A highly influential economist and policy adviser, Weidenbaum has a legacy in the academic and governmental realms that began in the early 1960s. He served as the first chairman of President Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Weidenbaum

“Murray Weidenbaum was an important and influential economist, a great educator and scholar, and a wonderful colleague," said Washington University in St. Louis Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton. "Washington University was fortunate to have him as a part of our community for so long.

“He was a wise and trusted university colleague for about 50 years, and we have many reasons to be proud of the ongoing scholarship that takes place at the Weidenbaum Center at Washington University.”

“Not long before he passed," Wrighton said, "I had the great privilege of meeting with Murray and informing him that the university has established the Murray Weidenbaum Distinguished Professorship in Economics.”

“I know he was pleased – as are his colleagues – that his name will continue to live on here at Washington University, but he will surely be missed by all those who had the honor to know and work with him,” Wrighton said.

During his career, Weidenbaum served under or advised five U.S. presidents, spending much of the time teaching, writing and conducting research. During the administrations of Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, he served on the staffs of what was then known as the U.S. Bureau of the Budget.

After a stint in the business world as an economist for Boeing Co., Weidenbaum turned to academia via Stanford University, then Washington University, where he began as an associate professor of economics in 1964.

Two years later, he was named a full professor and chair of the Department of Economics in Arts & Sciences. During that time, Weidenbaum also directed the NASA Economics Research Program, the department’s largest research project.

He left for Washington, D.C., in 1969 to serve as the first assistant secretary of the treasury for economic policy under President Richard Nixon. In 1971, he was installed as the Mallinckrodt professor at WUSTL.

This straddling of two worlds would become a pattern throughout the 1980s.

President Reagan's economic adviser

During the first Reagan administration, Weidenbaum became the first chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. His dual role as teacher and government policy leader continued through the presidency of George H.W. Bush, when the president sent him on a special mission to Poland and as a member of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Air Advisory Committee.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image courtesy Ronald Reagan Library

President Reagan presents Weidenbaum to the media at a Feb. 12, 1981, news conference following release of the "Audit of the U.S. Economy."

Throughout his academic life, Weidenbaum continued his keen interest in the impact of government on business, serving on the boards of directors of a variety of companies. In 1975, he founded the Center for the Study of American Business at WUSTL.

In 2001, the center was renamed the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy.

"I cannot possibly count the daily conversations we had that meant so much to me," said Steve Smith, PhD, the Kate M. Gregg Distinguished Professor of Social Science and director of the Weidenbaum Center.

"He was more than a colleague. He was a true friend," Smith said. "I always relied on Murray for advice, both professional and personal.

"In all these things," Smith said, "Murray demonstrated the value of being married to Phyllis, a wonderful partner and a Democrat."

Former U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, of Maine, will have an informal conversation with Washington University in St. Louis students and faculty at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 1, in the Women’s Building Formal Lounge on the Danforth Campus.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Snowe

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

“Sociology is an essential academic discipline that investigates important issues of human social structure and function — issues that are at the heart of many national and global challenges,” Schaal said.

“Re-establishing our sociology department will enhance our ability to educate our students and conduct world-class research in areas that are central to the critical social issues of our time.”

The decision to bring back the department comes nearly 25 years after the university announced in April 1989 that it would phase out its sociology department.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Schaal

Efforts to bring sociology back to the university have been building momentum for several years as the result of discussions between university students, faculty and administrators.

Henry L. “Roddy” Roediger III, PhD, former chair of psychology and the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor, has been heavily involved in those discussions in his role as dean of academic planning in Arts & Sciences.

“Washington University is simply missing an important discipline that deals with critical issues,” Roediger said. “When I was chair of psychology, students would sometimes approach me about my department offering courses on topics like criminology. However, I had to tell them that we had no faculty members capable of doing so. Criminology is a hugely important topic, but one that is usually covered in sociology departments. We have an obligation to both our students and our faculty to bring this important discipline back to campus. I am excited about the prospect of helping to build a great sociology department.”

An internationally recognized scholar of human memory function, Roediger is chair of a faculty advisory committee formed by Schaal to gauge interest in bringing sociology back to campus. The committee met several times, and in addition an open campus forum on the issue was held Dec. 2. In all venues, strong support was expressed for re-establishing the department.

In addition to criminology, sociology as a discipline brings critical tools and methodologies to the scientific study of social relationships, migration and immigration, demography, institutions, social justice and inequality.

In recent decades, Arts & Sciences has invested considerable resources in building world-class programs in psychology, economics, anthropology, political science and other areas. As these programs have evolved and expanded, the university has reached a point where building a strong sociology component is a logical next step.

The university commitment is a significant milestone, but Schaal cautions that building an academic department takes time. Recruiting top scholars can be a highly competitive and time-consuming process, one the university has no plans to rush. It will be looking to recruit top-ranked, innovative scholars from a variety of sociological subdisciplines.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Roediger

“Reinvesting in sociology will boost several important existing research areas within Arts & Sciences and also create the opportunity for new cross-campus collaborations with medicine, social work, public health and a range of other disciplines across campus,” Schaal said.

In particular, according to Roediger, the faculty and administration of the top-rated Brown School strongly support reinstating sociology.

Schaal is now working with the advisory committee to select a chair for the new department.

Plans call for hiring at least two full-time senior faculty as soon as qualified candidates can be recruited. Other faculty from within the university and other nearby schools may be enlisted to form research and teaching affiliations with the department.

New courses in sociology could be offered as early as the fall 2014 semester.

During this period of transition, with the support of Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton and Provost Holden Thorp, PhD, the university has been exploring a variety of options to broaden campus discussions about sociological issues.

Last semester, Arts & Sciences hosted a campus colloquium on labor unions and racial issues led by Jake Rosenfeld, a prominent sociology researcher from the University of Washington. More of these sorts of events are expected as the university begins the process of bringing top sociology recruits to campus for lectures and symposia.

Members of the sociology advisory committee are:

Roddy Roediger, PhD,  (chair), James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Psychology and dean of academic planning; Jean Allman, PhD, Jack Hexter Professor in the Humanities, director of the Center for Humanities  and chair of the Department of History;  John G. Baugh, PhD, the Margaret Bush Wilson Professor; John Bowen, PhD, Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor, Department of Anthropology; Carol Camp Yeakey, PhD, director, Program in Urban Studies, and director, Center on Urban Research & Public Policy; Marion Crain, JD, Wiley B. Rutledge Professor of Law, vice provost, and director, Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Work and Social Capital; Mary Ann Dzuback, PhD, director, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Steve Fazzari, PhD, professor of economics and associate director of the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy;  Robert A. Pollak, PhD, the Hernreich Distinguished Professor of Economics in Arts & Sciences and Olin Business School; Mark Rank, PhD, Herbert S. Hadley Professor of Social Welfare at the Brown School;  Jim Spriggs, PhD, Sidney W. Souers Professor of Government and chair, Department of Political Science; and William F. Tate, PhD, the Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor, chair of the Department of Education, incoming dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and incoming vice provost for Graduate Education.

Providing a rare glimpse of the trade secrets of planetary scientists, the journalIcarus published a study this month that compared lunar crater counts by eight professionals with crowdsourced counts by volunteers.

The professional crater counts varied by as much as a factor of two; some professionals counted twice as many craters as others. But the population of craters found by the volunteers was statistically similar to that found by the experts, said the study's lead author, Stuart Robbins, PhD, of the University of Colorado at Bouder.

These somewhat paradoxical results suggest both that it is harder to count craters than to count, say, train cars, but also that, if there are enough people counting, the robust similarity of their responses washes out slight individual differences.

The professionals included scientists from seven different universities, including Washington University in St. Louis. The volunteers were Moon Mappers who had signed up to count craters through Cosmoquest, a citizen science website.

