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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
Anne Fadiman, Yale’s newest writing teacher, has lots of ideas about what she will do as the first Francis Writer in Residence at Yale College. But if she accomplishes nothing else, she says, “I will make it my mission to stop Yale undergraduates from ever saying ‘different than’ instead of ‘different from.’” Love for the fine points of language comes up regularly in Fadiman’s own prose, especially her second book, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, in which, among other things, she tells of growing up in the word-loving family of writers Clifton Fadiman and Annalee Jacoby Fadiman. But her interests are wide-ranging: her first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, describes the conflict between American doctors and a Hmong refugee family with an epileptic child. And as editor of the American Scholar, the widely praised general-interest quarterly published by Phi Beta Kappa, she has striven for seven years to provide “a haven for fabulous stylists who wanted to write about things that interested them.” Fadiman, who went to Harvard and lives with her husband and two children in western Massachusetts, is leaving the Scholar after its fall issue. She will begin teaching at Yale in the spring with a course called “Writing about Oneself.” (“It’s not 'one’s self,' she explains over the phone. “It’s all one word.”) Fadiman’s new position was endowed by Paul Francis ’77, who was a student of the writer William Zinsser at Yale. As a writer in residence, she will also advise senior projects, organize dinners and readings for students with professional writers, and act as “a writing mentor to Yale students who are interested in what I call ‘non-non’—nonacademic nonfiction. I’m not sure writing can be taught,” she says. “But I think that people who are not born to be writers can at least become clearer writers and more sensitive readers. And it is possible that when a born writer walks into an atmosphere of encouragement and intellectual ferment, good things can happen. That would be all I expect to accomplish.”
Elected Margaret H. Marshall '76JD, the chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, has been elected by Yale alumni to serve a six-year term as a fellow of the Yale Corporation. Marshall practiced law privately for 16 years before becoming vice president and general counsel of Harvard. She has served on her state’s highest court since 1996 and was named chief justice in 1999. Marshall was the author of her court’s recent decision permitting same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. She lives in Cambridge with her husband, the writer and former New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis.
Honored Eight Yale professors are among the 178 new fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences: outgoing Yale College dean Richard H. Brodhead '68, '72PhD; molecular biophysics and biochemistry professor Donald Engelman '67PhD; engineering dean Paul A. Fleury ; physics professor Steven M. Girvin ; law professor Michael J. Graetz ; provost Susan Hockfield ; biblical studies professor emeritus Wayne Meeks '65PhD; and political science professor Stephen Skowronek. They will be inducted into the academy in October.
Remembered Mary Louise Brewster, the widow of former Yale president Kingman Brewster '41, died on April 14 at her home in England. She was 83 years old. Born Mary Louise Phillips, she attended Vassar before marrying Brewster in 1942, and with him she occupied the provost’s and president’s houses at Yale, the American ambassador’s residence in London, and the master’s lodgings at Oxford’s University College. After her husband’s death, she moved to their house in the village of Combe in Berkshire. Josh Hill '05, a center on the men’s basketball team, was killed in a car accident on May 27 in New Jersey. He was 22 years old. Hill, who had been sidelined by injuries for a year and a half, was planning to return to the team next year. A native of Wilmington, Delaware, Hill was “the inspirational leader” of the team, according to coach James Jones. Athletic director Tom Beckett called Hill “a popular and energizing force of the Yale community.” |
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©1992–2012, Yale Alumni Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Yale Alumni Magazine, P.O. Box 1905, New Haven, CT 06509-1905, USA. yam@yale.edu |
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