Ward. “Although I never had the opportunity to get to know him well, I do know that he was very much admired as a faculty member and an administrator. I am therefore so grateful to be the first recipient of this chair, and particularly thankful to the donor who thought to honor Bill Ward by creating a professorship in his name.”
Nine receive honorary degrees
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At the annual Commencement exercises on May 25, the college awarded honorary degrees to nine individuals. Those honored were:
Tom Gerety, Amherst’s president for the past nine years. Under his leadership, the college’s endowment more than doubled, and The Amherst College Campaign raised nearly $270 million to support teaching, research and scholarship. During his presidency, most of Amherst’s academic and athletic buildings were renovated and an ambitious plan for the renovation of student dormitories is now under way. He also established a common orientation for first-year students and established fellowships and internships to support students’ involvement in community service in the U.S. and abroad. He left Amherst June 30 to become the executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. Doctor of Laws.
Rosanne Haggerty ’82, founder and president of New York City’s Common Ground Community, a nonprofit housing and community-development organization dedicated to solving homelessness. She has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and serves on the boards of several other service organizations. She is a life member of the Amherst College Board of Trustees. Doctor of Humane Letters.
Asma Jahangir, the Pakistani human-rights lawyer who has focused particularly on the plight of women and children. She has founded the Women’s Action Forum and the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and is a special rapporteur of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. She has also written two books, Divine Sanction? and Children of a Lesser God, and was awarded the 2001 Millennium Peace Prize for Women. Doctor of Laws.
LaSalle Doheny Leffall, Jr., the preeminent cancer surgeon. The first African American to be president of the American Cancer Society and the American College of Surgeons, he is the Charles R. Drew Professor of Surgery at Howard University College of Medicine. He is also chair of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation and executive vice president of the National Housing Partnership Foundation. Doctor of Science.
Charles Ashby Lewis ’64, who leads the Investment Banking Group at Merrill Lynch in Chicago and who has been a major supporter of Amherst College, including serving as a life member of the Board of Trustees and co-chairing The Amherst Campaign with H. Axel Schupf ’57. Together with his wife, Penny Sebring, he has established the Lewis-Sebring Professorship in Latin American and Latino Culture and the Bender-Lewis Scholarship Fund, and also provided leadership for the renovation of Valentine Hall and the creation of the Lewis-Sebring Commons. Doctor of Humane Letters.
Minoru Oya, the lawyer, professor of law and, since April 2001, chancellor of Doshisha University. He has written three books: Treatment of Mental Illness and the Law, An Introduction to Criminal Law and Mental Behavior and the Law. Active in the Kyoto Center to Aid Victims of Crime and the World Research Center for Human Rights Issues, he was appointed by the Japanese government as an advisor to the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Justice. Doctor of Humane Letters.
Gordon Parks, the well-known writer, photographer, filmmaker and composer. He was the first African-American photographer to work at Life and Vogue and the first to work for the Office of War Information and the Farm Security Administration. He has written three autobiographical books and directed several feature films, including Shaft and The Learning Tree. He has also composed orchestral music, film scores and a ballet, Martin, based on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. Doctor of Humane Letters.
Gary Alan Sinise, the actor and film director best known for his Academy Award-nominated role as Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump. Sinise is also one of the founders of the acclaimed Steppenwolf Theater Company. He won an Obie Award for directing the play True West, an Emmy for his title role in George Wallace and a Golden Globe Award for his role in Truman. He also had major roles in The Green Mile, Apollo 13 and Of Mice and Men (which he also directed), among many other movies. Doctor of Humane Letters.
Peter Morrison Vitousek ’71, the eminent environmental biologist and Clifford G. Morrison Professor of Population and Resources at Stanford University. Vitousek’s research has focused on the interactions of various elements within an ecosystem and how the whole is affected by changes in its parts. Named America’s Best Ecologist last year by CNN and Time, Vitousek is a fellow at the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a winner of the 2002 Princeton Environmental Prize. Doctor of Science.