To find out more, we talked to the WUSTL crater counters: postdoctoral research associate Kelsi Singer, PhD, who has mapped craters on the icy satellites in the outer solar system, and graduate student Michael Zanetti, who has counted craters on the moon and Mars. Both are in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Neither was surprised by the two-fold discrepancy between expert counts.

“There were very few singletons, craters only one person mapped,” Singer said. “Most of the discrepancies showed up in counts of degraded, or 'subdued,' craters, or ones that were very small.”

Zanetti explained that one of the images they were asked to analyze included both lunar maria and highlands. “It’s not so bad counting craters on the flat, smooth maria created by volcanic eruptions. But it’s a different story counting them in the heavily cratered lunar highlands,” Zanetti said. 

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

robbins et al., Icarus

Experts identified and measured craters on this image from the Wide-Angle Camera above the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The image includes both lunar mare (bottom) and the heavily cratered ancient terrain of the highlands (above the fine dotted white line). Counting craters in the mare is much easier than counting those in the highlands. There are roughly 500 million craters bigger than 35 feet across on the moon.

“You’re never going to get a true distribution of crater sizes there,” he said. “You’ve reached something called saturation, where each new crater obliterates old ones.“

For the most part, Singer added, crater counts are used to reconstruct the history of a planet. "A heavily cratered feature is probably older than one with few craters, she said.

"But we're usually trying to understand whether a feature is a million, 100 million or a billion years old. Even if you are off by a factor of two in your counts, it's not going to change your understanding of the history,” she said.

Nonetheless, Zanetti said, when he is working on an important problem, he counts all the craters himself to make sure the count is at least self-consistent. He then publishes his technique and his definition of a crater with his results. “There’s a bit of subjectivity to it, but not as much as you might think,” he said.

But, he added, it can take a couple of months to count the thousands of craters for really big projects. 

"You don’t undertake something like that lightly," he said. "The question you’re trying to answer has to be a really good one.”

So both Zanetti and Singer are happy to know that crater counts could be crowdsourced. “We have WAAAYYY too many craters to possibly map them ourselves,” Singer said.

At bottom, the study showed that people are fantastic pattern recognizers. “Pattern-recognition software is still not up to the game,” Zanetti said. “It takes as long, if not longer, to double-check the software’s counts as it does to do the count yourself.”

“But people are good at finding circles,” Singer said. “Even if the crater is half gone, our brains fill in the rest of the circle."

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

WUSTL juniors Sarah Hull, Hana Hartman, Rachel Hirsch, Sara Fletcher and Madeline Wells share a passion for travel and potluck. During one of their regular dinners, the five friends realized each would be spending the spring semester on a different continent. They decided to chronicle their adventures in the shared blog, 5times5.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Sarah Hull, an art and psychology student, is enrolled at University of Cape Town in South Africa. Sarah got a glimpse of Cape Town’s penguin colony.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Hana Hartman, an anthropology and women, gender and sexuality studies student, is in Buenos Aires as part of the SIT Argentina: Social Movements and Human Rights program. Hana met a baby duckling at an estancia, a ranch outside Buenos Aires.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Rachel Hirsch, majoring in women, gender and sexuality studies, is in New Delhi as part of the SIT India: Health and Human Rights program. Rachel celebrated Holi, the spring festival of colors, in New Delhi.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Sara Fletcher, a mechanical engineering major, is enrolled in the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Sara visited one of New Zealand’s breweries.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Madeline Wells, an art and English literature student, is attending the Sam Fox School's Florence Program. Madeline visited the Arno River.

Here, the five friends interview each other, round-robin style, about their experiences abroad.

Hull: Hana, you described Buenos Aires as "old-world glamour meets postcolonial mess," which I've been thinking a lot about, because Cape Town is similar in that respect. Can you just talk a little more about where you see the old-world glamour, where you see the postcolonial mess and what modern responses are to both?

Hartman: Sarah, I'm glad you asked about that particular phrase, because now that you show it to me again a few weeks later, I am actually somewhat embarrassed to have written it! After having the opportunity to explore the city and learn more about Argentine history, I can see that my description says much more about me and my personal biases than it does about Argentina (at least I know I'm learning!). If I were to ask an Argentine to explain the "mess" (and I doubt they would agree with that phrasing), I know now that they would be much more likely to cite the military dictatorship of the ‘70s and continued economic mismanagement by corrupt politicians than anything the Spanish might have done 200 years ago.

At the same time, I was unintentionally correct that colonialism has had a big impact on the way the city looks today, although not in the form I imagined. Economic colonialism has played a major role in most of Argentina's hardships, from the U.S.-bankrolled dictatorship to the more recent exploitation of the market by multinational corporations and the International Monetary Fund. From what I can tell, citizens today are well aware of Argentina's problems and the role that foreign powers played in creating them. Nevertheless, people that I have spoken to remain confident, if not necessarily optimistic. Argentina has a long history of ups and downs, and whatever its current problems, locals are in no doubt that Buenos Aires is and will remain one of the greatest cities in the world.

Click a thumbnail to view images from the 5times5 blog

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Hartman: Rachel, India is often portrayed in the American media as being a very dangerous or oppressive place for women. What has your experience been as a woman visiting and traveling around India?

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Rachel Hirsch celebrated Holi, the spring festival of colors, in New Delhi.

Hirsch: Though it may seem strange, I’d like to begin by writing about the importance of family in Indian culture. My program staff accepted me as their child the moment I walked off the plane, and my homestay family texts me that they miss me every day while I am on an excursion with my program. As many Indian parents do, my new “parents” (and there are about six of them) worry about me every time I travel and/or go somewhere new. This has been challenging for me to get used to. As an American, I value freedom and independence, which are principles that are not as important in Indian culture. However, I appreciate their concern with my safety and know that there is a reason why I am so protected.

While I have never felt seriously concerned for my safety, there have been numerous times that I have felt uncomfortable or nervous, especially when it is dark outside and there are no other women in sight. Safety is not only an issue for me as a foreigner; many of the Indian women around me stick to even stricter rules than I do about staying out late and being alone​. I have found that I am less stared-at when wearing traditional Indian clothing, so I do this as much as possible. My “kurta” collection is growing quickly!

Hirsch: Sara, what is something you have learned during your travels in New Zealand before your program started that you wouldn't have been able to learn in a class?

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Sara Fletcher visited one of New Zealand’s breweries.

Fletcher: The pace, daily activities and mentality are very different between traveling and studying. I really appreciate my time traveling around the South Island before arriving in Auckland (the largest city in New Zealand located on the North Island) because it exposed me to a bit of the traveling culture. There are traveling standards that I became familiar with, such as omitting first names upon introduction and starting all conversations in English until another common language is discovered. This culture was really interesting to be a part of and not something that I had expected. There are also a lot of culture differences between the South Island and the North Island — namely, Auckland. Generally, life on the South Island is much slower, while Auckland, like most large metropolitan cities, is quite fast-paced. I think that experiencing the different lifestyles has helped me appreciate some of the culture differences within New Zealand, and I would not be as aware of them from simple discussions in a classroom setting. I also learned how to use a camping stove, which is a fun skill.

Fletcher: Maddie, you are on an art program studying in one of the most art-enthusiastic places in the world. Compared to Wash U/the U.S., what are the differences in how the general community and your professors perceive and relate to art? And do you think your relationship with art has changed during your time in Italy?

Wells: As a Renaissance city, Florence has this weird, almost automatic relationship to art. You don't have to go into a museum to see it. It's just there, everywhere — frescoes (wall paintings), mini-altars wedged into the sides of buildings, giant stone statues of David and, of course, the buildings themselves. It really does feel like you're living in a museum sometimes. Except the art and architecture on display everywhere aren’t controversial; it's such a tourist attraction that it's practically Disneyfied. That kind of art historical context can be a little stifling or overwhelming because, as student artists, I think my peers and I are more interested in being relevant within a contemporary art context than in paying homage to Michelangelo Buonarroti. But when you remember how innovative and radical many of these Renaissance artists were for their time, you think, “Whoa, two-point perspective — that's some pretty crazy stuff!” And then you shuffle back to your studio and just try and attempt to draw maybe one straight line (on a good day).

