FARM REPORT NEWS
|
MEDICINE Taking the Campus PulseAS A SPECIALIST in the treatment of children with cancer and HIV, Philip Pizzo has seen medicine work wonders. When he served as head of the infectious disease section and chief of pediatrics at the National Cancer Institute, Pizzo often held the hands of critically ill children. He watched many of them regain their strength and grow up to lead full lives -- he notes with fatherly pride that two former patients recently completed graduate studies in radiology and health services technology. Pizzo says he had "the enormous privilege" of being at the Cancer Institute at a time when children with leukemia and solid tumor malignancies were cured. And that experience profoundly strengthened his commitment to his work: "If you stay focused, are tenacious, try to maintain your optimism and believe that you can make a difference, sometimes it can happen," he says. "Of course, there's a lot of luck involved, as well." Those insights should serve Pizzo well when he becomes dean of Stanford's School of Medicine on April 2, taking charge as the school begins a major curriculum reform and a five-year, $185 million renovation of its facilities. Since he was named to the deanship in December, Pizzo has been commuting between Stanford and Boston, where he has been physician-in-chief at Children's Hospital and chair of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. On frequent visits here, he has asked broad questions and listened for nuances in the answers, taking the academic and human pulse of the campus. Education. Research. Clinical care. Community service. Pizzo ticks off the issues he has discussed with deans, researchers, teachers and administrators as he develops his blueprint for change. But in a wide-ranging interview in January, he declined to specify his agenda for the Medical School until he's had time to settle in. "I've begun constructing some of the issues that I think are important to my own strategic plan," he says. "But I'm still validating things by doing a lot of listening." However, the 56-year-old dean has plenty to say about the bigger picture, particularly the "transitional state" in which teaching hospitals and research institutions find themselves today. Medical schools grew and flourished during the 1970s and '80s, he says, but underwent significant turmoil in the '90s, "when managed care tried to convert medicine to a business, rather than a service." As he takes the helm at Stanford, he says this is a good time to be asking 21st-century questions. "What should a medical school that's in a research-intensive environment look like? How should it configure its education focus? Who should it train? For what purpose? What kind of cross-fertilization should be in place?" With a nod to the pioneering Bio-X project that will promote interdisciplinary research in biological sciences, bioengineering and medicine at Stanford, Pizzo asserts that cross-campus conversations are the building blocks of future research. "As our knowledge has expanded over the last 50 years, it has become clear that some disciplines that seemed so separate and distinct are actually very closely related," he says. "So the possibilities exist for creating interdisciplinary research that not only improves knowledge but also, in the case of a medical school, potentially improves the ability to diagnose or treat or prevent disease -- or simply understand it better." At a time when many medical students are trying to decide whether to become primary care physicians or specialists, Pizzo thinks Stanford is positioned to train specialists who are committed to doing research. "I think this is a big country with a lot of needs, and one of the important issues -- and, I think, big mistakes -- is the concept that medical schools should all do the same thing, that everyone should produce an array of clinicians and researchers," he says. "I think there is a need for focus and specialization. While primary care physicians continue to play an important role, we've learned that specialists and highly trained clinical and basic investigators are an essential part of the medical enterprise. Not every place has the resources or ability to train that group of individuals. So I feel that Stanford and a handful of other schools should focus their energies on specialists and researchers." As he looks at the changes and needs that are propelling discussions about curriculum reform at Stanford, Pizzo says the declining number of specialists nationwide is one of his top concerns. Citing trends in his own field, he notes that during the past 10 years the percentage of new U.S. pediatricians who opted to enter specialty areas, such as pediatric oncology, fell from more than one-third to less than one-fifth. "That represents a crisis, because it means we won't have enough pediatric specialists to do clinical care," he says. "And even more important, we will have fewer who are able to conduct research -- so that at the very time when there is such a vast array of new opportunities, there won't necessarily be a workforce capable of seizing those opportunities." An internationally known clinician who has designed innovative controlled trials, Pizzo in 1988 published the first article, in the New England Journal of Medicine, on antiviral therapy for hiv in children. He served as acting clinical director of the National Cancer Institute, where he founded Children's Inn, a temporary home for young patients and their families. In 1997, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine. The first person in his family to go beyond elementary school, Pizzo holds a bachelor's degree from Fordham University and earned his md at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, which he attended on a state regents' scholarship. Pizzo's delivery is New York rapid-fire without the bite. He appears to have hit the campus running like the veteran marathoner he is. Year-round, in icy New England or "remarkably nicer" Palo