Recently in Alumni News

With a top-32 finish at the World Cup in Paris, epee fencer Soren Thompson ’05 qualified to represent the United States at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. Thompson also competed at the 2004 Olympics in Athens. [Miami Herald]

 

Liza Mundy ’82’s story on “Women, Money, and Power” was featured on the cover of Time magazine. [Time]

 

Another recent Time article looked at Princeton engineering professor Jeremy Kasdin ’85’s role in the search for Earth-like planets. [Time]

 

Proteins developed by Caltech professor Frances Arnold ’79 have aided development of biofuels; her current work aims to improve brain imaging. [Bloomberg Businessweek]

 

Dan Feyer ’99 defended his title at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, defeating 600 top solvers and a computer. [New York Times]

 

Asset-management analyst Ross Glotzbach ’03 is working to gain approval for a charter school in Memphis, Tenn. [Memphis Commercial Appeal]

 

The recession has not dampened Broadway box offices, Jujamcyn Theaters president Jordan Roth ’02 told “Morning Joe” hosts Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist. [MSNBC]

 

When Princeton’s Rhodes scholars headed off to Oxford, they expected to find historic buildings, world-class scholars, and the intellectual tools with which to tackle some of the world’s most complex problems. But they got one thing they hadn’t bargained for: free time.

 

“I just have so much time to use however I want,” Henry Barmeier ’10 said. “My perception of time is radically different [from before].”

 

For Barmeier, one of the greatest luxuries of the Rhodes experience has been an abundance of time for unstructured learning outside of the classroom. He has used the space in his schedule to learn the guitar, visit art museums, and have long conversations with friends.

 

“I feel more at liberty now to pursue interests for no other reason than because they’re interesting,” he explained. “That really is the heart and soul of the Oxford experience for me: a shift in what I think it means to learn.”

 

Scott Moore ’08, a D.Phil. candidate in politics, said he felt his Oxford lifestyle was a good departure from the pressurized, harried culture at Princeton.

 

“Compare Firestone’s opening hours with those of the Oriental Studies Institute at Oxford, where I did much of my research: 9 a.m. until 6:45 p.m.” he said in an email. “That’s right, you can’t do any work after 6:45 p.m. even if you wanted to. How healthy!”

Scholar and international affairs expert Joseph S. Nye Jr. ’58 spoke to packed audiences in Robertson Hall Feb. 21 and 22, discussing American presidential leadership in foreign policy as part of the 2012 Richard Ullman Lecture Series.

 

Nye, a former dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, worked with collaborator (and current Princeton professor) Robert Keohane to develop the theory of neoliberalism in their 1977 book Power and Interdependence. He also has held posts that included chairman of the National Intelligence Council in 1993-94 and assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs in the Clinton administration.

 

Nye's first lecture focused on the efficacy of seven presidents who presided over what Nye called the “American era.” He separated the definition of leadership into two categories — style and objectives — with two subtypes each. Leaders, he said, can have inspirational or transactional styles and transformational or incremental objectives.

 

According to Nye, the differences between broadly transformational and transactional leadership can also be described in terms of “soft power” and “hard power,” with the ideal mix of the two being “smart power,” which uses “contextual IQ” to combine resources and understand the situation.

Each of Alumni Day’s top honorees dreamed of becoming doctors, they said in campus addresses Feb. 25, but FBI director Robert Mueller III ’66 and Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa P. Jackson *86 ended up on very different paths. Each talked about how formative experiences at Princeton and elsewhere reshaped their career paths and led to their leadership of government agencies.

 

For Mueller, the Woodrow Wilson Award winner, a difficult Princeton class on organic chemistry derailed his plans for a medical career, he said in remarks in Richardson Auditorium. He earned his bachelor’s degree in politics instead. But it was the death of David Hackett ’65 on a Vietnam battlefield that helped set Mueller on the path to public service, he explained. Hackett and Mueller played together on Princeton’s lacrosse team.

 

“One would have thought that the life of a Marine, and David’s death in Vietnam, would argue strongly against following in his footsteps. But many of us saw in him the person we wanted to be,” Mueller said. “And a number of his friends, teammates, and associates joined the Marine Corps because of him, as did I. … He taught us the true meaning of leadership. One teammate can change your life. And David Hackett changed mine.” 

 

Jackson, who won the James Madison Medal, spoke about being one of the few women in Princeton’s chemical engineering graduate program, from which she earned a master’s degree in 1986. Her interest in science and math, she said, began with a calculator that she received at an engineering summer camp, and was fueled by attending an all-girls’ high school. “The qualities that have traditionally discouraged young women from pursuing science — that we are not interested in a cold and hard and disconnected discipline — are a misrepresentation of both women and science,” she said.

 

She initially wanted to be a doctor “because I wanted to help people by treating them when they got sick. I came to realize that if I studied chemical engineering, and started working to protect our environment, I could help people by making sure they didn’t get sick in the first place.” Studying at Princeton “set the trajectory for my entire life. This university is where I had the opportunity to fully immerse myself in what became one of the greatest passions of my life — the exploration of science.”