Wells: Sarah, I know how important social justice issues are to you at Wash U (and in life, generally), and I'm interested in how being in South Africa has affected or informed this passion?

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Sarah Hull got a glimpse of Cape Town’s penguin colony.

Hull: Being in South Africa has definitely taught me a lot about social justice. First, South Africans view race really differently. Race is discussed really openly and people have different categories than we have in the U.S. The South African distinctions among "black, colored, Indian, white, etc." are different from the lines Americans draw, which just highlights the fact that race is a social construct. And in South Africa, that social construct was set up by the apartheid government for the economic benefit of whites. That said, race is socially very real and has an extreme impact on the lived experience of South Africans.

I’ve also noticed the standards for resourcefulness and sustainability are much higher than we are used to in the U.S. Many things we think of as unlimited resources are really rationed here. There is no such thing as unlimited Internet, and scheduled power outages are common. Solar-powered water heaters are abundant, and laundry is pretty expensive. In my apartment, we've been doing laundry by hand. We in the U.S. could use a lesson in such moderation.

Finally, I've just really been learning from my South African peers about what we can do as young adults in this global world. I was at a meeting for a group called Equal Education, which is committed to improving education here. The meeting opened with apartheid protest songs sung in Xhosa. One person wore a T-shirt that said, "Every generation has its struggle," with fists holding pencils, pens, calculators and paintbrushes. They were approaching the need for a better education system with the ferocity and passion with which they fought apartheid. I think we, as American students who consider ourselves "passionate about social justice," have a lot to learn here about taking ourselves seriously and working toward real change in our world.

Reading all of your answers, I can't wait to have a potluck or whatever when we get back and have this conversation face-to-face. I miss you all!

Wells: Yes, it's going be a like seven-hour potluck.

Read more of their travels at the 5times5 blog.

Staff, faculty and students throughout the WUSTL community will be touched by the projects chosen to receive this year’s Diversity and Inclusion Grants.

For 2013-2014, nearly $112,000 was awarded to 10 projects, ranging from anti-bias workshops for campus police to an internship program to promote diversity in museum professions.

Allison Taylor, manager of education at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, was awarded $5,000 for the museum internship grant.

“We want to give diverse students an opportunity to gain access to and experience in the museum profession by exploring and participating in multiple departments within the museum,” Taylor said.

“The goal is to increase awareness about and interest in the various professions open to students in the museum field and to cultivate lifelong participation in and appreciation of cultural institutions.”

Don Strom, chief of University Police, received $1,520 to hold workshops on "fair and impartial policing" in partnership with Protective Services at the School of Medicine.

In December, 45 members of the University Police and 27 people from Protective Services participated in a six-hour program on the issue of bias, especially subconscious bias.

“Even well-intentioned people have biases,” Strom said. “The workshop acknowledged that fact and then taught skills to prevent biases from influencing decision making and behavior.”

The curriculum for the program is based on the research of Lorie Fridell, PhD, associate professor at the University of South Florida and a national expert on racially biased policing. With funding from the U.S. Department of Justice and assistance from national experts on law enforcement and the social psychology of bias, Fridell has produced the science-based "fair and impartial policing" curriculums for patrol officers and first-line supervisors.

Two members of the University Police also participated in a train-the-trainer program so they can instruct incoming employees.

“I would argue that we all could benefit from this training, not just police,” Strom said.

The Diversity and Inclusion Grants program rewards initiatives that strengthen and promote diversity on campus, including differences in gender, race, ethnicity, geography, socioeconomic status, age, politics, philosophy, disability, religion, sexual orientation and gender identity.

Funding for the selected projects is one-time only, and awards are for up to $30,000. The Office of the Provost funds the program, which is in its fifth year. So far, nearly $850,000 in grant money has been awarded to 48 projects.

The project team leaders of the rest of the 2013-14 diversity grant-winning proposals, amounts awarded, and project titles are:

• Stan Braude, PhD, senior lecturer in biology, in Arts & Sciences, faculty associate in William Greenleaf Eliot Residential College and faculty adviser in the Village, and Annamaria Pileggi, professor of the practice in drama, also in Arts & Sciences; $13,942 for “Theatre for Social Change Workshop for Staff and Faculty.”

• Robin Hattori, assistant director of the Gephardt Institute for Public Service; $6,500 for “Project DIVE: Diversity & Inclusion, Valuing Engagement Workshop.”

• Melissa Hopkins, assistant vice chancellor and assistant dean of facilities at the School of Medicine; $20,000 for “Lactation Education, Outreach and Facilitation.”

• Jennie Marchal, associate director of employer relations in the Career Center; $6,500 for “WU Summer Associates Program.”

• William G. Powderly, MD, director of the Institute for Public Health, J. William Campbell Professor of Medicine and co-director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the School of Medicine; $30,000 for “Diversity Summer Research Program in Public Health.”

• Alicia Schnell, project coordinator, vice chancellor for students; $6,650 for “First-Year Reading Program Staff Discussions.”

• Molly Tovar, PhD, director of the Kathryn M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies, and David Patterson, assistant professor of social work, both at the Brown School; $6,650 for “Two-Spirits — Interdisciplinary LGBT Workshop for Faculty, Staff and Students.”

• Heather Woofter, associate professor of architecture and chair of graduate architecture in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts; $15,000 for “Women in Architecture and Design Symposium.”

Read more about Diversity and Inclusion Grants here.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

James Byard/WUSTL PhotoS

Bill McKinnon, PhD, professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, lists as his top research interests the icy satellites of the outer solar system and the physics of impact cratering. But he isn’t picky. If anything unusual and exciting is going on anywhere in the solar system, he wants to know about it.

Our knowledge of the solar system has exploded since Sputnik went up in 1957. How much was known when you were young?

When I was a boy, we hardly knew anything. What we knew would fit between the covers of a "How and Why Wonder Book of Planets" or, in my case, a book in the "Exploring" series by writer Roy Gallant. We knew how many planets there were and how big they were and that they had moons, but it was all very mysterious. I really wanted to find out about them. 

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

McKinnon’s youthful reading. The image to the right, which is reproduced inside the book as an illustration, is captioned “Stationed on one of Mars’ jagged moons, you have this view of the Red Planet, which changes color with the seasons.” The reason Mars looks like peach Jell-O with banana slices is that’s all astronomers could see at the time. In the days before satellites, author Roy Gallant said, they would have needed “a large, air-free tunnel from Earth to Mars” to see Mars clearly.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

The artist’s conception of the canals on Mars, still a tenuous possibility when the book was published in 1956. Gallant is noncommittal about the existence of the canals. Astronomer Percival Lowell swore he could see them, back in1906, but Gallant said dryly that if you squint and strain long enough you can make yourself see just about anything.

Did they know how many moons Jupiter had, or Saturn?

Well, astronomers discovered the big moons early on. Then, one by one, smaller moons would be picked up by telescopes. And we keep finding new ones. Let’s consult the oracle. . . the font of all knowledge. . . the Wikipedia.

(pause)

We’re up to 67.

Good grief.

My thesis was on the physics of impact craters, the ones on our moon and, to some extent, Mars and Mercury. But the Voyager missions were launched while I was in graduate school. I had a postdoctoral research appointment with one of the Voyager imaging team scientists when the spacecraft reached the icy moons of Jupiter in 1979, and we saw them for the first time.

So then I decided that instead of studying impact craters in rock, I’d study impact craters in ice.

But then the bodies themselves became interesting. The Voyagers reached Saturn in 1980 and 1981, and Voyager 2 went on to Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989. So it was a moveable feast.

The sheer strangeness of these places, which became real worlds once we could see them, was fascinating to me. So I left the inner worlds of the moon and Mars behind.

