Posted 10/01/05 James van Benschoten Dresser, '63, P'93, chairman of Wesleyan's Board of Trustees, will be among the kick-off speakers of a new "First Friday" series being sponsored by the Center for Community Partnerships. The event is open to the Wesleyan community and will be held from 4 to 5 p.m. Friday, Oct. 7 at 167 High Street. The series will feature presentations on the first Friday of every month and has been created by the Center for Community Partnerships for members of the Wesleyan and Middletown communities who are interested in town-gown collaborations. Dresser's talk, titled "If These Walls…

Pictured are Kay and Morton Briggs. Briggs, professor emeritus of romance languages and literatures, died Sept. 25. He worked at Wesleyan for 42 years. Posted 10/01/05 Morton W. Briggs, a Wesleyan faculty member for over 40 years, died Sept. 25 at Middlesex Health Care Center at the age of 90. Born in 1915 in Millbrook, N.Y., he was graduated from Cornell University in 1937. He studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and obtained master’s (1939) and doctoral (1944) degrees from Harvard University. He joined the Wesleyan faculty in 1943 and attained the position of professor of romance languages in 1956…