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Upcoming Events
April 23, 2018
Sheth Lecture
Dana Greene
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This issue of our newsletter is sent to members and friends of the Emory University Emeritus College (EUEC). I hope the newsletter will help keep you informed about our activities and help you feel connected with our members throughout the U.S. On the left are links to our website and links to contact either me or the EUEC office.
With best wishes,
Gray
Gray F. Crouse Director, EUEC
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 Message from the Director
This is a busy time of the year, but it is filled with an abundance of riches here at the Emeritus College. Our reception on April 5 was certainly a highlight of the year. We were back in the beautiful spaces of the Miller-Ward Alumni House and got to celebrate some of the best parts of the Emeritus College: our distinguished members, new members who come to keep us young and vital, and our donors who help to make it all possible. We recognized 50 new, and newly retired, members. I see it as a great affirmation of our organization that half of those new members are not yet retired. A link to the full list of those members is included in the article below. Please make an effort to seek out and welcome these new members and help them to flourish in retirement.
One of the great aspects of our Lunch Colloquium series is its variety, and Payson Kennedy's talk certainly was in that vein. It was no surprise to hear about the many Olympians who have trained at the Nantahala Outdoor Center, but most of us did not expect to hear stories about riding an elephant that was attacked by a tiger! Thanks to Gretchen Schulz's article below, you can get a flavor of what you missed, if you were not able to attend.
Another major event in our year is the annual Sheth Distinguished Lecture and that is taking place next week. Thanks to the generosity of Jag and Madhu Sheth, not only do we get to hear a great talk in a beautiful space (Governors Hall), but there is a free lunch provided. Please be sure to register so we will have enough food for everyone.
We just learned on Friday of EUEC Member Dick Muth's death. Not only was he one of our founding members, he was one of the fourteen faculty members to sign the original proposal for establishment of the Emeritus College. You can read a tribute to his life and work in the article below.
I am very grateful to John Bugge, Herb Benario, and Gretchen Schulz for help with proofing and editing.
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Sheth Distinguished Lecture--April 23
 Field Notes of a Biographer
Governors Hall
Miller-Ward Alumni House
11:30-1:00
Dana Greene, PhD, Dean Emerita, Oxford College
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Lunch Colloquium Tuesday, April 10
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Awards and Honors Reception, Thursday, April 5
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New Members
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Walking the Campus with Dianne
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Sheth Distinguished Lecture--April 23
Field Notes of a Biographer
Dana Greene, PhD, Dean Emerita, Oxford CollegeIf the original, the primary art, is the art of living, then the telling of a life, biography, matters. What are the merits and demerits of this venerable genre? How does biography affect those who write it? If biography's role is neither adulation nor condemnation, what does it offer the reader? Each of us has been given the chance to compose a life. Can biography help us understand what it is to be human and to live with the limits and seize the opportunities of the human condition? My field notes, smudged and crumpled, tell the story. So says EUEC Member Dana Greene, G 1971 and Dean Emerita of Oxford College, who will share "the story" with us at the Sheth Lecture this year. She is the editor of four volumes, and author of biographies of Evelyn Underhill, Maisie Ward, and Denise Levertov. Her latest biography of a British poet, Elizabeth Jennings: The Inward War, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in September. A New Jersey native and graduate of the College of New Rochelle, Dana Greene served in the Peace Corps in Costa Rica, returned to the United States and completed a PhD at Emory University. For almost thirty years she was on the faculty of St. Mary's College of Maryland and subsequently became the Dean of Oxford College of Emory University. In retirement as dean emerita she served as executive director of the Aquinas Center of Theology at Emory University. Author of three biographies, four edited volumes, and numerous essays and articles, she is a contributing writer for the National Catholic Reporter, and she lectures widely on topics related to biography, spirituality, and poetry. She has presented at the University of London, the Washington National Portrait Gallery, Kings College (London), Emory University, Wesley Theological Seminary, Georgetown University, the Washington National Cathedral, Virginia Theological Seminary, The Atlanta Institute for Spirituality, the Washington Theological Consortium, the Graduate Theological Union (Berkeley), St. Mary's College of Maryland, St. Mary's College (Indiana), The University of St. Thomas, and at many churches. She has led pilgrimages to England and Italy and directed workshops and retreats at Emory University, The Episcopal Divinity School, Washington National Cathedral, the Chelmsford Diocesan House of Retreat (England), and the Centre for Christian Spirituality (Cape Town). Dana Greene is the president of the Evelyn Underhill Association, on the Boards of the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation and formerly of Associates for Religion and Intellectual Life, and is a member of the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality. She is the recipient of many grants, including from the American Historical Association, The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Emory University, The University of Notre Dame, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The American Philosophical Society, The American Theological Library Association, Radcliffe College, Fulbright-Hays, and the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research. She has been given awards by The College of New Rochelle, St. Mary's College of Maryland, and Emory University. She is married to Richard Roesel, and with him is the parent of four adult daughters. The Lecture and Lunch are made possible by a generous donation from Dr. Jagdish and Mrs. Madhu Sheth. A free box lunch is available for all attendees. Please register by clicking here so that we can arrange for enough food for everyone.
