Princeton in the News
September 17 to 22, 1999
PrincetonUniversity
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NEWS EVENT OF THE WEEK
HEADLINE: Protest Over Princeton's New Ethics Professor
BYLINE: By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Demonstrators opposed to Princeton's hiring of Peter Singer, who has written in support of euthanasia for some disabled infants and is the university's first professor of bioethics, protested his inaugural day of teaching yesterday by chaining themselves to the administration building.
The Princeton police said they arrested 14 people who refused to stop blocking the entrances to Nassau Hall, the administration building. Most of the protesters were in motorized wheelchairs and either locked themselves to the building or linked their chairs with handcuffs. They were charged with trespassing and disorderly conduct and released.
"This protest is more against Princeton than it is against Peter Singer," said Stephen Drake, an organizer of the rally for Not Dead Yet, a disability rights group. "The university has chosen to hire this man, to give him a platform."
The graduate seminar being taught by Mr. Singer, who is also known as an advocate of animal rights and who was the director of the Center of Human Bioethics at Monash University in Australia, went off quietly. About 23 students met yesterday morning at a large house on the edge of campus to hear Mr. Singer introduce his course, "Questions of Life and Death," and to collect a reading list.
Three members of Not Dead Yet had been evicted from the house on Monday night, so university security officers surrounded it with a temporary fence and let in only students who had valid university identification cards.
HEADLINE: Princeton Professor Sparks Protest
BYLINE: LORI HINNANT
DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J.
More than 250 demonstrators protested the first day of classes of a Princeton University professor who says parents should have the right to euthanize newborns with severe handicaps.
The protesters including about 60 people in wheelchairs -- surrounded the school's administration building. Fourteen people were arrested when they refused to stop blocking the entraances.
Police who guarded the classroom where bioethics professor Peter Singer was teaching said they will continue to do so as long as they feel it was necessary.
In his recent books, Singer has said children less than one month old have no human consciousness and do not have the same rights as others.
Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes, a Princeton alumnus who also serves on the university's Board of Trustees, said Tuesday he will withhold any donations to the school as long as Singer teaches there.
Forbes, whose daughter is a Princeton junior, said in an open letter that Singer's elevation to an endowed professorship ''deeply troubles me, just as it would if such an honor were bestowed upon an anti-Semite or a racist.''
NOTE: Digest below contains additional stories on Peter Singer and Steve Forbes.
HEADLINE: MIT's Andrew Lo Asserts Predictability In Stock Performance; New Book Challenges Conventional Wisdom of 'Random Walk' Theory
DATELINE: CAMBRIDGE, Mass.
Sept. 21, 1999--Andrew Lo, Harris and Harris Group Professor of Finance and Director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at MIT Sloaan, believes it's possible for individuals to become millionaires in today's wild stock market. But not without new tools that will help both institutional and individual investors turn the data they're bombarded with into usable information. In many ways, his theories represent a sea change from the conventional stock investment wisdom of the last two decades.
Lo, who was recently named one of "Wall Street's 25 Smartest Players" by Worth Magazine, is co-author, with Wharton Professor Craig MacKinlay, of a new book, A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street (Princeton University Press), which challenges the 1973 classic, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, by Burton C. Malkiel. Back then, Malkiel asserted that successful investment in the stock market was at best random and that the so-called experts could do no better in stock selection than a "blindfolded monkey."
Headline: National Press Club Luncheon
Speaker: Lachlan Murdoch, Chairman And Ceo, News Limited
MR. LIPMAN: Good afternoon, and welcome to the National Press Club. My name is Larry Lipman. I'm the president of the National Press Club and Washington bureau chief of the Palm Beach Post in the Cox Newspapers bureau.
Our speaker today is deceptively young, a mere 27 years, but he comes with an impressive list of executive responsibilities for publishing, newspaper and broadcasting operations as long as your arm. He's Lachlan Murdoch, the eldest son of Rupert Murdoch, founder and chairman of News Corporation, the conglomerate that owns the Fox Television Network, 20th Century Fox Studios, the New York Post, TV Guide, the Times of London, the London Sun, and 700 or so other media entities on five continents.
But Lachlan Murdoch has made astounding progress on his own since leaving Princeton University with a degree in philosophy. To mention just a few of these activities, he is now chairman and CEO of News Limited, which is in charge of numerous Australian publishing enterprises .
MR. MURDOCH: I know I've got a baby face, but I'm actually 28 years old. (Laughter.) My birthday was last week. Well, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. It's a pleasure to be speaking before you here today as part of the Experience Australia Week here in Washington. I'm told it might be a National Press Club first, at least in my lifetime.
But today I've been given really the broadest of subjects. To my initial horror, I was asked to speak on Australia generally to kick off this Experience Australia Week.
So to bring you closer to our lucky country, I thought I should explore some of the differences and similarities between Australians and Americans. We are, in fact, far more alike than we are different. And I think I'm possibly uniquely positioned to tackle this subject, as I have lived almost my entire life straddling these great two nations.
And while we both began as Anglo-Saxon outposts, we have now become the world's most successful immigrant societies, multicultural melting pots that have enriched us beyond measure. We share a common language. We share a market-based economic system. We share a love of consumerism. And for many American corporations, Australia has become a true bridge to Asia. It's a place where they can establish their South Pacific headquarters in a stable environment and move capital around with a minimum of fuss. And they can draw on the increasingly multilingual populations of cities like Sydney and Melbourne to converse with and trade with emerging regional economies like Indonesia, Vietnam, China and Taiwan.
HEADLINE: Clinton Appoints Connor to President's Committee on
the Arts and Humanities
BYLINE: White House Press Office, 202-456-2100
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Sept. 21
BODY: The President today announced his intent to appoint W. Robert Connor as a member of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.
Dr. W. Robert Connor, of Hillsboro, N.C., is the President and Director of the National Humanities Center, a private independent center for advanced study located in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina and is also a Professor of Classics at Duke University.
Dr. Connor came to the Center in 1989 from Princeton University where he was the Andrew Fleming West Professor of Classics and Chair of Princeton's Council of the Humanities. He served on the Princeton University Board of Trustees from 1993 to 1997, and has worked closely with boards or visiting committees at other institutions, including Athens College and the American School of Classical Studies in Greece, Harvard University, Yale University, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Asheville, and Stanford University. Dr. Connor is also a trustee of the Glaxo Wellcome Foundation.
Dr. Connor received a B.A. from Hamilton College, studied at the University College Oxford on a Fulbright scholarship and received a Ph.D. from Princeton University.
SECTION: THE FACULTY
HEADLINE: Computer Scientists Flee Academe for Industry's Greener
Pastures
BYLINE: ROBIN WILSON
Just as he prepared to leave Cornell University last spring to help start a new high-technology company, Thorsten von Eicken got word that the computer-science department at Cornell had voted to grant him tenure.
He left anyway.
Mr. von Eicken is part of a stampede of bright, young Ph.D.'s in computer science who are abandoning academe for the corporate world.
High-paying, fast-paced jobs in the computer industry are attracting both seasoned academics and newly minted Ph.D.'s who, in the past, would have opted for careers in higher education. The upshot: Computer-science and computer-engineering departments are suffering a serious shortage of professors at a time when undergraduate enrollments are booming.
"The feeling in most computer-science departments is that we have an infinite number of openings," says David Dobkin, the chairman at Princeton, which made four offers last academic year but drew only one taker. This year, the university was more successful: It made four offers and hired three professors.
HEADLINE: U.S. Bioethics Panel Urges Congress to Lift Ban on
Stem-Cell Research
BYLINE: JEFFREY BRAINARD
The National Bioethics Advisory Commission last week urged Congress to permit federal financing of biomedical research that uses stem cells derived from human embryos.
The recommendation supports the Clinton Administration's plan to provide funds for such research, although the Administration is pursuing plans for a more-limited scope of financing than the commission recommended. Some scientists are worried that the more-limited approach would slow the progress of research on stem cells.
Scientists and politicians have been excited about the potential therapeutic uses of stem cells, which develop into the differentiated cells of the adult body, since researchers reported isolating them last year. Scientists hope to coax the cells to grow in the laboratory into replacement tissue for damaged hearts and brains, for example.
When the N.I.H. guidelines on stem-cell research are published, they will probably recommend that oversight of the work oc cur within the agency's existing structure, said Shirley M. Tilghman, a professor of molecular biology at Princeton University and a member of Dr. Varmus's advisory committee who has worked on the N.I.H.'s stem-cell guidelines.
HEADLINE: Stanley Fish Inveighs Against Biographies While Recruiting and Promoting Biographers in His Own Department; 'Military History Quarterly' Publishes a 'What If?' Issue
* * *
If rain, wind, and fog had not aided the Continental Army's desperate escape across the East River one night in August 1776, would we now be singing "God Save the Queen" at ball games?
