Olivia DrakeColin Campbell, who served as president of Wesleyan University from 1970-1988 and received Wesleyan honorary degrees in 1971 and 1989, received an honorary doctorate of humane letters at the College of William & Mary's Commencement on May 12. Campbell, who served on the William & Mary Board of Visitors from 2008-12, has been the president and chief executive officer of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation since April 2000. He was elected a member of the foundation’s Board of Trustees in 1989 and served as its chairman from 1998 to February 2008. Campbell previously served as the president of the Rockefeller Brothers…
David LowDavid Hessekiel ’82 is co-author with Philip Kotler and Nancy Lee of Good Works! Marketing and Corporate Initiatives that Build a Better World … and the Bottom Line (John Wiley and Sons), a guide that offers actionable advice on integrating marketing and corporate social initiatives into broader business goals. The book suggests that purpose-driven marketing has moved from a nice-to-do to a must-do for businesses and explains how to balance social and business goals. The book’s introduction explores why some marketing and corporate social initiatives fail and others succeed and then looks at six social initiatives for doing well by…
Cynthia RockwellCharisse Lillie ’74, vice president of Community Investment of Comcast Corporation, delivered the 2013 keynote commencement address at Cheyney University of Pennsylvania. The school, the oldest of the historically black colleges and universities in America, was founded in 1837 as the Institute for Colored Youth. Lillie, who holds a J.D. from Temple University and an LLM degree from Yale Law School, received an honorary doctor of laws degree from Cheyney. Cheyney University President Michelle Howard-Vital welcomed Lillie, saying that her “many accomplishments will inspire our new graduates to aim high as they approach their future.” Lillie urged the new Cheyney graduates…
David Igler ’88 has written the new history book, The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (Oxford University Press), the first book to combine American, oceanic, and world history in a vivid portrayal of travels in the Pacific world. He researched hundreds of documented voyages to explore the commercial, cultural, and ecological upheavals following Captain Cook’s exploits, and concentrated on the eastern Pacific in the decades between the 1770s and the 1840s. Igler starts with the expansion of trade as seen via the travels of William Shaler, captain of the American Brig Lelia Byrd. Soon he…
Bill FisherOn April 25, Matt Weiner '87, creator and writer of Mad Men, regaled an engaged Wesleyan crowd of 280 with insights into the TV business and comments on connections between the COL syllabus and Don Draper's reading. The fundraising event, "An Evening with Mad Men" was held at the Director’s Guild of America Theater in New York, N.Y. During an engaging and unscripted conversation with President Michael Roth, Weiner presented clips from his popular and award-winning AMC series and spoke about Wesleyan experiences that helped to shape his career in the entertainment industry. He talked about being a College of…
Kate CarlisleHenry Howell ’03 is bicycling to his 10th Reunion. He lives in London. So, a long trip. Luckily the transatlantic portion of the roughly 3,300 mile journey will last only about eight hours, via airplane. Howell, an investment banker who has taken up bicycling in a big way, will finish the trip – about 75 miles – on two wheels, from his family home in Pound Ridge, N.Y. “Reunion will be even more memorable heading up to Wes by bike,” Howell said. “I’m already looking forward to it.” He won’t be the first alumnus to bike to Wes for Reunion.…
Gregory Heller ’04 is the author of Ed Bacon: Planning, Politics, and the Building of Modern Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania Press), the first biography of the controversial architect and urban planner. A book launch will be held on Thursday, May 16 at the Center for Architecture in Philadelphia (1218 Arch Street) at 6 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. Go to http://hellergreg.ticketleap.com/edbacon/ for more information. In the mid-20th century, Edmund Bacon worked on shaping urban America as many Americans left cities to pursue life in suburbia. As director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, Bacon forged…
Storyteller and cultural anthropologist Ruth Behar ’77 is the author of Traveling Heavy: A Memoir Between Journeys (Duke University Press), in which she recounts her life as an immigrant child and later, as an adult woman who loves to travel but is terrified of boarding a plane. Behar shares moving stories about her Yiddish-Sephardic-Cuban-American family, as well as the kind strangers she meets on her travels. The author refers to herself an anthropologist who specializes in homesickness and repeatedly returning to her homeland of Cuba. She asks the question why we leave home to find home. Kirkus Reviews writes: “A…
Virginia Pye ’82 has published her first novel, River of Dust (Unbridled Books), which begins on the windswept plains of northwestern China not long after the Boxer Rebellion. Mongol bandits kidnap the young son of an American missionary couple. As the Reverend sets out in search of the child, he quickly loses himself in the rugged, drought-stricken countryside populated by opium dens, nomadic warlords, and traveling circuses. Grace, his young wife, pregnant with their second child, takes to her sick bed in the mission compound, and has visions of her stolen child and lost husband. The foreign couple’s dedicated Chinese…
Katherine Krug ’04, COO and co-founder of tech startup Everest, was recently featured by Forbes contributor Leslie Bradshaw as part of a running series on the rise of female chief operating officers. A psychology major as an undergraduate, Krug left the corporate world to become a tech entrepreneur, first founding a startup dedicated to changing the way nonprofits raise funds, before moving on to co-found Everest. Krug looks back on her decision to dive into entrepreneurship as one of the most personally fulfilling she’s ever made. “I now leave work everyday with more energy than when I arrived,” says Krug.…
Gabe Rosenberg '16A litigation associate at Squire Sanders, Dan Matzkin ’06 beat out several hundred other applicants for a clerkship with Judge Adalberto Jordan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Matzkin also has been blind since birth with a condition called Leber congenital amaurosis. It didn’t hold him back, however, from earning an undergraduate degree with honors, double-majoring in Wesleyan’s College of Letters and Classics or graduating from law school at the University of Michigan. While Jordan had reservations about how someone with such a disability could manage the challenges of legal practice, which include reading hundreds of…
Sebastian Junger ’84 has directed a new documentary, Which Way Is the Front Line From Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington, which premiered on HBO this month. The film covers Hertherington’s career as a war photographer, from his earliest days covering the civil war in Liberia to his final days in Misrata. He was killed in 2011 at age 40 in the siege of Misrata during Libya's civil war. Junger pays tribute to Hetherington's video and still photography and how he engaged himself on a personal level with his subjects. Junger and Hetherington were co-directors of the acclaimed…