A new faculty lecture series rolls out with the mission of fueling cerebral life on campus.

By Mary Jo Patterson

An intellectual feast, with food and drink and an occasional visiting star. That’s the concept guiding the creation of the Drew Faculty Seminar set to debut this semester. Four deans and eight faculty members spent the fall designing the series, intended to draw in faculty and staff from the entire Drew community. “It will be a mix of scholarship offered by Drew faculty, outside speakers of some prominence and panel discussions,” says Robert Ready, interim dean of the Caspersen School of Graduate Studies, one of the planners. “The idea is to create a more vibrant intellectual culture in this university.”

The new seminar is actually a reinvigorated version of a very old Drew institution, the Aquinas Seminar, which launched in the fall of 1970 and held its final meeting Oct. 3, 2011. For 41 years interested faculty and staff gathered regularly to hear lecturers that included British philosopher Owen Barfield and University of Pennsylvania sociologist Philip Reiff, a specialist on Freud.

During its first three years, the seminar examined the relationship between psychology and history, a topic requested by its early funder, the Aquinas Fund of New York. Later it took on all kinds of annual themes, chosen by a steering committee. They ranged from “Self and Identity” and “Events That Transform Thinking” to “Dimensions of Global Awareness,” following 9/11.

“It was always very exciting. I always felt as if I was on the cutting edge of all these different intellectual currents,” says trustee emerita Shirley Sugerman, a psychoanalyst and former Drew adjunct in religion who coordinated the Aquinas Seminar from its inception. But in recent years attendance declined, especially among new faculty members. “It was losing its luster. We needed new people, new energy.”

2011 Nobel winner Adam Riess attended Drew’s Governor’s School in 1987.

Professor James Supplee inspired a 2011 Nobel Prize winner to pursue physics.

By Renée Olson

It took just 11 years for Adam Riess to go from being a 17-year-old student at the New Jersey Governor’s School in the Sciences at Drew to coming up with calculations that have upended conventional thinking in astrophysics.

And then, it took just 13 more to win a Nobel Prize.

As a teen, what drew him to science was a teacher at Watchung Hills Regional High School in Warren, N.J. What led him to physics was attending the Governor’s School in the summer of 1987.

“I had a professor, Dr. Supplee, who I remember very well. He taught a course in special relativity that made my head spin,” says Riess, who holds degrees from MIT and Harvard and is now a professor at Johns Hopkins. “I left wanting to be a physicist.”

“Special relativity has all these crazy ideas about how objects move in space,” says Riess. “I remember arguing with him. I would say, ‘That’s how it looks, but not how it is.’”

Riess is credited with being the first to discover “dark energy,” a force that makes up as much as 70 percent of the universe and is causing the cosmos to expand at an accelerating rate. The findings may help researchers understand what’s ultimately in store for the universe.

Thrilled that his former student won a Nobel, James Supplee, physics department chair, has vivid memories of the budding scientists in the program, where he taught for a decade. “After class, eight or 10 students would follow me to the cafeteria, asking questions,” says Supplee. “They couldn’t stop. They were so curious, the most energetic students.”

Riess, who remembers living at Drew in “a dorm back near the woods,” shares Supplee’s recollection of ardent, post-class conversations in the Commons. Says Riess, “I would have been in that group.”

Christine Hepburn (left) with Professor of Biology Sara Webb. Photo by Peter Murphy

A pair of determined women turn over a new leaf for what is now called Hepburn Woods.

By Mary Jo Patterson

The forest preserve was dying, and it hurt just to look at it.

Native trees had stopped reproducing. Mayapple, trillium, foamflower and other wildflowers had vanished. Thick ropes of wisteria and oriental bittersweet strangled trees. The only things flourishing were destructive plant invaders—Norway maples, garlic mustard and Japanese stilt grass—and deer, whose constant browsing killed any hope of regeneration.

Chris Hepburn, former resident of a house that bordered on the woods, funded the restoration's deer fencing. Photo by Peter Murphy

The sight pained Sara Webb, professor of biology and director of the Drew Forest Preserve—the 45-acre area at the southwest corner of campus—who uses the woods to teach forest ecology and conduct research. “I often thought about how to rescue it,” she says. It also pained Christine Hepburn, an environmental activist who lived on the edge of the preserve with her husband and son. “I loved those woods,” Hepburn says. “I raised my baby there. To me, they were not Drew’s woods. They were ours.”

A chance encounter between the two women grew into a shared resolve to rescue the preserve. Today, thanks to a $155,000 gift from Hepburn, plus donated labor and materials from the New Jersey Audubon Society and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, restoration of 30 acres is underway. Hepburn’s donation financed construction of a 10-foot-high deer fence around part of the woods and the adjoining Zuck Arboretum. Last April, volunteers planted 1,300 baby trees and shrubs.

Six weeks later Hepburn walked into the cleared portion of the preserve, renamed the Hepburn Woods. Tiny tree and shrub seedlings—grown by inmates at Bayside State Prison in South Jersey—dotted the ground. “I was in tears, just to think, oaks will grow here again,” says Hepburn, who moved from Madison to Manhattan in 2009. “It’s going to be so rich in birds. It’s exciting.”

The project has a long backstory. Hepburn’s chapter starts in 1994, when she and husband Ken Martin, a pharmaceutical executive, moved to Madison. “I’m a woods person,” says Hepburn, who grew up in Bucks County, Pa. “We couldn’t find woods in Madison initially, so I dragged my husband off to Mendham Township. He couldn’t stand it out there. One day he came home from a bike ride and said, ‘Chris, I saw the perfect house for sale. It’s in Madison, and it’s got woods.’”