For Robert Cowley, editor of a magazine called Military History Quarterly, such idle speculation is serious business. He thinks that "counterfactuals," scenarios of how the course of history might have changed if some key event had unfolded differently, don't deserve their image of frothy frivolity. So he enticed 34 historians to contribute to a new book of essays: What If? The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been (G.P. Putnam's Sons).
James M. McPherson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Princeton University, suggests that the Confederacy might have won the Civil War if an absent-minded Southern officer hadn't left the famous "Lost Order" lying in a field. Recovered by Union soldiers, the document revealed General Lee's military strategy during the summer of 1862. Without it, Mr. McPherson writes, the North might have been drawn into a battle at Gettysburg two years early -- and lost.
HEADLINE: Revising the age of the universe - again
BYLINE: Robert C. Cowen, Special to The Christian Science
Monitor
DATELINE: BOSTON
HIGHLIGHT: Scientists thought they'd discovered it in May. A new
report questions
Hold the press. The age of the universe may not be known as precisely as previously thought.
In May, a team working with the Hubble Space Telescope reported it had achieved the Hubble program's No. 1 goal: measuring the rate at which the universe expands to within 10 percent. That figure suggested that the universe was approximately 12 billion years old - similar to the oldest stars.
Now, a different group of NASA researchers is warning that the Hubble team's cosmic "yardstick" probably is faulty. The expansion rate may be 12 percent faster than the Hubble team measured, meaning that the estimated "age of the universe would decrease by the same amount," says Eyal Maoz of the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.
This would bring back a paradox - that the universe's estimated age is slightly younger than the oldest known stars.
Commenting on this in today's Nature, Bohdan Paczynski of Princeton University in New Jersey notes that there are several sources of possible errors. He observes that "systematic effects and personal judgments dominate published values of [the Hubble constant]."
HEADLINE: Bioethics row hits Princeton
BYLINE: Martin Kettle in Washington
The millionaire Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes, whose family is a large benefactor of Princeton University, yesterday cut off funding to the celebrated Ivy League university over its appointment of the controversial philosopher Peter Singer as its first professor of bioethics.
His move comes the day after a rally of mainly disabled protesters chained themselves to Princeton's administration building as the Australian-born Mr Singer began to teach his first classes of the term.
His arrival has sparked a series of campus protests because of his high -profile notoriety as an advocate of euthanasia for some disabled infants.
But Mr Forbes' decision is certain to politicise the dispute even more sharply. The conservative publishing millionaire had earlier resisted pressure to withdraw his support from Princeton over the issue, but yesterday he reversed that decision while campaigning in California.
'Though I fondly remember my days as a student at Princeton, and though I am a trustee of this university, I have given no money to Princeton since Peter Singer was appointed to be a professor of bioethics, and I pledge to you today that so long as Peter Singer remains a tenured professor there, I will not financially contribute to Princeton University,' Mr Forbes said in a statement.
BYLINE: Jennifer Harper; THE WASHINGTON TIMES
FUTURE FUNDS
Sen. Bill Frist, Tennessee Republican, would not say if he planned to withdraw future financial contributions to Princeton University yesterday. Presidential candidate Steve Forbes has already announced he would withdraw his money from his alma mater to protest the hiring of Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics who advocates killing certain disabled infants.
Mr. Frist, like Mr. Forbes and Democratic presidential candidate Bill Bradley, is a member of Princeton's board of trustees.
"I'm greatly disturbed by many of Mr. Singer's ideas, especially as they relate to the value of and treatment of human life," said Mr. Frist, a heart-transplant surgeon.
"As a physician, I have always fought to preserve life. I have also been a strong advocate for the rights of individuals with disabilities. I fundamentally disagree with Mr. Singer's positions and beliefs, and have strongly expressed my views on this matter with the administration of Princeton University."
He called Mr. Forbes' decision to stop contributing money "unfortunate for Princeton University," but added Mr. Forbes "obviously is entitled to spend his money as he sees fit."
HEADLINE: Internet Sites That Click for Charity Researchers
Seeking Donors
BYLINE: Compiled by MARILYN DICKEY
Following is a sampling of some of the Internet sites that fund raisers say they use frequently to find information about donors and potential donors. Sites listed here are free unless otherwise noted.
Where to Start
For researchers overwhelmed by the Internet -- or someone looking for an overview of resources -- the following sites are good places to begin a search. They have links tto a broad range of sites and are updated often.
Development Research Links (http://www.princeton.edu/one/research/netlinks.html), maintained by the Princeton University development-research office, is a compilation of nearly 300 sites often used by staff members, including links to salary information, on-line newspapers, stock and other business information, and genealogy sites, among others. Links are listed alphabetically by category.
HEADLINE: The Pitfalls of Mining the Internet
BYLINE: MARILYN DICKEY and HOLLY HALL
The explosion of data on the Internet is making it easier and cheaper than ever for charities to obtain detailed information on people who have the potential to make big donations. But many charities aren't using those tools very effectively, experts say, nor are they taking sufficient steps to protect the privacy of potential donors.
Conducting research on prospective donors used to be a task that only people with special training in computer data bases and other record keeping could do well. Now just about anyone with access to the Internet can search public records and other resources to find a wealth of information about would-be donors, such as their earnings, assets, and personal interests.
That worries some of the people who specialize in "prospect research." They say that small charities are starting to assign research on donors to fund raisers, secretaries, interns, and others who have little or no training in the finer points of culling information from public records.
Says Jon Thorsen, director of development research at Princeton University: "Now there is so much more on-line access, people are thinking, 'Yes, we have high-speed Internet access. Now we're researchers, too.' But there's a skill set that you need that is very different from that of fund raisers or other people in the organization."
At Princeton University, the job titles of researchers were changed last year to "development research analysts," and their positions were classified in a higher salary range. As a result, the university's five researchers saw their pay increase by 5 per cent or more.
Princeton's researchers, for instance, are now trying to learn more about planned gifts, which often involve complicated tax and financial-planning matters, so that they can offer fund raisers advice about what types of gifts would be most likely to appeal to particular donors, given their age, assets, and other factors.
That's a big change from previous years, when researchers had little or no understanding of how the information they compiled was actually used, says Mr. Thorsen. They simply picked a name from a list of donors, did research, and wrote a report that seldom generated any response from fund raisers, with whom they had little interaction.
HEADLINE: Forbes Protests Alma Mater's Hiring
BYLINE: LORI HINNANT
DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J.
Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes said Tuesday he will withhold further donations to Princeton University as long as controversial bioethics professor Peter Singer teaches there.
Forbes, a Princeton alumnus who also sits on the university's board of trustees, has long opposed the appointment of Singer, who has written that parents should have the right to euthanize newborns with severe handicaps.
More than 250 demonstrators including about 60 people in wheelchairs and two of Forbes' representatives gathered in the rain Tuesday at the university's gates to protest the first day of classes for the Australian professor.
Bioethicist Paul Armstrong, the Bridgewater, N.J., attorney who successfully argued for the right to die in the landmark Karen Ann Quinlan case, said Singer is Princeton's first serious foray into the field of bioethics since President Clinton four years ago named the school's president, Harold T. Shapiro, to chair a federal advisory commission on the subject.
''Peter's is a puckish voice that poses from a unique perspective very serious questions,'' Armstrong said. ''He's also a lightning rod for controversy.''
HEADLINE: Forbes Looking To Capitalize On Buchanan Defection.
Reuters (9/21) reported that as Pat Buchanan "moves toward leaving the Republican Party for the Reform Party, cracks are starting to appear in his 'Buchanan Brigade.'" On Tuesday, "four days after Bob Adams quit as Buchanan's communications director, saying, 'I'm a Republican,' Scott Bell resigned as Buchanan's South Carolina field director and endorsed Republican presidential rival Steve Forbes."
Forbes To Withhold Princeton Donations During Singer's Tenure. The AP (9/21, Hinnant) reported Steve Forbes, "a Princeton University alumnus who also serves on the university's Board of Trustees, said Tuesday he will withhold any donations to the school for as long as controversial bioethics professor Peter Singer teaches there." Forbes has "long opposed the appointment of Singer, who has written that parents should have the right to euthanize newborns with severe handicaps." Over "250 demonstrators including about 60 people in wheelchairs and two of Forbes' representatives gathered in the rain Tuesday at the university's gates to protest the first day of classes for the Australian."
HEADLINE: Professor Dangerous Australian philosopher makes waves
It's a welcome development that Peter Singer will begin teaching bioethics at Princeton University this month, not because the noted Australian philosopher is right about everything (or anything), but because academia can always use a good shaking.
Few thinkers can provoke as Singer does. Probably the most controversial philosopher alive, his unorthodox views (and the glibness with which they're expressed) encompass topics ranging from a proper dinner or how to spend your money to the value of human life.