There’s more people working on Mars than on any other solar system body. It’s just like being on the Earth, these days. And somebody has to pay attention to stuff beyond the ice line.

(pause)

I’m teasing.

The ice line?

The line that marks the border of the region far enough from the sun that water ice remains stable on a planet or satellite’s surface.

What would you put in a 'How and Why Wonder Book of Icy Satellites?'

In 2005, the Cassini spacecraft made images of Enceladus, a tiny moon orbiting Saturn, that showed enormous plumes of icy particles shooting 100 kilometers into space. It was fabulous. 

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

NASA/JPL/SSI

False color image of jets of ice particles, water vapor and trace organic compounds erupting from Saturn's icy satellite Enceladus.

The plumes were coming from four fissures at the moon’s south pole, nicknamed tiger stripes. 

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Cassini Imaging Team/SSI/JPL/ESA/NASA

False color image of Enceladus’ southern hemisphere showing the tiger stripes

When we looked at Enceladus with heat-seeking eyes, we saw there is a hot spot right at the south pole and then, in closeups, that the heat anomaly follows the tiger stripes.  

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

NASA/JPL/GSFC/SwRI/SSI

The heat map of the tiger stripes, the hottest spots marked with stars. The temperatures along the fractures are high enough to melt ice, even though surface temperatures elsewhere are below 72 Kelvin (-300 degrees °F).

Where does the energy come from?

As it goes round Saturn, Enceladus is goosed gravitationally by a nearby moon called Dione and this bumps up the eccentricity of its orbit, its out-of-roundness. But as the orbit gets more out of round, tides bend the body back and forth.

It’s like bending a paper clip back and forth. The paper clip will get so hot it will burn your fingers.

Is it hot enough along the stripes to melt the ice?

The spectrum of the hottest portions of the tiger stripes corresponds to a temperature of 200 Kelvin (-100 °F), which is still below the magic number (273 Kelvin, or 32 °F, at 1 bar of pressure).

But there is probably antifreeze in the water that lowers the melting temperature. Cassini flew through the plumes to sample them and detected ammonia, methanol and salts, which together may permit the existence of liquid water at temperatures as low as 176 Kelvin (-143 °F). So, yes, ice would melt.

So there’s a subsurface ocean on Enceladus feeding the geysers?

Probably at least a sea under the south pole.

But other ice worlds like Jupiter’s moon Europa have a global ocean.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

NASA/ESA/L. Roth/SWRI/University of Cologne

This image of Europa’s plumes combines emissions from hydrogen and oxygen (blue pixels) detected by a spectrometer aboard the Hubble Space Telescope with an image of Europa made by combining observations made by NASA’s Voyager and Galileo space probes.

Last December, scientists announced that the Hubble Space Telescope had spotted two plumes like those on Enceladus coming from Europa’s southern hemisphere. These plumes rise to an altitude of about 200 kilometers (125 miles) and then probably rain back as frost. They are pushing out 10 times more water than the plumes on Enceladus.

And where there’s water there’s life?

We’d like to find out. We don’t have any signature of life, but these are the kinds of environments where you might imagine simple life could start — assuming we really knew how life started anywhere.

I am involved with the joint NASA-ESA radar team on a European Space Agency (ESA) mission to Jupiter that has just started. We hope to sound the depths of the icy shells of Europa and Ganymede, to see “what lies beneath.”

We won’t get to Jupiter until 2030, however. You have to be patient when exploring the outer solar system.

What would you put in the 'How and Why Wonder Book of Impact Craters'?

The most interesting ones are the biggest ones, because the biggest ones affect whole planets, or the sides of planets, and they’re very revealing structurally.

They’re not just holes in the ground. They have broad, flat floors and concentric rings of peaks, which is really neat, because the whole structure of the planet is involved in their formation.

The impact is kind of a probe of the planet, and the planet’s response tells you a lot about it. So a solid, cold planet will act differently from a layered planet that has cold ice on top, a layer of warm ice, and then an ocean below. 

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

An image of Tyre Crater, a 140-kilometer (86-mile)-wide impact crater on the ice moon Europa made by the Galileo spacecraft.

On the moon, there’s a crater with a beautiful three-ring structure, called the Orientale Basin. But on the icy satellites, you might get 10 rings or 20 rings spaced out away from the impact site.

I can’t prove this yet, but I think the multi-multi-ring basins on the ice moons of Jupiter may be the signatures of underlying oceans. 

Not that people need more proof …

They don’t?

In Europa’s case, and the cases of the other big moons, we have gravity measurements and magnetic field measurements that tell us there’s a layer of somewhat salty water below the ice that’s conducting electric currents. So it’s got to be water there. It could be aluminum foil, but more than likely it’s water.

(laughter)

I would put a shrinking planet in a 'How and Why Wonder Book.' I read your editorial about Mercury in this week’s Nature Geoscience.

All planets and satellites, including the Earth, must ultimately cool and shrink over time, unless their internal engines are somehow renewed, for example by tidal heating. Mercury is an extreme case because it has an enormous iron core.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

The long-curving cliff that runs down the middle of this image made by the Messenger spacecraft was formed as Mercury’s crust tried to accommodate the rapid contraction of its core.

A portion of the core must be liquid because Mercury has a magnetic field and you need a convecting, conductive fluid to generate a magnetic field.

But because solid iron takes up less space than liquid iron, as Mercury cools, it loses more volume than a cooling planet without such a core.

And because Mercury’s crust, unlike the Earth’s, is a single shell, the only way it can accommodate that much shrinkage is by faulting.

A global map of the planet’s faults and ‘wrinkles’ led scientists to conclude that Mercury has shrunk three or four times more than they had thought based on less complete measurements made in the 1970s.

Isn’t Mercury on the wrong side of the ice line for you?

Yes, but I would still put it in a "How and Why Wonder Book," together with rivers and lakes of liquid methane on Saturn’s moon Titan and the ‘spiders’ on Mars (look it up!) . . . 

Wonders never cease.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

“An exchange of ideas is one of the fundamental reasons why a university exists,” said Marion Crain, JD, vice provost and professor of law. “We want to bring together scholars of all disciplines to spark collaborations that are key to addressing issues and taking advantage of opportunities on campus and beyond.”

The Office of the Provost recently awarded the first round of Bring Your Own Idea grants. A complete list of proposals is below. Faculty with a research or teaching interest in any of these topics should contact the faculty listed for more information.

Bring Your Own Idea award recipients and proposals:

• Religion, Poverty and Social Justice: Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, PhD, John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, and Gregory Magarian, JD,  School of Law
• The Creative Process: Andrew Knight, PhD, Olin Business School, andRobert Mark Morgan, Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences
• Gender and Leadership Across Disciplines: Michelle Duguid, PhD, Olin Business School, and Hillary Sale, JD, School of Law
• In/Equality in Theory and Practice: Vetta Sanders Thompson, PhD, Brown School and Institute for Public Health, and Carol Camp Yeakey, PhD, Arts & Sciences
• Public Health Opportunities and Challenges in Guatemala, WUSTL Opportunities for Research and Teaching Collaboration: Joaquin Barnoya, MD, School of Medicine, and William Powderly, MD, School of Medicine and Institute for Public Health
• Global Cities: Migration, Capital and Transformations in Urban Space: Margaret Garb, PhD, and Sonia Lee, PhD, Arts & Sciences; Patty Heyda and Eric Mumford, PhD, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts
• Post-conflict Cultures: Jennifer Kapczynski, PhD, and Lori Watt, PhD, Arts & Sciences
• Economic Inequality and the American Experience: Steven Fazzari, PhD, Arts & Sciences, and Mark Rank, PhD, Brown School
• Enhancing Global Engagement and International Affairs at WUSTL: Jeremy Caddel and Andrew Sobel, PhD, Arts & Sciences, and Leila Sadat, JD, LLM, School of Law
  
• Working Across Disciplines to Make Data More Meaningful: Heather Corcoran, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts; Matt Kreuter, PhD, Brown School and Institute for Public Health; Aaron Addison, Olin Library; and Leslie McIntosh, PhD, School of Medicine

Further information about this year’s Bring Your Own Idea grant winners and their proposals is available here. 