Women’s lacrosse wins NCAA title
For only the second time in college history, an Amherst team has won an NCAA Championship. The Amherst women’s lacrosse team defeated two-time defending national champion Middlebury College 11-9 in the title game of the 2003 NCAA Division III tournament. The team, which has emerged as one of the top programs in the nation over the past few years, had advanced to the national championship game twice before, but failed to win until now, having been eliminated by Middlebury on both previous occasions. Even this year, the outcome must have seemed far from certain for the players: The Jeffs fell to the Panthers twice during the season and trailed for much of the championship game, but then, with three minutes left on the clock, junior Liz Martin scored the go-ahead goal, followed by a game-sealing tally by teammate Abby Ouimet ’02 with four seconds remaining.
Though the victory came in the game’s waning minutes, it was no fluke. Martin, who connected for six goals in the game, led the NESCAC with 66 goals on the season, which was an Amherst record. Ouimet, too, had an outstanding season, passing the 100-point mark in the tournament’s final game and graduating as Amherst’s career leader in points (271) and assists (129). The team’s victory also depended on the aggressive defense of senior goalie Brooke Diamond, who tallied 25 saves in the semifinals and championship, including 12 saves in the final game alone, which earned her the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player Award. “There aren’t words to describe what Brooke has meant to this team from an inspiration point of view,” said head coach Christine Paradis. “She plays every minute like it’s the final minute of the championship.”
As if winning the championship weren’t enough, the team’s strong performance throughout the year led to a number of postseason awards and honors. Martin, Diamond, Ouimet and senior defender Annie Jamieson were each named First-Team All-Americans, while fellow senior Mary Kate Allen was a Third-Team All-American. Paradis was named both New England and National Coach of the Year by the Intercollegiate Women’s Lacrosse Coaches Association and Division III Coach of the Year by WomensLacrosse.com. Overall, Paradis has guided the team to six consecutive postseason appearances, including this year’s championship. Her overall record through nine seasons is an impressive 116-30.
From the Folger
"I suppose you must e’er now have heard of the Shakesperean discoveries lately made ... the desire of seeing these things has so much excited the curiosity of the learned world,” wrote Frances Nicholl to Eva Maria Garrick, widow of the great Shakespearian actor David Garrick in February 1795 (Folger MS Y.c.1701). Three months earlier, a 17-year-old law clerk named William Henry Ireland (1777-1835) had presented his father with a parchment mortgage deed signed by William Shakespeare and fellow actor John Heminges. Buoyed by the enthusiastic reception of this document and his father’s strong desire for other Shakespearian manuscripts, William Henry presented a further cache of documents and books, including a love letter from Shakespeare to his future wife, adorned with poetry and a lock of hair; a fan letter from Elizabeth I to Shakespeare; Shakespeare’s profession of Protestant faith; a fragment of “Hamblette”; a complete manuscript copy of King Lear; and, perhaps most incredibly, a document in Shakespeare’s hand bequeathing all of his plays to his friend William-Henry Ireland (from whom William Henry claimed to be directly descended), in gratitude for saving him from drowning in the Thames.
The teenager claimed to have discovered these treasures in the country house of “Mr. H,” a wealthy friend who wished to remain anonymous. His father, a collector and engraver who made no secret of his devotion to the Bard, published an expensive facsimile edition of “the Shakespeare Papers” and provided tickets to a steady stream of curious visitors who wished to view them in person. James Boswell purportedly fell to his knees and kissed the manuscripts when he visited the Ireland household, and members of the royal family viewed them with awe. Numerous aristocrats and scholars signed a certificate of authenticity.