Singer sees man's dominion over animals as a tyranny akin to the suffering imposed by slavery. Any animal able to anticipate pain is a ''person,'' he argues, and, therefore, more worthy of protection than, say, a severely handicapped infant. The anguish of a pig that is confined only to be butchered counts as much as human anxiety, he argues. He sees little difference between causing an animal pain in a lab experiment and slaughtering one for dinner.
''The notion that human life is sacred just because it's human life is medieval,'' Singer told Michael Specter in a recent profile in The New Yorker magazine. ''The person who used to be there is gone,'' he said, referring to withholding medical treatment for the hopelessly ill. ''It doesn't matter how sad it makes us.''
Perhaps his disdain for sentiment is Singer's most controversial trait. For him, proximity means nothing when it comes to moral decisions. Saving your own child's life is not nearly so valuable as saving the lives of 10 strangers, he argues. Therefore, prosperous people should do far more to ease suffering around the world, including giving away most of their money.
NOTE: This also appeared in the Star-Tribune of Minneapolis, Minn.
Section: White House 2000
Headline: Forbes: Forbes Pulls Princeton Dollars
The Washington Times' Billups reports, Steve Forbes (R) will withhold financial support of Princeton University to protest its hiring of bioethics professor Peter Singer. Singer's hiring is controversial because he "advocates the killing, in certain instances, of deformed infants and other disabled persons." Forbes' position is a reversal from last week when he declined to pull funding. Over 200 protestors gathered at Princeton 9/20, Singer's first day, blocking the entrance to an administration building. Christopher Benek, pres. of Princeton Students Against Infanticide, praised Forbes' decision. Benek called on Princeton trustees Bill Bradley (D) and Sen. Bill Frist (R) to join Forbes.
HEADLINE: Last Arguments Are Offered in Microsoft Case
BYLINE: By JOEL BRINKLEY
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Sept. 21
Almost a year after it began, the Microsoft antitrust trial wound to a close today with final arguments from lawyers for the company and the Government that ranged from scornful to contemptuous of the other side's case.
When it was over, at dusk this evening, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson said simply, "Thank you, counsel. The case is submitted." He then rose from the bench and marched unceremoniously from the packed courtroom.
Later this year, probably before Thanksgiving, Judge Jackson is expected to issue his findings of fact, a first brush at a verdict that sets out which version of events, the Microsoft Corporation's or the Government's, he takes to be closest to the truth. A verdict should come a few weeks after that.
As for Mr. Boies's repeated success at humilating Microsoft's witnesses in court early this year, Mr. Warden said: "It did win the rapt attention of the gallery, but in the real world it is clear that the Government has failed to make its case. There are astounding failures of proof and glaring inconsistencies from the witnesses."
He repeatedly directed the judge's attention to a Federal appellate ruling in June 1998 that Microsoft had the right to integrate a browser with Windows if the integration benefitted consumers.
He held out his harshest criticism for Edward W. Felten, a Princeton University computer scientist who served as a Government witness and professed to be able to pull the browser out of Windows without damaging the performance of the operating system. This was an attempt to disprove Microsoft's assertion that the browser had been so thoroughly integrated into Windows that neither would work any longer without the other.
Mr. Felten sat in the courtroom with several of his students this afternoon as Mr. Warden called his testimony "a shame, the crudest form of sleight of hand, a game."
HEADLINE: Women still rare in math, physical sciences
BYLINE: By Sameena Shahid, Yale Daily News
SOURCE: Yale U.
DATELINE: New Haven, Conn.
When she was seven years old, Deseree Meyer '01 helped her father repair the family's car. Crouching under the hood, the first-grader handed her father tools as he needed them and asked incessant questions about the engine.
Thus began her love of science.
"I was always very interested in asking for explanations about how things worked," Meyer recalled, "everything from how to change the oil to why the outer rainbow in a double rainbow is inverted compared to the inner one."
Now that she has declared her major as physics, Meyer can be found most nights in the library or her bedroom working on problem sets for her "Classical Mechanics" and "Electromagnetism and Optics" classes.
Meyer is unique - not only because she was raised with a lot of hands-on exposure to science, but also because she is one of only a handful of undergraduate women at Yale pursuing a degree in the physical sciences.
Yale is not the only university with a gender gap in the physical sciences - both at the undergraduate level and in the faculty.
In fact, many experts and professors at Yale and nationwide say this gap remains a national phenomenon and persists for a number of reasons.
"I think historically women were not encouraged to go into the physical sciences and it takes a while to change that," said Marc Kastner, Donner Professor of Physics and head of the physics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The gender gap in math, physical sciences, and engineering exists at universities and colleges across the nation. According to statistics for the 1998-9 school year from Harvard University, Princeton University, Dartmouth College, and M.I.T., women major in the physical sciences at a considerably lower rate than men.
At Princeton, of the 29 juniors and seniors are majoring in mathematics, seven are female, said C. Anthony Broh, senior registrar at Princeton. Although the number of students enrolled in physical science majors varies from school to school, based on particular undergraduate populations and the quality of various departments, women are still clearly in the minority.
"This [gap] is not a Yale thing or a Princeton thing or even an Ivy League thing," Broh said. "This is a national problem."
HEADLINE: Protests mark controversial Princeton prof's first
teaching day
BYLINE: By Richard Just & Emma Soichet, The Daily
Princetonian
SOURCE: Princeton U.
DATELINE: Princeton, N.J.
A day of protest against Princeton University's hiring of controversial bioethicist Peter Singer culminated Tuesday in the arrest of 14 activists, who were dragged away from Nassau Hall after sealing off the building for two hours.
About 30 wheelchair-bound protesters and several other disability-rights advocates from Not Dead Yet barricaded all five entrances to Nassau Hall -- trapping University officials inside and preventing at least two deans from entering -- before being removed by Public Safeety around 1:30 p.m.
Just hours before, about 200 protesters descended on a soggy campus while singing, "Shapiro promotes murder," and wielding posters that compared Princeton to Auschwitz.
Meanwhile, at the Center for Human Values at 5 Ivy Lane, Singer's first seminar proceeded without incident. Public Safety officers rimmed the building to ensure that only authorized students would enter the class.
"Singer was an incredibly open and amiable man," said Hyeseung Song '01, one of Singer's students. "It was like a regular course."
The Princeton Borough Police helped proctors process the arrests but the physical removal of activists was left to campus security. None of those arrested were New Jersey residents.
HEADLINE: Red hot Rutgers to battle in-state rival
Princeton
BYLINE: By Mike Barber, Daily Targum
SOURCE: Rutgers U.
DATELINE: New Brunswick, N.J.
The Rutgers women's soccer team is off to an impressive start so far in 1999. Wednesday night, head coach Charlie Duccilli's team will look to take the momentum of a 4-1 start into their matchup with in-state rival Princeton.
"We were hoping to get this kind of a start," said Duccilli. "The last two matches were very interesting."
Against Princeton, Duccilli is expecting a close contest, a trend he has seen develop in this rivalry.
"This is the best Princeton team I have seen in seven or eight years," he said. "It's going to be nip and tuck. It will come down to the wire."
HEADLINE: Senior provides leadership from setter spot for
Princeton volleyball
BYLINE: By Patrick King, The Daily Princetonian
SOURCE: Princeton U.
DATELINE: Princeton, N.J.
Looks can be deceiving.
"You look at Melissa [Ford] and she looks like an angel, but she's got a bit of an assassin in her," women's volleyball head coach Glenn Nelson says. "She's a competitor and she's a hard worker. She's got that little voice and she looks so sweet and innocent, but she's a battler."
Ford, a senior captain, has been battling on the courts for the women's volleyball team for the past three seasons as Princeton's starting setter. As the Tigers' primary play-maker, Ford averaged 11.56 assists per game last season and notched a few 50- and 60-assist matches.
The Ecology and Evolutionary Biology major hails from Newport Beach, Calif., where she began her volleyball career 10 years ago.
HEADLINE: Clinton Bows Out of Jefferson Lecture; Critics Feared
Choice Would Politicize Honor
BYLINE: Jacqueline Trescott, Washington Post Staff Writer
President Clinton ended a small but increasingly nasty controversy over plans to have him give the annual Jefferson Lecture, an honor traditionally reserved for well-known figures in the humanities, with a simple: No thanks.
William R. Ferris, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, had invited the president to give the prestigious lecture, but a chorus of scholars said Clinton was unfit for the honor because he was a politician, not a scholar.
A Clinton speech would have broken a 27-year tradition of evenings with intellectuals such as Robert Penn Warren, C. Vann Woodward, Barbara Tuchman, John Hope Franklin, Walker Percy, Toni Morrison and Sidney Hook. The lecture, given at the Kennedy Center in recent years, draws a packed house; the speech is widely distributed and includes a $10,000 cash prize.
Stanley N. Katz, director of the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at Princeton University, reacted wryly to the president's no thanks. "What an unusual display of good sense," said Katz. He had argued that the NEH brand would be damaged, and eventual publicity might backfire. "It is the wrong instinct. Ferris is a purely good fellow but it is absolutely characteristic of the man's failure to understand that one can injure an organization if you treat it as purely something to be marketed."
