A pair of grad students recently discovered a cache of papers from the famous Drew colloquium that revealed a sinister chapter in the life of the iconic German philosopher.

It was, it seems fair to say, an assignment that might best be characterized as grad student grunt work.

Illustration by Danny Schwartz

On an October day in 2011, Drew doctoral candidates Jaclyn Harte (literature) and Peter Mabli (history and culture) found themselves in the dusty basement of S.W. Bowne Hall—also known as the morgue—charged with picking through boxes of papers and piles of abandoned books and assorted pieces of obsolete office equipment and tossing out anything that wasn’t needed, which looked to be pretty much everything.

But then they came across a plain cardboard box on which was written the word “ancient.” They opened the box and looked inside, and the first item to catch their eye was a 1964 letter written in German on onionskin paper and signed “Martin Heidegger.” Neither Mabli nor Harte knew a lot about Heidegger, but each recognized the name of one of the foremost philosophers of the 20th century. Their intellectual curiosities piqued, they kept digging. The box revealed more letters, dozens of letters, in fact, from academicians across the country, all inquiring about a gathering of distinguished scholars at Drew in April 1964, a conference that neither Harte nor Mabli knew anything about. They kept digging. They found that the three-day conference was the first such assembly ever convened in North America for the purpose of discussing and dissecting the work of Heidegger.

They kept digging. They learned that the attending scholars included some of the day’s most eminent theologians and philosophers from Europe and America, including Fritz Buri and Heinrich Ott from the University of Basel in Switzerland, John Cobb from Southern California School of Theology and Schubert Ogden from the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. In time, Harte and Mabli would discover that the papers they unearthed from the basement of Bowne Hall pertained to one of the most important colloquia of its time.

Officially titled “A Second Consultation on Herme­neutics: Theological Discourse and the Proclamation of the Gospel,” it was organized by Stanley Romaine Hopper, dean of the Drew Graduate School, who invited participants to explore the relevance of Heidegger’s philosophy to Protestant theology. Heidegger was best known for his seminal 1927 book, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), which changed the course of 20th-century philosophy. While the Second Consultation was heralded for its collection of scholars and their dynamic exchange of ideas, its lasting legacy would rest in the dramatic presentation delivered by a former student of Heidegger’s, who stunned the audience by revealing a shadowy chapter in his mentor’s past.

“That’s when we found out that we had stumbled upon something pretty significant for Drew’s history,” Mabli says.

“Dear Professor Heidegger:

I am writing to you as Professor of Philosophy and Letters of Drew University and as Dean of its Graduate School. I expect to be in Europe during the first part of September, attending the Eranos Conference at Ascona, Switzerland. Following the Conference (which adjourns September 5th) I should like to talk with you briefly, if at all possible …”

So began a letter from Dean Hopper to Martin Heidegger on Aug. 9, 1963. The letter, which Hopper wrote at his summer home in Lakeport, N.H., represented the first step in Hopper’s determined effort to recruit Heidegger to travel to Drew from his home in Germany to attend the conference Hopper was planning.

“I do not know quite how to express this next point. But there is a time when conditions are right for the word to be spoken. The time is right now for your coming. Drew University is the prepared place, by reason of its theological and philosophical interests; also closer study has been given to your works here than elsewhere in this country, so far as I know.”

The 1964 consultation would be the second of three such gatherings organized at Drew, the others occurring in 1962 and 1966. “They were the theological events in America at the time,” says Charles Courtney, a retired philosophy of religion professor who taught at Drew for four decades and who attended the ’64 conference. All three focused on the subject of hermeneutics, traditionally defined as the theory of Biblical interpretation. “Hermeneutics seemed aptly designed to represent the core values and scholarship that Drew’s Graduate School (less than a decade old at this time) wished to espouse,” Harte and Mabli wrote in a 2,400-word report on their findings from the morgue. “The study of herme­neutics was most famously arti­culated in the works of scholar Martin Heidegger. If Drew’s Graduate School was to convene a conference on hermeneutics, it was only proper, there­fore, to contact and invite the man who introduced its study to the world.”

Martin Heidegger

For at least a decade before the Second Consultation, Drew had gained a reputation as a hotbed of new philosophical and theological thought. In 1956 Charles Scribner’s Sons published Christianity and the New Existentialists, a compilation of public lectures delivered at Craig Chapel during the 1953–54 academic year, part of a series of lectures on Christian biography arranged through a foundation created by the late Drew President Ezra Squier Tipple.

Courtney recalls first learning about Drew’s reputation when he was a doctoral student at Harvard Divinity School. “Drew was a major site for the discussion and introduction of French and German Euro­pean thought to the United States,” Courtney says. “I had never heard of Drew, but one day several carloads of people from Harvard drove to Drew because Rudolf Bultmann, one of the great New Testament scholars, was lecturing there.”

Drew scholars such as Robert Funk, Carl Michalson, Ray Hart and Hopper himself had begun to expand the definition of hermeneutics to encompass, according to a New York Times account of the Second Consultation, “the entire task of interpreting and presenting the Christian message to the ordinary man.” The newspaper described Drew, with its young, “avant-garde” theology faculty, as “one of the centers of the New Hermeneutics move­ment.” In his August 1963 letter to Heidegger, Dean Hopper emphasized the influence Heidegger wielded in this field of thought. “Your presence and participation could make all the difference,” Hopper wrote, “in the unfolding of theological thinking in this country over the next years.”

Heidegger contended that although the objectifying thinking of science and technology is dominant in our time, it is not the only legitimate way. Critical think­ing distinguishes be­tween what is justified by proof (objectifying) and what requires simple perceiving and receiving for its confirmation (non-objectifying). Heidegger believed that poetry, which responds to what shows it­self in experience, is non-objectifying. Hopper wanted to explore with Heidegger whether theology might be another example.

Heidegger consented to Hopper’s request for an audience, and on Sept. 11, 1963, Hopper and Drew theology professor Karlfried Froehlich, a native German, arrived at Heidegger’s cabin in the Black Forest mountains of southern Germany. Alas, four months later, Hopper would learn that his quest to bring to Drew the world’s foremost authority on hermeneutics would not be successful. In a letter, Heidegger, who was 74, wrote that his doctor had advised against making the transatlantic trip.

Though Hopper must have been disappointed, he was not deterred. He moved forward with plans for the Second Consulta­tion. In lieu of Heidegger, Hopper invited Hans Jonas, a professor at the New School for Social Research who had earned his doctorate in philosophy in 1928 at the University of Marburg, where he studied under Heidegger. Jonas’ invitation to Drew, Harte and Mabli wrote, “ensured that the conference would stay grounded in Heideggerian philosophy.” By 1933, with Hitler in power, Jonas, a Jew, had left Germany, settling first in Palestine, then in London. He served in the British military for five years, returning to Germany at the end of the war, part of the victorious army, only to learn that his mother had been killed at Auschwitz.

The Second Consultation began at 9 o’clock in the morning on Thursday, April 9, 1964, inside S.W. Bowne’s Great Hall, whose architectural grandeur was modeled after the hall of Christ Church at Oxford Uni­versity. The subject of the conference was “The Problem of Non-objectifying Thinking and Speak­ing in Contemporary Theology.” Heidegger had written a 13-page paper that was read, in absentia, as the first order of business. Jonas then stepped to the lectern to deliver a lecture he had titled simply “Heidegger and Theology.”

It was expected that Jonas would offer praise for the philosophical canon advanced by his revered mentor. He did not. “Few were prepared for the unyielding, yet sober, polemic that Jonas delivered from the podium,” wrote CUNY philosophy professor Richard Wolin in Heidegger’s Children (Princeton, 2003). Over the course of some 8,000 words, Jonas invoked Heidegger’s participation in Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party before and during World War II. Historians believe that Heidegger’s support of the National Socialist German Workers Party enabled him to be appointed rector of Freiburg University in 1933, where he took steps to remove Jewish professors and students from the university.

Jonas told the scholars assembled in Great Hall that Heidegger’s actions during Hitler’s rise could be directly attributed to the “fate-laden” philosophy he championed in Being and Time. Jonas warned the theologians that an uncritical posture of receiving what is experienced could lead to disastrous decisions, such as Heidegger’s. “Neither then nor now did Heid­eg­ger’s thought provide a norm by which to decide how to answer such calls,” Jonas said. “Heidegger’s own answer is on record. Here it is, spoken to the university students of Germany: ‘Not theorems and “ideas” be the rules of your being. The Führer himself and alone is the present and future German reality and its law. Learn ever deeper to know: that from now on each and every thing demands decision, and every action responsibility. Heil Hitler!’”

Surely those who witnessed Jonas’ takedown of Heidegger—and, by extension, of the great philosopher’s thought—must have been taken aback. “With Jonas’ paper,” Robert Funk would write later that year in The Christian Century, “fires were lit on a hundred hills.” Courtney, then a young scholar, attended the conference because he had come to Drew to interview for the professorship for which he would be hired. “I don’t have any sense that the audience was angry or was ready to hiss Jonas,” he says. “I think we all just realized that something of gravity happened here today.” In fact, on April 11, The New York Times reported, “Dr. Jonas received a standing ovation in the Great Hall of the School of Theology after his talk.”