Alto, he begins each day with a 4 a.m. run. A self-described history buff, Pizzo pounds out the miles with rented books on tape; currently he is plugged into the first volume of Sir Martin Gilbert's sweeping trilogy, A History of the Twentieth Century. When he talks about the history of medical education in the United States, Pizzo goes back to the post-Civil War era, when scientific findings first began to guide the training of physicians. He talks about the founding of the first U.S. medical school in the late 19th century and how researchers in basic sciences worked together with those in clinical medicine in the early part of the 20th century. In the post-World War II phase, Pizzo says, federal funding launched the biomedical research enterprises that have become fixtures of today's medical schools. While placing a high premium on research, Pizzo says he hopes medical students will keep one guiding principle in mind, no matter what specialties they pursue. "It is all too easy in modern medicine to look at the imaging studies and to look at the laboratory studies and to formulate an opinion without actually engaging in a human interaction," he says. "It's very important not to lose sight of the fact that there's a patient at the other end of the discussion, and that the very fundamental part of medicine is sitting down, listening and making human contact. "It's one of the reasons why I think there has been, to some degree, a loss of public trust for medicine as a discipline. What people often are looking for is someone to listen to their problem and put an arm around them." |
[ Back to Top ]
|
|
ADMISSION Taking Time Out to Avoid BurnoutAMBITIOUS HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS hunker down with tutors, take after-school lessons in sports and music, volunteer for community service and attend SAT-preparation workshops -- all in an effort to buff up their chances of getting admitted to top schools like Stanford. "High school students think the way to get in is by being very, very busy," says Robin Mamlet, Stanford's new dean of admission and financial aid. "They are so stressed, and the whole college application process has become less joyful than it should be." And lately, Mamlet says, Mom and Dad have been turning up the pressure on kids. Parents who once filled bassinets with educational toys are paying consultants thousands of dollars to review -- and, in some cases, substantially revise -- entrance essays. "We hear things like, 'We are applying to X, Y and Z schools,' " she says. "Parents are very, very involved." If their efforts fail to win admission to the school of choice, many parents pick up the phone and complain. "As soon as Early-Decision letters go out in December, we spend the following week dealing with the aftermath," Mamlet says. "Parents don't understand how their children could have done everything right [and not get in], and we get a lot of angry phone calls and e-mails. The e-mails come straight to me, and people can pack an extraordinary amount of meanness into a few lines." Mamlet and admissions officers nationwide are tracking a troubling new development: after surviving the rigors of the application process, freshmen are emotionally and academically burned out by the time they arrive at college. In fact, a UCLA survey of 462 campuses nationwide found that a record 30 percent of students who entered college last fall felt "overwhelmed" by the process of getting in. The signs are alarming -- so much so that bellwether Harvard University is now calling for a time-out. Literally. In a new posting on its website, Harvard's dean of admissions suggests that it could be healthy to "postpone entrance to college for a year." Step back and reflect, the university urges applicants. Noting that about 20 percent of Harvard students take a year off at some point before graduation to backpack around Europe, sample kibbutz life, write stories or work for a political campaign, the dean concludes that the results of those time-outs have been "uniformly positive." Although Mamlet says Stanford does not actively encourage deferment -- "I think it's not right for the majority of students" -- she adds that "it is right for a significant subset. "I think it's great if those students take a year to do something they wouldn't otherwise get to do," she says. "I don't think of it as an additional way to get admitted, but as a way for really talented students to defer entry for a year. I would hope they would make the best use they can of that time by doing something meaningful -- by having a life-altering experience." Just as many incoming students need to catch their breath to reflect on their values and passions, Mamlet thinks it is important for the University to consider what kind of student body it wants. She has been making the rounds of departments since she arrived on campus in November and so far has talked with professors in computer science, mathematics, music and physics about the kinds of students they most enjoy teaching. "For one thing, faculty want kids who are not running from scheduled event to scheduled event," she says. "They want kids for whom success has been a byproduct, not a goal -- kids who are in love with learning, who have had the experience of being enthralled. They want the kinds of kids who stay awake reading a book all night, not because it's an assignment that's due, but because they couldn't put the book down." Of course, Mamlet adds, as soon as she says something like that in public, "high school students will think they're supposed to stay up all night reading [to get into Stanford]." Mamlet has been evaluating college applications since 1982, when she graduated from Occidental College in Los Angeles and started working in that school's admissions office. As associate dean of admissions at Pomona College, and as dean of admissions at Sarah Lawrence College and most recently at Swarthmore College, she became familiar with applications from all geographic