HEADLINE: Forbes shuns Princeton; Support curbed to protest
hire of Peter Singer
BYLINE: Andrea Billups; THE WASHINGTON TIMES
DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J.
PRINCETON, N.J. - Steve Forbes, the Republican presidential candidate whose family is one of Princeton University's greatest benefactors, yesterday withdrew his support of the university to protest the hiring of a bioethics professor who advocates the killing, in certain instances, of deformed infants and other disabled persons.
Mr. Forbes, an alumnus and member of the school's board of trustees, made his announcement in a letter distributed yesterday at a spirited campus rally against the hiring of Peter Singer, an Australian, as a professor of bioethics in Princeton's Center for Human Values.
Mr. Singer was scheduled to teach his first class yesterday.
"Though I fondly remember my days as a student at Princeton, and though I am a trustee of this university," Mr. Forbes said, "I have given no money to Princeton since Peter Singer was appointed to be a professor of bioethics, and I pledge to you today that so long as Peter Singer remains a tenured professor there, I will not financially contribute to Princeton University."
His announcement reverses his earlier position, spelled out last week in a letter to protest leaders, that it "would be counterproductive" for him withhold funding from Princeton to protest the Singer appointment. His letter yesterday reflected no such ambivalence.
HEADLINE: Developer chosen for on campus hotel
DATELINE: STORRS, Conn.
A Long Island man who helped bring minor league baseball to eastern Connecticut has been named preferred developer for the University of Connecticut's first hotel to be built on campus.
Robert Friedman, co-owner of the Norwich Navigators, has formed a partnership with MeriStar, a company that manages the Forrestal Hotel at Princeton University for the $10 million UConn project.
HEADLINE: AlliedSignal Technical gets a new president; Adamson
is former astronaut, shuttle executive, engineer; Aerospace
BYLINE: Greg Schneider
SOURCE: SUN STAFF
A former astronaut and space shuttle program executive has been named president of AlliedSignal Technical Services Corp. in Columbia, the company said yesterday.
James C. Adamson will take over early next month at ATSC, which employs about 1,800 people in Maryland and oversees most spacecraft ground and flight control at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt.
He earned a master's degree in aerospace engineering from Princeton University, and was president of Lockheed Engineering and Science Co. at the time of the parent corporation's merger with Martin Marietta Corp. in 1995.
Headline: Managed Care: Boston Globe Asks, 'Has It Failed?'
With premiums "roaring back with double-digit increases" and public cries of "mismanaged care," the Boston Globe asks whether it's "time to pull the plug." Managed care was supposed to "bring about organized health care systems in which doctors and managers would be working hard to improve the quality and cut the costs," says Alain Enthoven, one of the original Jackson Hole Group "fathers of managed care" and a Stanford Business School professor. Enthoven, who "coined the term 'managed competition,' paving the way for managed care as we know it today," believes that managed care has succeeded, but "not nearly as much as I had hoped." The Globe takes a look at the industry's record on cost and quality.
'WHAT WENT WRONG?'
True, managed care is responsible for a 1.1% drop in premiums between 1988 and 1994. And according to Princeton University Professor Uwe Reinhardt, managed care is largely deserving of credit for health care being just 14% instead of 19.8% of the GDP for the year 2000, as predicted in 1993 by the Congressional Budget Office. But HMOs are "steeped in red ink" and premiums are on the rise again -- an average of 15% for next year.
HEADLINE: UN - New Permanent Representative of United States presents credentials
HIGHLIGHT:
Biographical Note (Based on information received from the Protocol
and Liaison Service.)
The new Permanent Representative of the United States to the United Nations, Richard C. Holbrooke, presented his credentials to Secretary-General Kofi Annan on 7 September.
Ambassador Holbrooke was confirmed by his country's Senate as the Permanent United States Representative on 5 August. During his career he has been a professional diplomat, a magazine editor, an author, a Peace Corps director, the Chairman of two non-governmental organizations and an investment banker.
Ambassador Holbrooke began his career as a Foreign Service Officer immediately after graduating from Brown University in 1962.
Following these assignments, Ambassador Holbrooke spent a year as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University.
HEADLINE: Microsoft Turns Tables, Blasts DOJ Case
BYLINE: Darryl K. Taft, Computer Reseller News
A Microsoft attorney Tuesday afternoon blasted the U.S. Department of Justice's case against the software giant, calling it little more than "red herrings, misstatements, and omissions."
The government has not proven that Microsoft broke any laws, but instead smeared the company using a variety of e-mail snippets and videotapes to embarrass it, said Jack Warden, of the Washington law firm Sullivan & Cromwell.
Microsoft produced ISVs and senior executives from its largest OEMs, as well as nine Microsoft executives, forwritten, direct testimony.
"Day by day, I waited for the government to challenge that," Warden said.
Also, Warden had little but ridicule for (Edward Felten), the Princeton University computer science professor who wrote a piece of software that allegedly stripped out Internet Explorer functionality from Windows.
"That testimony was the crudest form of sleight of hand and his testimony is as much a game as his program," Warden said.
HEADLINE: The obligations of freedom of speech
BYLINE: MICHAEL VOLKMAN
You've probably never heard of Peter Singer. He is an Australian-born philosopher who is famous for establishing a worldwide animal liberation movement. That would be fine if he only did that, but there is much more.
An in-depth read through some of Singer's published work reveals some disturbing ideas. Singer is a follower of a branch of ethical study known as ''utilitarianism,'' started early in the 19th century by Jeremy Bentham, which holds that human endeavors work for the general goal of increasing happiness and pleasure, and decreasing unhappiness and suffering. Bentham and his colleagues believed that this should be a guiding principle for public policy decisions, that choices should be made based on how they raised people's happiness or eased their suffering.
Fortunately, academics and legislative advisers have understood, for the most part, that real life is much more complicated and that social justice needs cannot be reduced to such oversimplified arithmetic, and Bentham's ideas have been widely rejected. Singer revives them, and goes on from there with some new premises of his own invention.
So why should attention be paid to Singer in an age when people are better enlightened? Singer starts his new job today as the Ira W. DeCamp Professor and Chair of the Bioethics Department of the Center for Human Values at Princeton University. His appointment gives him a platform from which to speak to future leaders of this country (and to foreign students who study in America to become leaders in their home countries), with the full backing of Princeton.
Controversy is good and freedom of speech (in this particular instance, academic freedom) must be protected, but Princeton also has an obligation to the global community. Peter Singer is not simply playing ''devil's advocate'' in a contained classroom discussion; he is leading a movement to influence public policy.
HEADLINE: Ivy schools tightening alcohol policies
BYLINE: By Omer Ismail, The Dartmouth
SOURCE: Dartmouth College
DATELINE: Hanover, N.H.
Dartmouth College is not alone in its renewed initiative against alcohol abuse.
Several other Ivy League institutions, most notably the University of Pennsylvania, have also implemented revised alcohol policies at the start of this school year.
Even though Princeton University's alcohol policy remains essentially the same, the penalty for students caught serving alcohol to minors has become stricter.
Previously, offenders would receive a dean's warning and subsequently a three-month and then nine-month probation before being suspended on the fourth violation. Following the recent initiative, first-time offenders receive a three-month probation directly; the deans' warning is no longer given.
Kathleen Deignan of the Dean of Students' Life Office at Princeton said the Committee on Discipline recommended these changes after realizing that students weren't taking alcohol rules seriously. She said a dean's warning was considered by most as "very mild."
HEADLINE: Princeton officials take steps to limit water
consumption
BYLINE: By Rich Tucker, The Daily Princetonian
SOURCE: Princeton U.
DATELINE: Princeton, N.J.
Princeton University entered its fourth day of severe water restrictions Monday with no definite end in sight, prompting University officials to continue to seek ways to cut campus water consumption.
Elizabethtown Water Company spokeswoman Erin Reilly said the company has detected a decrease in water consumption by its customers, but the situation remains critical. Nevertheless, she said it was now unlikely the University water supply would be cut off entirely unless additional equipment fails or a dramatic increase in water consumption occurs.
Despite this favorable news, University officials continued to follow strict water consumption guidelines. By Monday afternoon, maintenance personnel had closed nearly all athletic showers, Baker Rink and DeNunzio Pool. They have also locked most of the campus's laundry rooms. Vice President for Administration and Finance Richard Spies GS '72 said building services personnel have been asked to drastically reduce water use while cleaning University buildings.
Students are being asked not to shower, wash clothes or flush toilets frequently. Air conditioning has been shut down in many University buildings, and several stations have been set up around campus to dispense water.
SECTION: Commentary
HEADLINE: If 'Doogie' can, can we?
