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Faces
November 2000

At its September meeting, the Yale Corporation appointed former Stanford University president Gerhard Casper '62LLM a successor trustee. Casper, a native of Germany, is a legal scholar. Before beginning his eight-year term as president of Stanford in 1992, he was at the University of Chicago, where he began as a law professor and later served as dean of the law school and provost. He recently chaired the evaluating team that reaccredited Yale, and he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University at this year’s Commencement.

Speaking to an audience of students born well after her 1973 novel Fear of Flying was published, author Erica Jong told of the prefeminist literary world she was reacting against in her writing. “It seemed that only the voice of a male protagonist could be taken seriously,” Jong said at an Ezra Stiles master’s tea on September 26. “I wanted to show everything going on in a woman’s head.” It was during a three-year stint in Heidelberg as an Army wife, she said, when she found her voice. “I began to write with a kind of passion and panic, as if my life depended on it.”

Annette Walton, a homeless woman who for six years has sold flowers on campus, was arrested on July 27 by Yale Police for disorderly conduct and warned not to sell flowers again without a vending license. Police said she was “aggressively panhandling” and interfering with pedestrian traffic. Walton pleaded not guilty, and prosecutors dropped the charges on October 5. Yale students held a fundraiser at Rudy’s to buy Walton a $200 vendor’s license.

At a conference to inaugurate the Howard Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders on September 9, environmental activist Andy Kerr was one of a panel of speakers on the American national park system. Kerr, founder of Alternatives to Growth Oregon, defended President Clinton’s recent executive orders creating national monuments. “For those who criticize the use of executive power to create national monuments, my question is, which ones were mistakes?” said Kerr. “If we were to say it was a bad idea because it wasn’t popular locally, we wouldn’t have a Grand Canyon.”

Donald Gallup '34, ‘39PhD, longtime curator of the American literature collection at the Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, died on September 6. He was 87 years old. Gallup was best known in the literary world for his admired bibliography of T.S. Eliot. He spent almost all of his career at Yale, and in addition to his scholarly work, he collected nearly 400 works by the British artist Edward Lear, which he donated to the Center for British Art in 1997. Gallup’s gift is the centerpiece of the current Lear exhibit at the BAC (see Calendar).

Close-Up: In the Palm of Her Hands

When Donna Dubinsky '77 first came to Yale from a high school in Michigan, she remembers, “I really struggled. It was a sink-or-swim environment for me.” Little did she know that she would one day return as the doyenne of tech toys, the business half of the team that launched both the Palm Pilot and its new competitor, the Handspring Visor. Dubinsky spoke to the Yale Entrepreneurial Society and at a Jonathan Edwards College master’s tea on September 20, drawing at both events an audience of admiring undergraduates bearing their own personal digital assistants (PDAs).

“Hey, is that an M100? Wow!” said Dubinsky as she stepped up to the lectern at the YES event, spotting the latest from Palm in the hands of a student. To a tea-goer who was taking notes on his vintage 1994 Palm Pilot she noted, “That one’s in the Smithsonian already.” And the student fortunate enough to have bought Dubinsky’s latest product, the Visor, was given the opportunity to try out some new plug-ins for the machine, including an MP3 music player.

Dubinsky was not a technical type in college—she majored in history, then went to work for the Philadelphia National Bank before going to Harvard Business School. After working for Apple Computer and helping launch its software subsidiary Claris, she teamed up with product developer Jeff Hawkins and started Palm, the company that would put the PDA into the hands of five million consumers. After Palm was acquired by 3Com, Hawkins and Dubinsky went out on their own again and started Handspring, whose Visor has changed the market with its expansion port, which will allow the device to morph

Dubinsky offered generous amounts of advice to the students about the technology world, about business, and about life in general. She also talked about the future of her business, predicting that PDAs will begin to merge with cellular phones and become increasingly versatile. At prices as low as $150, she said, “I believe this will be the first kind of computer to get to a billion people.”  

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