regions of the United States and even got to know the subtleties of specific school districts. In December, Stanford offered admission to 520 of the 2,227 high school students who applied under the Early Decision program. By the time regular admission letters go out in early April, Mamlet and her staff will have read some 130,000 pieces of mail from more than 18,700 applicants. Mamlet herself reads the records of every student who is offered admission and the records of all the "swims" -- those who survive the initial cuts but are not immediately put into the admit pile. She also reads the majority of legacy applications -- all in the space of five months. Does she have a life? "No." But, sensitive to the danger of burnout herself, Mamlet says she reserves three hours of "sacred time" every evening to be with her 7-year-old daughter, Chloe, 6-month-old son, Austin, and her husband, Charles Brown, who is director of medical development at Stanford. Then, come 8 p.m., it's back to the piles of applications. |
[ Back to Top ]
Cardinal NumbersSLAC professors who have won Nobel prizes: 3
Publications generated each year by SLAC's science program: 600-700
U.S. websites established earlier than SLAC's: 0
Weight, in tons, of the BaBar particle detector, which identifies the charge and mass of particles: 1,000
Average weight, in tons, of a male African elephant: 5
Number of AA batteries that would be required to produce the electron voltage at which the linear accelerator runs: 30 billion
Number of times that a chain of 30 billion batteries would stretch to the moon and back: 2
Universities that make use of SLAC's resources: 147
SOURCES: SLAC director's office; www.slac.stanford.edu; askjeeves.com |
[ Back to Top ]
|
|
WORKPLACE University Takes Steps to Address Child-Care CrunchHOUSING COSTS are high enough in the Bay Area. Ugly Reality No. 2 for young families is the dearth of affordable child care. Two years ago, 350 children were on the waiting list for Stanford's two campus centers. Today that number is 500 and climbing. And those who get in have to pay the going local rate -- $1,200 per month for infant care and $800 for preschoolers. A recent study in Santa Clara County concluded that there already is a need for 11,000 spaces. Kathleen Sullivan, who retired in December as director of Stanford's WorkLife Office, says her group "hears from families all the time who say they are choosing not to have another child" because of the expense of child care. Sullivan and her staff completed an assessment of campus child-care needs in June, and President John Hennessy studied it over the summer. In November he announced several initiatives. The University will pay for improvements to two child-care centers on campus -- the Children's Center of the Stanford Community and the Stanford Arboretum Children's Center -- and may build an additional center, he said. Yet another child-care center, this one run by a for-profit group, will open at the Stanford West apartments next fall. And the University is considering a salary supplement for faculty and staff beginning next September or January. That should come as encouraging news to junior faculty at the University and postdoctoral researchers and staff physicians at the Medical Center, who seem to make up the majority of parents -- on the waiting list and enrolled -- at the campus day-care centers. |
[ Back to Top ]
|
|
FACILITIES Despite Energy Crisis, Campus Has Power to SpareAS CALIFORNIA'S ROLLING blackouts made national headlines this winter, the campus just kept humming along. Well, there was that Saturday morning brownout at FloMo that set off fire alarms in the dining hall. But Chris Christofferson, associate vice provost for facilities, told the Stanford Daily it was "just an equipment glitch." That's because the University has its own power plant, the Cardinal Cogeneration Facility, which produces steam, chilled water and twice as much electrical power as the University typically needs. Commissioned in 1987, the plant is a wholly owned subsidiary of General Electric. Stanford purchases about 25 megawatts of power from the plant daily and distributes that through its own campus substation. The remainder is sold to Pacific Gas & Electric for local distribution through its power grid. "Every kilowatt-hour the campus conserves during this critical period increases the amount of power we can provide to PG&E and the general public," University President John Hennessy wrote in a letter urging faculty, staff and students to conserve energy at work and in dormitories. Christofferson says Stanford has the lowest energy consumption per square foot of any California research university, thanks to an extensive energy conservation plan launched in the late 1980s. Since 1996, the University has spent betweeen $750,000 and $1 million each year on a retrofit program that has included installing more efficient electrical lights and fan systems in its buildings. To continue to save energy, Hennessy and Christofferson urged people working and living on campus to turn off unnecessary lights, machines and personal heaters, especially at night: "If you are away from your computer for an extended period of time, and especially at the end of the day, please put the computer and monitor to sleep or turn them off." With a low-watt lullaby? |
[ Back to Top ]
|
|