The house, set on 1.6 acres off Glenwild Road, had belonged to Florence and Robert Zuck, former botany professors at Drew. (When they retired in 1980, Drew named the Zuck Arboretum in their honor.) “I met Mrs. Zuck, and walked through her gardens with her. I barely knew a rose from a marigold, but I told her I loved nature and the woods,” Hepburn says.

Webb joined the Drew faculty in 1986. “From day one I have wanted to protect this forest,” she says. One year, with students, she erected a small deer exclosure as a demonstration project. After two years baby trees sprouted inside, although neither shrubs nor ferns nor wildflowers reappeared. Another experiment involved removing Norway maples. The trees, introduced from Europe during the 1700s, destroy woodland by pushing out native plant species. Hepburn was home when the clearing started. “Suddenly there were chainsaws in my woods. I was hysterical, crying.” She called the university, which sent Webb over. As time passed, a friendship developed. Hepburn, meanwhile, complained to Drew about the state of the woods. “They’d throw up their hands. They’d say, ‘We’re a university, not a conservancy,’” she says.

In 2008 Hepburn suggested Webb contact the New Jersey Audubon Society, which—through a partnership with the federal fish and wildlife agency—had helped her restore wildlife habitat on land she owned in Hardwick, N.J. Both partners were eager to help restore the preserve, but on one condition. “Without a deer control fence, there was no point in planting anything,” says Audubon land steward John Parke.

“That’s when Chris came to the rescue,” says Webb. “She has really been an angel. The forest is going to take some time. But she’s left a great environmental legacy.”

Read more about campus nature in “Four Seasons at Drew.”

Tree Census

While the oak is near and dear to Drew’s identity, other trees are actually far more prevalent on campus. Here are the dominant species in order of abundance.

• American beech
• Sugar maple (native)
• Norway maple (invasive)
• The oaks: black, white, red and pin

Courtesy Wikipedia Commons.

By Christopher Hann

[Editor's Note: In his Fall 2011 Drew Magazine column, President Robert Weisbuch teases readers with a brief mention of a fascinating conversation he and Associate Professor of Music Trevor Weston had about the richness of the musical traditions in the Stones’ song “You Can't Always Get What You Want.” We made a beeline to Weston for details.]

When Trevor Weston hears the Stones perform “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” he hears more than a 1960s pop anthem. He hears a gumbo of musical tastes, beginning with the opening harmonies, sung in the English choir tradition that Weston knows so well.

“There are so many different musical traditions represented in the song,” says Weston, an associate professor of music at Drew. “Maybe it’s an example of the zeitgeist of the time. People were just interested in mixing different things.”

The opening verse is sung a cappella, in an impossibly high pitch, by the London Bach Choir, which brings Weston, who grew up in Plainfield, N.J., back to his days as a choirboy at St. Thomas Choir School in New York City. As the choir recedes, a guitar strums, backed by a mournful French horn—an instrument, Weston notes, more commonly associated with classical music. And when Mick Jagger concludes the iconic refrain (“But if you try sometime you might find/You get what you need”), maracas shake and conga drums beat, recalling the traditional sounds, Weston says, of Latin America and Cuba.

“Then eventually you hear what sounds like gospel music,” he says. “This is important, because in the ’60s American pop music changed because of the work of Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin, where popular artists were using music more from the gospel tradition.”

At the song’s close, the choir singers return, their voices rising higher and higher, this time backed by all manner of instrumental accompaniment, from maracas to electric organ to Keith Richards’ guitar. For the Rolling Stones, Weston says, a British band inspired by American musicians such as bluesman Muddy Waters and the rock ’n’ roll avatar Chuck Berry, the result is the sound that Jagger and company were always aiming for.

“The overall sentiment is the blues,” Weston says. “The Stones were always connected to the blues—you can hear that in this piece. But what is striking to me is the refrain—‘You can’t always get what you want/But if you try sometimes you just might find/You get what you need.’ The blues deals with fixing a problem in the immediate.

“Since I teach a course in African-American music, I’m really interested in pinpointing aspects of the African-American musical tradition in pieces that we don’t necessarily always associate with the tradition. This one always jumps out at me just because of my background as a choirboy in the English tradition. Maybe that’s why I’m so enamored with the song, because it represents me as a musician.”

Read how Trevor Weston rescued a 1930s piano concerto nearly lost to history.

By David W. Muha

Faculty gave Kuan an ancient oil lamp from Jerusalem. Photo by Bill Cardoni.

“I stand before you today keenly aware of the enormous honor and task that the communities of faith and higher education have conferred upon me,” said Kah-Jin Jeffrey Kuan, who at his April 8 installation ceremony described his path from Malaysia to California to Drew as “a journey to the East.” His hope for the Theological School is that it will “increasingly become more global in its orientation.”

“[By] expanding transnational teaching and learning relationships, I hope we can explore together what progressive Christianity and progressive religion can look like in a global context,” said Kuan, the first Asian American to lead a United Methodist seminary. “I am very confident that Drew Theological School’s pioneering legacy will help move us in our journey of theological education.”

The service included a performance by Drew’s Korean Men’s Choir; a special hymn, “We Abide,” composed for the occasion by lyricist Laurie Zelman and the school’s music director, Mark Miller; and the presentation of gifts from the Methodist church and Drew faculty, staff, students and alumni.

Kuan sees his journey eastward eventually coming full circle, leading him back to where he grew up. Still, he realizes both he and the place of his birth will have changed significantly in the intervening years.

