Three new trustees joined Claremont Graduate University

Vernon Altman is senior partner and director of Bain & Company. Altman joined Bain at its founding in 1973, and currently leads their Telecommunications, Media & Technology practice, and Aerospace & Defense practice. He also leads Bain’s Full Potential practice, which assists companies in transforming and achieving their full potential. Together, these practices represent about one-third of the firm’s global business. Altman founded Bain’s European, Japanese, and US West Coast practices, and has broad experience in strategy development, implementation, and organization and change management for the US and international corporations.

Altman is a member of the Board of Directors of Napster, an Internet music distribution company, and chairman of Vobile, a privately held Internet video fingerprinting and recognition company. He is also a member of the boards of directors of the San Francisco Bay Area Council, the California Business Roundtable, the California Chamber of Commerce, and the San Jose Tech Museum. He is a presidential nominee to the MIT Corporation Visiting Committee for the Engineering Systems Division, a member of the Board of Visitors and Fellows at the University of California-Davis School of Viticulture and Enology, and a former board member of KQED (San Francisco’s public TV and radio broadcaster).

Early in his career, Altman held technical positions at General Electric and Honeywell.  He received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a masters in management from MIT’s Sloan School.

George R. Hedges, from Los Angeles, specializes in entertainment litigation and has experience in virtually every type of dispute involving entertainment matters. His clients include motion picture studios, international production/distribution companies, television networks, major producers, actors and directors, talent agencies and management companies. Hedges has also organized and led archaeological explorations into unexplored regions in Yemen and Oman, leading to the discovery of the ancient incense roads and the lost city of Ubar. In addition, he is the founder and president of the Archaeology Fund, a nonprofit corporation devoted to archeological exploration.

Hedges has several educational and philanthropic affiliations, including his current positions on the School of Arts and Humanities Board of Visitors for Claremont Graduate University and on the Board of Directors for the Mental Health Advocacy Services.

Hedges received his JD degree from the University of Southern California, and his master’s and bachelor’s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania.

Ellen Palevsky, from Bel Air and Malibu, California, is a philanthropist. In addition to her new duties as a trustee of Claremont Graduate University, she is an advisory board member of the university’s School of Arts and Humanities.

Palevsky is involved in activities ranging from the Grameen Foundation (microcredit in developing countries) to the arts (the Ellen Palevsky Collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) to political activism (ACLU of Southern California Foundation Board of Directors). A member of the Chairman’s Council of the Metropolitan Museum in New York (where she supports Greek and Roman art, Islamic art, Ancient Near Eastern Art, and the Watson Library), Palvesky is also a founding board member of Shine on Sierra Leone, a nongovernmental organization active in rebuilding schools in that impoverished African country. She is also an advisory board member of Intelligence Squared US, the acclaimed public-debate series based in New York.

Palevsky holds a bachelor’s degree from Mount St. Mary’s College, Los Angeles, and a masters in public policy from the University of Southern California.

New student housing is going up. Old dorms are coming down.

The much-anticipated student housing complex is about to become a reality; a very impressive reality. The construction site can currently be viewed north of Foothill Boulevard on North College Avenue, the street that leads into Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden.

The housing complex will consist of five buildings with 62 studios, 19 one-bedroom, and 77 two-bedroom apartments. The seven-acre site will also feature a playground, parking lot, and several grassy areas and sidewalks. The project should be completed before the fall semester of 2008. Around this time the dorms on the corner of 11th and Dartmouth will be demolished and replaced with a temporary parking lot.


“Imagine CGU”

Imagine Claremont Graduate University 10, 20, or even 30 years from now. This was the task of the trustees, faculty, students, and staff who attended the “Imagine CGU” seminar this spring. Coordinated by Professor Hallie Preskill from the School of Behavioral and Organizational Sciences, the workshop encouraged everyone to discuss what is unique about the university and what they wished for its future.

When participants were separated into brainstorming groups, a wide array of ideas sprang forth.

“Planning can be an elite activity, but we wanted to open this up to everyone,” said President Robert Klitgaard. “At knowledge institutions, power and passion are decentralized.”

The convergence of ideas helped inspire the spring board of trustees meeting, which helps set the course for the future of the university.

2007 Tufts Poetry winners honored

Rodney Jones—a professor of English at Southern Illinois University—is the winner of the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his collection of poetry, Salvation Blues.

Salvation Blues represents a body of Jones’ work that stretches over 20 years, and draws upon material from six previous collections. The meditative and narrative poems – which playfully combine sacred and profane themes and language – evoke a rich Southern smoothness that is both lyrical and profound.

“The attempt to make poetry is one of the most sustaining activities on earth, but it is lonely work,” Jones said. “To win such an award makes one feel and trust the silent accompaniment of kindred souls.”

Robert Wrigley, chair of the Tufts Award Judging Committee, said: “Rodney Jones is a poet whose work is intellectually sparkling and, at the same time, beautifully readable.”