The original request for Bring Your Own Idea proposals is available here. 

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Bate

His lecture, which is sponsored by the Department of English in Arts & Sciences, is free and open to the public.

“The range of Professor Bate’s work is astonishing,” said Wolfram M. Schmidgen, PhD, professor and chair of English. “He is not only one of the leading Shakespeareans of his generation, but also is one of our most influential scholars of ecocriticism, which analyzes the representation of nature and the environment in literature.”

Bate’s wide-ranging research interests also include Renaissance literature, Romanticism, biography and life writing, contemporary poetry and theatre history.

He is a Fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, as well as an Honorary Fellow of St. Catharine's College, Cambridge.

A governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Bate broadcasts regularly for the BBC, writes for The Guardian, The Times and The Telegraph, and has held visiting posts at Yale University and the University of California-Los Angeles.

In 2006, Bate was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s 80th Birthday Honours for his services to higher education. He is currently vice-president (leading the Humanities) of the British Academy.

His latest works include “Being Shakespeare,” a one-man play for Simon Callow, which toured nationally and internationally. He was consultant curator for the British Museum’s major Shakespeare exhibition for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad.

His studies of Shakespeare include “Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination,” “Shakespearean Constitutions” and “The Genius of Shakespeare.”

For more information on the lecture, contact (314) 935-5190.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Photo Credit: Michael Frachetti (2011)

Panoramic view of the Byan Zhurek valley and setting near Tasbas, Afghanistan

Charred grains of barley, millet and wheat deposited nearly 5,000 years ago at campsites in the high plains of Kazakhstan show that nomadic sheepherders played a surprisingly important role in the early spread of domesticated crops throughout a mountainous east-west corridor along the historic Silk Road, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Frachetti

“Ancient wheat and broomcorn millet, recovered in nomadic campsites in Kazakhstan, show that prehistoric herders in Central Eurasia had incorporated both regional crops into their economy and rituals nearly 5,000 years ago, pushing back the chronology of interaction along the territory of the ‘Silk Road’ more than 2,000 years,” Frachetti said.

The study, to be published April 2 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, establishes that several strains of ancient grains and peas had made their way across Eurasia thousands of years earlier than previously documented.

While these crops have been known to exist much earlier in ancient China and Southwest Asia, finding them intermingled in the Bronze Age burials and households of nomadic pastoralists provides some of the earliest concrete signs for east-west interaction in the vast expanse of Eurasian mountains and the first botanical evidence for farming among Bronze Age nomads.

Bread wheat, cultivated at least 6,000 years ago in Southwest Asia, was absent in China before 2500 B.C. while broomcorn millet, domesticated 8,000 years ago in China, is missing in southwest Asia before 2000 B.C. This study documents that ancient grains from eastern China and soutwest Asia had made their way to Kazakhstan in the center of the continent by 2700-2500 B.C. (nearly 5,000 years ago).

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Spengler

Findings are based on archaeobotanical data collected from four Bronze Age pastoralist campsites in Central Eurasian steppe/mountains: Tasbas and Begash in the highlands of Kazakhstan and Ojakly and Site 1211/1219 in Turkmenistan.

“This is one of the first systematic applications of archaeobotany in the region, making the potential for further future discovery very exciting,” Spengler said.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Photo credit: Michael Frachetti (2011)

Archaeological excavations at the site of Tasbas, Kazakhstan.

“Finding this diverse crop assemblage at Tasbas and Begash illustrates first evidence for the westward spread of East Asian and Southwest Asian crops eastward, and the surprise is that it is nomads who are the agents of change,” Frachetti said.

Washington University co-authors include three anthropology graduate students: Paula Doumani, Lynne Rouse and Elissa Bullion. Doumani led the excavations at Tasbas in Kazakhstan while Rouse co-led the excavations at Ojakly in Turkmenistan.

Other co-authors are Barbara Cerasetti, of the Universita`degli Studi di Bologna, Italy, and Alexei Mar’yashev, of the Institute of Archaeology in Kazakhstan.

Funding was provided by National Science Foundation grant nos. 1010678, 0535341, 1132090 and 1036942, as well as Lambda Alpha National Honor Society, the Mary Morris-Stein Foundation, Wenner-Gren grant no. 8157, George F. Dales Foundation and International Research & Exchanges Board IARO.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Photo credit: Paula Doumani (2011)

Long-term settlement stratigraphy at the site of Tasbas. Mudbrick/clay oven (visible on right lower portion) contained earliest evidence for grain farming.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

sid hastings/WUSTL Photos

When Adam Steltzner, PhD, NASA’s engineer in charge of the Mars Curiosity rover sky-crane landing, was on the Washington University in St. Louis campus recently to deliver an Assembly Series talk, a group of undergraduates was eager to meet him and talk about engineering and robots.

The 11 students comprise an independent team for NASA’s Robotic Mining Competition, a university-level program to design and build a working mining robot to collect simulated Martian surface material. With guidance from team leader Mike Zanetti, a graduate student in earth and planetary sciences, and faculty adviser Dennis Mell, PhD, professor of practice in electrical and systems engineering, the WUSTL Lunabotics team is preparing for the fifth annual NASA competition.

Before his talk, Steltzner (above, left) met with Lunabotics members for a demonstration and a firsthand account of the engineering challenges involved in maneuvering a robot around on Mars. Also pictured are (from left) students Pradosh Kharel, Nathaniel Stein, Dagmawi Gebreselasse and Adam Cooperberg.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Adelaide Burr cornered Ms. Hempel during homeroom and described her costume. Adelaide was an avid appreciator of dance. Her first book report had celebrated in a collage (dismembered limbs; blue glitter) the life and contributions of Martha Graham, and her second, a dramatic monologue, was based on a bestseller written by a ballerina who had suffered through several disastrous affairs and then developed a serious cocaine habit.

-- From "Ms. Hempel Chronicles"

Ms. Beatrice Hempel, teacher of seventh grade, is new — new to teaching, new to the school, newly engaged, and newly bereft of her idiosyncratic father. Grappling awkwardly with her newness, she struggles to figure out what is expected of her in life and at work.

Is it acceptable to introduce swear words into the English curriculum, enlist students to write their own report cards, or bring up personal experiences while teaching a sex-education class?

So begins "Ms. Hempel Chronicles," the acclaimed second novel by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum. A finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award, the book followed Bynum’s 2004 debut, "Madeleine Is Sleeping," a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize.

On Tuesday, April 8, Bynum will lecture on the craft of fiction for The Writing Program in Arts & Sciences, followed by a reading on Thursday, April 10. Both events begin at 8 p.m. in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall. A reception and book signing will follow each.

For more information, call 314-935-7428.

Bynum’s fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Tin House, the Georgia Review and the "Best American Short Stories" 2004 and 2009. The recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Fellowship, she was named one of “20 Under 40” fiction writers by The New Yorker.

She lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Otis College of Art and Design. 

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

The WUSTL Symphony Orchestra and WUSTL Choirs will join forces for the 2014 Chancellor's Concert April 13. Photo by Mary Butkus/WUSTL Photo.

A mysterious stranger arrives with a mysterious commission. The fevered composer fears the work may foreshadow his own demise. He dies with the score uncompleted at his fingertips.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, K. 626 (1791) is perhaps the most mythologized work by the most mythologized composer in classical music—the subject of legends and scholarly debates, a source of drama for playwrights and filmmakers.

On Sunday, April 13, WUSTL’s Department of Music in Arts & Sciences will perform the Requiem as part of the 2014 Chancellor’s Concert.