“Likewise,” said Kuan, “Drew Theological School is hardly the same school that began 144 years ago. In our respective and intertwining journeys, I hope that we’ve been changed for the better and that we’ve been changed for good.”

By Mary Jo Patterson

Illustration by Justine Beckett.

Imagine, for a moment, you’d like to learn how medieval mapmakers depicted Noah’s ark. Perhaps you’re a scholar. Or maybe you read about the explorers who claim to have found the ark’s remains on Mount Ararat in Turkey.

You can use your laptop to view high-resolution photographs of these fragile old manuscripts in the British Library’s digital collection or Cambridge University’s Parker Library on the web. They’re beautiful. But to understand what you are seeing and reading—medieval maps are full of Latin inscriptions—you’ll have to track down related scholarship the old-fashioned way. That means assembling and consulting books and journals.

A humanist and a computer scientist from Drew have teamed up to unite computer technology and scholarship. They’re creating an interactive website, Digital Mappaemundi, which will allow users to search, study and annotate medieval maps. (Mappaemundi is Latin for “maps of the world.”) Their collaboration, which began in 2009, was funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

“We’ve created tools that allow a scholar to select a page of a digitized manuscript, create a bunch of annotations around it and link to other ideas and concepts that people will be able to find online,” says Martin Foys C’90, associate professor of English and a medievalist.

Collaborator Shannon Bradshaw, associate professor of computer science, believes their “annotation toolbox” will encourage new scholarship. “In the annotations scholars leave behind, we envision a dialogue emerging, much the same way scholars of Jewish writings have done for millennia,” he says.

Foys and Bradshaw also believe the tools will someday be applied to a broad range of uses, from online museum exhibits and news archives to medical records. “Say you had a database of  X-rays of bone fractures,” says Bradshaw. “M.D.’s could go in there, select an image and create annotations describing what happened.”

By Christopher Hann

Trevor Weston’s assignment seemed monumental, to put it mildly: Reconstruct the long-lost orchestral score for a piano concerto originally written by an early–20th-century, female African-American composer of classical music. Weston, 44, an associate professor of music at Drew, received the commission last year from the Center for Black Music Research in Chicago, which was planning to perform the concerto and release an album of the composer’s work. As Weston says, “My name came up as someone who could put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”

Never mind that the composer was something of a mystery.

“My name came up as someone who could put Humpty Dumpty back together again.” Photo by Bill Cardoni.

Her name was Florence Beatrice Price. Born in Little Rock, Ark., in 1887, she performed at a piano recital at 4, published her first work at 11 and enrolled in the New England Conservatory of Music at 16. Though she left Little Rock for Chicago around 1927, she could not escape the smoldering vestiges of the de facto apartheid that had inspired her very flight. Even in Chicago, few were the opportunities for classical composers of her persuasion.

But in 1932 Price won a prestigious prize for symphonic composition, and the conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Frederick Stock, took note. Stock encouraged her to write a piano concerto, and the following year he presented Price’s Symphony in E minor at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair—the first time that a major American orchestra performed a symphony written by a black woman.

Weston, who received a Ph.D. in music composition from UC-Berkeley, confesses to knowing little of Price’s life and work before he was approached by the Center for Black Music Research. The center was producing a series of recordings documenting the African diaspora, one of which was to be Price’s Concerto in One Movement. There was just one problem. “We knew going into this,” says Morris Phibbs, the center’s deputy director, “that part of the score for the concerto had been missing at least since 1940.”

What ensued was a fairly elaborate process of research, intuition and detective work. To reconstruct an orchestral score in the musical style of its author, Weston needed to make the same countless decisions—how much percussion here? how much brass there?—as had Price herself. He studied three of Price’s piano rehearsal scores for Concerto in One Movement and read articles about her written by Rae Linda Brown, a music professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and a Price biographer. “Trevor’s name surfaced early on as someone who understands the history of American music, because you have to be able to understand what a symphony orchestra would sound like in 1934,” Brown says.

Photo by Bill Cardoni.

Fortunately, Price had jotted notes on the piano scores, giving Weston insight into her musical tendencies, indicating, for example, where she wanted to use winds or strings. Weston listened to the only recording of Price’s orchestral work ever produced as well as works written by the renowned composer George Whitefield Chadwick, who taught Price at the New England Conservatory. For Weston, the process took on a familiar refrain: What would Florence do?

“Sometimes it isn’t really enough to know exactly what each part is doing,” Weston says. “The strings are playing these notes. Was it all of them? Or just some? If you use violins and cellos, that’s a different sound than violas and cellos. It’s like reconstructing a recipe or dish by a cook. That’s really how I approached it.”

Finally, on February 17—nearly 77 years after Florence Price’s Concerto in One Movement had premiered—the New Black Music Repertory Ensemble premiered Weston’s toil inside the 1,500-seat Harris Theater for Music and Dance in downtown Chicago. Weston, dressed in a navy blue suit, sat in the orchestra section with a former classmate, Horace Maxile, the associate director of research at the black music center. The center’s executive director, Monica Hairston O’Connell, introduced Weston and asked him to stand and take a bow. It is fair to say there were nerves.

Soon the conductor raised his baton, and the orchestra commenced to play the concerto, bringing to life the lush tones of the score’s first section, the spiritual reach of the second and the ragtime influence of the third.

“It was bizarre and delightful, hearing something that has been in your head for so long publicly presented,” Weston recalls. “It reminds me of why people create. It was actually fun.”