Doctoral student Jaclyn Harte holds a letter on onionskin paper from Heidegger to Drew.

It is not clear just how much was known, in 1964, of Heidegger’s wartime affiliations, yet even those who deplored Heidegger’s Nazi sympathies did not discount the importance of his work. “It doesn’t make me less interested in how Heidegger reshaped philosophy in the 20th century,” says David Miller, a former chair of the religion department at Drew who attended the ’64 conference. “Anybody who uses that as an excuse not to read Heidegger is sticking his head in the sand.”

It is undeniable that Jonas’ revelations inside Great Hall ignited a cottage industry surrounding Heidegger’s conduct that thrives to this day. The 2009 documentary Only a God Can Save Us takes its title from a dispiriting answer Heidegger provided in a 1966 interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel published, at his request, after his death in 1976. In Heidegger’s Children, Wolin refers to the Second Consultation at Drew as “an intellectual event of international magnitude.”

Having immersed themselves in the history of the conference, which the plain cardboard box they found in the basement of Bowne Hall had only hinted at, Jaclyn Harte and Peter Mabli came away from their experience wanting to resurrect the sort of interdisciplinary colloquium that Stanley Hopper had orchestrated nearly a half-century earlier. This spring Drew will do just that. Inspired by Harte and Mabli’s find, the Graduate Program in History and Culture will sponsor “Thinking Publicly,” a conference on public intellectuals, on June 7–8. “Through this conference we hope to provide a space for emerging scholars to voice their perspectives on public intellectualism,” read an email publicizing the event and calling for proposals.

“Just the idea of working together and having an interdisciplinary community among the graduate students would be really great,” says Harte. Especially, she adds, if “that’s something that comes from finding a box of files in the basement.”

Drew ruggers, circa 2012.

Ruggers, what gives?

Do you play for the mayhem? The third-half libations? Or for the bonds that last a lifetime? However you define its appeal, rugby at Drew has had a glorious 50-year run.

And it’s far from over.

By Christopher Hann

Photography by Bill Cardoni

This spring marks 50 years since Drew students first convened a team of young men to compete against squads from other colleges, many of them institutions much larger than Drew, in the mostly untried and only vaguely familiar game of rugby. And over the ensuing half-century Drew rugby players of both genders—a women’s team was founded in 1992—have forged a communal bond that extends far beyond the broken noses and bloodied scalps received on the rugby pitch. “The closest and dearest friends in my life are my DRFC teammates,” Tony Buttacavoli ’82 wrote in this magazine three years ago, referring to the Drew Rugby Football Club. “We have stood up for each other at our weddings and are godfathers to each other’s children. We are family.”

At Drew, rugby operates as a club rather than a varsity sport, and thus the teams are neither governed nor financed by the university. Given the heightened sense of irreverence and individuality that seems particular to practitioners of the sport, this is no mere incidental distinction. In rugby, a game with ancient roots, participants spend 80 minutes trying to inflict all manner of bodily hurt upon their opponents in an attempt to prevent them from scoring a three-point try—the rough approximation of a touchdown in American-style football. At game’s end, members of both sides shake hands and proceed to what is known as “the third half,” the ritual post-game display of solidarity expressed by the collective singing of song and quaffing of beer. Generations of Drew ruggers have honored this ritual with religious devotion.

Close to Heart

Chris Deraney ’13 keeps alive the memory of two fellow ruggers lost too soon.

The tattoo of a pouncing wolf emblazoned across the left side of Chris Deraney’s rib cage serves as a daily reminder of the bonds he’s forged as a Drew rugger. Alongside the wolf are the names of two rugby teammates, Bryan Case ’10 and Larry Pierre, who died within a four-month span in 2011.

Pierre held on for five days after being shot. Photo courtesy Chris Deraney

Case told The Acorn that rugby “came to define the time that I spent at Drew.” Photo courtesy Chris Deraney

Case, a member of the Army Reserves, was deployed following his sophomore year, spending a year in Iraq as a psychological operations specialist. Upon returning to Drew, Deraney says, Case suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and passed away in April 2011. Pierre was killed by stray gunfire in his hometown of Elizabeth, N.J., in July 2011. “It was my memorial to them,” Deraney says of his tattoo, “the way I accepted they were gone.”

As you might expect, nothing about the tattoo’s image is accidental, not even its geography. According to Deraney, the rib cage is the most painful part of the body on which to receive a tattoo. “I wanted to go through that for them, to offer up that pain for them,” Deraney says, “to make it more memorable and more important to me.”

The wolf was chosen, he says, because it’s his “spirit animal.” “It’s a pack animal,” Deraney says. “It’s stronger in a pack.”

The names of Case, a former roommate, and Pierre were inscribed (in Deraney’s handwriting) in Arabic, because Deraney is of Lebanese descent. “I didn’t want it to be an obvious memorial tattoo,” he says. “I wanted it to mean more to me than anyone else.”

Like so many who came before him, Deraney, an English major and music minor, had never played rugby before enrolling at Drew. But he took to the sport immediately, drawn in large part, as the tattoo attests, by the singular intensity of the team’s fellowship.

“The team,” Deraney says, “has really been one of the most important parts of my Drew career.

Ruggers Forever

Rugby IQ Answers

1. Pita J. Ala’ilima ’64.
Ala’ilima was the founder and first captain of the Drew men’s rugby team. A native of Western Samoa, he was one of the few members of that maiden squad who had actually played the game before coming to Drew.

2. Robert Oxnam.
For its first three years the team played in hand-me-down soccer jerseys. “They were made out of some plastic material,” says Hunt Jones ’70. “When you sweated, all the water stayed inside the shirt. You just got hotter and hotter.” In 1966 Oxnam stepped in, buying 30 authentic rugby jerseys from an Australian manufacturer.

3. Don Clarke ’72.
Clarke’s 45-yard conversion kick, following a try by Mike Lescault ’71, gave Drew a 5–3 victory in a fiercely contested game at West Point, with plenty of Army brass in attendance for Homecoming. The Drew squads of the 1960s often surprised more established rugby clubs such as Rutgers, Columbia and Princeton. “They probably put us on the schedule for Homecoming weekend as a sacrifice,” Clarke says of the Army game. “It obviously didn’t work out the way they had hoped.”

4. The pig.
After each season the team would bid farewell to the mascot, then savor it during a team pig roast.

5.The men’s rugby team members typically carpooled to away games. But during one stretch in the 1970s and ’80s, the team splurged on a charter bus (yes, it was blue) and a driver. The trip took its name from a lyric in a song by The Doors, “The End.” (“C’mon baby, take a chance with us / And meet me at the back of the blue bus.”) The Blue Bus Trip inspired many memorable stories. Here’s just one. In the early 1980s the team was headed to New York City, its post-game keg of beer stored securely in the luggage hold below the bus. Or maybe not so securely. As the bus approached a tunnel, the keg crashed through the hold’s door and went bounding through traffic. The ruggers gave chase, corralled the keg and restored it to the hold, this time securely.

6. Bill Bernhard ’82.
In a 1987 game against Tunisia in Pebble Beach, Calif., Bernhard scored 14 points in a 47–13 blowout.

7. Malachy McCourt.
“He looked like an Irish flag,” recalls former player-coach Steve Carnahan ’67. “Orange socks, white shorts, emerald green rugby jersey, brilliant red beard.”

8. Emily (Riggs) Fennessey ’96.
After forming in the spring of 1992, the club endured an inauspicious launch, with an uneven turnout of players and a regular turnover of coaches. Riggs scored her try for the Brewsers during a scrimmage in the spring of her senior year. Today, the team’s affiliation with the Morris Rugby Club, which has provided coaches the past three years, has given the team some much-needed stability.

9. In the 1960s and ’70s, the Schaefer Cup was awarded to the winner of the annual match between Drew and Princeton.
The Tigers were a perennial rugby power, but in the spring of 1969 Drew prevailed, 10–0. Alas, in the aftermath, the Schaefer Cup never materialized, and the Princeton team, defying rugby tradition, did not stick around. As Hunt Jones ’70 recalls, it was the first time the Drew ruggers conducted their post-game party on campus. “We were so elated and so noisy,” Jones says. “There were multiple reports of too much merriment.”

10. Former Drew rugby coach Alex Boraine G’69, a native of South Africa, was appointed by Nelson Mandela to be deputy chairman of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was created in 1995. He wrote about the experience in A Country Unmasked: Inside South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Oxford, 2001).

11. John Hinchcliff G’69 and Roger Martin ’65.
Hinchcliff, from New Zealand, was a standout player-coach from 1965 to 1968. Later he became president of Auckland University of Technology. Martin, who played with Pita Ala’ilima and was coached by Alex Boraine, later ascended to the presidency of both Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pa., and Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va.