Dr. Joe Tsien, an assistant professor at Princeton University, has built a smarter mouse. Tsien's genetically altered mice learned faster than run-of-the-treadmill rodents, thanks to an extra copy of a gene encoding a protein that boosts communication among neurons in their brains.
In one set of experiments, the special strain of mice nicknamed ''Doogies'' (after the precocious child doctor on the old TV show, ''Doogie Howser, M.D.,''), were better at recognizing strange objects. In another, they remembered where to find a platform submerged in murky water from one test to the next.
What Tsien did was show how learning happens, and how it can be facilitated, at the molecular level. What he did not do was to find the intelligence gene.
Intelligence is a complicated, subtle and highly subjective quality. The ability to learn and remember, to make associations between one idea and another, to compose music or solve theorems involves many genes working together in ways science has only begun to understand. That is not to mention the interplay of genetic and environmental factors over which parents, educators, politicians and scientists argue endlessly.
But it's hard to resist the tantalizing questions posed by this astonishing research.
If, in our lifetime, Tsien and his colleagues, and Doogie and his, work it out for us we will face the usual dilemmas.
Just because we can, should we? Who will have access to the gene technology? Who will own its patents? How much should it cost? How will the government regulate the new crop of order-by-Internet IQ-enhancers?
Reprinted from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
HEADLINE: The Economy Financing Knowledge
The campaign-finance debate is full of statistics. One key piece of data: 48% of Americans don't know if Republicans or Democrats are more conservative. This surprising statistic comes from a poll conducted by the Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University.
Its findings are like those of many other polls over the past several decades.
The hard-to-avoid conclusion: Many Americans have little clue what's going on in their country's politics.
During the 1980 campaign, the odds that a typical poll respondent could place him- or herself on a left-right scale and also place Ronald Reagan to the right of Jimmy Carter were just 24%, according to Larry Bartels, a professor at Princeton University.
Four years later, when Reagan opposed Walter Mondale, the odds a typical respondent would get it right were 34%. In 1988, when George Bush faced Michael Dukakis, the odds were just 32%.
Headline: On This Date 100 years ago (Wednesday, Sept. 20, 1899)
Byline: Compiled By Alice Demetrius Stock And Milan Simonich
Former President Grover Cleveland was hired to teach a course on politics at Princeton University. Cleveland, a Democrat, won the presidency in 1884, lost it in 1888 to Benjamin Harrison, then won it back from Harrison in 1892. Cleveland was to receive $10,000 to teach, roughly equal to a $160,000 salary today.
SECTION: EDITORIAL
HEADLINE: Brown's new values program
For a long time in America, much talk about "values" (and virtues ) has re-mained tucked away in conservative rhe-toric, ensconced in a critique of sex, violence and other degradations of modern life. So when Brown University, generally considered a bastion of liberalism, an-nounced that it was going to integrate the study of values into its otherwise laissez-faire curriculum, starting this year, a lot of heads turned. How could Brown, a school famous for its comparatively open curriculum, suddenly decide it wanted to impart values?
Liberals can rest assured. Brown does not plan to become Baylor any time soon. The idea is not to inculcate pliant under-graduates with some rigid moral-phi-losophical-political ideology. Values is getting a new connotation. It is now set to add aesthetics, spirituality, and even love to old-fashioned ethics, creating a new and progressive program that scrutinizes what makes a good life and leaves out self-righteous morality.
At Princeton University, the University Center for Human Values, which examines life-relevant questions similar to those explored by Brown's initiative, has exploded in popularity since its 1990 founding. According to the center's director, Amy Gutman, Values have been playing an increasingly explicit role in many levels of undergraduate and graduate education. The academic fields involved, such as moral and political philosophy and practical ethics, are booming. Demand is skyrocketing.
SECTION: COLUMN
HEADLINE: Strike a healthy balance between pride, humility
BYLINE: By Justin Hastings, The Daily Princetonian
SOURCE: Princeton U.
DATELINE: Princeton, N.J.
I'm sure that many 'Prince' columnists will hold forth with sage words of advice on classes, the 'Street,' residential colleges, student resources, activities, etc. I won't begrudge them their eagerness to guide freshmen through perilous waters, but I have a different message: Be humble.
Like classes before them, this year's crop of freshmen has already spent the summer flaunting their Princeton paraphernalia and their paperback copy of "This Side of Paradise." Freshmen, while you are excited to finally be in the pinnacles of the Ivy League, no one really cares that you're a Princeton Man or a Princeton Woman now. In fact, any effort you make to call attention to your elite collegiate status is at best annoying, and more often arrogant and condescending. Those T-shirts that proclaim "It's Lonely at the Top" say it all.
It's hard to miss Princeton's love/hate town-gown relationship. The town chafes at rowdy students, grumbles at the University's tax-exempt status, and cringes at the possibility that students might vote in local elections. But if it weren't for the University, Princeton would just be another rich suburb in the wastelands of New Jersey.
SECTION: COMMENTARY
HEADLINE: Princeton's "professor death"; Singer's Nazi intellectual roots
BYLINE: Suzanne Fields; THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The crippled and the lame, on crutches and in wheelchairs, walking slowly with friends and family, will gather at Princeton University on Tuesday, Sept. 21 to bear witness for humanity. Students with muscular, athletic bodies as well as the bowed and infirm will register their outrage.
Protestants, Catholics and Jews (in the season of the New Year when the Jewish people pray for their names to be written down in The Book of Life) will join hands to express their fury at the presence of a professor on their campus whose intellectual coldness and academic credentials have led him to a prestigious chair as tenured professor. This is a "scholar," whose ideas, if they had prevailed, would have denied many of them a life on the planet. Why should such a man be invited to teach ethics at Princeton?
Peter Singer begins teaching bioethics at Princeton's Center for Human Values in the fall semester. He is a very intelligent man. He has written politically correct books and articles in the right intellectual journals. He's especially well-known in this country for his espousal of a bizarre theory of animal rights, comparing man's domination of animals with the white man's domination of the black man in America. Anyone who regards this as a specious argument, according to the professor, is a "speciest" (as in racist and sexist.)
What really upsets almost everybody except the Princeton administration is his idea that it could be OK to kill babies in the first 28 days of their lives. He specifies babies with "severe" disabilities, which include hemophilia: "When the death of the disabled hemophiliac infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed."
HEADLINE: Time to pull the plug on managed care?
HEALTH POLICY; Alex Pham covers the business of health care for
the Globe.
BYLINE: By Ale Pham, Globe Staff
Has managed care failed?
That has become a fair question, given the parade of headlines this year detailing managed care's shortcomings.
Public outrage continues to fuel politicians' calls for regulations to "manage" managed care, with some even suggesting patients should be able to sue health maintenance organizations for malpractice. Senior citizens now make a regular event of rallies where they hold placards accusing HMOs of "mismanaged care." And state secretary William Galvin captured front-page news this month by wagging his finger at HMOs for what he called "managed costs and diminishing care."
To judge fairly whether managed care has failed, one must define what it was meant to do.
"What it was supposed to accomplish was bring about organized health care systems in which doctors and managers would be working hard to improve the quality and cut the costs," said Alain C. Enthoven, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and the person who in 1986 coined the term "managed competition," paving the way for managed care as we know it today.
"That has happened to some extent, but not nearly as much I had hoped," Enthoven said.
In 1993, the Congressional Budget Office projected that health care spending would swallow 19.8 percent of the national gross domestic product by 2000. Instead, health care's portion of the GDP is just 13.5 percent this year, and projected to reach 14 percent next year.
"That's $400 billion less a year than what we would have spent if trends projected by the CBO persisted," said Uwe E. Reinhardt, a professor at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. "That's a major achievement. And the managed care industry deserves our greatest thanks for that."
HEADLINE: Cartoonist joins News
Henry Payne, formerly editorial cartoonist and cartoon editor for the Scripps Howard News Service, joins The Detroit News on Monday as chief editorial cartoonist.
His cartoons appear in more than 150 newspapers.
Payne's work will initially appear five days a week on the editorial page of The News.
"We are thrilled to have somebody of Henry Payne's caliber join our pages," said Editorial Page Editor Thomas J. Bray. "He mixes keen insight, a lively drawing style and a fine sense of wit in his visual commentary on the leading issues of the day."
Payne, a licensed race car driver, is a native of West Virginia and a 1984 graduate of Princeton University.
HEADLINE: Bookend; History: It's Still About Stories
BYLINE: By James M. McPherson; James M. McPherson is the author of one of the volumes in the Oxford History of the United States, "Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era," which won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1989.
At least once every generation since the teaching of history acquired standing as an academic profession more than a century ago, some historians have publicly lamented their inability to reach a general audience. In the 1930's Allan Nevins of Columbia University, a historian without a Ph.D. whose training was in journalism, decided to do something about the problem. At the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in 1938, Nevins sponsored a resolution to establish a popular magazine of history under A.H.A. auspices. After rancorous debate, in which opponents spoke forcefully against the potential taint of commercialism and popularization, members narrowly rejected the resolution.