The annual event, which features more than 100 musicians from both the WUSTL Symphony Orchestra and the WUSTL Choirs, is among the university’s largest concerts of the year. It will begin at 3 p.m. in the E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall of the 560 Music Center.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

The WUSTL Symphony Orchestra and WUSTL Choirs performing together in the E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall. Photos by Mary Butkus/WUSTL Photo.

Program

The program will open with Mozart’s setting of the Ave verum corpus, K. 618. Written to celebrate the feast of Corpus Christi, this ethereal motet—just 46 measures long—was Mozart’s first sacred work in a decade and a gift to his friend Anton Stoll, parish choir director in Baden, Austria. It was completed in June 1791, shortly before the birth of Mozart’s sixth child and less than six months before the composer’s death.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Mozart

Here’s what is known: In July 1791, as Mozart was completing The Magic Flute, he was approached by a “gray stranger” seeking to commission a requiem mass on behalf of an anonymous patron. It was a busy time but Mozart needed the money and accepted the commission, working on it as his schedule allowed.

But in October the composer fell ill and on Nov. 17 was confined to bed. He grew increasingly obsessed with the requiem and—its patron still unknown—came to feel that he was writing music for his own funeral. By Dec. 4 he’d completed two sections but collapsed that afternoon while attempting to sing a few lines with friends. He died early the following morning.

Legends were not long in coming. In his short play Mozart and Salieri (1830), Alexander Pushkin hypothesizes that Mozart was poisoned by his rival Antonio Salieri—a theme later adopted, in 1897, in an opera of the same title by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Peter Shaffer, in his 1979 play Amadeus and its 1984 film adaptation, similarly casts Salieri as the mysterious patron.

In truth, the Requiem was commissioned by Count Franz von Walsegg, a nobleman with an unenviable reputation for presenting the music of others as if it were his own; the “gray stranger” was Walsegg’s valet. Following Mozart’s death, the score was completed, at the behest of his widow, Constanze, by Joseph Eybler, a friend and student of Haydn’s, and by Franz Xaver Süssmayer, with whom Mozart had left detailed instructions.

It is this, the “Süssmayer completion,” that is typically performed. It was first published in 1802, after Constanze prevailed upon Walsegg to acknowledge Mozart’s authorship.

Soloists for the Requiem will be soprano Jane Jennings, mezzo-soprano Martha Hart, tenor Marc Schapman and bass Mark Freiman.

Nicole Aldrich, director of choral activities, leads the WUSTL Choirs. Steven Jarvi conducts the WUSTL Symphony Orchestra. Sandra Geary is accompanist for the choir.

The 560 Music Center is located at 560 Trinity Ave., at the intersection with Delmar Boulevard. For more information, call (314) 935-5566 or email daniels@wustl.edu.

​

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

500 Clown returns to Edison April 12.

At once bouncy and philosophical, 500 Clown combines acrobatics, circus arts, commedia dell’arte and in-your-face improvisation to create a unique brand of physical, action-packed theatre.

Over the last decade, the madcap Chicago trio has won critical acclaim for 500 Clown Macbeth, 500 Clown Frankenstein and other inventive performances. On Saturday, April 12, the troupe will return to Washington University with 500 Clown Trapped, its first all-ages show.

The special, one-afternoon-only matinee is presented as part of Edison’s ovations for young people series and begins at 11 a.m. Tickets are $12.

500 Clown Trapped

Conceived by artistic director Adrian Danzig, 500 Clown Trapped is a slapstick rumination on themes of ensnarement and escape. The show begins with three simple questions:

How might you define the word trapped?
How do you feel when you are trapped?”
What sounds might you make when trapped?

Amidst a clamor of bells, cymbals and drums, the three clowns — Danzig, Molly Brennan and Paul Kalina — march confidently to the stage but soon find themselves encaged in a room-sized pile of shredded paper. Bantering with the audience, they attempt to dig, climb, claw, improvise and even sing their way to freedom.

The New York Times calls 500 Clown “exhilarating,” while the Chicago Daily Herald notes that "There's pathos behind the pratfalls and real drama underscores the well-conceived, broadly comic and carefully choreographed productions.”

“Many performance and comedy artists — Blue Man Group is a fine example — shape and hone every moment, discarding everything that does not elicit a sensorial reaction from the paying customers,” adds the Chicago Tribune. “Not so 500 Clown. Improvisers and risk-takers to the bone, the clowns are perfectly comfortable trying things for the first time in front of an audience and seeing where they go.”

500 Clown presents 500 Clown Trapped at 11 a.m. Saturday, April 12. Tickets are $12.

Tickets are available at the Edison Box Office, located in the Mallinckrodt Center, 6445 Forsyth Blvd. For more information, call (314) 935-6543, e-mail edison@wustl.edu or visit edison.wustl.edu.

Edison programs are made possible with support from the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency; the Regional Arts Commission, St. Louis; and private contributors.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

“I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black. And I’m gay.”

For scholars of race, gender and sexuality, it’s no accident that NBA basketball player Jason Collins chose these words to become the first active openly gay athlete in the history of America’s four major professional men’s sports — baseball, hockey, football and basketball.

Collins’ story, and that of openly gay University of Missouri football star Michael Sam, will be the focus of a one-day symposium Friday, April 11, in the Women’s Building Formal Lounge at Washington University in St. Louis.

The symposium, “Jason Collins in the American Sportscape: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Sexuality,” will examine these important cultural moments and consider how they fit into a larger politics of racialized discourses of homophobia and non-dominant sexuality in American culture.

Free and open to the public, the event will include two panel discussions. The first, beginning at 10:30 a.m., will focus on the meaning of Collins and Sam in this contemporary moment. The second, starting at 3 p.m., will explore broader lessons and what the future holds. 

“Professional sports is a mirror that Americans hold up to themselves as a nation,” said Iver Bernstein, PhD, professor of history and of African and African-American Studies, and professor and director of American Culture Studies, all in Arts & Sciences. “We are living at a watershed cultural moment, when matters of sexual identity that U.S. professional sports so often take as a given are being opened up for critical discussion.

“This symposium gives attention to basic questions such as ‘who are we?’ and ‘what are the shared assumptions that define the communities that we form?’ ” Bernstein said.

New era in American professional sports

Then, early in 2014, standout Missouri linebacker and likely NFL draftee Michael Sam announced that he was gay, but also stressed that his identity was multi-faceted: “I’m a college graduate. I’m African-American, and I’m gay.”

Said program coordinator Noah Cohan, a doctoral candidate in English and in American literature and a Lynne Cooper Harvey Fellow in American Culture Studies, “The symposium is inspired by the words Collins and Sam chose — in what they knew would be historic announcements thought to advance gay and lesbian rights —to assert their race before their sexuality.

“Given the prominent role of sports in American race relations — especially in the second half of the 20th century — Collins’ and Sam’s choice of words cannot be simply understood as accidental,” said Cohan, also founding coordinator of the Sports Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association.

“It begs the question: how does their ‘coming out’ help us recontextualize the relationship between race and sexuality in American sports? How does race complicate the discourse of non-dominant sexuality and how do black men and women understand their sexual selves?”

Panelist Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr., PhD, cautions that “coming out” may not be possible for many black gay athletes.

“For those at the margins of the margins, what folks like Jason Collins have done is often implausible or undesirable. This truth deserves recognition as well,” said McCune, associate professor of performing arts and of women, gender and sexuality studies at WUSTL.

“For players who already find it difficult to be black in the sport and in the world, the desire to mark oneself and make one more available to surveillance is rarely understood as a good move," McCune said. "It is not a shame of their sexuality; it is about the safety and job security found within remaining discreet.”

McCune, author of “Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing,” is unsure if these announcements signal real change in societal attitudes toward gays and lesbians.

“It only requires a trip to the locker room, the press, popular blogs or the local church to see that such announcements garner as much hate as they do praise,” McCune said.

The program is sponsored by the Program in American Culture Studies, with support from the departments of English and History.