12. A 50-second YouTube clip starring women’s rugger Judea Hill ’13.
In the video, taken during a 2010 game at Columbia, Hill catches a pass and rumbles toward the try line. En route, she encounters a would-be Columbia tackler. Upon impact, the Columbia player is tossed backward, ragdoll-like, about the length of a New York City block. “I didn’t even know what happened to her,” Hill says of her unfortunate opponent. See for yourself at drew.edu/judeahillrugger.

13. Nalani Tarrant ’10, Kate Etcheverry ’10, Ralph Scoville ’80 and Chris Walsh ’80.

Morristown Medical Center physicians “talked to me a lot,” says Mourad. “It was very interactive.” Photo by Bill Cramer

Yasmine Mourad ’13 is determined to become an emergency room physician after having spent a semester observing at Morristown Medical Center. Here is her story.

By Yasmine Mourad ’13

“Doctor, doctor, the phone! It’s ringing!” The attending physician answered the phone in triage. His face turned intense. “Uh, huh … yes … wow… completely nonresponsive? … When did you say this all happened? … OK, see you in a few minutes … We are already preparing for her arrival.”

It had been an ordinary Thursday in the emergency room at Morristown Medical Center, just a few miles from Drew. I came to the hospital after my physics lab, put on my white coat and nametag and grabbed my notebook. I joined the physicians in triage and waited for one of them to whisk me away to see a patient. Throughout the evening I visited a number of patients, and now, in the last hour of my four-hour shift, the phone rang.

After the doctor snapped the phone down onto the receiver, he grabbed doctors and nurses and began preparing for the incoming patient. I didn’t want to get in the way, so I stood on the side and listened to the group of white coats in urgent discussion. I waited for what seemed like 10 minutes, but was probably just 30 seconds until finally a resident poked his face out of the crowd and told me they received a call saying that an unresponsive, possibly brain-dead, 40-year-old woman was being flown by helicopter to the hospital.

I was shocked; I immediately thought of my 46-year-old mother. About 20 minutes later, I watched medical technicians wheel the woman into the room the emergency room staff had prepared.

The woman didn’t have any family members with her. She looked young, and it was strange how she lay so limp, so still on the stretcher.

I am a neuroscience major at Drew and perform research in the field, so this woman’s medical case greatly intrigued me. There was the potential that she’d had a stroke, a medical problem I know about and can relate to, since my grandmother had suffered one. Immediately I felt for this lady. I thought, Does she have a family? Kids? Does anyone know that she is sick right now? Is she feeling pain or fear, even though she is just lying there motionless, with her head slightly cocked to the side? She looks … lifeless. She looks … dead. I wanted to tell her, “Please don’t be scared. These doctors will help you.”

Ever since I was a young girl, I knew I wanted to be a doctor. When I was 6 years old, I even practiced on my dolls. “Q-tips … check. Cream … check. OK, Yashu, don’t cry, I won’t hurt you,” I softly mumbled as I prepared my doll for dental work and minor surgery on his arm. The surrounding pink walls were my operating room, the rough sofa was my operating table and my grandfather was the nurse. I went to work with great concentration, while reassuring Yashu I would not hurt him, he would be OK, I would be done soon. I wanted to calm Yashu’s fear, make him comfortable and make sure that he liked me, even though I was performing surgery on him without anesthetics.

Now, years later, I again had the chance to practice my bedside manner when I was selected for the Morristown Medical Center Mentorship Program, a semester-long opportunity at Drew that allows students to shadow emergency room physicians. For students planning to become physicians, this is a remarkable opportunity to get a taste of what it’s really like to be a doctor.

Participants get to see everything, and I mean everything. I followed doctors into patients’ rooms, and what I witnessed behind the curtains was always a surprise. Some cases were gruesome. Others were just plain weird. I saw a man who had dropped a chain saw on his leg, the cut penetrating his skin and muscle, exposing the bone, yet he told the doctors that he didn’t need any pain medication. He just wanted it cleaned up.

But of all of the patients I saw, none stick out in my mind more than the 40-year-old woman who, the doctors confirmed, had suffered a stroke. As she lay in her hospital bed, doctors and nurses tended to her while other doctors calmly discussed her condition and still others talked on the phone. It was like a scene out of a movie, and I was the invisible bystander watching everything happen.

Finally, one of the physicians had some free time, and he asked me if I knew what brain region might have been damaged, based on the symptoms the patient was exhibiting. I thought back to Professor Christina McKittrick’s systems neurobiology course, and remembered how the symptoms the patient exhibits after a hemorrhagic stroke are indicative of where the bleed in the brain may be. Since this woman was not responsive to any stimuli and had to be given multiple shots of epinephrine to keep her heart beating, I guessed the stroke was near the brain stem, the most critical part of the brain. The doctor nodded his head “yes” quickly, and went back to the patient. We knew that she had gone out for a walk and had collapsed, and had been in this condition since then. The intensity of her case was only heightened once her family—two daughters, ages 12 and 22—arrived at the hospital. I thought, What if their mother dies?

We learned that the daughters no longer had contact with their father and had no family members in the area. I put my­self in their place, and tears came to my eyes. I realized that while physicians have to worry about helping the patient, they often need to tend to the patient’s family as well.

Photo by Bill Cramer

After an hour of watching the doctors analyze the tests they had ordered for the woman, my shift was over. But I needed to stay. I needed to know what would happen.

I ended up staying past midnight, watching a neurosurgeon drain the woman’s brain of blood in an effort to save her life. Blood was flowing out of a vessel in her brain and had started leaking into the hollow spaces, quickly building up pressure within her skull. Physicians were prepared. They knew the chances she would survive were slim, but they performed the procedure anyway. I had to go home. It was almost one o’clock in the morning.

During my next shift that weekend, I found out that the woman had passed away the morning after she arrived. Thoughts rushed through my head. I wished I’d had the opportunity to talk to her and her daughters. I had watched how the medical staff interacted with them, seeing the girls hug each other and then hug the nurses tending to them. I could feel the girls’ fear and the medical staff’s tension and intensity; I wanted to step into the situation and do something, but I could not. I was nothing but a bystander, watching the chaos unfold in front of me.

Yet that tragic mother’s situation taught me a lot, and confirmed that not only do I want to become a doctor, I want to become an emergency room physician. I’m determined more than ever to complete my medical studies, and care for those who need it most.

After a yearlong, $12 million renovation of the former University Center, Drew now has a vibrant living room that makes the collegiate experience oh-so-much better.

“There’s a lot more natural light, it’s more spacious and the new eating area is beautiful.” —Janelle Hoffman ’13

By Mary Jo Patterson

Photography by Don Hamerman

With its raised roofline, expansive windows, fireplaces, two-story rotunda and dining hall with barrel-vaulted ceiling, the Ehinger Center is a jaw-dropper.

The new center, named in honor of university trustee and donor Tony Ehinger ’80 and his wife, Marianne Hyzak Ehinger ’80, “will definitely make a positive difference in student life at Drew,” says Student Government President Janelle Hoffman’13. “Everything has been updated to reflect the needs of today.”

Two years ago Ehinger raised $500,000 from members of his graduating class to renovate the center’s pub, now known as the C’80 Pub. Then he and his wife committed $3 million of their own toward the rest of the project. Other key donors include John H. Crawford III T’65, chairman of the university board of trustees, and his wife, Cathie ’64, who gave $1 million to create a new lecture hall that doubles as event space, and trustee Gates Hawn and his wife, Mary Ellen, who donated $300,000 for a commuter lounge.

Ehinger, a retired investment banker who met early on with architect Victoria Pivovarnick of KSS Associates in Princeton, N.J., dropped by the site regularly during construction. “It’s gorgeous—awesome,” Ehinger says. “But what’s going to be even cooler is seeing kids enjoying the space.”

One Size Does Fit All

A stunning social hub made for launching a million college memories and an irresistible magnet for the next generation of Drewids, the EC offers something for everyone.

By Renée Olson   Plan by Thirst

Some of the 20 students on the inaugural U.N. Semester in 1962.

Born of sudden inspiration (and rescued by the mother of a poli-sci major), Drew’s U.N. Semester has given students a front-row seat to major world events spanning a half-century.

By Christopher Hann

One afternoon in the winter of 1962 Drew President Robert Fisher Oxnam summoned to his office Robert G. Smith, the founder and chair of Drew’s Department of Political Science. Oxnam was meeting later that day with the presidents of 10 Midwestern Methodist colleges, and he wanted Smith to take part in their conversation. The presidents had been on a quest to create a joint program of international studies and had recently toured Europe in search of a location that might serve as the base for such a program. They were not successful. Back in the United States, the presidents turned to Drew for help.

