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The College’s New Chief Social Worker
September/October 2007
by Mark Alden Branch ’86
Being dean of student affairs in Yale College comes with its share of
drama: student drinking, disciplinary proceedings, feuding a cappella groups.
But Marichal Gentry, who just took over the job from 20-year incumbent Betty
Trachtenberg, has seen worse. He spent nearly six years as a social worker with
the pediatric bone marrow transplant program at Duke University Medical Center,
and that helps keep things in perspective: “When I’m working with a student, I
say to myself, ‘Is this one of those life-and-death situations that I used to
deal with, where parents are saying goodbye to their kid?’”
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“I like to see people who dream big.” |
Gentry, 43, comes to Yale from Middlebury College, where he was
associate dean of student affairs, then associate dean of the college. A native
of Tennessee, he attended college at the University of the South in Sewanee,
Tennessee. After a few years in banking and a tour of duty in admissions at
Sewanee, he got his master of social work degree from the University of North
Carolina.
Having spent eight years working with students at an elite college, he
is not given to hand-wringing about the current generation of driven,
competitive students known as “millennials”: “I like to see people who dream
big—not to the detriment of their health or well-being, but people who
are focused and are able to visualize and create things. I think that’s what
education is all about. The opposite would make for a more boring campus.”
Remembered
Henry W. Broude, who taught economics at Yale for more than 50 years
and served as an adviser to three Yale presidents, died of cancer on January 15
in Branford, Connecticut, at the age of 81. Broude, the Philip G. Bartlett
Professor Emeritus of Economics and History, came to Yale in 1954. He was
director of academic planning from 1963 to 1972 and adviser to the president
from 1972 to 1992. “His discretion and loyalty generated the great affection
and trust not just of presidents but of countless friends and colleagues,” said
President Richard Levin. Broude is survived by his wife, Josephine.
Norma Lytton, who was associate master of Jonathan Edwards College from
1987 to 1997, died on July 28 at her home in New Haven. She was 70 years old.
Lytton, an artist and longtime docent and researcher at the Center for British
Art, was married for 44 years to Bernard Lytton, Donald Guthrie Professor
Emeritus of Surgery. Bernard became founding director of the Koerner Center for
Emeritus Faculty in 2001; he and others credit Norma with a major role in
making the center a success. She was well known in many different parts of
Yale, and her funeral at the Slifka Center was standing room only. Besides her
husband, she is survived by four children and six grandchildren.
Appointed
Sociologist Elijah Anderson, who is noted for his influential studies
of urban black communities, has left the University of Pennsylvania to become
the William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Sociology at Yale. Anderson, 62, is the
author of A Place on the Corner, a 1978 study of the denizens of a Chicago bar and liquor store. More recently, he
has examined black culture in Philadelphia in works such as Code of the
Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City.
Shelly C. Lowe has been appointed assistant dean of Yale College and
the first full-time director of the Native American Cultural Center.
(Previously, one assistant dean oversaw the Native American and Latino
centers.) Lowe comes to Yale from the University of Arizona, where she is
completing a doctorate in higher education. She was facilitator of Arizona's
American Indian studies program for six years.  |
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