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Awards and Honors Reception, Thursday, April 5
Our annual reception was held in the elegant facilities of the Miller-Ward Alumni House and was a great time of celebration and fellowship. Many thanks are due to Dianne Becht for all of her work in putting everything together! The program for the reception may be seen by clicking here. The program began with remarks from Lynn Zimmerman, Senior Vice Provost of Academic Affairs. This was a bittersweet moment, as it represented the last time that Lynn would address us in her capacity as Senior Vice Provost, as she is retiring at the end of the academic year. Emory University has benefited tremendously from her wise and capable leadership in the Office of the Provost. For the past three years her responsibilities have been in Academic Affairs (which include the Emeritus College), and in that time she has been a great supporter and wise counselor. The one upside to her retirement is that we can look forward to her being a member in the Emeritus College!
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| | Wenger, McKay, and Mitchell |
Next up was one of the highlights of the Program: Distinguished Faculty Awards to Katherine Mitchell, Marilynne McKay, and Nanette Wenger. As the program stated,
"The Distinguished Faculty Award recipient is one who has made significant professional contributions since retirement to Emory, its affiliates, and/or communities and professional organizations that reflect the spirit of Emory." Thus these awards celebrate retirement as a time of transition to a new phase of, and not an end to, one's faculty life.
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| | Gretchen Schulz and Katherine Mitchell |
Katherine Mitchell, retired Senior Lecturer in Visual Arts, was nominated by Brenda Bynum and Gretchen Schulz; the award was presented by Gretchen Schulz.
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| | Marilynne McKay and John Bugge |
Marilynne McKay, Professor Emerita of Dermatology, was nominated by John Bugge, who also presented the award.
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| | Nanette Wenger and Virgil Brown |
Nanette Wenger, Professor Emerita of Medicine, was nominated by W. Virgil Brown, who also presented the award.
Note: the next few issues of the newsletter will contain the text of the nominations for the award winners.
Next on the program was recognition of new members and of donors to the Emeritus College in the past year, as well as remembrance of members who had died in the past year. The booklet with all of those names may be seen by clicking here.
We welcomed 50 people who had either joined in the past year or had newly retired! It is a sign of the vitality of the Emeritus College that 26 of those faculty are joining in advance of retirement. One of our missions is to help faculty in the transition to retirement, and there is no better way to make that transition than to begin association with colleagues who have made that transition and are eager to help our new members discover how retirement can be a very fulfilling phase of their faculty life.
There is no requirement that a member make any financial contribution to the Emeritus College in order to be, or remain, a member. Because of that, it is a special privilege to recognize those people who have donated to the Emeritus College in the past year. Their support helps us sustain our vision and mission and there is no way to say thank you enough to our contributors.
The final part of the program was recognition of the 2017 Heilbrun Distinguished Award Recipients. These fellowships offer emeritus faculty in the Arts and Sciences an opportunity for heightened engagement in active research and scholarship.