ECONOMICS Want to Know History? Question the NumbersAS ROW AFTER ROW of students in Cubberley Auditorium whipped out Palm Pilots to record the dates of midterms and final exams, Professor Gavin Wright fielded questions about Econ 116. Yes, there would be a term paper. And yes, there would be a test on this, the first day of class, January 9 -- "mostly for my own edification," he said, grinning. In fact, the historical literacy test was a first for Wright, who has been teaching at Stanford since 1981. He distributed a sheet with 34 questions, including the following: when was Thomas Jefferson president? Which document established the division of powers between the states and the federal government? Identify Snoop Doggy Dogg. Not surprisingly, 99 percent of the 150 students who showed up for American Economic History got the last question right. But only 57 percent knew that Jefferson had served from 1801 to 1809. "I was a little fearful as to what I might find," Wright says about the quiz. "It seems that there's a general lack of awareness of American history, and the main purpose of this course is to explain the importance of history to people with the mindset of a typical econ major." A past president of the Economic History Association, Wright finds himself one of only four in the 36-member economics department he chairs who would describe themselves as economic historians. But while the theorists and econometricians may argue about whether market forces are independent of historical factors, they agree on one point -- that economics is a social science. "It's about understanding the world and understanding policy," Wright says. "It's not about how to go out and make money." Many students perceive that economics is precisely about making a bundle, however, and those bent on careers in business continually lobby for more courses in finance, insurance and quantitative methods. The department has complied, with the result that economics is consistently the largest undergraduate major -- bigger than hum bio or computer science, where the numbers fluctuate from year to year. In the past few years, enrollment in Wright's course has exploded, from about 50 students to more than 150, partly because the class now satisfies a general education requirement in American cultures. Looking over the sea of faces in Cubberley, Wright surmised that he was talking to the confirmed. "I know from the expressions on your faces that most of you are econ majors, and most economists take a deductive approach -- they start with a model or a set of assumptions and work out the implications," he said. "But economic history as a school of thought starts with facts and data. So we will study technologies and institutions, and we'll look for patterns and changes in the course of history. And bit by bit, we'll build up a body of thought and try to generalize from there." Walking them through the expectations of the term paper, Wright said they would have to make original use of data -- from the federal census or reports of the Department of Labor or Bureau of Labor Statistics, perhaps -- to address an unsettled question in American economic history. Try to think imaginatively, he said, about issues like social welfare expenditures, immigration, the national debt, bank failures and international trade. "We don't like it if someone writes in his term paper, 'I found this data on the Internet,'" Wright said. "You have to have some knowledge of where the numbers came from, what biases were built into them, why those particular numbers survived while others didn't and who the researcher was who put them together. Then you have to question the numbers and deploy them in some coherent way to ask a question." As a grad student at Yale in the early '60s, Wright had to ask similar questions about a recently uncovered set of data from the 1860 U.S. census -- the Parker-Gallman sample that contained rich details about individual households, farms, crops and slave holdings. He turned his analysis into a thesis on the cotton slave economy of 1860; and in the summer of 1963, he worked with a Quaker-organized voter registration project in a black-majority county in North Carolina. In his research and publications since then, Wright has argued that the civil rights movement was a political and economic success, particularly benefiting metropolitan areas of the South. "I learned to ask about the roots of the problems of the South," Wright says about his days as a student activist. "And I would love to think that our undergraduates still do that -- talk late into the night about the nature of life and what they want to do with themselves to fit into the historical currents." |
[ Back to Top ]
|
|
ENGINEERING Photonics: Growing at Light SpeedTODAY WE TRANSMIT images with digital cameras and make long-distance phone calls for 10 cents a minute, thanks to fiber-optic cables. Tomorrow we may use an improved version of that technology to download entire libraries of information on our computers -- in a matter of seconds, rather than hours -- and physicians may have access to scanning equipment that can help them track cancerous cells. Those and other advances will result from research in photonics, the science that harnesses light for practical uses. The ability to send particles of light energy -- photons -- through optical fibers as thin as one human hair has almost completely displaced electronics for transmitting information long distances. Researchers at Stanford and Duke now are revving up to design new generations of lasers and light-emitting diodes that likely will revolutionize telecommunications. Both universities have received $25 million from high-tech entrepreneur Michael J. Fitzpatrick and his wife, Patty, to establish research centers for advanced photonics. Fitzpatrick is former head of San Jose-based E-Tek Dynamics Inc., which makes fiber-optic components and systems for cable television and telecommunications. The Fitzpatrick Center for Photonics at Stanford will be constructed in the Science and Engineering Quadrangle over the next five years. Replacing the Ginzton Labs, the new facility is expected to open by summer 2004. It will house between 16 and 20 faculty, 120 doctoral students and 50 more postdocs, research engineers and visiting staff from affiliated companies. Researchers at Stanford and Duke will collaborate in distance learning and joint research and symposia. "The photonics business is growing faster than Microsoft grew," says electrical engineering professor David Miller, who was at AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1981 to 1996 and will direct the new institute.