The ballad of Florence Price’s lost concerto did not end on a winter night in Chicago. This fall the Center for Black Music Research will release a studio recording of two works by Price: Symphony in E minor and Concerto in One Movement, as re-imagined by Trevor Weston. For Rae Linda Brown, the reviews are already in. “We can uphold Trevor’s score as authentic,” Brown says. “He upheld it as a piece of African-American history, a very important piece of history. He stayed true to Florence Price’s voice.”

Listen

Listen to an excerpt from Concerto in One Movement by Florence B. Price, reconstructed by Trevor Weston, associate professor of music. More audio clips are available at the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College.

Read Weston’s take on a completely different genre of music: The Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

The most ingenious fundraiser we’ve ever seen was the Pants Auction, which sold pants donated by students, teachers and deans to benefit Drew’s Honduras Project. As repeat students in English Professor Frank Occhiogrosso’s courses, Steffi and I knew that we absolutely had to score a pair of his trousers for the 21st birthday of fellow acolyte Kristen Daily Williams C’98. The day of the 1997 auction, we arrived at a UC full of eager would-be pants buyers and, as we waited, our anxiety rose in direct proportion to the selling price of each lot. We couldn’t afford it, but we outbid all the competition. Who cares that we spent the equivalent of a semester’s worth of trips to The Other End? It was for a great cause. And to this day, Kristen still has those pants.—Sarah Murphy and Stephanie Palermo, both C’98

Busy Monsters, his accidental homage to Homer’s Odyssey, explores raging male insecurity and a crazy little thing called love.

Interview by Robert Ready

Photo by Bill Cardoni.

A former competitive bodybuilder, William Giraldi C’01 grew up in a working-class, central Jersey town called Manville, a place straight out of a Bruce Springsteen ballad. It’s also a town where, surrounded by nascent mechanics and wrestlers, he cultivated his addiction to words and ideas at the public library, poring over books on Greek gods and heroes, which he amplified at Drew as an English major and theatre arts minor. This potent mix of influences has endowed Giraldi, who teaches writing at Boston University, with a particularly heady, picaresque prose style that immediately distinguishes Busy Monsters, a debut novel that The New York Times says “abounds in antics and satire.”

“Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, he’s building a world of outrageously beautiful language,” says his former professor Robert Ready, Baldwin Professor of Humanities and interim dean of the Caspersen School of Graduate Studies. “It is a book about heroes, about grief, about love, about language. He combines the tall tale with a highly sophisticated book about the fate of writing and writers in a world that has its monsters.”

Busy Monsters follows Charles Homar, who, besotted with love for his fiancée, Gillian, is desperate to keep her even as she sets sail to find the legendary Kraken, a colossal squid. What sends Charlie into a jealous homicidal rage is the fact that her partner for the lengthy voyage is a man Charlie describes as “a big-shot squid hunter, some ocean yahoo affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution,” a “jerk-off” with “Stalinesque” eyebrows. After a bumbling incident involving a .223-caliber rifle, Charlie lands in jail and, upon release, begins a hopelessly wrongheaded odyssey to recapture Gillian’s heart.—Renée Olson

Robert Ready: When you were a young writer at Drew, were you thinking of the nakedness, the risk, the danger of writing?

William GiraldI: No, I definitely wasn’t. I came to Drew kind of late. I was 25 when I got here, and I started writing when I was about 18 or 19. But even at 25, I didn’t know how to think about writing. I knew that it was the hardest thing I’d ever done, but I also knew that I couldn’t not do it. I don’t know if it’s a paradox, but writing is not easy for me. I don’t like it. So I’m always very skeptical when I meet new writers and they say, “I love to write. God, I just love it. It’s great.” I say, ohhh man.

RR: What’s your sense of your development as a writer since college?

WG: I’ll tell you how Drew changed my development as a writer, or rather how Drew changed my direction as a writer. You’ll be happy to know, I hope, that it had to do with your class in Romanticism because, prior to that, I had always thought of myself as just a fiction writer. I had written two novels by that time. I’d written a few dozen stories, but I hadn’t ever thought of myself as a man of letters or a literary scholar; but your delivering me Wordsworth and Byron, and [Professor of English] Frank Occhiogrosso introducing me to Donne, that had a lot to do with it. Drew changed the trajectory because so much of what I’ve published has been literary criticism. This is something I’d never expected. It’s not something that I ever wanted. I can’t quite explain how that happened, except that once you gave me Wordsworth I knew that it was the essence, the substance I didn’t even know I needed.

Giraldi (left) and Professor Robert Ready catch up in Sitterly House. Photo by Bill Cardoni.

RR: This intense literary consciousness comes shining through in Busy Monsters with your protagonist. As I was reading it, I began to write down writers. There are about 50 whom Charles refers to, just gently, and never pretentiously. Tennyson, Dante, Shakespeare, Jack London, Jules Verne, Michel Foucault, Lewis Carroll, Bram Stoker, Aeschylus, Fitzgerald, H.G. Wells, Sophocles, Graham Greene, Dickens, O’Neill, the list goes on and on. It is an extraordinary element of your character’s consciousness. It’s not a weight, it’s a kind of liberating force within him, all he knows.

WG: I’m glad that was powerful for you because I was worried that Charlie was going to come across as a wannabe, and in some ways he is conscious of all this literary posing and literary shenanigans. But it is, as you say, something very genuine inside of him. He doesn’t know how to make sense of what is happening to him unless he can see it through Tennyson or through Homer. I needed to make this an organic part of his character.

RR: Another part of this book is the way it mirrors writing. Charlie is a writer and he is writing what we read. There’s this doubleness going on.