During the meeting with President Oxnam that February afternoon a half-century ago, Smith told the visitors about Drew’s London Semester, begun the previous fall, in which political science students traveled to the British capital to study government. Smith, who’d created the the London Semester and who’d been looking to create other off-campus programs, suggested that perhaps he could adapt a similar model for the study of the United Nations in New York City. Smith, who spent four decades at Drew, burnishing a legacy as an enthusiastic and innovative educator, told the presidents that he would submit a plan to them the following day. And he did.

The 1967 Oak Leaves captioned this photo,“Another day, another ride.”

“The plan they approved the next day,” Smith would write a quarter-century later in a report on the founding of Drew’s off-campus programs in political science, “was that of the housing of students on the Drew campus, busing them to a study area near the United Nations two days a    week and the taking of the remainder of a semester’s courses on campus in any of our offerings. At the United Nations study area, two Drew faculty members would lead a seminar drawing on United Nations personnel as speakers and guide the students in individual research papers to be done at the United Nations and elsewhere in the city. We stipulated that the semester not be limited to those 10 colleges and universities, but be opened to all such schools in this country and to foreign students as well.”

By the time you read this, the 2012 U.N. Semester will be in full swing. Here, students in 2007. Photo by Don Hamerman

If there is anything more remarkable about the U.N. Semester’s founding than that its essential framework was assembled in a mere 24 hours, it is this: Smith’s plan was then approved at a special meeting of the college faculty on Feb. 22, 1962, no more than three weeks after Smith himself had first been apprised of the need for it. Ten days later, Smith’s plan, creating the only United Nations–based program of study offered by an American college, was presented to the rest of the world in the pages of The New York Times. “The United Nations will serve as a part-time campus for students from colleges and universities throughout the country who enroll in a new program announced last week by Drew University,” the Times reported.

Thus commenced Drew’s U.N. Semester.

Well, not quite. There was one problem. Neither Smith nor anyone else at Drew had yet sought—much less won—the consent of the United Nations. And when Smith went to talk to U.N. officials a day after the story appeared in the Times, he wrote, “They would have nothing to do with me.”

The U.N. Semester appeared dead in the water, a grand idea buried before it could blossom. But perhaps all great institutions must from time to time rest their fortunes on the whim of serendipity. Enter Mary Lodge.

Mary Lodge ’64 saved the day when her mother, a staffer for then-Secretary-General U Thant, pulled crucial strings at the United Nations for Drew.

A sophomore from Long Island, a political science major, Lodge appeared the next day in Smith’s office. She told Smith that her mother, Grace Lodge, had heard of his conundrum at the United Nations, and she extended to Smith her mother’s offer to help. Grace Lodge had only a high-school education and had gone back to work only when she found herself widowed, with two young daughters, at the age of 35. She had found a job at the United Nations—it didn’t hurt that she spoke fluent Swedish—and by February 1962, when she reached out to Bob Smith, she’d become the executive officer in the office of Secretary-General U Thant, the highest-ranking official at the United Nations.

“From that moment on,” Smith wrote, “almost daily for the rest of the semester, Mrs. Lodge guided me through the intricacies of the United Nations organization, arranging interviews with key persons, briefing me before the meetings and opening key doors for our program.”

Grace Lodge introduced Smith to such U.N. luminaries as the American diplomat Ralph Bunche, who in 1950 had received the Nobel Peace Prize (the first African American to be so honored) for negotiating a peace agreement between Jews and Palestinians, and Chakravarthi Narasimhan, the incoming under-secretary for General Assembly Affairs. “She was absolutely indispensable,” Smith wrote of Grace Lodge, “and Drew later honored her by a ceremony on campus.”

Fifty years later, Mary (Lodge) Wells deflects any credit for her cameo role in the creation of the U.N. Semester. She’s retired now, having founded and run a family service agency that today employs 500 people across seven counties in southern New Jersey. Credit for the U.N. Semester, she insists, goes to Bob Smith. “Professor Smith was a very brilliant and worldwide person and was always thinking of ways to expand our horizons,” says Wells, who enrolled in the U.N. Semester as a senior in the fall of 1963. “He knew how to make things happen by knowing people who could make things happen. You couldn’t go anywhere and get a better professor than Bob Smith.”

Still, before Smith’s plan for a U.N. Semester could win approval, there were diplomatic hurdles to clear. Although the plan had received wide support throughout the U.N., Smith wrote, there was “a reluctance to accept it, as it was to be sponsored by one university—Drew—and an American one at that.” Smith was told that none other than Dag Hammarskjöld, the U.N. secretary-general who had died in a plane crash a year earlier, had directed that a small conference room be built at U.N. headquarters expressly for students. The decision would come down to Narasimhan, an Indian, who also thought the plan was “excellent,” Smith wrote, “but that its approval would be awkward for him as one of his first decisions.”

Narasimhan conceded to Smith that he especially liked working with young people. Smith invited him to be the opening speaker in Drew’s inaugural U.N. Semester. “As I was leaving his office, assuming that he would have to disapprove,” Smith wrote, “he called me back and said that the idea was too good to turn down. He approved, and he would be our first speaker.”

Fifty years later, the Semester on the United Nations has educated upwards of 2,000 students from across the country on the organizational and philosophical underpinnings of the world’s most important international body. The program has evolved over the years—in the 1960s most students in the U.N. Semester were not from Drew—but in 2012 the fundamental ideas on which Bob Smith built the program remain remarkably intact. Twice a week students travel into Manhattan and meet in a classroom inside a 12-story office tower at First Avenue and 44th Street, known as the Church Center for the United Nations. Throughout the semester students hear from a parade of speakers whose work is rooted in the function of the United Nations—U.N. officials, mission employees, representatives of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—and across the street they sit in on U.N. meetings covering all manner of global conflict and urgency.

In recent years dozens of Drew students have undertaken valuable internships at the United Nations and at NGOs such as Human Rights Watch, the International Peace Academy and Amnesty International. For countless alumni of the U.N. Semester, the experience has had a profound and lasting influence on their geopolitical worldview. For at least one, it led to a posting in the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. Fifty years after its impromptu founding was made possible by the selfless acts of one student’s mother, Drew’s Semester on the United Nations is one of only two such U.N.-based college programs in America. (The other is run by Occidental College in Los Angeles.)

“I probably owe my graduate degree to my U.N. Semester,” says Victoria Webbe ’09, who earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and women’s studies and then a master’s in international studies from the New School. Today she’s completing a Scoville Fellowship at the Truman National Security Project, a leadership development organization in Washington, D.C.

“If I were understating, I would call that semester pivotal in my life,” Webbe says. “Probably more than any other class I took, it gave me a combination of theoretical and practical knowledge that has proven invaluable for me.”

Robert Kopech ’73 crafted what he calls a “multidimensional major in Russian studies.” His plan was to become a college professor and teach Soviet foreign policy. Vietnam still raged. The Cold War was in full bloom. The U.N. Semester seemed a natural path.

“With the background and the objectives I had, it was extremely interesting to get a better understanding for not just the function and structure of the United Nations, but how it worked,” says Kopech, today a vice president at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. “The general concepts for which it was founded, the objectives it was trying to deal with—all of that was definitely grist for my mill. I thought it was a great experience.”

Students receive eight credits for their U.N. Semester work and typically take two additional classes, for eight more credits, on campus. They also write term papers on any aspect of the U.N.’s work—peace and security issues, economic development, human rights, war crimes tribunals. “As long as it was U.N.-dependent,” says Doug Simon, who co-directed the program for 15 years starting in 1972. At one point, Simon says, he had to impose a 35-page limit on the research papers, the most verbose of which were consuming some 75 pages.

Simon’s partner as co-director was the late political science professor Richard Rhone, who came on board a year earlier and remained with the U.N. Semester for 33 years, until his death in 2004. No other program director has served nearly as long. Bill Carney ’84, who has spent his career in the federal government and who now works as a counselor in the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, says the passion that Rhone and Simon brought to the semester invariably infected students. “It was just a fantastic semester,” Carney says. “A lot of it had to do with Simon and Rhone. They really loved what they were doing, and that made you want to love it just as much.”

Carney says the directors’ ability to attract a rich variety of speakers to the program brought firsthand accounts of the day’s hot-button global issues into the classroom. He recalls, for example, Israeli and Palestinian diplomats articulating their positions on their long-standing divide. “It was just a great opportunity to hear both sides of the argument,” Carney says.

In 1977 Rhone brought to the Drew program a career U.N. official, a French national, who had been with the organization nearly from its opening day. Jean Gazarian had come to work at the United Nations in 1946 as a translator. In a career that spanned more than six decades, he worked closely with several secretaries-general. He spent 18 years as the director of the Division of General Assembly Affairs and was later appointed a senior fellow at the U.N. office in charge of training diplomats worldwide. Gazarian’s formal title with the U.N. Semester was assistant director, but he also served as a liaison, lecturer, tour guide and institutional historian. In the corridors of the U.N., Gazarian was the ultimate insider, and he often invoked his access when leading students on tours of the U.N. complex.