Eric McHenry is the winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award – a prize for younger, emerging poets – for which he received $10,000. McHenry, the associate editor of Columns, the alumni magazine of the University of Washington, won for his poetry collection, Potscrubber Lullabies. “I’d like to think of it as a book that is ironic and humorous,” McHenry said, “with the humor not masking but perhaps revealing deeper ambiguities.”

The Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award was established at Claremont Graduate University in 1992 by Kate Tufts to honor the memory of her husband, Kingsley Tufts, a poet, writer, and certified public accountant. The Kate Tufts Discovery Award was initiated in 1993.

Please check the Fall 2007 issue of the Flame for coverage of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Awards ceremony.

Positive psychology now at SBOS

Known affectionately as the “happiness people,” world-renowned developmental psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Jeanne Nakamura have joined the full-time faculty of the School of Behavioral and Organizational Sciences (SBOS), and have developed a new degree program offering the world’s first PhD with a concentration in positive psychology.

Among his many other accomplishments, Csikszentmihalyi is the author of the 1990 bestseller, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, a cofounder of Positive Psychology, and the director of the Quality of Life Research Center at the university. Nakamura, director of the Good Work Project – a series of studies of excellence and social responsibility in professional life – has overseen the work of numerous SBOS students at the Quality of Life Research Center and specializes in adult development.

SBOS is launching two degree concentrations in the emerging field of positive psychology: positive developmental psychology and positive organizational psychology.

Positive psychology aims at enhancing human strengths such as creativity, joy, enhancing flow at work, responsibility, and optimal performance and achievement.


Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka and journalist Peter Steinfels speak on religion

This winter, the School of Religion hosted Wole Soyinka, winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, to inaugurate the Institute for Signifying Scriptures (ISS) Distinguished Speaker Series.

Soyinka addressed an audience of hundreds, who were eager to hear the thoughts of this great scholar and intellectual. His lecture, “Deities for a Secular Dispensation,” discussed the dynamics of and threats from religion that the twenty-first century faces.

Vincent Wimbush, director of the ISS, said, “We should hear someone like him, who puts out a challenge to rethink the kind of structures of our religious myths and religious traditions.”

In a separate engagement, Peter Steinfels presented “What Catholicism Will We Choose for the 21st Century?” Steinfels is an author, university professor, and New York Times columnist.

“His talk outlined the agenda for a forward-looking chair in Catholic Studies that seeks to be of service to the Catholic community,” said School of Religion Dean Karen Jo Torjesen. “It was presented within the context of the kind of open discussion that a university can provide. We were very honored to have these distinguished speakers as our guests,” she added.

SBOS evaluation team brings expertise to South African officials

The University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Institute of Monitoring and Evaluation (IME) recently hosted School of Behavioral and Organizational Science (SBOS) Dean Stewart Donaldson and Associate Professor Christina Christie, who brought their expertise in evaluation sciences to inaugurate the training event in Pretoria and Cape Town, South Africa. The weeklong event featured a series of workshops presented by national and international evaluation specialists. It drew delegates from Botswana, the Eastern Cape, Bloemfontein, and Worcester.

The focus of the IME workshop was the evaluation of business, government, NGO, and educational programs. “South Africa is grappling with some serious societal problems such as AIDS, health care, violent crime, and the delivery of basic government services,” Donaldson said. “The potential for change is huge, because they have the resources to make changes, they just need to carefully decide how best to deploy those resources to best meet human needs.”

Plans are underway to formalize student and faculty exchange programs between Claremont Graduate University and UCT.

In addition to making multiple visits to various agencies in South Africa over the past few years, Claremont faculty and students are also forging strong connections with evaluation groups in Europe, Canada, and the South Pacific.

Great memories inspired Robert Redford

This spring, Claremont Graduate University was the center of activity when a major motion picture, Lions for Lambs, starring Robert Redford, Tom Cruise, and Meryl Streep, began filming on campus. Redford, who is also directing the movie, was a member of the School of Politics and Economics Board of Visitors for eight years, a commencement speaker in 1995, and holds an honorary degree from the university. In preparation for the role, Redford spent time shadowing SPE Dean Tom Willett. The Academy Award-winning director plays a college professor whose story about making ethical choices and influencing students plays against the backdrop of a parallel story of a US senator and a journalist, played by Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep. Redford said his memories of his eight years with Claremont inspired him to come to campus for the film. “I have great memories of my time here,” he said.

IN MEMORIAM:

Marshall Waingrow (1923-2007)
Distinguished Emeritus Professor of English, Marshall Waingrow, has passed away. He served as a Claremont Graduate University professor and was department chair at various times before retiring in 1989. “He was an accomplished scholar who believed foremost in education and taught through the eyes of perfection,” said his daughter, Emily Hope Falke.