WG: I had a lot of fun playing with that metafictional or even postmodern element of writing mirroring writing. Charlie is going on all of these adventures and writing about them for a weekly magazine, and you are reading what he is writing. This is a story about storytelling. It’s about mythology and folklore as well, but also about the stories we tell ourselves in order to live. He can’t help but write, and he becomes this minor celebrity. I’m a little bit nervous about how that is going to be received. There have been novels about writers that have fallen pretty flat. I think it’s hard to get across.

RR: The great national Turkish writer, Yashar Kemal, referring to writing his magnificent book, Memed, My Hawk, says that “when people find themselves cornered, when they feel the pain of death in their heart, they tend to create a world of myth, in which they try to take refuge.” Do you connect with that?

WG: Oh, wow, it’s beautiful. I wish I had written that. My Lord, I mean, religion, myth—the narrative structures we have built that we can then retreat into. Charlie’s focus on mythologies, his focus on monsters, is, I think, a perfect illustration of this beautiful quote. He’s got no other way to process what’s happening to him, so there’s this conscious mimicking of mythological tropes, of mythological paths. The name he has chosen for himself—Homar—he admits that that’s a pen name; you never find out what his real name is. But he has chosen this pseudonym for a reason. The book has this kind of Odyssey feel to it, where it is just monster to monster to monster and travail to travail to travail. And I didn’t realize that was happening until about three quarters of the way through, when I said, “I’m stealing from Homer.” I said, “Well, what do you expect, what’s Charlie’s last name?”

RR: Why not steal from the best.

WG: [Laughs.] Why not steal from the best. Exactly.

RR: There are a number of references in this book to Christ, Christianity and even a wonderful adjective—I’ve never heard it before—“Christic.” What is that?

WG: Charlie’s being a former Catholic, a lapsed Catholic, like myself, is important because the mythic aspect is pronounced in Catholicism: the ritual, the mass, the stations of the cross, the music and the pageantry that is involved. It is like Greek theater in a way. Christ-ic or Kris-tic, I’m not sure how it is pronounced. I was like “Oh, I love that”—you know, not Christian, but Christic. And Charlie, in his own way, looks like Jesus. In fact, someone in the book says to him, or he admits, “God, I got to get a haircut and shave before I reunite with Gillian because I look like a Christ wannabe here.” You know, he’s got a beard and he’s got shoulder-length hair and his mother accuses him of having a hero worship with Christ; she says, “that hero of yours who died at 33.” Of course, Charlie is 33 in the book.

RR: [Pause.] Hmmm.

WG: I know, I know, it’s there. In the writing process, these things come up when you’re not aware of them. You put something there, and not until later do you realize it.

RR: At one point, Charlie has this grand phrase. He speaks about his “willingness to be berserk in the service of the heart.” Were you content when you wrote that phrase? I was very content to read it.

WG: It’s what we men do, Bob. We can sort of go bonkers with overweening love and then usually get punched for it. Was I content when I wrote it? I’m not sure one should ever be too happy with what he’s written, but I like the line. This book was the first experience I’ve ever had where I liked what I was doing. I began writing as a sort of avenue out of my melancholy. I was such a depressed kid. To go back to Wordsworth, I had so much trouble as a young man, troubles of the heart, family troubles; I’ve got a very complicated relationship with my family. Charlie definitely has the willingness to go berserk in service of the heart. I’m not sure that he’d know what to do otherwise.

Illustration by Miguel Santamarina.

RR: At one point, Charlie says that in writing you can’t just drop in female characters. You have this extraordinary object of male desire, Gillian, who finds her own Kraken. One of the grandest moments in the book is when they raise this creature up out of the wet and Gillian confronts this beauty of her own monster. How was it creating this female character?

WG: It might be the only one I got right. One of the early criticisms of me as a writer was that I couldn’t do female characters very well, that I was too masculine. Charlie is forever wondering what it means to be a man. And he has trouble getting that right. He, in many ways, adheres to the stereotype that it must involve John Wayne and guns and knives and blowing things up, and certainly muscles. Richie Lombardo, the bodybuilder in the book, is definitely a manifestation of that American masculinity in the extreme. When that Kraken rises from the sea, she is a female—and there is my female character relishing it and delighting in the glory of this capture. It’s so nice for you to pick up on that because that was a real triumphant moment for me as a writer. Whether I succeeded or not, people will let me know, but in a book that’s saturated with the masculine, this was a real genuine moment of the feminine. In many ways, any book that’s constantly about the masculine is sort of, ipso facto, about the feminine.

RR: What question would you ask William Giraldi at this point in his career?

WG: The question I’ve asked myself is what am I going to do next? Can I even do anything? I’ll tell you the truth, after writing this book, I felt spent. I felt like I put everything I knew into this book, and in many ways I feel like I don’t know anything else now. How am I going to get full again? I think the answer has to do with my son. He’s almost 2, and he already contains multitudes. It’s amazing. I remember you telling me stories about when your own son was a boy, and the material there—you’re filled with worry and you’re filled with fear, but you’re also filled with bliss. I think the answer lies with him somehow. I’m just going to keep watching him and see what he shows me.

Busy Monsters  

An Excerpt

No beer in a bar, much less sex in my car, but just the two of us perched on the top step outside her one-bedroom prefab townhouse with a cheese pie so succulent it rendered us speechless for minutes at a time. She had said that, lifesaver though I was, if I attempted anything wacky or even suggestively satanic, she’d go succubus on my ass—she had studied ninjutsu and Descartes and knew how one enhances the other—“so don’t get snaky,” she said —and I warmed with admiration. Here was a gal with gumption, sang­froid, with a Virginia voice that might melt wrought iron. In the driveway slept her yellow Volkswagen Beetle, the face of a whopping flower painted on the hood and testifying to goodness.