“He is so widely respected in the building, he would just wander to the point that we actually ended up on the floor of the Security Council,” recalls Victoria Webbe. “I remember him just breezing past the security guard at the door, just kind of waving, just wandering into this space that we should not have been.”

Gazarian was often a witness to history, and twice a week each fall he’d share his memories and his lessons with the Drew students. He was there, for example, on Oct. 12, 1960, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev did (or did not) pound his shoe on his desk to protest remarks by a Philippine diplomat about Soviet aggression. In 2007 Drew awarded Gazarian an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree. Earlier this year he stepped down after 35 years with the U.N. Semester, having played a singular role in its success.

“He’s the living history of the U.N.,” says Political Science Associate Professor Debra Liebowitz, who directed the U.N. Semester shortly after Rhone’s death and who will direct it again in 2013. “Having him in the program has just been invaluable. He would provide historical context for a lot of the issues we were talking about. There is absolutely no way anyone could know the history the way he knows the history.”

Under the direction of Liebowitz, the U.N. Semester received certification as an NGO, giving students access to meetings throughout the U.N. complex. Liebowitz says she made this effort so students could get a firsthand look at how the countries of the world conduct international relations. They have sat in on the Rwanda war crimes court and heard discussions about the strategy of embedding humanitarian aid workers with the military and George W. Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq.

When Liebowitz woke up on Oct. 9, 2006, and read that North Korea had just conducted its first test of a nuclear weapon, she knew she’d be bringing her students the next day to the meeting of the General Assembly’s First Committee, which oversees arms control negotiations. During the committee meeting, Liebowitz recalls, a student turned to her and said, “‘Oh, my God, that’s the North Korean ambassador’—who was having to defend, in front of the world community, their detonating a nuclear weapon.”

Fifty years on, the U.N. Semester has helped sustain the stellar reputation of Drew’s Department of Political Science. For Drew students, the semester provides a real-time window into world affairs that can’t be replicated in any other setting. This fall, it might be the Syrian uprising, Egypt’s fragile new democracy or the evolving state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“It’s the most amazing—and I know all the students would say this—capstone experience if you are interested in international politics,” Liebowitz says. “Not because you’re necessarily interested in the United Nations per se, but because it’s this place where you’re able to see international politics happen.”

Not Your Typical Course

U.N. Semester Memories via Facebook

“The opportunity to study with Doug Simon and Dick Rhone was the gift of the U.N. Semester. The bus rides in and out of the city often turned into impromptu lectures from two of the most insightful and engaging minds Drew had to offer.” —Kevin Barney ’83

“Benjamin Shedlock ’09 and I once groggily sat outside of a General Assembly conference room, fully spent from a long night of research and writing. Suddenly the doors burst open and a whirlwind of journalists and camera flashes jolted us to attention. The mob was swirling around Bill Clinton, who led the procession past Ben and me. Somehow the sight of two dumbfounded college seniors caught his attention and he waved to us. It took us about 10 seconds to wave back, 30 more to regain our composure and before a minute had passed we were on our phones. ‘Hey Ma, you wouldn’t believe who just waved to me!’” —Seth Gorenstein ’09

“I participated in the U.N. Semester my senior year. One afternoon, while walking to the bus, we noticed a movie production crew filming a man running repeatedly up the sidewalk in front of the flags. I realized that the man they were filming was Woody Allen. After about the third or fourth time I walked right up to him and said, “Don’t you think you’d run faster with sneakers on?” He smiled and replied, “As it is, the camera can’t keep up with me anyway!” The movie was Manhattan. I was happy to see that the scene I watched them film actually made it into the movie.” —David Ellovich ’79

50th Anniversary Celebration

Join President Vivian A. Bull and faculty emeriti Doug Simon and Bill Messmer for the United Nations Semester 50th Anniversary Celebration on April 12, 2013 at 1 United Nations Plaza, New York, N.Y. Learn more  >

Sumiko Kobayashi near her home in Medford, N.J.
Photo by Bill Cardoni

When Sumiko Kobayashi ’46 first came to Drew, she hadn’t left her parents’ home. She’d gotten a pass out of a Japanese internment camp in Utah.

By Mary Jo Patterson

Some memories of the desolate spot where she and her family were imprisoned so long ago are still sharp.

Like the band that was playing when they stepped off the Army bus, bewildered and tired. (The musicians were prisoners too.) The official who handed them mattress ticking and told them to fill it with straw from a pile on the floor. The dust, which blew across the flat plain and seeped through the barracks’ closed windows and doors. Their room, which was furnished with a light bulb hanging from the ceiling.

Together with her younger sister and brother and their parents, Sumiko Kobayashi, 19 years old, had been deposited smack in the middle of a Utah desert previously populated by jackrabbits and coyotes. They were now family 21518 at the Topaz Relocation Center, a city of tarpaper shacks hastily erected to contain thousands of ethnic Japanese. Ten months earlier, on Dec. 7, 1941, Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into World War II. The federal government ordered more than 110,000 men, women and children of Japanese ancestry from their homes in California, Oregon and Washington state, and transported them to 10 remotely located internment camps inland, surrounded by barbed-wire fences. Two-thirds of them were U.S. citizens, like Kobayashi, who was born in Florida, and none had displayed any disloyalty to the United States. But the government, fearing espionage, cited military necessity.

Topaz Relocation Center in 1942.

Other memories are hazy, as if from a dream. Some things—like the well-documented death in 1943 of 63-year-old inmate James Wakasa, shot by a sentry in a watchtower—she does not recall. But this is not surprising. Kobayashi is 89. And she is not one to dwell on past injustices. Before Topaz she’d lived an idyllic childhood in the Midwest. After Topaz came an interesting and successful life, starting with her early release from the camp to attend Drew, from which she graduated in 1946.

Sumiko sits next to her mother, with her father and siblings.

“Being in the camps was a small part of my family history. Traumatic, but a small piece,” she says, sitting in her home in Medford, N.J., about 20 miles from Philadelphia.

There was also, among the internees, a widespread cultural attitude expressed as Shikata ga nai, Japanese for “It can’t be helped.” Her parents and perhaps most Japanese Americans accepted their fate. “I thought it was wrong, but I was resigned,” she says. “We were completely under the control of the military.”

That’s not to say Kobayashi was indifferent. Diminutive (4 feet, 10 inches), friendly and mild-mannered, with a good sense of humor, yet also assertive and frank, she later became a prominent figure in the movement to provide redress for Japanese Americans. She lobbied hard for passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, in which Congress formally apologized for the shameful chapter and admitted it was based not on military need, but on “racial prejudice, war-time hysteria and a failure of political leadership.” The government also paid survivors $20,000 each for having deprived them of their liberty and caused so much suffering. Ordered to bring only what they could carry to the camps, people lost jobs, businesses, possessions and, sometimes, identities. When the war ended and the camps closed, many chose not to return to their former lives.

Kobayashi’s story starts in the Yamato agricultural colony in Boca Raton, Fla., where her father emigrated in 1914. After a few years he returned briefly to Japan to marry, then brought his new bride back to America. The couple settled in Geneva, Ill., near Chicago, where Kobayashi’s father found employment tending the Japanese garden of Colonel George Fabyan, a millionaire textile merchant. Kobayashi and her family lived in a house on the grounds of his lavish 300-acre estate, which housed a private zoo, Roman-style swimming pool, greenhouses, windmill and laboratory complex where Fabyan studied cryptology. “It was a fabulous place to grow up,” she recalls. “Mrs. Fabyan bred farm animals and dogs, and there were other families with children living at Riverbank.” Kobayashi and her family lived there for 14 years, with she and her siblings attending public school.

At Mead Hall in her Drew days.

When the estate was sold, the family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where Kobayashi’s father raised roses and carnations. She graduated from San Leandro High School and was about to enter the University of California, Berkeley, when she became ill. A doctor misdiagnosed the problem as tuberculosis and sent her to a sanatorium. One day, during a visit from her parents, a nurse came into her room and announced that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. “We knew, of course, there would be hostility to us. My parents were not citizens—Japanese-born were ineligible for citizenship under American law—and we knew something was coming,” she says. “We just didn’t know when, or what.”

With the military worried about the Japanese invading the West Coast, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order creating military zones and authorizing the evacuation of persons deemed national security risks. It did not specifically mention the Japanese, but within a matter of weeks Japanese Americans in the Seattle area were ordered to leave. Notices soon went up in other communities. When Kobayashi’s parents received their order, they had two weeks to prepare. Household items had to be stored or sold. Since pets were not allowed, Kobayashi had to give up her toy terrier, Tippy, an 11th birthday present from her father. A government official who came to their house at this time spotted a baby picture of her on the wall and attempted to confiscate it, convinced it was the infant crown prince of the emperor. In May 1942 the family was transported to a temporary assembly center at the Tanforan Racetrack near San Francisco, where the government had built barracks. Families were also housed in the grandstands and horse stalls.

