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Faces
October 2001

Yale’s newest vice president may have come from a chemical company, but he’s spent some time in education, too. Robert Culver, who was named vice president for finance and administration in June, was most recently executive vice president and chief financial officer of the Cabot Corporation in Boston. Before that, though, he spent seven years as vice president and treasurer of Northeastern University. Culver has also worked for the Cambridge, Massachusetts, schools and for the consulting firm Coopers & Lybrand. He is a graduate of SUNY-Buffalo, the London School of Economics, and Harvard.

Alumni have elected Theodore P. Shen '66 of Brooklyn, New York, to a six-year term as an Alumni Fellow of the Yale Corporation. A veteran financial manager, Shen retired in 1999 as chair of the Capital Markets Group at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. Shen also graduated from the Harvard Business School and Phillips Exeter Academy, where he is co-chair of the board of trustees. His daughter graduated from Yale in 1999. Also running for alumni fellow were Thomas Lovejoy '64, ’71PhD, and Gerald Fink '65.

Tennis star Venus Willams won her third-straight Pilot Pen Tennis Tournament on August 25, defeating Lindsey Davenport in the finals. The tournament, which is held at the Connecticut Tennis Center adjacent to the Yale Bowl, drew record crowds and seven of the top nine women tennis players in the world this year. “I don’t know what it is,” said Williams after the match, “but I always play well here.”

An August heat wave broke just in time for fans of Ray Charles to fill the Green on August 11 for the first of three concerts in the Yale Tercentennial New Haven Jazz Festival. Charles attracted what organizers said was the largest crowd in festival history. Latin drummer Poncho Sanchez and singer Dianne Reeves also performed in the series, which Yale joined as a title sponsor this year.

Public schools should have on-site clinics to provide preventive health care for children, said former surgeon general Joycelyn Elders in an address on July 10. “You can’t educate people who are not healthy, and you certainly can’t keep people healthy if they’re not educated,” said Elders, who now teaches at the University of Arkansas Medical School. Her speech was part of the annual conference of the School of the 21st Century Initiative, a program founded by Yale psychologist Edward Zigler that promotes the idea of schools as “family resource centers.”

“You know, I’ve been to New Haven before,” said former Black Panther Bobby Seale to a full house at the Yale Repertory Theater on June 20. “But now I finally have a chance to really see it.” Seale was referring to his 1970 trial for the murder of Panther Alex Rackley, which led to the May Day events that year. Seale was speaking in a series of programs about May Day that was part of this year’s International Festival of Arts and Ideas. While his strategies are now more mainstream, Seale voiced no regrets over the Panthers' past. “It was a good struggle,” he said. “Somebody had to stand up and do something.”

Close-Up

When photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones began his career in the early 1950s, he had one objective. “I wanted to photograph the two Englands,” said Armstrong-Jones, who became the Earl of Snowdon when he married Princess Margaret in 1960.

To say that he succeeded would be a monumental understatement, as the recent retrospective of his work at the Center for British Art clearly demonstrated. It is said that Lord Snowdon, who retains the title even though he and the princess divorced in 1978, knew everyone worth knowing and photographed them. At the BAC last June, Snowdon, 71, led viewers on a tour of 180 images, from the “charge of the nannies” to pictures of dancers, designers, actors, writers, and royalty. He recalled a lesson in his craft from Marlene Dietrich, the generosity of Sir Lawrence Olivier, and the “enormous amount of luck required to get a split-second right.”

Snowdon also dismissed any elevation of his craft. “Photographs are not art,” he said. But they could be useful. “I want my pictures to make ordinary people react—to see something that they hadn’t taken in before.”  

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