Michael Elliott, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, recognized each of the recipients after some initial remarks.
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| | Ron Gould and Michael Elliott |
The topic for the fellowship awarded Ron Gould, Goodrich C. White Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, was chorded cycle structure in graphs, saturation in graphs, and spanning trees and degree conditions. He described his proposal in detail in
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| | Larry Taulbee and Michael Elliott |
Larry Taulbee, Associate Professor Emeritus of Political Science, gave his topic the descriptive name of Kein Geld, Kein Schweizer: No Money, No Swiss-- Reflections on the Mercenary Option. His project is described in detail in Volume 3, Issue 18 of the newsletter.
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Lunch Colloquium Tuesday, April 10
Finding Flow: Stories from the Nantahala Outdoor Center
Payson Kennedy, Founder and Retired President of the Nantahala Outdoor Center
Once upon a time there were six little boys growing up in Atlanta, Georgia, busy becoming bigger boys right through the 30s and 40s and beyond, forming friendships in school and church, sharing adventures in sports and Scouts, studying at Emory, as undergrads and/or after, and wooing and wedding little girls who had themselves become bigger girls in that same time period. Last Monday, April 5, 2018, five of these little boys returned to Emory once again to hear the sixth, Payson Kennedy, talk about his experience founding and running the Nantahala Outdoor Center, the subject of the new book he and fellow outdoorsman Greg Hlavaty have coming out at the end of April, NOC Stories: Forty-five Years of Changing Lives at the Nantahala Outdoor Center. One of the group--and one of our own, longtime EUEC member Stuart Roberts--introduced Payson, telling some of what could be told of their growing up together in order to do so. And the others who were also there to celebrate the memories of 50, 60, 70 years ago, along with the wonderful career that followed? They included Jimmy Van Buren, Tolly Williamson, Dickie Hubert, and Horace Holden. If you weren't able to attend yourself, you missed quite a sight, there at the start of the program, as Stuart raised three fingers and began to recite the Boy Scout Oath they'd all taken back in the day. And you missed quite a sound, as "the boys" in the group joined in, the increasing volume clarifying the words they've never forgotten: "On my honor, I will do my best / To do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; / To help other people at all times; / To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight." Lord Baden-Powell himself would surely have approved the lives all of these boys-to-men have lived, not least that that Payson Kennedy himself began to recount once Stuart's introduction had concluded. By the 60s, he had begun to "help other people" via his tenured position in the library at Georgia Tech, doing what he could to automate the system there and throughout the State. And he and his wife, Aurelia, were both involved in advancing the cause of civil rights, as well. But they (and the four kids they had by then) always found time to enjoy the outdoors, especially the whitewater sites around the southeast they visited whenever they could. By the time John Boorman was ready to shoot the movie Deliverance, Payson's reputation as a whitewater specialist was such that Boorman hired him to assist in choosing a locale for the film (they chose the Chatooga), to advise as it got shot--and to serve as a double for Ned Beatty. About the same time (1971), his boyhood friend Horace Holden, another outdoor devotee who was running Camp Chattahoochee, a day camp for Atlanta children, bought the Tote 'n' Tarry Motel (cum café and gas station) on the banks of the Nantahala in North Carolina's Great Smoky Mountains. As reported in a wonderful article about Payson in the Emory Magazine of 1998, and as confirmed by Payson himself as he spoke with us, "[Horace] asked his friends Aurelia and Payson . . . to run the place as a small whitewater canoeing center." And "Payson soon quit his job as a librarian at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Aurelia left hers as a schoolteacher, and they moved with their four children to Wesser, North Carolina" where they soon "launched the Nantahala Outdoor Center (NOC) out of the Tote 'n' Tarry with a few canoes and rafts and a hastily assembled staff of twenty-five friends and fellow whitewater enthusiasts. They offered canoeing instruction and led one raft trip down the river per day." As Payson said, "We were pretty nervous . . . . We were trying something totally new, and we had four teenage children we wanted to send to college." But 1972 was also the year that whitewater canoeing and kayaking became Olympic sports. And it was the year that Deliverance hit the theaters--and was nominated for three Academy Awards. "Whitewater became white hot." And the rest is history--the wonderful history of success that has made the Nantahala Outdoor Center "the nation's leader [and indeed the world's leader] in the whitewater recreation industry," grossing 25 million dollars a year with the activities it sponsors on the Nantahala and on other rivers and in other forests in the southeast and in sites around the world, as well (as far flung as Mexico and Fiji and Nepal).