|
[ Back to Top ]
|
|
WRITING Reading and Writing in the Internet AgeANDREA LUNSFORD was recruited to the English department last year as a world-class authority in writing, writing instruction and language communication theory. She has reorganized Writing and Critical Thinking as the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, and next fall she will launch the Stanford Center for Writing, Rhetoric and Technology. Lunsford encourages students to use multimedia presentation tools and says her favorite classrooms are designed around clusters of computers, where students can roll their chairs up to a central conference table to comment on one another's work. Stanford: How are today's freshmen faring as writers? Lunsford: You know, in the 1880s Harvard did a study of first-year-student writing and put 3,000 papers in the Harvard archives to attest to the illiteracy of American boys. Those papers are still there, and I've looked at them. What they say to me is that they're writing like 16- and 17-year-old kids. The myth that writing development is perfected by the age of 14 or 16 is very persistent in this country, but it's a myth because many people don't fully mature as writers until they're in their 40s and 50s. What are your expectations, then, of 17- and 18-year-olds in your classes? Our courses are writing courses, so they're productive, as opposed to solely interpretive. And that means the focus is always squarely on the students' writing and their growing maturation as writers. The college years are really crucial to writing development, which results from good instruction and from intensive response from both a knowledgeable adult and peers. Thus, every student who comes here can benefit from instruction in writing that is very time-intensive. There's no way to lecture about writing, although lecturing may give you ideas or be interesting and fun. The way to improve writing is to write with a kind of a guide, and that's what the teacher becomes -- a mentor, a more experienced stylist, a more experienced thinker. What's the most striking change you've seen in freshmen over the past decade? Students are not reading as much in the way of traditional texts, but they are reading more in the way of nontraditional texts. With the rise of newspapers and their narrow columns of print, sentences and paragraphs got shorter, and now the Internet invites a reader, much more than a print book does, to skip around, to click and go to other links. And perhaps because of that, it seems to me that students are often listening at random. They dip in and dip out, and if I ask them to take notes, their notes look very different from the notes I would take. I'm not a neurobiologist, but I'm wondering if we're changing the way we process information. And that's what makes the field of writing so exciting -- that those are the kinds of questions we're asking today. |
[ Back to Top ]
|
Related Site: |
HEALTH RESEARCH Buying Relief from Compulsive ShoppingIMELDA MARCOS and Jackie Kennedy may have suffered from it. Flaubert's fictional Madame Bovary showed all the symptoms. But compulsive shopping is more than conspicuous consumption by the wealthy or bourgeois. It is a disorder, described by one specialist as a hunting-and-gathering impulse "gone amuck" that can afflict both rich and poor. Whether they're buying diamonds or second-hand clothing, compulsive shoppers fill their carts with things they don't need, use or care about; sometimes they never even remove the purchases from the packaging. And the consequences are serious, according to Lorrin Koran, professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the Medical School and director of Stanford's Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Clinic. Some of his patients have spent their way into a $60,000 hole, taken out second mortgages on their homes, declared bankruptcy or gotten divorced as a result of their behavior. What distinguishes those who love to shop from those with a shopping disorder? The origins of compulsive shopping are biological and cultural, says Koran. People with the disorder feel anxious before they shop; shopping itself gives them a sense of exhilaration, pleasure or control. The regret and guilt -- plus the emotional or financial problems -- come later. Compulsive shoppers, says Koran, find themselves preoccupied by irrational impulses they cannot resist. They may wonder what's new at the mall, for example; or if they hear about a new fashion, they may buy it in every available color, even colors they dislike. While spouses may resort to hiding car keys to prevent shopping splurges, addicted shoppers will find a way to shop when no one is looking -- and they'll hide the evidence, stashing the goods in secret places. Until recently, there were few treatment options in the United States for the roughly 2 to 8 percent of adults who suffer from impulse control disorders that include hair pulling, pathological gambling, kleptomania, pyromania and compulsive sexual behaviors. But results from a pilot study at Stanford that began in December 1999 suggest there may be hope for compulsive shoppers. So far, 80 percent of the subjects in the study who took Celexa -- an antidepressant similar to Prozac that adjusts serotonin levels that may be out of balance -- have reported spending less time thinking about or engaged in buying things than they did before. Individuals whose lives previously had been turned upside down by their shopping habits "absolutely stopped shopping," Koran says. "They totally lost interest; they threw out catalogs; they could go to the mall and not buy anything." |