We talked and ate till midnight, the familiar chatter about childhood, siblings, and what we would buy if we won the lottery. I said, “I’d donate half the money to the children’s hospital and use the other half to build a house with no other houses in view. Privacy matters.”

She hinted that she was unmoved by my soppy wish to play Robin Hood for a hospital, and that if I was trying to win her approval with stories of sick kids, the donkey in me could forget it. She said she’d spend all the money on a curvy boat and a team of scientists and fishermen, trying to be the first-ever person to capture a giant squid, which no modern human has ever seen alive but about which tales abound. Astonishing! Gillian collected giant squid curiosa and could hold court with any ocean-loving dweeb in thick glasses.

“It lives,” she said. “I know it. Ancient seafarers have seen it and written about it. The problem is, we think it lives at such great depths it’s nearly impossible to find. Some carcasses have washed up on shore, but we need it alive. There are only a handful of scientists who have dedicated themselves to finding it. Sadly, the really big funding is scarce for the giant squid.”

“Giant squid, huh? How’d you become interested in that?”

“In childhood, Charles. Always in childhood.”

“A monster?”

“No, not a monster,” she confirmed. “A beautiful animal.”

And I thought, Yes, a beautiful animal indeed. When I drove home that night—her number already entered in my cell phone, me jittery with a teenage thrill, alive again after what seemed bubonic eons, the lunar light pulling at my water—I was certain that if I switched on the news in my living room I’d find that the cosmos had been washed of brutality and outrage. Remember the stimulating incipience of romance, the excitement of possibility, of being rescued from the abscess of lonesomeness and having someone to share your hydrogen with? Recall the glee? It meant your little life was worth something, your personality, yes, have-able. It meant sex for your now-laudable seed, and dinnertime conversation, too. Go grab your lovers, people, hold them close, feel the validation. You’re barely carbon-based without them.

W.W. Norton released Busy Monsters on August 1.

Bonn, here at Ground Zero, walked away from corporate life to immerse himself in criminal justice. Photo by Bill Cardoni

In his new book, Mass Deception: Moral Panic and the U.S. War on Iraq, Assistant Professor of Sociology Scott Bonn lays out how George W. Bush marched into battle while the American media napped.

By Christopher Hann

The theory of moral panic was first advanced in the 1970s. Can you describe what it means generally and how it applies to your book? A moral panic is a situation where a particular group or condition becomes perceived as being threatening to society through the attention of the media and the articulation of political leaders. But this alleged threat is exaggerated. The reality is grossly overstated. There’s a notion here of a symbiotic relationship between the media and the political elite, that sometimes it’s in both their best interests to promote this fear. If you have an issue or agenda and you want to sell that agenda, there’s nothing like fear to promote your point of view. Politicians rely on the media to promote their positions and rhetoric. At the same time, the media rely on the political elite for juicy stories. I’m not implying there’s a conspiracy. I’m not arguing that the Bush administration sat down with Time Inc. and said, OK, how can we scare the hell out of the public? I’m saying the news media was uncritical of the Bush administration, uncritical of their claims of weapons of mass destruction, and they just passively went along for the ride.

Before becoming an academic, you spent 20 years as a media and advertising executive, including a time as vice president for client marketing at NBC Television. Did that give you insight into the workings of a major news organization? All you have to do is look at the ownership of a given news organization to understand the political orientation of that news organization. There’s no coincidence that Fox News, owned by Rupert Murdoch, who describes himself as one of the most conservative men in the world, is the most conservative news outlet. An example that I have looked at since leaving NBC: General Electric is, if not the most heavily fined, one of the most heavily fined corporations for various infractions—such as consumer injury, faulty products and false advertisements—and is penalized by the federal government accordingly. I did an analysis where I looked at the coverage of General Electric’s infractions by various television networks. At the time, NBC was owned by General Electric. NBC provided practically no coverage of General Electric’s infractions, where the other networks provided meaningful coverage. It was my exposure being on the inside of the machine, if you will, that led me to even ask these kinds of questions in the first place.

What are you teaching at Drew? I teach the sociology of deviance, which is really anything considered different or unusual. My interest is more at the elite level—white-collar crimes and crimes of the state. I’m very interested in how the media portray and frame issues related to crime and terrorism and the perceptions that the public develops.

In the book, you analyzed statements from the Bush administration in news accounts. Can you describe what you did? I looked at more than 5,000 news stories about Iraq in The New York Times from March 20, 2000, to March 19, 2003. Only 1,100 of them had direct quotes about Iraq from the administration; those are the ones I used. I compared the presidential rhetoric published during the 18-month period beginning the day after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and ending the day before the invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003, to the rhetoric concerning Iraq published during the 18 months before Sept. 11. I found that the presidential rhetoric became much more punitive and inflammatory toward Iraq almost immediately after Sept. 11. I then compared the rhetoric to 24 Gallup public opinion polls that measured the nation’s willingness to go to war against Iraq, starting in February 2001, a month after Bush took office, and ending in March 2003. I looked at the extent to which the presidential rhetoric that preceded these polls influenced public support for war. And I found that, yes, it did. As the rhetoric became more punitive, public support for war increased. It maxed out at almost 70 percent of the American public in support of going to war. And the same percentage believed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and that it was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. The Bush propaganda campaign worked very effectively in manufacturing support for war.