Nevins later helped found the Society of American Historians and the magazine American Heritage to promote and publish accurate, incisive narrative history intended to engage the general reader. Meanwhile, the very year the A.H.A. rejected Nevins's proposal, two young historians who would emerge as the next generation's foremost exemplars of vivid historical writing with impeccable scholarly credentials published their first book and article respectively: C. Vann Woodward and Richard Hofstadter.
By anyone's ranking, Woodward and Hofstadter are the two leading American historians of the second half of the 20th century. Woodward's "Origins of the New South" and "The Strange Career of Jim Crow" reshaped our understanding of the Southern past and the history of race relations. Hofstadter's "American Political Tradition" and "Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R." offered new perspectives on the intersections between political and cultural history. In these and hundreds of other books, essays and articles, they reached millions of readers among their fellow historians, students and the educated public. Both were gifted writers who owed their influence to a luminous prose style as well as to erudite scholarship.
HEADLINE: Crime and Punishment
BYLINE: By Joyce Carol Oates; Joyce Carol Oates, a professor of humanities at Princeton University, is the author, most recently, of the novel "Broke Heart Blues" and the essay collection "Where I've Been, and Where I'm Going."
WHY THEY KILL
The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist.
By Richard Rhodes.
371 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.
To write a mighty book, Herman Melville declared, you must have a mighty theme. Few works of American nonfiction of our time have been mightier than Richard Rhodes's "Making of the Atomic Bomb" (1986) and "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb" (1995). These are magisterial books, richly detailed and mesmerizing narratives in which history, science, politics and the life stories of scientists, theoreticians, politicians, engineers, military men, traitors and spies are skillfully woven together; the making of ever more lethal nuclear weapons in the service of defending good against the enemy's evil would seem to be the century's great scientific achievement, a tragic and irrevocable communal action.
"Why They Kill" is a hybrid, part profile of Lonnie H. Athens, a professor of criminology at Seton Hall University, part a history of violence and part advocacy of a familiar, idealized sort. "Criminal violence," Rhodes writes, "emerges from social experience, most commonly brutal social experience visited upon vulnerable children, who . . . return in vengeful wrath to plague us. If violence is a choice they make, and therefore their personal responsibility, . . . our failure to protect them from having to confront such a choice is a choice we make."
An alternative title for "Why They Kill" might have been "The Myth of Senseless Violence," in homage to Dr. Thomas Szasz's controversial and influential book "The Myth of Mental Illness" (1961), in which Szasz argues that "mental illness" is a mythological concept employed by the state to control deviate behavior.
NAME: Barbara Cassani
HEADLINE: Nurturing a No-Frills Airline
BYLINE: By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
DATELINE: STANSTED, England
LIKE the proud mother of a newborn, Barbara Cassani bounces into the reception area of Go, the no-frills, low-cost European airline, showing off and pointing out every facet of her company -- "my baby," she says -- down to the dowdy details of the cafeteria.
"I buy my sandwich out of that really elegant machine over there," she said with a laugh, apologizing for "probably smelling a bit tuna-y from lunch."
Ms. Cassani (pronounced cas-SAN-i), at age 39 the chief executive of Go Fly Ltd., shares responsibility for the company with its true parent, British Airways P.L.C. Three years ago, Robert J. Ayling, the president of British Airways, tapped Ms. Cassani, an American, to write a business plan for a low-cost airline with the promise that if she could show it could be profitable, she could run it. It's not profitable just yet -- Go has been in business just a little more than a year -- but Ms. Cassani said it would break into the black by 2001.
Ms. Cassani went to Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., for her undergraduate degree and then to the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University for a master's.
"I wasn't supposed to be a business person," she said. "I was supposed to grow up and move to Washington, D.C., or join an international organization or go run a state somewhere."
SECTION: EDITORIAL
HEADLINE: Schroder's in the doghouse, and Germany's in the
doldrums
BYLINE: JONATHAN D. ROCKOFF
THESE ARE TOUGH TIMES for German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder. The German economy remains mired in the doldrums, despite the chancellor's campaign pledges to right it. His Social Democratic Party just lost elections in two longtime strongholds. And a puppet show on German television will soon air episodes portraying Schr der as a nym-phomaniac.
The chancellor, of course, has reserved his scorn for the puppet show. After learning that the comedy will depict his character wearing a studded collar, stuffing a suitcase with sex toys and seducing a glamorous interviewer, Schroder expressed outrage. When he found out his wife will be satirized, too, he threatened legal action.
He canceled an interview with the show's network. And warning the show's producers to drop the sketch in which his wife brags to friends about his sexual prowess, Schroder did his best imitation of Clint Eastwood: "This is the border - this is the line they must not cross."
After such a laughable defense, it is clear that Schroder can discuss only one topic without attracting the ridicule of the German public. It is Germany's Nazi heritage. The chancellor entered office last year promising to relieve the heavy burden of the Holocaust. And he seems to have succeeded.
Jonathan D. Rockoff, a Journal staff writer, majored in German history at Princeton University, spent summers in Munich and Vienna and interned for the Associated Press in Vienna.
Headline: Knowing The Scores; Nicholas Lemann Takes On Standardized Tests And The Just Society In 'The Big Test'
BYLINE: By Susan Larson Book editor
For most of his writing life, Nicholas Lemann has been chronicling the great shifts in opportunity and society in America, defining and interpreting the American dream.
For "Out of the Forties," he studied the lives of a group of people who had experienced the Great Depression, the subjects of a photography collection commissioned by Standard Oil. For "The Fast Track: Texans and Other Strivers," he collected his Texas Monthly portraits of people on the move. The bestseller "The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America" traced the migration of Southern black people to Northern cities as they searched for greater economic opportunity.
Now, in "The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27), Lemann describes how the Scholastic Aptitude Test, conceived as a means of providing educational opportunity for those outside the traditional upper-class, white male elite, instead created a new class system, fractious with debate over race and affirmative action.
Soft-spoken and complicated, Lemann is a man of ideas. He loves to wrestle with them, talk about them, think about them for years on end. And "The Big Test" is a test of his ability to make complicated ideas accessible to the general public.
Some of the most fascinating parts of the book describe the development of the Educational Testing Service, a highly secretive organization whose archives were made available to Lemann. "It was a pure lucky break," he said. "I wrote them a letter couched as a request to have access to the Henry Chauncey Papers in the ETS archives. It was purely a fishing trip. I didn't know if there were any papers or any archives. Fortuitously, there were archives and voluminous Henry Chauncey papers. And Chauncey himself, who is 94, was just starting to pressure the current top brass at ETS to find somebody to go into the archives and write a history of the organization. And one of the current executives was a fan of 'The Promised Land,' and that helped."
Lemann isn't sure his book pleased the ETS; he went to Princeton University last week to discuss his findings with organization members and said his reception was "polite but not all the way to warm." Lemann says that while "the ETS is good at the technical work of testing," he is "uncomfortable with them as a public policy organization that gets to decide things about American public life. The ETS is a private organization that's not accountable to anyone in public life."
September 19, 1999, Sunday
HEADLINE: Dialing for Deliverance
BYLINE: Liza Mundy
I'M, UH, I'M CALLING TO SEE how to obtain the, uh, the morning-after pill?"
Man, is this embarrassing. Especially since I'm calling from work, within earshot of colleagues.
"We don't have it," a harried receptionist snaps. She works -- after all -- for a private doctor; she's putting paying patients on hold to talk to me, an unknown woman trying timidly to score an emergency contraceptive hit. "You'd need to get an appointment," she snaps next, and disconnects me.
It is 10:30 on a Tuesday morning and I have been at this for an hour. Fortunately, I do not really need the morning-after pill. Rather, in the interest of research, I'm trying to find out how I would get it if I did.
Seeing as how the pill is most effective if taken in the first 12 hours, I also tried Mary's Center, an Adams-Morgan clinic, where, I learned, I'd have to undergo a social-worker intake and a full physical first. For something quicker, the helpful nurse suggested I try a morning-after hot line, 1-888-NOT2LATE.
At which point it occurs to me that a resourceful young woman might also turn to the Web. As it happens, a search yields a Web site (www.not-2-late.com) maintained by Princeton University's Office of Population Research, which also runs the telephone hot line.
HEADLINE: Mission Implausible; Caught Between National
Interests And Nationalism
BYLINE: Richard Falk
The humanitarian catastrophe in East Timor, coming so soon after the war over Kosovo, provides a vivid reminder of how political turbulence within states is upsetting world order. Such turbulence presents challenges for the United Nations--the embodiment of organized international society--and for the United States, the sole government with both the logistical ccapabilities and leadership to mount interventions in any part of the world.