[ Back to Top ]
|
|
Inquiring MindsUseful Weed: A 17-member Stanford group led by Ron Davis, professor of biochemistry and director of the Stanford Genome Technology Center, has completed a four-year project to sequence a portion of the genome of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Working with researchers from UC-Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania, the Stanford scientists have been studying the small, flowering weed -- a relative of cabbage and mustard that is considered the lab mouse of plants -- in an effort to increase food production and improve nutrition. Wizard of Os: Researchers at Stanford and the Palo Alto Veterans Affairs Hospital are recruiting healthy men over 65 for a study called "Mr. OS," which will help men deal with osteoporosis. An estimated 2 million men in the United States develop this gradual, age-related loss of bone density, says Robert Marcus, '63, MD '66, professor of medicine. The researchers are examining the risk of fractures and seeking a possible relationship between osteoporosis and prostate cancer. Stealth Viruses: Steven Block, professor of biological sciences and applied physics, wrote in the January issue of American Scientist magazine that biological weapons are "the poor man's atom bomb." He argues that bioweapons like anthrax spores and deadly viruses offer terrorist groups and such rogue states as Iraq and North Korea an affordable way to counter the overwhelming military superiority of the United States and other world powers. Block supports the production and stockpiling of new vaccines and argues in favor of strengthening the 1972 bioweapons treaty. |
[ Back to Top ]
|
|
DANCE Shaking Up Notions about 'Good' MovementEXPOSURE TO AN eclectic range of rhythm and movement keeps Stanford dancers on their toes. "You need to see a lot of different work to loosen up your ideas about how dance is made," says Diane Frank, a lecturer in the dance division. "Otherwise, you might think, 'All good dancers face front, all good dance is made to music I know, and it's all in unison.'" The American College Dance Festival is just the place to shake up those notions. Held at the University of New Mexico from March 7 to 10, the marathon of dawn-to-dusk classes -- in ballet, jazz, tap, modern, hip-hop, tai chi and maybe even wushu sword dancing -- will bring together some 400 students from 40 schools. Following evening concerts that stretch toward midnight, judges discuss the strengths and shortcomings of each work with the dancers and the public audience. Frank, who used to teach with Merce Cunningham in New York City, and dance lecturer Robert Moses auditioned students in October and chose three pieces that showed the most promise and the clearest intention. They mentored the projects by offering suggestions about choreography, but mostly they let the artistic pots simmer on their own. Shibani Patnaik, '03, rehearses Essence of the East in the basement of Casa Zapata several nights a week, moving to the drumbeats of music that was specially composed for the festival by teachers she has studied with, on summer vacations in India, since she was 4. "When I tried out, mine was the only ethnic dance," Patnaik says. "It gives me a real sense of fulfillment to be keeping up with my cultural heritage by being able to perform." Graduate student Brittany Brown comes to Recollection from the "little bit here, little bit there" school of training. "Instead of staying focused, I went berserk," she says. Dancing to an arrhythmic composition for guitar, cello and banjo, Brown is challenging ballet's traditional male-female lifts by choreographing a work in which she and her dance partner, Emma Stewart-Teitelbaum, take turns lifting each other. Noelle Thomas, '02, who has been dancing since the age of 2, is taking Haywire -- a six-minute piece with "serious conflicts" -- to the festival on her second visit. She says she learned to look at dance with new eyes last year, thanks to the adjudicators' comments. "I'd see a piece and react viscerally -- like 'yuck.' But the judges, who were professionals and had been dancing for years, were so articulate and could find really constructive things to say." |
[ Back to Top ]
|
|
Bookmarks PAULA MOYA, assistant professor of
English TERRY SHTOB, associate dean of continuing studies
program DEBORAH GORDON, associate professor of biological
sciences |
[ Back to Top ]
|
|