William Henry’s coup de grâce was his discovery of a complete autograph copy of a previously unknown play by Shakespeare, Vortigern and Rowena. His father arranged to have it produced by Richard Brinsley Sheridan at Drury Lane Theatre with John Philip Kemble in the title role and William Henry’s entire household enlisted to revise it for performance. But suspicion about the authenticity of the Shakespeare papers was beginning to gain currency, and the sold-out theatre on opening night laughed raucously at Kemble’s sabotaging intonations of his lines, ensuring that Vortigern’s first performance was its last. Edmund Malone’s 450-page Inquiry into the Validity of the Papers Attributed to Shakespeare (1796), which systematically dismantled the validity of all of Ireland’s Shakespeare discoveries through an analysis of their historical inconsistencies and unusual orthography, was the final blow. William Henry immediately confessed, providing a detailed account of his careful selection of ink, paper and parchment, and his many harrowing close calls as he tried to stay one step ahead of the public. His Confessions is a strange mixture of repentance, exoneration of his father from complicity in the affair and teenage pride (he compared himself to the Romantic poet and forger Thomas Chatterton, who committed suicide at age 17). Even stranger than William Henry’s Confessions was his father’s refusal to believe that the manuscripts were forgeries, and further, if they were forgeries, that his son was clever enough to have created them.
William Henry Ireland’s forgeries are just one part of a new exhibition called “Fakes, Forgeries and Facsimiles.” Highlights of the exhibition include the Ashbourne portrait, once thought to have been of Shakespeare, with its complex history of overpainting and conservation; a selection of Shakespeare First Folios cobbled together with pages from other copies or with facsimile leaves; forgeries by John Payne Collier, a respected drama editor who protested his innocence until his death; and examples of false imprints and forged ownership inscriptions. In addition, there are displays on the technology used, motivations of forgers and scholarly facsimiles. The exhibit runs through January 3, 2004 at the Folger Library.
— Heather Wolfe ’92
Curator of Manuscripts
Verbatim
A compilation of recent remarks made at Amherst.
“The irony is that he’s forced to play the fool to survive, but the fool is what he doesn’t want to be. Then when he gets the full power, he’s suddenly responsible for the welfare of a transcontinental empire in all of its aspects. He’s not really equipped to do it; in trying to do it, he ends up making terrible mistakes, which prove him, in some ways, to be as foolish as he feared he would be.”
William Taubman, Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science
Discussing his book Khrushchev: The Man and His Era
NPR’s Fresh Air, March 19, 2003
"Students at Amherst think there’s a time and a place for everything. That makes it kind of hard for us to find a time and a place for dealing with world issues.”
Barbara Sieck ’05
At a student and faculty discussion about political diversity on campus
Bruss Room, Johnson Chapel, April 2, 2003
"From the world over come ever more legal challenges made in the name of otherness. Most [cases] have involved relatively small minorities against the constitutional hegemony of the nation-state. But in post-colonial states like South Africa, heterodox practices are claimed by the majority of the population. South Africa is striving to fashion a highly enlightened democracy under the banner ‘one law for one nation.’ But to what extent is this actually possible? Is not the alternative to ‘one law’ a descent into Hobbesian pluralism, a cultural war of all against all?”
Anthropologists John L. and Jean Comaroff of the University of Chicago
In a talk on “The Limits of Liberalism and the Pragmatics of Difference in the New South Africa”
Cole Assembly Room, April 24, 2003
"In a society as large and powerful as ours, one so full of contradictions, it’s easy to lose hope in change, in the effectiveness of your own efforts against large social forces, forces that can more easily be steered with fibs and fears than with complex truths. ‘Who am I,’ you may wonder,‘ to protest or complain about the actions of the mightiest state in human history? Will our actions make any difference to America and to the world?’ The cynic in each of us will say ‘no’: it’s a big and busy world, a stubborn world, and one not likely to listen to you or me as we debate at length or protest or vote. There is an act of faith in all action. You came here in that faith, as I did. As we leave here together then, may your faith and mine remain both strong and stubborn.”
President Tom Gerety
In his final Commencement address
Main Quadrangle, May 25, 2003