Where does this pattern of recurrent ethnic conflict and humanitarian catastrophe lead? It is impossible to know whether the decades ahead will see a continual increase in the number of sovereign states--193 today--or will bear witness to powerful movements of regional consolidation under the aegis of a few dominant giants. Eqqually uncertain is whether the world community will accept a growing responsibility to protect people against internal ravages or, alternatively, will become disenchanted with such rescue missions because they so often backfire or because the costs of success seem too high.
What helps make these challenges especially bewildering is that they emerge at the intersection of two sometimes-conflicting principles: respect for territorial sovereignty of the state and the right of self-determination enjoyed by the peoples of the world.
Richard Falk is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice at Princeton University and the author of "Predatory Globalization" (Blackwells).
HEADLINE: Rules change controversy quieted, Miss America
Pageant plods on
BYLINE: By JOHN CURRAN, Associated Press Writer
DATELINE: ATLANTIC CITY, N.J.
With a controversy temporarily quelled, producers of the 79th annual Miss America Pageant were preparing Saturday to crown this year's winner.
Among the hopefuls: A Radio City Music Hall Rockette with a $12.95 off-the-rack swimsuit, a former Princeton University anthropology major, a civil rights activist's daughter, a tattooed Texan and several starry-eyed singers and aspiring anchorwomen.
HEADLINE: Kentucky leaders for new century nominated by state's newspapers
EDITORS NOTE: Their heroes range from Abe Lincoln to John Kennedy, from Jesus to John Lennon, from mom to a mountain housewife who set up a one-room food bank at her home.
They are concerned about their state and its brain drain, its dependence on tobacco, its crippling regionalism, and, more than all else, its need to be unrelenting in the pursuit of better schools.
Franklin K. Jelsma, 35, of Louisville, is an attorney at Wyatt, Tarrant Combs.
During the 1987 campaign for lieutenant governor, Jelsma, then a recent graduate of Princeton University, served as the driver for Brereton Jones. After Jones was elected, Jelsma worked in the lieutenant governor's office.
He left state government to attend law school at the University of Kentucky, but returned after graduation to become chief of staff to then-Gov. Jones.
Jelsma's interest in politics hasn't waned. He volunteered during the 1996 Clinton/Gore campaign and in state and local campaigns. Jelsma sees government's role as that of a catalyst for change, and its greatest challenge as that of persuading Kentuckians that change is good.
"Kentuckians are wary of change and wary of government," he said.
"They've had bad experiences in the past, and we need to do some work to overcome that."
Another challenge for government in Kentucky's future, he believes, is to attract good people to public service - "both bureaucratic and elected."
Headline: Tweak and Tuck Miss America Pageant Airs Tonight With A Few, Hmmm, Minor Adjustments
BYLINE: KARYN D. COLLINS, SUN MEDIA
Are you a closet Miss America watcher?
You know who you are: The type who swears you have no plans to watch the televised festivities but somehow ends up watching anyway.
Somehow, when you channel-surf each year, you just happen to end up watching. Again.
And if we're really going to be honest, then let's talk about a certain sparkly piece of headgear you've insisted on hanging onto all these years.
For Princeton University student Victoria Andrews Paige, winning the title of Miss New Jersey meant a $10,000 scholarship, the use of a car for a year and the chance to earn more money through public appearances.
HEADLINE: BOOK REVIEW: ARTS DEGREES IN THE SHADE;
Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education by Alan Ryan Can Courses In Culture From Plato To Nato Really Deliver the Workforce of the Future?
BYLINE: Lisa Jardine
When it comes to education, Alan Ryan has been around. "I am what used to be called a scholarship boy: the beneficiary of a meritocratic educational system that plucked boys like myself from working class and lower-middle-class backgrounds, to give us a fiercely academic secondary education," he tells us in the opening chapter of Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education. From Christ's Hospital, which gave him the the kind of general education to which his parents could never have had access, Ryan went on to study that most revered of liberal subjects at Oxford, Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE).
In the early Sixties he was a lecturer at the new and radical University of Essex. His period there coincided with student protests and sit-ins, targeted against restrictive, job-orientated curriculum reforms. I was a graduate student there, and remember him as an enlightened champions of the student cause. Later Ryan went to Princeton University - an Ivy League college which prides itself on recruiting and funding students from a wide range of backgrounds, and which delivers a "liberal education" on the classic American model (a thorough grounding in western civilisation from Plato to Nato). He returned to this country to become Warden of New College, Oxford.
HEADLINE: Campaign Circuit
BYLINE: Peter H. Stone and James A. Barnes
More Bucks for Bradley
Looking to keep the campaign money flowing in, former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley has opened two fund-raising offices in Los Angeles and New York City. Meanwhile, the Democratic presidential hopeful will rake in donations in the Washington area with separate, $1,000-a-head fund-raisers scheduled for Sept. 17 and 18. Former Democratic congressional candidate Stewart Bainum of Maryland is hosting one; Don Roth, a former basketball teammate of Bradley's at Princeton University, is organizing the other. And the sports world continues to boost Bradley's fund raising. Among those co-chairing the Roth event are Washington-based sports agent David Falk and former Redskins running back Calvin Hill. Ex-Redskins lineman Ray Schoenke is lending his name to the Bainum fund-raiser.
HEADLINE: Students Seek Some Reality Amid the Math of
Economics
BYLINE: By MICHAEL M. WEINSTEIN
On my first day as a graduate student in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the professor introduced the discipline by intoning, "All of economics is a subset of the theory of separating hyperplanes." (You don't want to know what that mathematical term means.)
I started to giggle. But then I looked around. Everyone else was scribbling notes. So I wiped the smirk off my face and muttered, only to myself, that I had thought economics was about the plight of people living in sub-Saharan Africa or the impact of technological change on living standards. Apparently I thought wrong -- and wondered whether I had made a terrible career choice.
Decades later, I find economics graduate students asking themselves the same question: where is the economic substance in graduate economics programs? I recently joined several dozen first- and second-year students at a conference in Airlie, Va., that was convened to help them find their way toward applied economics -- analyzing problems that real people face. During the weeklong conference, organized by the Social Science Research Council and paid for by the John D. and Catherine T. McArthur Foundation, eminent scholars presented lectures on applied topics ranging from the plight of low-income mothers under the 1996 welfare law to the long-term determinants of innovation.
Prof. Alan Blinder of Princeton University considers it damning to some of the country's most prestigious graduate programs that their students need to flock to summer camp to find an outlet for their interest in applied work. Mr. Blinder, a former member of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and a driving force behind the council's efforts to promote applied economics, said in a recent interview that too much of what young scholars write these days is "theoretical drivel, mathematically elegant but not about anything real." He attributes the problem in part to the first year of training, or what he calls mathematics boot camp, during which students are handed a steady diet of theory but not taught to connect it to the real world. They soon forget the issues that attracted them to economics.
Mr. Blinder makes an important distinction. He remains scrupulously agnostic over whether graduate training is overly theoretical. "That's a tough issue." But he is unwavering when he criticizes the training as "increasingly aloof and self-referential."
Franklin Fisher of M.I.T. is the Justice Department's chief economist in the Microsoft antitrust trial; his colleague, Richard Schmalensee, is Microsoft's chief economist. Harvard's Lawrence H. Summers is Secretary of the Treasury; Stanford's Joseph Stiglitz is senior vice president of the World Bank; M.I.T.'s Stanley Fischer is deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund. Harvard's Lawrence F. Katz and Princeton's Alan Krueger designed labor-force policies for the Clinton Administration. Harvard's David Ellwood designed President Clinton's original welfare proposal.
HEADLINE: Alien haven
BYLINE: Dan Falk (Toronto; Dan Falk is a science writer and
broadcaster based in Toronto)
HIGHLIGHT: Not too hot, not too cold; not too big, not too small. Finding a planet that is just right for life sounds like a chore. But there may be a simple way, says Dan Falk
REMEMBER the amazing good luck that Captain Kirk and his crew seemed to have whenever they beamed down to a planet ? The gravity was always normal, the temperature comfortable and the air breathable. And, more often than not, they were greeted by surprisingly human-looking life forms. Was this just wishful thinking, or do Earth-like planets, the kind on which "life as we know it" could flourish, really litter the Galaxy ?
A few years ago, there would have been little hope of answering that question, but within a few years we should know. With an array of space missions, scientists are preparing to explore the region known as the habitable zone - the comfortable region around a star in which an Earth-like planet is most likely to be found. We may soon see the fingerprint of such a distant planet passing in front of its sun, briefly dimming its yellow-white glow.
Even so, their existence is encouraging. "If you see giant planets around a few per cent of nearby stars, despite the extreme limitations of our current ability to detect them, it tells you that their formation really is a very common process," says Scott Tremaine of Princeton University. "And if so, it's hard to believe that you wouldn't also commonly form terrestrial planets." That is, planets like the small, rocky worlds of our inner Solar System.
HEADLINE: Discrimination ban's broad net; N.J. Supreme Court
has broadly interpreted state law
BYLINE: THOMAS MARTELLO
A New Jersey law designed to ban discrimination has sent two famous American institutions into a collective tizzy this year.