SLAC On the Subatomic Prowl for Quarks and B-mesonsTHE SCHOOL BUSES WEREN'T yellow, but the field trip was an atom-smashing success and the students got to ask the scientists a lot of questions. Q: "What are those blue and yellow things?" A: "Focusing and bending magnets." Q: "How vulnerable are you to electric-power problems? A: "Very." Many of the Faculty Senate members who trooped around the grounds of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in January were getting their first-ever look at the facility on the hill, and slac director Jonathan Dorfan did his best to make the walkabout instructive by outlining the purposes of the main facilities. In a get-acquainted presentation that approached the speed of light, Dorfan described the world's highest-energy linear accelerator as "essentially a very large and powerful electron microscope that is used to see what's inside protons." What he and his colleagues are looking for are the fundamental building blocks called quarks. The more energy generated by accelerated electrons, the tinier the things scientists can see, which helps to explain why slac researchers have discovered three of the world's six known quarks. Moving on to the second major facility, Dorfan explained that the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory provides very intense, energetic Xrays that are used in chemical, environmental science and structural molecular biology projects. "Electrons going around in a circle are very unhappy," he noted. "And they show their unhappiness by emitting hard Xrays." Their introduction to high-energy physics completed, the faculty got back on the buses for the drive through research yards and past hulking concrete buildings to the synchrotron lab. In one office, U.S. Geological Survey researchers are studying arsenic-contaminated drinking water from Bangladesh. There, too, President John Hennessy, provost John Etchemendy and a few dozen of their closest friends crowded into a tiny room where steam was spitting from a liquid-nitrogen canister on a gigantic praying mantis of a machine. Slipping on nifty 3-D glasses, they stared at a shimmering computer model of the crystal structure of a protein that researchers are studying in an effort to figure out how aggressive viruses invade cells. "Wow," said a professor of drama, rendered almost speechless by the dancing image. Faculty from earth sciences, linguistics, psychology and philosophy then donned red hard hats to tour the $177 million particle accelerator known as the B Factory -- for the B-mesons, or subatomic mixtures of matter and antimatter, that are stirred up inside it. There physicists are chasing after the mystery of why matter exists. Faculty also got a quick glimpse of BaBar, the 1,200-ton, $110 million particle detector that is named for . . . what? The children's book elephant? Q: "Why is it called BaBar?" A: "Purely whimsical." |
[ Back to Top ]
|
|
ATHLETICS Is Time Running Out On Nike Contract?CARDINAL ATHLETES have long symbolized Stanford's quest for achievement. But recently some faculty members have asked whether athletes' uniforms should be quite so, well, symbolic. For years, nearly every varsity player here -- and at scores of other universities -- has worn a uniform emblazoned with the Nike swoosh. Now that Stanford's contract with the sportswear maker is set to expire in June, opponents of the agreement have appealed for an end to the relationship, citing concerns about the company's labor practices and the commercialization of college athletics. Supporters argue that Nike and other apparel manufacturers fill a significant hole in the athletics department's budget by providing scholarships, clothing and expensive sports equipment for Stanford's athletes. The most outspoken opponent of Nike on campus has been Rush Rehm, an associate professor of drama and classics. At a Faculty Senate meeting in November, Rehm, PhD '85, complained that "there's a swoosh in every shot," during televised college games. "Do we want to be in the business of advertising Nike?" he asked. Rehm, who played football at Princeton in the early 1970s, asked Provost John Etchemendy, PhD '82, about new contract negotiations. "They have committed severe violations of labor and human rights," Rehm said to the provost at the Faculty Senate meeting. "Can't we get rid of this?" Several other faculty members joined in the Senate discussion, worrying aloud that the agreement overlooks possible objections of student-athletes who, as a matter of conscience, might not want to wear Nike apparel. Ted Leland, PhD '83, director of athletics, says Nike and other apparel suppliers, including Champion and Speedo, contribute between $1.5 and $2 million annually to the department's $44 million budget. Less than a third of the contribution is in cash; most is in the form of shoes, jerseys and other equipment. About 200 colleges and universities have some sort of partnership with Nike, but only about a dozen, including the University of Texas, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Duke University, have contracts as extensive as Stanford's. This latest debate comes less than a year after the University banned corporate advertising in most