In addition to McCune, panelists are:

• Edward E. Baptist, PhD, a distinguished scholar of African American History, associate professor at Cornell University and author of "The Half Has Never been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism";
• David J. Leonard, PhD, chair of Critical Culture, Gender, & Race Studies at Washington State University and author of "After Artest: The NBA and the Assault on Blackness";
• Thabiti Lewis, PhD, associate professor of English, Washington State University Vancouver, and author of "Ballers of the New School: Race and Sports in America";
• David Shields, professor of English at the University of Washington and author of "Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season"; and
• Lucia Trimbur, PhD, assistant professor of sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, and an expert on sexual identity in boxing gym culture.

For more information, visit the symposium website here.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Joe Angeles/WUSTL Photos

Visitors will tour campus, meet current students and faculty, learn more about research and academic opportunities and enjoy performances from a variety of multicultural groups.

“Even in that short period of time, I could feel that sense of community,” said Neason, a political science and educational studies major. “By the end of the weekend, I could see myself in the classroom, talking to professors, and living on campus in the residence halls. You can’t get that from a brochure or a website. You have to be here.”

Neason is one of 200 Celebration Weekend student volunteers who will welcome to Washington University in St. Louis about 600 admitted students, plus their family members, Thursday through Saturday, April 10-12. Visitors will have an opportunity to tour campus; meet current students and faculty; learn about research and academic opportunities; and enjoy performances from a variety of multicultural groups. Other activities include “Bear Blastoff,” presented by the First Year Center, and the Celebration Weekend welcome dinner. Celebration Weekend also offers visiting students plenty of time just to get to know each other.

“Our current students make Washington University what it is,” said Julia Martin, senior assistant director of admissions. “Giving our admitted students the opportunity to meet a variety of current students is the best way to introduce them to all we have to offer. Many of them tell us that those interactions really make a difference.”

Director of Admissions Julie Shimabukuro said many participants are visiting WUSTL for their first time, and — more importantly — their last before selecting a college.

“Many students tell us that they cannot find our special combination of academics, students and faculty at other places, especially one that’s so welcoming,” Shimabukuro said. “They can see themselves here. That’s what Celebration Weekend is about — students can see all that Washington University has to offer and the different ways that they can contribute to our community. It’s going to be their ‘home’ for the next four years.”

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

An architect's rendering of the new Gary and Rachel Sumers Recreation Center.

Growing up, Rachel Sumers never considered herself an athlete. But as an undergraduate, her initial visit to the university fitness facilities proved a humbling experience.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Rachel and Gary Sumers

The incident would spark a lifelong interest in health and wellness. On Friday, April 11, Rachel and her husband, Gary, will help break ground on the new Gary and Rachel Sumers Recreation Center at Washington University in St. Louis.

“Going to college is one of the greatest experiences in a young person’s life,” said Gary Sumers, JD, a WUSTL alumnus (AB '75) and a university trustee. But at the same time, “You feel the pressures of doing well, of getting your work done, of achieving in your classes.

“Our hope is that this facility can provide an outlet,” Gary Sumers said. “It will be a place where students can relax, socialize, hang out with friends and find their balance.”

Scheduled to open in fall 2016, the Sumers Recreation Center is part of a $54 million renovation and expansion of the university Athletic Complex — the first significant update since 1985.

Work will include a reimagining of historic Francis Gymnasium, a 66,500-square-foot addition with sweeping views of Francis Field, and an expanded sports medicine suite. A reconfigured entranceway will emphasize Francis Gym’s iconic towers as well as the path running eastward to Graham Chapel — a physical link between two important campus buildings and a symbolic connection of mind and body.

The project comes as part of Leading Together: The Campaign for Washington University, an important priority of which is the further strengthening of university teaching, research and living environments.

“We want our students to lead healthy, well-balanced lives, and the Sumers Recreation Center, with its state-of-the-art facilities, will promote this important goal,” said Justin Carroll, associate vice chancellor for students. 

“Excitement, enthusiasm and engagement will all be strengthened by the Center," Carroll said. "The Sumers Recreation Center will also serve to promote a strong sense of community by bringing students, faculty and staff together for informal interaction.”

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

For Gary Sumers, the Athletic Complex always has been associated with community. A graduate of the College of Arts & Sciences, he credits his freshman-year roommate, Dave Lebioda (AB ’75), with introducing him to the western side of campus.

“Dave was a football player, a defensive lineman, and through him I met a lot of the other athletes,” he said. The complex became an important part of his social life, a place to exercise but also a place to bond and cheer for friends.

Returning to visit the Danforth Campus, Sumers is struck by the changes since his student days, but also by a deep sense of continuity.

“There’s a real commitment to academic standards,” he said. “The university has been focused, very appropriately, on recruiting top faculty and students and developing the best-quality housing and academic buildings. Architecturally, it’s as beautiful as any campus I’ve visited.

“There’s a great sense of community,” he said. The campus culture is one that challenges students with high expectations yet remains supportive and flexible about helping them to succeed.

“You’re not going to get lost in the crowd,” he said.

That balance between individual and community is a defining trait of the Sumers Recreation Center.

“I’m a fan of watching sports,” Rachel Sumers, JD, said. She jokingly admitted to swiping her husband's Sports Illustrated when it arrives in the mail. “But in terms of participating, I like to run, I like Pilates. For me, fitness is more of a solo activity.

“I still wouldn’t call myself an athlete,” she said. “So it’s great to have a place where everyone, whatever their interests or abilities, can feel safe, welcome and comfortable.”

“For us, this was a natural fit,” Gary Sumers said. “I’ve been very lucky in business, and Rachel and I wanted to do something for the university. I think it will be a great addition for students, as well as an important tool for recruiting. Our hope is that the center will encourage socializing and bring people together in new ways.

“Part of becoming a well-rounded person is getting a great academic education,” he said. “And of course, Washington University has spectacular academics.

“But students also need social experiences, because that's part of growing up, too. And for those students that want it, they should have quality exercise facilities.”

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

About Gary and Rachel Sumers

A native of Teaneck, N.J., Gary Sumers graduated from Arts & Sciences Phi Beta Kappa in 1975 with a double-major in history and political science. He spent his junior year abroad at the London School of Economics and later earned a law degree from Northwestern University.

He served as managing director in charge of asset management at JMB Institutional Realty Corp. and as chief operating officer of General Growth Properties before joining the Blackstone Group in 1995. Until his retirement last year, he served as a senior managing director and as the chief operating officer of the Blackstone Real Estate Group, where he remains a senior adviser.

In addition to serving as a WUSTL trustee, Sumers is a member of the New York Regional Cabinet and on both the Arts & Sciences committee and the New York City executive committee for Leading Together. Active in Opening Doors to the Future: The Scholarship Initiative for Washington University, he has established both annual and endowed scholarships in memory of his late mother, Joan.

Rachel Sumers was raised in Sante Fe, N.M., and earned her undergraduate degree Phi Beta Kappa from the University of New Mexico in 1993. She earned a master’s in nutrition from Florida State University in 1998 and her law degree from New York University in 2002, as well as an LLM in taxation in 2005.

She began her law career at Simpson Thacher and Bartlett in New York and later worked as internal tax counsel at Goldman Sachs. Active with a number of charities, she provides pro bono legal services to Immigration Equality and is a board member for ARF, an animal shelter in East Hampton, N.Y. She serves as a mentor with the TEAK Fellowship, which helps talented New York City students from low-income families gain admission to and succeed at top high schools and colleges.

Gary and Rachel Sumers are sustaining charter members of the Danforth Circle Chancellor’s Level and life patrons of the William Greenleaf Eliot Society.

A groundbreaking ceremony for the Gary and Rachel Sumers Recreation Center will begin at 4 p.m. Friday, April 11. A reception will immediately follow in the Athletic Complex, located near the intersection of Big Bend and Forsyth boulevards.

For more information or to RSVP, call 314-935-3911 or email ncwest@wustl.edu.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Thorp

“We in higher education have an obligation to keep the humanities vital,” he said. “But we need to find a way to talk about the humanities to our external stakeholders that also resonates internally.”