In what way did the rhetoric become more inflammatory? The administration began to use terminology like evildoers, mad men, axis of evil, weapons of mass destruction, imminent threat, mushroom cloud. All this terminology was essentially introduced after Sept. 11 and specifically so in the context of Iraq. Bush knew there wasn’t evidence to link Iraq to Sept. 11. Instead he did it through deception. He would say things like, “We can’t have another situation like the falling of the Twin Towers.” He was trying to incite retaliation and fear regarding Iraq, without saying that Iraq was responsible for Sept. 11.

Bonn signs copies of Mass Deception (Rutgers University Press, 2010) in Drew’s bookstore. Photo by Bill Cardoni

Does moral panic require the collaboration, implicit or explicit, of both the ruling political class and the media? There are two types of moral panic: grassroots moral panic and elite-engineered moral panic. An example of grassroots moral panic is something like satanic cults in schools or the witch hunts in Salem during Colonial times, where the fervor of society in general created the moral panic and political leaders jumped on later. In an elite-engineered moral panic, yes, it requires both. It requires the elites, whoever controls the rhetoric, with the assistance of the media. This methodology has never been applied to an international event before, or specifically a war situation.

Why do you think the Bush administration had to create a moral panic in order to go to war with Iraq? Couldn’t the administration have cited commonsense concerns about Saddam Hussein and his potential threat, given his track record? They did do that as part of the argument, but that alone would not have constituted a valid justification for the war. Instead, they came up with the Bush doctrine of pre­emptive self-defense. Pre­­emp­tive self-defense is an oxymoron. It’s either self-defense or it’s not. Preemptive self-defense is something different. Their argu­ment was that the United States has a right to preemptively strike against another country if it’s believed that country potentially poses a threat to our security, whether or not that threat has manifested itself. The trouble with that is that it’s in direct violation of the United Nations Charter, the Nuremberg Char­ter and the Geneva Convention, all of which the United States helped write. The invasion of Iraq violated all of those. Not only was an attack not im­mi­nent, but Saddam Hussein declared that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. In terms of international law, even if he had weapons of mass destruction, it still wouldn’t have been allowed. Oh, by the way, he wasn’t involved in Sept. 11 either.

Why do you think George Bush was so hell-bent on taking out Saddam Hussein? In the book you theorize that he was trying to finish a job that his father had started. Absolutely. These are not just unsubstantiated accusations. Scott McClellan—Bush’s press secretary and a close personal friend—talks in his book about being very disenchanted about essentially being used. Yes, it was very personal. Bush’s father was much criticized in conservative circles at the end of the Gulf War. There were a lot of people, a lot of neo-cons, who wanted his father to take Saddam out. I think part of the rationale was finishing his dad’s business. When they finally captured Saddam Hussein in that hole in the ground, he had a pistol with him. George Bush kept that pistol on his desk in the Oval Office. That’s an indication of how personally he took it.

Does the book give lessons on how to prevent a moral panic from occurring again? My message is essentially Let’s not get fooled again. The average person tends to be rather uncritical. The Bush administration very effectively created a moral panic, using language such as axis of evil and weapons of mass destruction. The party that uses the word evil is generally trying to strip out humanity. Once you do that, you’ve removed any possibility of discourse. You can’t have dialogue with evil. The Bush administration created a dichotomy in the world. Good people were the ones who went along with them. Evil people were the ones who didn’t.

Kuan is the first Asian American to head a Methodist Seminary. Photo by Bill Cardoni

Methodist Kah-Jin Jeffrey Kuan arrives as the new dean of the Theological School.

By Bruce Wallace

After completing your undergraduate degree, you were a pastor in Malaysia. Do you find that your pastoral experience influences your academic life? Absolutely. For me teaching in a seminary is ministry. A lot of my own seminary students struggle with whether or not this is really what they are called to do and other issues as they think about moving into religious leadership. So in many contexts I have had to put myself in a pastoral role in relating to my students.

Your scholarly work often deals with issues of Biblical interpretation and Asian and Asian-American identity. Why does that area interest you? As Asian Americans continue to think about and construct Asian-American identity, I see the same thing happening in the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Bible is written in the context of the exile. If you look at what the writers were trying to do, much of it is also about constructing their own identity of what it means to be an Israelite, what it means to be a Jew.

You’ve said that Drew is poised to be a pioneer in preparing religious leaders and scholars for global societies—how so? In theological education, Drew has perhaps the most diverse faculty. But more important is that this is an amazing collection of faculty who are pushing the edges of theological education and theological religious scholarship. And I get a sense that they are ready to rethink theological education.

What will that mean in terms of what the school looks like in a year or two or five? It’s more like five to 10 years, but it is a matter of staying ahead of the game. In terms of the U.S. population,  the demographics are showing quite clearly that probably by 2042 the non-Hispanic white population is no longer going to be in the majority. Secondly, when you think about global Christianity, the majority of Christians will no longer be in North America and in Europe. It will be in Africa and Asia. So the question that I’m posing for myself and Drew is: How do we prepare ourselves to do theological education for a new reality?

By Renée Olson

Se Habla Español

As part of a Drew project with Morristown’s nonprofit Neighborhood House/Pathways to Work program, undergrads from Elise DuBord’s Spanish class, “Service Learning and Translation: The U.S. Latino/a Immigrant Experience,” recently served as interpreters for a Seton Hall University School of Law survey on wage theft among Jersey day laborers.

Home Making

Drew Civic Scholar Pirianthini Suntharalingam C’14 devotes a half day each week to helping Fur­ni­ture Assist, a central Jersey nonprofit that makes donated furniture available free to low-income households. Passionate about issues facing her family’s native Sri Lanka, Suntharalingam, one of 33 civic scholars, is well on her way to learning the skills she’ll need for that work—she’s already taken a seminar exploring the meaning of community service.