of its arenas, becoming the nation's first high-profile athletic program to do so. That decision costs Stanford about $500,000 in revenue annually. But Rehm, pointing to allegations that Nike has sold products made by poorly paid subcontractors working in unsafe factories overseas, contends that the University should go further. (Nike says conditions and monitoring in overseas plants have been improved.) President John Hennessy told the Senate that the University, rather than the athletics department, will lead the Nike contract discussions to remove any potential conflict of interest. "Over the long term, we will see if we can extract ourselves from having to use corporate sponsorship to keep our athletic teams on the field and correctly outfitted," he said. "But it will take us some time, realistically, to accomplish this." |
[ Back to Top ]
|
|
MUSIC Hallelujah Chorus for the OrganLIKE A LITTLE KID in a candy store, organist Robert Huw Morgan can't keep his fingers off the goodies. "You have to hear the big, big trumpets," he says, pulling out an ivory stop inscribed tube mirabilis. He closes his eyes and leans back on his bench high up in the gallery of Memorial Church, while high C's resound from stone floor to carved arch. "The amazing trumpet, indeed." Morgan's fingers dance across the console to the exquisite viole d'amour -- "the love fiddle," he croons. He draws out the posaune, or German trombone, and flirts with the contre bombarde, a mellow reed with French attitude. "It's such a great big round sound, so typical of a romantic-style, 20th-century organ," Morgan says, running an admiring palm along the finished wood. "And it's pretty typical of the period to have such a huge mixture of German, French, Latin and English." In this centenary year of the Murray Harris, the 33-year-old Welshman is having way too much fun. As University organist, he has lined up four of his favorite British and American musicians for the Bishop George Amos Miller Organ Recital Series, eight concerts designed to show off the range and majesty of an instrument that is highly regarded by those in the professional know. The series began in October and continues through Commencement weekend. The first organ installed in Memorial Church, in 1901, the Murray Harris has survived two major earthquakes and extensive restorations and releatherings over the years. As Morgan works the bass line, a low growl rumbles out of 26-foot-tall pipes that flank the organ. "Inside the pipes there's a reed, like on an oboe, and the reed vibrates as air goes through it," he says. "You can't really hear the pitch, but if you listen carefully, you can sort of feel the individual vibrations." Each of the stops on the console corresponds to a rank of some 60 pipes, which adds up to "an awful lot of pipes," says Morgan -- 3,770 at last count. The biggest pipes emit the lowest sounds, and tiny, tiny pipes about the size of a pencil produce piercing high notes. "It's useless having anything smaller," he adds, "because then you'd have dogs running in circles for miles around." |
[ Back to Top ]
|
|
Head of the ClassTop Profs: Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo has been elected president of the American Psychological Association for 2002. The author of more than 200 professional articles, chapters and books on subjects ranging from sexual behavior in rats to persuasion, hypnosis, cults, shyness and madness, Zimbardo is probably best known for his work on a controversial 1971 experiment in which students assumed the roles of prison guards and prisoners with unanticipated consequences. Mary Pratt, PhD '75, professor of Spanish and Portuguese, has been elected second vice president of the Modern Language Association, a position that leads her to the presidency in two years.
Literary Lions: Renato Rosaldo, professor of cultural and social anthropology, won first place this year in the poetry division of El Andar magazine's Prize for Literary Excellence. Clayborne Carson, professor of history and director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project, received a Founder's Award for Exemplary Service to History from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
Go Cardinal: Linda Randall Meier, '61, has been awarded the degree of Uncommon Woman by the Stanford Associates for extraordinary service to the University. Meier is a former University trustee, past director of Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, chair of the Stanford Hospital board and founder of the Cardinal Club, which raises money for women's athletic scholarships. Meier is the 21st recipient of the Uncommon Man/Woman award, established in 1953. |
[ Back to Top ]
|
|
Campus Notebook
H&S Dean Beasley Steps
Down
New Associate H&S Deans
Named
Not Your Father's
Oldsmobile
For Vice Provost, a Superior Court
Judge
Vive la France and Pass the
Hat
Freedom of Speech
Online
For CFO, a Specialist in Interactive
TV Software
Eek! A Mouse with Migrating
Marrow! |
[ Back to Top ]
Home / Current Issue / Back Issues / Talk to Us / Advertising / Alumni Website / Search