Of course, we should note, as Payson did, that the fulfillment of his dreams for the NOC was not a matter of millions of dollars made. The money made, from the earliest days until now, has only been a means to an end such as all Boy Scouts and their founder would approve--namely, helping other people to enjoy the kind of inspiring life experience that can make one "physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight"--while enjoying just that sort of experience himself, again and again and again. As Payson explained, what he really values about paddling of all kinds (and other outdoor ventures) is the "flow state" that absorbs one utterly when one's attention is concentrated in such an activity." As he put it in the Emory Magazine article about his decision to leave academe and run the NOC, "I would get completely caught up in these recreational activities. I was conscious of the amount of energy and excitement [they] generated, and . . . I thought it would be really neat to be in work that generated the same degree of enthusiasm [in others--others working with me and others seeking the benefits of our work]."
The book that will be out at the end of April, the aforementioned NOC Stories: Forty-five Years of Changing Lives at the Nantahala Outdoor Center, will confirm that the NOC has indeed changed the lives (of staff and customers alike) just as Payson (and Horace) hoped it might, from the get-go, when they sat about the Tote 'n' Tarry and shared their dreams of what the future might possibly bring. As of now, that future has swept the third generation of their first staff and customers into the "flow state" they offer--the former category including grandchildren of both of these remarkable men, now primo-paddlers (and instructors of others) themselves. I'd say it's pretty clear they have done their duty to God and their country--and helped other people at all times. Wouldn't you? --Gretchen Schulz
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New Members
New members are the lifeblood of any organization. Please make a special effort to welcome them to EUEC!
Keith D. Wilkinson, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry
Affiliate Members
Donna L. Sadler, PhD, Professor Emerita, Art History, Agnes Scott College
The majority of my teaching career has been spent in the Art and Art History Department of Agnes Scott, though I did teach briefly at Texas Christian University, East Carolina University, and Mount Holyoke College. While at Agnes Scott I helped introduce art history into the City of Decatur high school curriculum and won a teaching award from Sears and Roebuck (I lamented the fact that they didn't offer the washer-dryer, though I suppose that would not have looked as impressive on one's CV). My research focuses on medieval sculpture ranging from Reims Cathedral to the art commissioned by Philip the Bold to late medieval sculptures of the Entombment of Christ, and most recently, carved retables. My publications focus on issues of royal and ecclesiastical patronage, performative piety, ritual, dogs in the Middle Ages, and audience reception. My books include Reading the Reverse Façade of Reims Cathedral: Royalty and Ritual in 13th-century France (Ashgate, 2012) (just reissued in paperback by Routledge in 2018); Stone, Flesh, Spirit: The Entombment of Christ in Late Medieval Burgundy and Champagne (Brill, April, 2015); and just published in March, 2018, Touching the Passion---Seeing the Late Medieval Altarpieces through the Eyes of Faith (Brill).
I have one daughter who is an art teacher living in Fort Worth, TX, and have half a house in the medieval quarter of Dijon, France, where I hope to spend more time. In addition to continuing my research on medieval sculpture, I plan on devoting more time to teaching adults how to read and becoming more involved with continuing education opportunities.