Six months later, the family learned of its final destination: a 19,800-acre site in central Utah, 140 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. The heart of the camp was a grid of 42 blocks. Each residential block contained a latrine, mess hall, recreation hall, bathhouse and 12 barracks with six rooms each. Most families were jammed into one room. “The partitions between the six apartments only went up to the eave line. It was open across the top,” Kobayashi remembers. “If a neighbor sneezed, you heard it.” Family life suffered terribly. So did parental authority.

Topaz was a prison, surrounded by barbed wire, but it was also a community, with athletic fields, schools, churches and a PX, where detainees could buy snacks. Residents built ornamental gardens, to make the place seem more like home, and planted trees and bushes brought down from the mountains. (Most died in the arid climate.) Beyond the barracks were agricultural fields, a chicken farm, turkey farm, hog farm and kitchen. Jobs were available, but paid little, even for skilled professionals. The pay scale ranged from $12 to $19 a month.

Kobayashi wound up processing bills of lading. “I didn’t like it, but I put up with it. Shikata ga nai. If we had wanted to resist, we would have been leaderless,” she says. “Those with a sense of responsibility felt that the best thing was to go along with the government. We weren’t thinking about civil rights. We were worried about staying out of jail, staying alive.”

Kobayashi with a photo of her and her parents.

As the war wore on, pressure developed to return the detainees to mainstream life away from the West Coast. Young people of college age were of particular concern; before Pearl Harbor, some 3,500 nisei, or second-generation Japanese, were studying at American colleges, mostly in Washington state and California. In 1943 the federal government sanctioned a student resettlement program, the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council. Led by the American Friends Service Committee, it recruited prospective students from the camps and helped them apply to universities willing to accept them. Private colleges, especially those affiliated with churches, were the most receptive; big state universities, with war contracts, were ineligible.

At Topaz, Kobayashi was interviewed by Tom Bodine, a young Quaker and conscientious objector on the council. She applied to a number of schools, but was not immediately accepted. “Grinnell said they would accept me, but only if they could find a Japanese roommate,” she says. “I decided I wasn’t going to wait for that.” Then she applied to Drew, whose undergraduate school, then known as Brothers College, had only recently begun admitting women. She had enjoyed trips into Chicago as a young girl, and thought she’d like living near New York City. On the application, Kobayashi stated she was Methodist, which was partly true. Though she did not attend church regularly, her parents had taken her to Methodist Sunday School years earlier. Drew accepted her.

In the fall of 1943 Kobayashi traveled alone to New Jersey. She vividly remembers getting off the train and heading toward campus, one suitcase in hand, when a young man across the street called out a friendly hello. “I was surprised. It made me feel so good. Here I was, coming out of a concentration camp, and it was such a cheerful greeting,” she says. She had just turned 20.

With her tuition covered by a private group, she worked for room and board in the homes of two local Quaker families. When the war ended and her parents, released from the camps, found work, she could afford a dorm room. Kobayashi has fond memories of these years. She formed strong relationships with a couple of professors and was readily accepted in a social circle of students. One of her close friends was Maurice Blanken ’46, a returning serviceman. “Drew had a lot of girls, but they were inexperienced and naïve. I couldn’t relate to them,” Blanken recalls. “Sumi was more mature. She was savvy. Like me, she’d had a lot of experiences.”

Kobayashi graduated with a degree in economics. She remained in Madison for another year, working in Drew’s registrar’s office to pay off college bills. Then she moved to Philadelphia, where her family had relocated. She brushed up on her shorthand and got a job as a law secretary. Years later, finding the job a dead end, she became a computer programmer. Throughout she was active in many cultural and civic organizations. When the Japanese American Civic League launched a campaign for redress in 1978, she signed on. “It was the young people—the children of the people in the camps—who decided we ought to do something,” she says. “They’d been brought up on civil rights marches and Martin Luther King. They said, ‘This was terrible, you should do something.’ Some people wanted to let sleeping dogs lie, but I thought it was the right thing. Part of the movement was to get our experience into the textbooks, so it would not be forgotten.”

Over the years, she returned twice to Topaz, where a retired high school teacher was leading a campaign to build a museum at the site. These days Kobayashi lives quietly at Medford Leas, a Quaker-related continuing care community once home to 18 Japanese Americans from the camps, including Kobayashi and her mother, Suye, who died in 2001. Their numbers grow smaller every year. In 2008 Kobayashi assembled an exhibit there about the Japanese-American experience during World War II.

At times she wonders if the country has truly absorbed its lessons. After 9/11, she says, “Americans began looking at Muslims and people from the Mideast the same way they looked at us. The tendency toward prejudice is still there. One generation may have learned, but another generation has come along.”

Kobayashi’s health is good, but she no longer makes many public appearances. Still, thanks to the internet, people manage to find her. Last year she was contacted by a doctoral student in ethnic music wondering if there was music in the camps. (There was.) A museum executive called from Florida on behalf of a student looking to interview a Japanese American from the camps. Kobayashi didn’t hesitate to volunteer her story: “Of course, I would talk. There are not many of us left.”

As the last surviving member of her immediate family, there is one last piece of business she wants to complete. After retiring she wrote a trilogy about her family’s experience in the United States. While the experience of Japanese Americans who stayed in the West after being released from the camps has been well documented, the lives of those who moved elsewhere has not. “I’m trying to fill in the blank spaces,” she says, referring to her dream of publishing her work. “If I don’t do it, who will? I don’t have children. This is my legacy.”

Mary Jo Patterson is a former reporter for the Star-Ledger and a regular contributor to Drew Magazine.­

Meet undergrads who thought they knew what they wanted to do with their lives—until they found an unexpected passion.

Narrative slideshows by Bruce Wallace, photography by Bill Cardoni

Alae Kawam

was swept away by the beauty of a scientific theory

Gus Baxter

took a course on a whim and found his ultimate passion

Rebecca Ruppert

had a surprising epiphany and changed her major that very day

Diana Ortiz

chose to study art at Drew because she craved freedom

Kiah Edmondson

revisited his worldview, inspired by a pivotal professor

After his son was murdered, Walt Everett did what few would. He reached out to the man who killed him.

By Christopher Hann. Photos by Bill Cardoni

Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pa. September 2011.

The first-year seminar is titled “Timeless Questions, Difficult Times: Making Meaning of Uncertainty,” and you might have to search the darkest corners of the planet to find a guest speaker more qualified to hold forth on that topic than the Rev. Walter Everett C’56, T’60.

A retired Methodist minister, Everett is something of an authority on timeless questions and difficult times, and he’s spent years trying to make meaning of uncertainty. He’s come to Bucknell, where he sits at the head of a small classroom crammed with 15 students and two instructors, to weave his extraordinary tale one more time, a retelling that will leave some of those in his young audience questioning their very core. For he’s also come with some questions of his own.

“How many of you are in favor of the death penalty?” Everett begins.

Silence.

“How many of you are opposed?”

A few.

“How many are not sure?”

All the rest.

Over the past quarter-century, Everett has emerged as one of the leading voices—and perhaps the least likely—in the national movement to abolish the death penalty. He is 77 years old, with a snow-white beard, neatly trimmed, and a soft but steady voice. His impromptu classroom survey might have affirmed the abolition movement’s long odds, but in recent years several states have in fact repealed capital punishment, New Jersey among them. To date 17 states do not permit executions (most recently, Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber announced last November that he would not approve any more executions during his term). Everett is convinced that nine or 10 more states will soon join them—enough, he hopes, to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court, which reinstated capital punishment in 1976, to ban it once and for all.

Everett’s son Scott, shortly before his murder a quarter-century ago.

Everett has been active in a number of abolition groups, and he sits on the board of Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights (he remains friends with former board member Robert Meeropol, son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, accused spies who were executed in 1953, their case still an iconic emblem of the Cold War). So strong has been Everett’s influence in the movement that each year the Connecticut Network to Abolish the Death Penalty bestows the Walter Everett Humanitarian Award. He tells the Bucknell students that he opposes the death penalty on multiple grounds: its application (it is inequitably and sometimes mistakenly imposed); its price (capital cases cost far more to prosecute than non-capital cases); and its misperceived benefit (it does not provide solace to the families of murder victims).

“Walter was the first family member of a murder victim who would publicly speak out against the death penalty,” says Renny Cushing, the executive director of Murder Victims’ Families and a former New Hampshire state representative. “You can’t tell somebody you need to forgive the killer. Walt simply explains his journey, and that models it. And he does it with the humility that’s Walter. He’s one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever met in my life.”

At Bucknell, Everett tells the students that he still remembers the indifferent response he got from his Drew classmates the day, more than a half-century ago, that he spoke out against capital punishment during a public speaking course taught by Ralph Johnson. “The rest of the class kind of looked around and said, ‘Huh? What’s the big deal?’” he says. Then, Everett’s position was rooted in his faith. Today, it’s more personal, the result of unforeseen events and his uncommon response to them. Taking stock of the course of his life during this period, he calls it “my journey.”