New Jersey's Law Against Discrimination, first enacted in 1945, was used by the state Supreme Court this summer to proclaim that the Boy Scouts of America's ban on homosexuals is illegal in this state. It was the first time that a state's highest court has made such a ruling; the Boy Scouts say they will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Just this week, controversy brewed on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City after The Associated Press reported that the Miss America Pageant had decided to break with nearly 50 years of tradition and allow women who've had divorces or pregnancies to compete in the venerable contest. The proposed rule change, still under consideration, drew a hornet's nest of protest.
Pageant officials said they were concerned about violating New Jersey's Law Against Discrimination.
The New Jersey law has loomed large for a long time. It was used to defend girls playing Little League baseball and helped break the tradition of all-male eating clubs at Princeton University. Just this year, the state Supreme Court cited the law when allowing a bank vice president to sue for age discrimination - on charges he was fired because of his youth.
HEADLINE: Dreamed-of Peace in Balkans Remains Far Off
To the Editor:
The crisis in Kosovo is in part due to the fact that the international community has committed two major mistakes in the implementation of the Dayton accords: not having brought to justice the two principal culprits of Srebrenica: the Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, and having centered our diplomatic activities and expectations in the power, personality and performance of Slobodan Milosevic (Op-Ed, Sept. 14).
The West repeats its mistake by investing too much hope in the traditional Serbian opposition rather than in helping to create new, non-corrupt leaders. If those indicted by the war crimes tribunal are not brought to justice, the crisis in the region will continue, and so will the West's costly involvement.
WOLFGANG DANSPECKGRUBER
Princeton, N.J., Sept. 14, 1999
The writer is director of the Liechtenstein Program on
Self-Determination, Princeton University.
Headline: Newsday Queens Profile / Kim Magloire
BYLINE: Sheila McKenna
JOB Founder and executive director of the SciTech Youth Foundation, an educational organization dedicated to changing the way young people perceive science, math and technology; recipient of the National Community Leader of the Year award presented by the Quaker Oats Company and the National Council of Negro Women on Aug. 7 in Washington, D.C.
BIOGRAPHY 36; born and raised in Forest Hills, graduated from Princeton University and earned a master's degree in epidemiology from Columbia University, where she is currently studying for a Ph.D.; started SciTech in 1996; single.
WHY SHE'S INVOLVED "For a time, while I was teaching high school students, I volunteered as a guest speaker at career days. As I spoke to the students, I noticed that many of them were intimidated by math and science and the kind of person who studied those subjects. So, I invited my friends to do their own career-day presentations and based on that response, I decided to develop a relationship with the Board of Ed. to bring the program to schools all over the city." IMPACT "SciTech has helped to bring science and math to life in the classroom. Our Regents program, in particular, has had such a success rate in some schools that they have expanded the program to include chemistry along with biology.
Headline: Ramsey's Ferrara In Rush; Wants Title For Princeton
BYLINE: TIM LEONARD, Staff Writer
Even before his fingers dig into the turf and he looks up from his stance to stare down an offensive lineman, Dave Ferrara can feel the adrenaline coursing through him. A pass play is coming. Ferrara knows it, the quarterback knows it, and that overmatched offensive lineman knows it.
These are the moments in a game that Ferrara, a 6-foot-3, 263-pound senior defensive end for Princeton, relishes. Deceptively quick and powerful, Ferrara can use his speed to blow past a lineman or knock him back and go over him. His versatility is a big reason the former Ramsey High standout has been able to dominate in the Ivy League.
Headline: Glynn Strives To Make Difference
BYLINE: Bill Valyo
A Moment In The Sun
There are a number of dedicated peope in Indian River County whose good works for the community have made a difference.
Bill Glynn of Summer Place in Vero Beach has been making a difference here since 1991, when he left Fort Lauderdale and moved to the beach to a rather run-down house that he and his wife converted to its current showcase condition.
As Bill looks out on the ocean from his large wrap-around open terrace, he enthusiastically speaks of a number of things that have disturbed him through the years.
He talks of erosion, and abuse of the nesting turtles, and of the need for a fire-EMS station in the area. And he talks of frustration and battles with local, state and national bureaucracies. But mainly he speaks of certain successes that have been won through the efforts of the North Beach Civic Association, of which he has served as president since 1997, a year after its establishment.
The North Beach Civic Association is a group of 2,000 property owners from Indian River Shores to Sebastian Inlet whose purpose is to protect the area and to legislate for better conditions for the beach homeowners.
Education: Princeton University.
Headline: Scientists Can Now Understand How Learning Takes Place on Molecular Level
BYLINE: George Johnson
This month marks a hallmark in the history of biology. For the first time, we understand how learning takes place. Not vaguely, with ill-defined concepts and analogies, but in concrete precise molecular detail.
This discovery had its beginnings in the work of others, and is but the latest chapter in a long history of investigation. The story starts 50 years ago. Many scientists believed then that memory was some sort of electrical "field effect" shared by many cells. A prominent Canadian psychologist named Donald Hebb argued instead that learning must involve changes in the way brain nerve cells link up with each other.
To understand what Hebb proposed, let's step back for a moment and look at how our brains process information - how nerve cells talk to one another.
For a start, they are not wired together like parts of a computer. In your brain, the nerve cells don't actually touch each other, although they get very close. Understanding what happens in the tiny gap that remains between them is the secret to Hebb's proposal, and this month's discovery.
When a nerve cell in the brain wants to send a signal across the gap to a neighbor nerve cell, it does it like a little boy might, by throwing pebbles. Each pebble is a kind of chemical called a neurotransmitter. In your brain, the neurotransmitter is the amino acid glutamine.
On the receiving side of the gap are a cluster of targets for the pebbles, each in effect a tiny electrical switch.
This month, a team of researchers led by Dr. Joe Tsien, a young assistant professor at Princeton University, showed us how these subunits interact to promote learning. One version of the channel subunit, called NR2B, is common among the NMDA receptors of young people and lets in a lot of calcium ions.
A second version, which tends to replace NR2B as we grow older, is called NR2A and lets in far less calcium. If Hebb is right, then NR2B-rich NMDA receptors should be much better at establishing nerve cell con nections - and at promoting learning! This would explain why younger animals learn so much faster than older ones.
Headline: You Read It Here: News That's Stranger Than Fiction
Australian Peter Singer this week takes up his duties as a tenured professor at Princeton University, the Washington Post reports. Singer, a founder of the animal liberation movement, advocates infanticide of human babies who are born severely disabled. In his book, Practical Ethics, Singer wrote: ''Human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time. They are not persons.'' But animals are self-aware, ergo ''the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog or a chimpanzee.'' Singer also favours euthanasia, regardless of age. At Princeton, Singers joins the staff as a professor of bioethics, assuming the endowed seat at the university's Centre for Human Values . . .
The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
September 17, 1999, Friday
HEADLINE: Paid Notice: Deaths
John Wright Pyne
John Wright Pyne. Of Peapack on Wednesday, September 15, 1999 at his home. Husband of Nancy Buck Pyne, father of Moses Taylor Pyne & Holly Pyne Connor, brother of Eben Wright Pyne, Alison Pyne Ewing & the late Percy Rivington Pyne III and Grafton Howland Pyne, grandfather of three grandchildren. Memorial service at St. Luke's Episcopal Church, Gladstone, on Monday, September 20 at 5:00 P.M. Private Interment St. Bernard's Cemetery, Bernardsville. In lieu of flowers, memorial gifts may be made to Princeton University Class of 1940, Princeton, N.J. 08540.
HEADLINE: OBITUARIES
David Alan Cunnison
David Alan Cunnison passed away on September 20, 1999 at his home in Vero Beach, as a result of lung cancer. He was born on February 13, 1927 in Brooklyn, New York and raised in the Village of Bellerose, New York.
Mr. Cunnison attended Princeton University and graduated from the University of Denver where he was a charter member of the Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity. He served as a paratrooper in the 110th Airborne Division in World War II.
SECTION: OBITUARY
Headline: Gregory R. Owens; Pitt Doctor Who Studied Health Effects of Smoking
BYLINE: CHRISTOPHER SNOWBECK, POST-GAZETTE STAFF WRITER
Dr. Gregory R. Owens, a University of Pittsburgh physician who studied how smokers could dramatically improve their health by kicking the habit, died Friday at age 50. The Oakmont man had been ailing from a stroke he suffered more than three years ago.
The health of smokers wasn't a hot topic when Dr. Owens chose it as his specialty in the 1970s, said Jane F. Owens, his wife and an epidemiologist at Pitt. But Dr. Owens kept up his research as public attention to the issue grew.
Dr. Owens was born south of Wheeling in Glen Dale, W.Va. He attended the Linsley School in Wheeling before studying biology as an undergraduate at Princeton University. He went to medical school at the University of Pennsylvania.