Tell It On the Mountaintop

Drew students, together with Marc Boglioli (Anthropology), headed to Appalachia last spring break to learn about mountaintop removal mining, the controversial practice of extracting coal from mountain summits. Students described the 10 days as “life-changing.” Says Boglioli, “They saw the environmental and social consequences that are paid in regions like eastern Kentucky every time we turn up the thermostat in New Jersey.”—Funded by a grant from NASA

Dam Nation

Students working with Anthropology Chair Maria Masucci at Drew’s archaeological field station in El Azúcar, Ecuador, interviewed local residents last summer about the toll a new dam has taken on their village. Deforestation topped the list of concerns, and Drewids responded by building the community a pilot tree farm.—Funded by grants from NASA, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Science Foundation

Green Justice

A medical waste treatment facility proposed in Newark, N.J., got shot down last fall with help from Zoe Crum C’10. The Ironbound Community Corporation called Crum’s GIS map showing the neighborhood’s high number of preexisting toxic waste sites “useful” in its campaign against the facility. A biology major, Crum created the map during a postgrad internship with Catherine Riihimaki (Biology) and Krista White (GIS support specialist).—Funded by a grant from NASA

Friday Night Lights Star Tackles Race Issues in L.A.

Best known for portraying “Smash” Williams on NBC’s football drama Friday Night Lights and his role in the 2010 Angelina Jolie flick, Salt, Gaius Charles now spends his days far from Holly­wood. As a Theo student working on his M.Div., Charles is busy with the same coursework and exams that try any seminarian. But he slipped back into character last summer to make his work as a Drew Communities of Shalom intern come alive.

Playing to an excited house at the Echo Park United Methodist Church in central Los Angeles, Charles—or rather, Smash—screened two episodes of Friday Night Lights in which Smash takes the lead in grappling with a racist coach and teammates. After the second episode, Charles stepped back out of character and led a discussion with members of the largely Hispanic community about gang violence and racial hostility.

“It was a really powerful event,” says Charles. “I feel a lot of people were able to let their guard down and have a dialogue about genuine issues that, I think, planted the seeds for transformation in the community.”—Funded by the Jessie Ball duPont Fund

Photo of Pirianthini Suntharalingam by Bill Cardoni. Photo of Gaius Charles courtesy Gaius Charles

Illustration by Pep Monserrat

By Mary Jo Patterson

Maybe the tragedy still  shocks because most of the 146 victims were girls or young women. Or be­cause many jumped to their deaths, driven by flames that had already ignited their clothing. Maybe it’s because exits were locked, and fire ladders were too short. Whatever the reason, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 in New York City is an event worth revisiting, again and again—with powerful lessons for the present, says history professor Richard Greenwald, dean of the Caspersen School of Graduate Studies.

Greenwald, author of a 2005 book and numerous articles about the fire, discusses the garment industry of that era in a new documentary airing nationally on PBS stations on February 28. The film, Triangle Fire, part of the Amer­ican Experience series, marks the 100th anniversary of the disaster, the city’s worst work­place calamity prior to Sept. 11.

Many people know that a government investigation into the inferno led to improved fire safety codes, labor laws and a new reform movement. But fewer understand the broader context of the fire, according to Greenwald. “The fire occurred during the Progressive Era, at a time when many New Yorkers thought some of these issues had been solved. The city had passed some new reform laws. There was a new awareness of fire and safety and zoning,” he says. A strike by women working in the city’s shirtwaist, or blouse, factories had been settled the previous year, with significant gains. But workers at Triangle went back to work without a union agreement.

Greenwald believes the building’s location in Greenwich Village helped fuel outrage and reform. “Middle-class folks were watching,” he says, “people like Frances Perkins,” who later became U.S. Labor Department secretary. “The fire also gave Tammany Hall, which had been losing its hold on its city, a cause. Labor relations went from being private to being public.”

By Christopher Hann

The 1947 Bachelor-Benedict Presentation Ball in Washington, D.C. Photo courtesy Scurlock Studio Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Behring Center, Smithsonian Institution.

When her academic adviser told Miya Carey C’11 that her daughter was taking part in a debutante program in Essex County, the history major from East Windsor, N.J., wanted to know more. Carey’s curiosity led to a $3,000 fellowship that enabled her to conduct research last summer on the cultural significance of African-American cotillions, or debutante balls, in the first half of the 20th century.

The practice of formally presenting young women to polite society with an ornate ball is well documented among privileged white Americans, but Carey says historians have largely overlooked black cotillions. “There’s nothing specifically written about them,” she says. It makes it even better to research.”

Carey says she was surprised to learn that young African-American women were less interested in using cotillions to search for potential husbands. “It was not as major a focus as I thought it was going to be,” says Carey, who did her research at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City and both the National Archives and Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center in Washington, D.C.

Carey intends to use her work, underwritten by the inaugural Leavell-Oberg Summer Fellowship to inform her senior thesis.

“Cotillions were a way for wealthy and middle-class blacks to demonstrate their achievements” says Carey. “If you look at cotillion programs and look at what the girls said they wanted to do, a lot of them said they wanted to go into professional fields like medicine or teaching or law.”

The fellowship honors history professor Perry Leavell, who retired in 2008, and his wife, Barbara Oberg, general editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson at Princeton University. Leavell acolyte and Invesco Advisers Senior Analyst Gerry Lian C’77 launched the fellowship as a way to honor his former professor, and to date, his appeals to alumni have led to commitments of more than $118,000 to the fund.