Walt Everett’s journey begins at 8 o’clock  in the morning on July 26, 1987, in Petersburg, Va. As the minister of a church in Hartford, Conn., Everett was traveling with members of his congregation to Charlotte, N.C., where they were to build homes with Habitat for Humanity. They’d spent the night in Petersburg, and Everett had just sat down to breakfast at the hotel when he got word to call home. An emergency, he was told.

Four hundred miles away, Everett’s younger son, Wayne, picked up the phone and delivered the news: “Dad, Scott was murdered last night.” Earlier that morning, in an apartment building in Bridgeport, Conn., Everett’s elder son, Scott, 24, had been shot, point-blank, by a 27-year-old drug dealer named Mike Carlucci.

Scott Everett had been born on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, the child of an alcoholic mother and absentee father. He was removed from his home before he was six months old, Walt Everett says, when child welfare officials accused his mother of trying to sell him for a case of beer. Everett and his first wife, Isabel, learned about Scott from Everett’s brother, Arthur, a minister who was working with Native Americans in White River, S.D. Within days they were on a flight to Pierre, the state capital. When they returned home to Connecticut, they brought Scott with them. He was 22 months old.

As a teenager Scott struggled in school, dropped out at 16 and began drinking heavily. But in time he turned his life around, joining AA, getting sober and finding steady work. At 22, Scott moved into his own place in the apartment building in Bridgeport. On a Saturday night in July 1987, Scott went out with friends, arriving home after midnight to find that his apartment had been burglarized. After his friends settled him down, he walked them outside to their car, leaving his keys in his apartment. But when he returned, he found the outside door of the building locked. He knocked, hoping someone would let him in. Around the same time, another tenant was screaming that her apartment had just been burglarized.

In the apartment across the hall, Mike Carlucci heard the commotion. By his own admission, Carlucci was stoned on cocaine and had not slept in at least a week. That night he’d been out drinking with a cousin and a friend.

They planned to drive down to New York City, where the bars stayed open until 5 a.m., and had returned to Carlucci’s apartment to change clothes and restock his stash of drugs. When Carlucci opened the door of his apartment and saw the woman screaming, he went back inside to grab his .38-caliber handgun. Armed, he walked down the hall and heard someone pounding on the door at the end of the hallway. When he opened it, he did not recognize Scott Everett, did not know that Scott was a tenant in the same building. Wielding his gun, he told Scott to leave. Then, for reasons that even Carlucci cannot explain, he raised the gun to Scott’s neck. For a fleeting moment, he considered the consequences of what he was about to do. If I pull the trigger, Carlucci reasoned to himself, this guy is going to die, and I’m going to prison for the rest of my life. And then he pulled the trigger.

Any death of a young person creates unspeakable trauma for the family, Everett tells the Bucknell students. A violent death, he says, “increases the trauma exponentially.”

And so it was that for the next 11 months Everett saw his life spiral downward, seemingly out of his control. He felt despair, rage, depression. His marriage, already on shaky ground, cracked under the strain. Everett prayed to God, beseeching him to show him a way out of the darkness. But Everett discerned no response. He attended a support group meeting with other family members of murder victims—the only people, he figured, who could possibly understand the anguish that consumed him. One night he heard a woman in the group say that anyone who committed murder “should be taken out and shot immediately.” Then he learned that the woman’s son had been killed 14 years earlier. He wondered if that’s what his life would be like for the next 14 years.

“I was ignoring mail. I was not paying attention to people,” Everett tells the students. “My thoughts were elsewhere.”

Eleven months and two weeks after the murder of his son, Everett sat in a courtroom in Bridgeport for Carlucci’s sentencing. Everett had never before set eyes on his son’s killer, who arrived at the courthouse three hours late, having indulged in one last cocaine binge before prison. The judge asked Everett if he wished to make a statement. Everett rose and spoke for 10 minutes, though he doesn’t remember a word of what he said. Then the judge asked Carlucci if he would like to speak. Carlucci stood. Everett tells the Bucknell students that he remembers every word Carlucci uttered.

“I’m sorry I killed Scott Everett. I wish I could bring him back. Obviously, I can’t. These must sound like empty words to the Everetts. I don’t know what else to say. I’m sorry.”

That simple expression of remorse would change the course of Everett’s life. “It was,” he tells the students, “as though at that moment God said, ‘I’ve been asking you to wait. This is what I’ve been asking you to wait for.’”

Scott with his younger siblings, Wayne and Janna.

Two weeks later, at 8 o’clock in the morning on July 26, 1988, exactly one year to the minute after he learned of his son’s murder, Walt Everett sat down to write a letter to Mike Carlucci. Over the course of three pages, Everett recounted the suffering that Scott’s death had inflicted on his family. “The pain,” Everett wrote, “is almost unbearable at times.”

Yet he also thanked Carlucci for the apology he had delivered at his sentencing. And then Everett went further. “I know also that I will not be able to move on with my life unless I can accept your apology,” he wrote. “And so, although words seem so trivial in some ways (yet they are all that we have now), I do accept your apology, and, as hard as these words are to write, I add: I forgive you.”

The Bucknell students sit rapt. The room is pin-drop quiet. Everett pauses a moment, then continues.

His decision to forgive Carlucci, he says, was not meant to ease the guilt that weighed on the soul of his son’s killer. It was more selfish than that. He says he offered forgiveness to save his own life. “You need to feel good enough about yourself in order to forgive,” he says. When he stuck the letter in the mail, he says, “I felt the burden start to lift.”

A few days later, inside Enfield Correc­tional Institution, Mike Carlucci looked at the return address on the letter that had just arrived, and he cursed. “What the hell is he doing writing to me?” he asked his drug counselor. Carlucci threw the envelope on the counselor’s desk and stormed into the mess hall. After dinner, he returned to see the envelope still there, unopened. The counselor suggested he read the letter. Carlucci refused. Finally he asked the counselor to read it and tell him if there was anything in the letter that he ought to see. The counselor did.

“Mike,” she said afterward, “I really think you ought to read this.”

Two weeks after Everett mailed his letter, he received a one-page response from his son’s killer.

“Dear Sir:

“Mr. Everett I hope this letter finds you in good health, and makes you feel as good as your letter made me feel.”

Carlucci went on to thank Everett, telling him that the letter gave him peace of mind and allowed him to sleep easier at night. In closing, Carlucci wrote:

“Again, let me say how truly sorry I am to you and your family! I hope I will hear from you soon.

“Sincerely, Michael Carlucci.”

Thereafter ensued an exchange of letters between the minister and the murderer, and then one day several months on Everett received a letter asking if he might visit Carlucci in prison. After much soul-searching and with great trepidation, Everett tells the Bucknell students, he agreed. Their first meeting, on Dec. 6, 1988, lasted about an hour and 15 minutes. As Everett prepared to leave, the two men went to shake hands. Somehow that didn’t feel right. They embraced instead.

Two years passed. They continued to correspond. Everett continued to visit Carlucci in prison. By and by Everett came to view Carlucci as a changed man, transformed from the drug-addled street thug that he’d once been. Everett interpreted this transformation as the work of God. The two men found themselves growing close. When Carlucci’s father died while he was in prison, Carlucci received a furlough to attend the funeral. Everett loaned him a suit and, at Carlucci’s request, preached the sermon.

Carlucci (left) and Everett, here at Carlucci’s home near Bridgeport, Conn., still talk regularly.

Because prosecutors had reduced the criminal charge against Carlucci from first-degree manslaughter to second-degree manslaughter as part of a plea bargain, he’d been sentenced to a term of just 10 years in prison, with the sentence to be suspended after five years. Everett had found it inconceivable that anyone who took another’s life—utterly without provocation—could receive so tepid a punishment. Yet toward the end of 1990, Carlucci told Everett he was thinking about asking the state parole board to grant him an early release from prison. And then he asked Everett if he would testify on his behalf. Everett did not hesitate to say that he would.

On June 1, 1991, Carlucci was released from prison—largely, he believes, on the strength of Everett’s testimony. He had served just 35 months for killing Scott Everett.

Walt Everett’s journey, it would seem, should end here. It does not, of course, not with his life now inextricably linked with the man who killed his son. Maybe, in some indefinable way, they needed each other.

In fact, Everett tells the Bucknell students, he and Carlucci developed a most unlikely fellowship. They began to make public appearances together—in churches, schools, prisons—Everett to advocate for the abolition of the death penalty, Carlucci to testify to the power of redemption. Carlucci met a woman, Sandie, at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. When they were married a few years later, Everett officiated at their wedding. By then, word of the uncommon bond be­tween Everett and Carlucci had spread to the news media. Everett jokes that at Carlucci’s wedding there were more television cameras than guests. A few years later, when Sandie died of a drug overdose, Carlucci arranged for her funeral, with Everett presiding.