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Faculty Activities
We are very grateful for our members who teach at OLLI ( olli.emory.edu). They provide a great service to Emory and to the community of adult learners in Atlanta. Herb Benario taught a course on Jane Austen in the Winter Quarter. For the current Spring Quarter: David Goldsmith is teaching a course on "The History of Photography: A Technological Art" Dorothy Fletcher, Bill Fletcher, and Clark Poling are teaching a course on "Dynamic Art During Turbulent Times: Germany 1900-1933" Brenda Bynum Senior Lecturer Emerita, Department of Theater Studies   An exhibit currently on view at the Woodruff Library on Level 2 titled " Education at Emory in a Changing World," features two EUEC Members: Brenda Bynum and John Stone (who died in 2008). "Unsung Players: Augusta Skeen Cooper and Brenda Bynum," curated by Kate Battaglia and John Gulledge, states that both of the women "significantly impacted the Emory community. While Augusta Skeen Cooper and Brenda Bynum worked within different departments and are decades apart, they illustrate a larger pattern of female figures making strides for gender equality at Emory."
"Matters of the Heart: The Teaching Philosophy of Emory's Poet-Physician, Dr. John Stone," curated by Mary Taylor Mann, demonstrates that "In addition to his career as a physician and teacher, Stone was a studied and published poet, and his poetry, essays, lectures, notes, and pedagogy demonstrate a dedication to an exploration of the relationship between literature and medicine in life and at the bedside."
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In Memoriam
EUEC Member Richard F. (Dick) Muth, Fuller E. Callaway Professor of Economics, Emeritus, passed away on April 10, 2018. Not only was he a founding member of EUEC, he was one of the fourteen faculty signers of the February 1999 "Proposal for an Emeritus College at Emory." His funeral will take place at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday. April 21, 2018, at Oak Grove Methodist Church. The following is a tribute written by Hashem Dezhbakhsh, Goodrich C. White Professor and Chair, Department of Economics:
Richard Muth was born in Chicago on May 14, 1927. He graduated with a BA degree from Washington University in 1950 and a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1958, both in economics. He started his academic career in Washington University, later joining the Cowles Commission, John Hopkins University, and Resources for the Future, before his appointment as an Associate Professor of Urban Economics at the University of Chicago in 1959. He was promoted to full professor in 1966, but he soon left the University of Chicago for Washington University and then Stanford before joining Emory in 1983. At Emory, Professor Muth was appointed Fuller E. Callaway Professor of Economics; he also served as the Department Chair until 1990. He stayed at Emory until his retirement in 2002. For many years after his retirement, he continued to teach, on a voluntary basis, one of his two favorite courses, Economics of Sports, or Housing and Mortgage Markets, every year. His courses were always popular and his students had tremendous respect and admiration for him. Professor Muth was an eminent scholar with an international reputation as a founder of the field of Urban Economics. His numerous papers have appeared in top journals, and his books are classics in this area. His findings have guided urban policy for years. Besides his impressive academic appointments and achievements, Professor Muth also served as policy advisor in various government departments and institutes. His service in this area includes membership on the President's Commission on Housing (1981-82), membership on the Presidential Task Forces on Urban Affairs and on Housing (1980-81), membership on the Presidential Task Force on Urban renewal (1969), membership on the National Research Council on Census Requirements (1992-94), and consultancy for the Defense Department and the Institute for the Defense Analysis, among others. Professor Muth was also an avid and very knowledgeable opera fan who generously shared his expertise and music with colleagues. He loved the Chicago Bears and followed many sports closely. Professor Muth's dry sense of humor was legendary, with students and colleagues alike. He will be sorely missed by all who knew him. You can find details about the service and share condolences with the family by clicking here. Click here to return to top
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Walking the Campus with Dianne
Did anyone recognize the stairway in our last photo? The stairs are located in the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing Building at 1520 Clifton Road (near the CDC). The School of Nursing bears the name of the wife of Robert W. Woodruff. She had been a nurse in training when she married Woodruff in 1917. Although she never pursued a career, she volunteered as a nurse's aide with the American Red Cross in World War I and World War II. She was the first woman on the Emory Hospital Administration Committee. The nursing school was named in her honor in 1967; it moved to its current building in 2001.
 
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Emory University Emeritus College The Luce Center
825 Houston Mill Road NE #206 Atlanta, GA 30329 |
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