Thorp’s Phi Beta Kappa/Sigma Xi Lecture, at 5 p.m. Thursday, April 17, in Simon Hall's May Auditorium, will be a good place to start the conversation. The event is free and open to the public.

In his presentation, “From Salesman to Hamletmachine: The Need for the Humanities,” Thorp will consider the current state of the humanities in American higher education and examine the arguments and strategies being used to garner support for its teaching and research within the current fiscal and political context. Citing texts such as “The Heart of the Matter” and Martha Nussbaum’s book, "Not for Profit," he will provide perspective from his years of arguing for the humanities as a dean and  chancellor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Washington University.

There are many areas of current debate and disagreement among groups and individuals making the case for the humanities. Some questions that will be considered include:

• Is there a crisis in the humanities?

• Should the same arguments used for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education in the report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” be used to mobilize support for the humanities?

• Can we find a way to talk about the humanities to our external stakeholders that also resonates internally?

Thorp earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from UNC and a doctorate from the California Institute of Technology.

At UNC, he was Kenan Professor of Chemistry and also served in a number of administrative roles, including chair of chemistry, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and chancellor. He is co-author, with Buck Goldstein, of "Engines of Innovation." He is a co-founder of Viamet Pharmaceuticals, which is commercializing new drugs for prostate cancer and anti-fungal indications.

The Phi Beta Kappa/Sigma Xi Lecture is held annually as part of the WUSTL chapter’s initiation ceremony, which will follow the talk and feature remarks by Jennifer Smith, PhD, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences and associate professor of earth and planetary sciences.

This year marks Phi Beta Kappa’s centennial anniversary on this campus, having been established in 1914 as the Beta chapter in Missouri. Founded during the American Revolution at the College of William and Mary, the academic honor society celebrates excellence in and advocates for the liberal arts and sciences.

The Sigma Xi honor society was established to enhance the health of the research enterprise, foster integrity in science and engineering, and promote the public's understanding of science for the purpose of improving the human condition.

This lecture concludes the spring semester’s Assembly Series. Look for the fall schedule in late August at the Assembly Series website.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Mary Butkus/WUSTL Photos

Anthropologist Tristram Kidder, PhD (center), visits with Tedi and Edward Macias April 7 at an event celebrating Kidder's installation as the Edward S. and Tedi Macias Professor in Arts & Sciences.

“Professor Kidder has earned a reputation of excellence in the field of anthropology and archaeology, and has exhibited extraordinary leadership and teaching here at Washington University,” Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton said at the ceremony.

A professor in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis since 2003, Kidder has served as chair of the Department of Anthropology since 2008. He will begin a second term as chair in July. He earned a bachelor's degree from Tulane University and master's and doctoral degrees in anthropology from Harvard University.

Before joining WUSTL, he taught for 13 years at Tulane, where he continued his research on early Native Americans in the Mississippi Valley. 

His archaeological research over the past 15 years has focused on the evolution of human societies in the Southeastern United States, including the emergence of social ranking and development of domesticated food crops. His interest in geoarchaeology has led him to undertake studies of the evolution and chronology of the Holocene Mississippi River using archaeological data.

Another long-term interest is to explore the nature of social evolution in Native American societies with the goal of understanding the
circumstances that led to periods of greater or lesser social and political complexity. 

The emergence and decline of mound building among Middle and Late Archaic cultures in Eastern North America is an example of the waxing and waning of seemingly complex behavior that Kidder is exploring in greater detail. Toward this end, he is working at several Middle to Late Archaic mound sites in the Lower Mississippi Valley, including the well-known Poverty Point site in northeast Louisiana.

He has applied archaeology and geology to the study of how human populations have adapted to climate and environmental change in China as well as in North America, focusing recently on the ancient dynamics of human settlements in the Yellow River valley of China. 

His work at the Sanyangzhuang site, known as China's Pompeii because of its excellent preservation, has led to a pathbreaking new understanding of how climate change and human manipulation of the environment shape human history.

“Professor Kidder’s research has contributed immensely to the world’s understanding of human diversity and the effects of climate change,
past and present,” said Barbara A. Schaal, PhD, dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences and the Mary-Dell Chilton Distinguished Professor. 

“His work along the Mississippi River Valley has helped explain circumstances that led to social changes in ancient Native American societies. We're fortunate to have someone of his caliber leading our
top-ranked anthropology department."

Kidder is the inaugural recipient of a professorship recently established by the Board of Trustees using university funds to honor two
individuals who have played a vital role in WUSTL's success for more than four decades: Ed and Tedi Macias.

About Ed and Tedi Macias

Ed Macias, PhD, came to WUSTL to teach chemistry in 1970, near the end of Thomas H. Eliot’s tenure as chancellor. Macias' wife, Tedi, has been an active member in the campus community, including serving as co-chair of the Washington University Woman’s Club and in the creation and maintenance of the Elizabeth Gray Danforth Butterfly Garden.

Macias became a full professor in 1984 and, during the 1980s, his administrative roles included serving as chair of the Department of Chemistry and directing the Summer School program. He pursued seminal research, including a study demonstrating that the atmospheric haze obscuring the Grand Canyon was made up of pollutants from Los Angeles.

In 1988, Macias became university provost, a position he held for 25 years. In 1995, he accepted the position of executive vice chancellor
and dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, along with a mandate to lead Arts & Sciences to the top rank nationwide. During this time, he also became the inaugural holder of the Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professorship in Arts & Sciences, a title he still holds.

He currently is co-chair of the Arts & Sciences Committee for Our Washington, the faculty and staff component of Leading Together: The Campaign for Washington University, which aims to raise the support needed to meet the university's strategic needs.

“When it comes to the opportunities and challenges of the modern university, Ed has a deep, broad, and nuanced understanding,” Wrighton said. “He embraces change, solves problems and envisions the future with optimism and imagination."

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

WHAT: Washington University in St. Louis will hold a ceremonial groundbreaking ceremony for the Rachel and Gary Sumers Recreation Center.

WHO: Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton; John Schael, director of athletics; Matthew Re, Student Union president; Gary Sumers, member of the WUSTL Board of Trustees; and Craig D. Schnuck, vice chair and chair-elect of the Board of Trustees.

WHERE: Western side of the Danforth Campus, near the intersection of Forsyth and Big Bend boulevards. Enter from Forsyth via Olympian Way.

WHEN: The ceremony begins at 4 p.m. Friday, April 11. A reception will immediately follow in the Athletic Complex.

MORE: Scheduled to open in fall 2016, the Gary and Rachel Sumers Recreation Center is part of a $54 million renovation and expansion of the university Athletic Complex — the first significant update since 1985.
The center will add more than 60,000 square feet to the Athletic Complex, including the Gary and Rachel Sumers Fitness Center. The fitness center will offer a variety of fitness classes such as spinning, strength training, yoga and cardio fitness.

The new state-of-the-art fitness and recreation facilities will enhance efforts to encourage the WUSTL community to develop healthy lifestyles and habits for life. The center will have much-needed space for intramural sports, exercise classes and recreation and fitness activities.

The Sumers Recreation Center will include:

• A reimagined Francis Gymnasium. Visitors will enter the facility through the historic towers of the Francis Gymnasium, which once again will be linked by a path to Graham Chapel, as originally envisioned by the university architects Cope and Stewardson.

• A new 66,500-square-foot addition, located south of the current Francis Gymnasium, boasting skylights and sweeping views of Francis Field

• A renovated auxiliary gym in the existing Athletic Complex

• A suspended jogging track

• A three-court gymnasium

• Two multipurpose rooms

• A spinning studio

• State-of-the-art fitness equipment

• Team locker rooms

• Team meeting rooms

• Expanded sports medicine suite

CONTACT: Liam Otten, 314-935-8494 (office) or 314-874-6331 (cell).

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.