 

 

 

 

 

Answering a reporter’s questions in the White House Rose Garden last year, Michelle Shearer ’95 spoke of the need to “elevate the teaching profession.” Teachers, she said, are not adequately recognized for their service, and the teaching profession is looked down on as a lesser calling, for smart people who just didn’t have what it take in areas like medicine or business.

 

Shearer has been rising above those preconceived notions since she first set out to become a teacher. A pre-medical student early in her Princeton career, Shearer volunteered at Trenton’s Marie Katzenbach School for the Deaf and eventually decided that teaching — not medicine — was her life’s passion. Since then her biography has included stops at the Maryland School for the Deaf, where she taught advanced placement chemistry, and at a Maryland public high school, where she taught chemistry in the international baccalaureate program.

 

Last May, Shearer was honored at the White House as the National Teacher of the Year, and since then, she has traveled throughout the United States and to China and Japan, speaking about how to improve the standard of education around the world. On Feb. 21, she spoke to a group of students, alumni, and faculty from Princeton’s Program in Teacher Preparation on what it meant for her to pursue K-12 teaching at a time when her classmates at Princeton were preparing for law school, medical school, or business.

Barclays executive Hugh “Skip” McGee ’81 had an inside-the-ropes view of Phil Mickelson’s PGA Tour victory Feb. 12, teaming with the golf star in the Pebble Beach National Pro-Am. [Bloomberg]

 

United Continental CEO Jeff Smisek ’76 and Ariel Investments CEO John Rogers ’80 and president Mellody Hobson ’91 were listed among this year’s 100 Most Powerful Chicagoans. [Chicago Magazine]

 

The late steel mogul William S. Dietrich II ’60 was No. 2 on this year’s “Philanthropy 50.” He donated nearly $400 million to Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh before his death in October and left $15 million to Princeton. [Chronicle of Philanthropy]

 

Since 2008, Stona Fitch ’83’s Concord Free Press has given away thousands of books — and received $250,000 in donations. [Los Angeles Times]

 

Richard Land ’69, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s ethics and religious liberty commission, discussed Rick Santorum’s recent caucus victories on The Kudlow Report. [CNBC.com]

 

Following violent clashes at an Egyptian soccer game, national team coach Bob Bradley ’80 marched with Egyptian fans to honor the dead. [Sports Illustrated]

 

Growing up in Wadmalaw Island, S.C., Grainger David ’00 saw film as something “giant and impossible.” Today, he is debunking that childhood belief as an independent filmmaker.

 

David came to film by way of writing. He was an English major at Princeton and took several creative writing classes, including John McPhee ’53’s famous nonfiction seminar. He credits McPhee with introducing him to journalism, a path he pursued immediately after graduation. At Fortune magazine, David covered such disparate subjects as caloric restriction, a Mongolian gold rush, and New Line Cinemas.

 

David's reporting on the movie business encouraged his growing passion for a new medium. Like so many filmmakers before him, he was drawn to the vibrant cinematic culture of New York City. He started watching independent films, “small movies that seemed somehow achievable.” He read screenplays and wrote his own. “Fiction writing is all about taking you into the mind of the character,” David explains, “and the mind of the character is exactly what's not available to you in film.” He found the challenge exhilarating.

 

In 2005, David enrolled in New York University’s film school, where he wrote and directed three shorts: “George & Karl,” named Best American Short Film at the 2008 Avignon Film Festival; “Sissypants”; and his thesis film, “The Chair,” which took David back to his roots in South Carolina. “The Chair” will have its world premiere at the 2012 SXSW Film Festival.

 

David's next project, “The Edge of the Woods,” was also shot in South Carolina. The film is supported by a grant from the South Carolina Film Commission and by individual donors on Kickstarter, a crowdsourced fundraising website.

 

The story John C. Bogle ’51 often tells of his senior-thesis journey is something to which nearly every Princeton senior, past and present, can relate. It started in Firestone Library and ended before graduation in a 133-page document.

 

Holed up in then-newly built Firestone Library, Bogle paged through a December 1949 copy of Fortune magazine looking for inspiration. An article on page 116 caught his eye. It was titled “Big Money in Boston,” and it discussed the “tiny but contentious” mutual-fund industry. Bogle realized he had found his thesis topic as he read about an industry that appeared “totally untouched by academics and the press” at the time.

 

Bogle’s thesis, titled “The Economic Role of the Investment Company,” outlined a strategy to make investing in mutual funds more accessible to individual investors with lower costs made possible through indexing rather than actively managing funds.

 

The idea eventually led to Bogle’s founding of the Vanguard Group in 1974, an investment-management company that took advantage of low-cost indexing. Vanguard now manages approximately $1.6 trillion dollars in assets, according to a February 2011 estimate.

 

At a Jan. 31 gathering that celebrated Bogle’s influence on the financial world, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker ’49 said, “[Bogle] is still living off an undergraduate thesis he wrote at Princeton. He got the thing reprinted! And it sells 50 years later!”

 

Bogle replied, “Never underestimate the power of luck.”