Everett tells the students that since his release from prison Carlucci has stayed sober and worked steadily as a supervisor for a trucking company. “Mike is doing a great job for that company,” Everett says. “He’s also doing a great job for his life. The important thing for me is not only that Mike is a new person, I’m a new person.”

Only 10 minutes remain in the class, time for a few questions. One student asks Everett how he feels about telling the story of his journey over and over. “Healing is a lifelong process,” he replies. “This is part of that process.”

Another student asks whether Everett had any doubts about Carlucci when he was freed from prison. Did he fear that Carlucci might return to a life of drugs and crime? Everett tells them about the day he and Carlucci appeared together on The Today Show, to be interviewed by Matt Lauer.

Toward the end of the segment, Lauer asked Everett if he could ever look at Carlucci and not think about what he had done to his son. Everett tells the students that he’d never been asked that question before, and he’s sure his answer was God-given.

“I can never forget what happened to Scott,” he said. “It has forever changed my life. But when I look at Mike, I don’t see the person who harmed Scott. I see somebody who’s been changed by God, and I celebrate that.”

Then Lauer looked at Carlucci and asked him what he’d learned from Everett. “Unconditional love,” Carlucci said.

End of interview.

The bell rings. A half-dozen students approach Everett, thank him for coming, shake his hand. Some, on their way out, reach for the anti-death penalty brochures that Everett brought with him. Everett leaves the building with instructor Deirdre O’Connor, who says the students will discuss the issues that he raised at a later class. Not until then could Everett know whether the timeless questions he’s posed really struck a chord with the students, whether he’d helped them to make meaning of uncertainty.

A few days later a neuroscience major from Bexley, Ohio, named Bridget O’Donnell wrote about Everett’s appearance in her course journal. O’Donnell grew up in a politically conservative home. Both her parents supported capital punishment. As a member of her high school political club, she took part in debates about the death penalty, arguing strongly in favor. Just two years earlier, as a high school junior, she’d written a research paper defending her position. “Today, however,” she wrote in the journal, “I questioned myself.”

O’Donnell says she left the class wondering whether her support for the death penalty was something she really believed in—“or something I learned to believe in.” And although she has a hard time articulating her change of heart, she is certain that a change has taken place. “I am not pro-death penalty anymore,” she says.

In Walt Everett’s long journey, another small step.

Click on the illustration below to view the panorama version, then click on an animal, tree or plant to find out more about species that surround us on the main campus, and in the Forest Preserve and Arboretum. For students and faculty and for area high schools, the grounds serve as a treasured outdoor laboratory for research on forest ecology, pond ecosystems and wildlife.

About the Artist

A native of Bologna, Italy, Roberto Osti has taught at Drew as an adjunct instructor in the Caspersen School of Graduate Studies since 2002. In addition to teaching courses such as “Introduction to Medical and Scientific Illustration” and “The Botany of Healing,” he is a fine artist whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including Natural History and Scientific American.

Upload Your Own!

Help Drew create an archival gallery of campus nature photography by uploading your own photos.

Name *

Email *

Drew Affiliation Student Faculty Staff Alumni Friend

Location of the Photo

Caption/Details

Upload Your Photo *

Uploading Files. Please Wait.

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

By Christopher Hann

The storyline seems too implausible, even for Hollywood: Promising young actor, his star on the rise after three seasons on a hit TV show, puts his career on hold to enroll in a seminary in Madison, N.J. Yeah, right.

Yet that’s precisely the route that Gaius Charles T’11 took to Drew’s Theological School. Charles played the talented but troubled running back Brian “Smash” Williams on Friday Night Lights, the Emmy Award–winning NBC drama about a high-school football team in small-town Texas. Afterward, in rapid succession, he appeared in films with Angelina Jolie, Woody Harrelson and Matt Dillon, and in a New York stage production of Othello with Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Yet there he was in September 2009, sitting in an introductory chapel session with his new classmates. Did his friends in the entertainment world think he was, well, nuts?

“Sure they did,” Charles says with a big laugh. “Some of them were thinking, ‘Isn’t … that … nice.’ I would talk to pastors—even they were very cautious.”

The decision was actually years in the making. Having caught the acting bug in the seventh grade in Teaneck, N.J., Charles took to the craft with a single-minded passion, earning a scholarship to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and ascending to Friday Night Lights just two years after graduating. But all that time he harbored another, sometimes conflicting, passion—“like a stone unturned in my heart,” he calls it.

“I’ve always known there was some kind of spiritual call, a ministerial call, in my life,” he says.

Through Charles’ character (top) on Friday Night Lights, the series “delved into racism with a delicacy and a nuance rarely seen on television,” said The L.A. Times. Last fall, Charles had a guest role on the new series Pan Am. Photos courtesy of NBC Universal, ABC.com.

Charles says he looked at Drew because of the Theo School’s reputation for a culturally diverse faculty and a curriculum that emphasized social justice and sociological
scholarship. True to form, Charles completeda three-year program in two and a half years and graduated in December with a master of divinity degree. “It’s been intense, to say the least,” he says.

Last year Charles received the John Patterson Award for Excellence in Hebrew Scholarship. “He was one of the outstanding students in class, in terms of his critical engagement with the material, his ability to do research and to incorporate what we were learning in class with what he was experiencing on his field trips,” says Kenneth Ngwa, an assistant professor of Hebrew Bible.

Although Charles lived on campus as a seminarian, he was especially moved by his travels—to India, Los Angeles and Uganda—which gave him

a greater understanding of how Christianity is practiced, and perceived, around the world. That lesson took hold in India, where eight in 10 people are Hindu. “In America,” Charles says, “I think we take for granted that Christianity is the way it is.”

In Los Angeles, during a four-week internship with Communities of Shalom, a Drew-based group focused on community development, Charles led a discussion on racism in which he played clips from Friday Night Lights. “He filled the church up with fans from his show,” says Michael Christensen, the national director of the Shalom initiative. “Very cool, and effective.”

Charles says he’s still trying to figure out his life’s path post-Drew, but he’s determined to invoke both his passions. In November he made a guest appearance on Pan Am, the ABC period drama, in which he played a soldier at the center of, in his words, “a very important storyline about interracial community life, tolerance and romance in the United States in the 1960s.” Yet he was also mulling a January return to Uganda, where he was invited to be the keynote speaker at a youth conference.

Wherever his path leads, Charles says, he wants to use his celebrity to advance his church-based work, citing the humanitarian efforts of Jolie and the rock star Bono as a model. “I would like to be able to use that platform to communicate some of my values, my faith values, to the world,” Charles says. “I don’t see myself as someone who is just in the non-secular world or the secular world. I see myself as somebody who can transition very effortlessly from the pulpit to the red carpet.”

Illustration by Anthony Freeda
Words By Mary Jo Patterson

The President

Theologian John McClintock, Drew’s first president from 1867–70 (and Daniel Drew’s former pastor at St. Paul’s Church in New York). Promoted the Union cause from Paris, where he was minister of the American Chapel and wrote for The Times of London.

The Trustees

Methodist bishop Matthew Simpson, trustee 1868–1885, board president 1877–1880. Baptized at birth by Francis Asbury. Confidant of Lincoln, sermonized at his funeral. Gave speeches on behalf of the Union.

Clinton B. Fisk, trustee 1876–1891. Union brigadier general, 33rd Regiment, Missouri Infantry. Fought in the Battle of Nashville. Wrote a letter to fellow trustee Simpson to ask Lincoln if Fisk could be moved up in rank from colonel to general. Founded Fisk University.

The Professor

Homer Baxter Sprague, professor of elocution 1896–99. Wrote articles denouncing slavery before the war. Served as colonel of Company H of the 13th Connecticut Volunteers and was wounded in Louisiana.

The Confederates

William Heyward Gibbons, son of the Georgia plantation owner who built the mansion that is now Mead Hall. Fought with the 2nd Battalion Georgia Cavalry. Received 5,200 acres in Georgia and 71 slaves from his father but returned to New Jersey, where he died.

Lloyd Tilghman, a brigadier general with the 3rd Kentucky Infantry. Killed in the Battle of Champion Hill in Mississippi in 1863. In 1915 his son Sidell, a wealthy widower, married a woman whose family owned Tilghman House, currently home to Drew’s registrar.

The Seminarians

At least nine Union soldiers enrolled at Drew after the war, including the Rev. Henry C. Langley, an Ohio Cavalry member imprisoned at the Confederates’ notorious Libby Prison in Richmond, Va., and the Rev. Edward H. Roys, who served with Connecticut’s 2nd Regiment and witnessed Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

The Profiteer

Founder Daniel Drew, an uneducated cattle trader from upstate New York, built himself a transportation empire after wresting control of the Erie Railroad in 1855. Believed to have profited from the Civil War by renting steamboats to President Lincoln to transport Union soldiers.

Gladly Laid Upon the Country’s Altar: American Methodists in the Civil War 

September 23–November 23
Rose Memorial Library and the United Methodist Archives and History Center

Exhibit curated by Christopher Anderson G’04,’06

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.”

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.