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FEBRUARY 2 0 0 2 Alumni News
News Associates: Jeanne Johnson, Emily Richards
Send email to
Nancy Grasmick, SPSBE '79 (EdD)
Nancy S. Grasmick has been immersed for four decades in
Maryland's most scrutinized institution, the public school
system, and for the last decade she has been its chief.
Still, when she needed a respite recently she drove from her
downtown Baltimore office for yet another school visit. This
was a special one, to Baltimore City's Windsor Hills
Elementary--the school she attended as a child.
"It was wonderful when I attended," she says of P.S. 87. Her
verdict after the visit? "It still looks wonderful."
Grasmick's 10-year tenure in the usually volatile post of
superintendent of schools is bound up with the issues of
reviving the state's most troubled school system, in
Baltimore City, and, more globally, with an intensely
debated testing program, the Maryland State Performance
Assessment Program. The MSPAP is at the center of her
efforts to measure schools' and students' achievement of
established standards and hence to render education
accountable to the citizenry.
Students throughout Maryland currently take the tests in the
third, fifth, and eighth grades, and the program will soon
be extended to include high school students. The MSPAP is
designed to measure capacities for learning in the major
subjects rather than simply retention. Students work on some
problems in groups and answer in essays. "This is not just
fill-in-the-bubble," says Grasmick. Performance is evaluated
by school, rather than by the individual student, and state
funds are allocated to schools that prove neediest. If
improvement is still not forthcoming, the school comes under
state intervention.
But the program has earned plaudits, as well: The
professional bible Education Week, in a massive evaluation
of each state's school improvement efforts, found Maryland's
first in standards and accountability. Grasmick was awarded
the 2000 Harold W. McGraw Jr. Prize in Education, $25,000,
"for her work in developing effective programs to improve
teaching and learning at all levels." Texan Rod Paige, one
of the two other 2000 winners, is now U.S. secretary of
education.
When Grasmick recalls standardized tests in grade school--
"We were told to eat a good breakfast"--she harks back to a
1950s Baltimore school system that was prosperous and
innovative, "a great system." But as she went on to what was
then Towson State Teachers College and into teaching, she
noted "a slipping of the standards, a disengagement of
parents." Throughout the 1960s and '70s, Baltimore's economy
weakened and its pay scales for teachers failed to
compete.
In 1989, Maryland Governor William Donald Schaefer appointed
another alumnus of P.S. 87, Baltimore civic leader Walter
Sondheim Jr., to chair a commission on education reform.
"Its report was visionary," making clear that Maryland, in
its tradition of local autonomy, "didn't really have a
statewide system," she says.
When Grasmick became superintendent in 1991 she used that
report as her lesson plan. The drive for test-based
accountability became an asset as she faced up to the
continuing crisis of the Baltimore schools, which culminated
in 1997 federal suits against the city system charging it
was failing to provide an adequate education for city
schoolchildren.
The result was a partial state takeover of the city schools,
which Grasmick describes as "collaborative," in contrast to
the "hostile" takeovers that other cities and states have
experienced. Since then, $300 million in additional school
aid has flowed to the city's poorest-performing schools,
generally those in the poorest areas.
Grasmick acknowledges there are still plenty of needs
unfulfilled, but contends that the city-state collaboration
has gone a long way toward fulfilling her own standard: "No
child should be denied a decent education by accident of
where the child lives." --Lew Diuguid (SAIS '63)
Book Review:
Wives in Biblical times were the property of their husbands,
and marriages were business deals transacted by the groom
and the bride's father. In ancient Greece, the bride was not
even present for the exchange of vows; her father pledged
her hand. But within a few centuries, Roman marriages
required the consent of the bride as well as the men in her
life. Looking across the centuries, Yalom traces the legal
evolution of marriage from a financial arrangement to a love
match.
She tells fascinating stories along the way. Even famous
women look different when examined in the role of wife. Anne
Bradstreet, America's first poet, was a Puritan who
nonetheless wrote passionate poems for her husband. Abigail
Adams, wife of the second president, wrote letters to her
husband encouraging him to keep women in mind as he helped
shape the new country's laws.
Lesser-known women are every bit as interesting in their
married lives. Take, for example, Katherina von Bora, a
16th-century nun who left the convent during the
Reformation. (She and eight other nuns hid among herring
barrels on a wagon to escape, against the will of their
families.) Lacking a dowry, von Bora might have been
unmarriageable, but she wed Martin Luther, the father of the
Reformation. "What began as a match of convenience for both
of them eventually turned into a marriage of love," Yalom
writes.
Von Bora became mistress of the monastery at Wittenberg,
which housed dozens of people, including the couple's six
children. She ran the home as a business, complete with an
orchard, a dairy, and a slaughterhouse. And she dealt with
her husband's bouts of depression, which the couple hid from
the public. Critics called her overbearing, but Luther
praised her. "In domestic affairs," he said, "I defer to
Katie. Otherwise I am led by the Holy Ghost."
Through such stories, Yalom examines the progress,
incremental at times, of women's partnership role in
marriage. Laws played a part, as women went from being
property to legal entities who could own property. And she
examines the history of divorce, from Hebrew husbands
handing their wives a bill of divorce because "she finds no
favor in his eyes" to today's no-fault divorces and rising
divorce rate.
Yalom, a senior scholar at Stanford University's Institute
for Research for Women & Gender, brought to the book the
special knowledge of having been married to psychiatrist and
writer Irvin Yalom (who completed his post-graduate
fellowship in psychiatry at Hopkins in 1960) for 47 years.
The couple, who met as teenagers and married eight years
later, makes their home in Northern California. --Eileen
Murphy
At first, Kim Snyder thought she had the flu. "It was
Halloween--October 31, 1994--and I woke up in the morning
with aches and pains and a low grade fever," says Snyder. At
the time she was working in Baltimore as assistant to the
producer on the Jodie Foster feature film, Home for the
Holidays. "I thought a few days of this and I'll be fine."
She soon returned to work, only to collapse during filming.
Nine months later, Snyder was completely bedridden with an
illness that her doctors were unable to identify. "It was
like a horrible flu, but coupled with enormous pain," says
Snyder. "I would lie in bed hunched in a fetal position for
days on end."
Nearly a year after falling ill, she returned to Baltimore,
where doctors at Hopkins Hospital were finally able to give
her a diagnosis: chronic fatigue syndrome, or CFS, a
little-understood disease sometimes disparagingly called the
"yuppie flu," which is thought to affect as many as half a
million Americans. Because researchers have been unable to
isolate a cause or even precisely define the symptoms, CFS
is medically controversial. Some physicians have denied the
syndrome exists.
Snyder suffered three years of serious disability from her
illness. Even today, more than seven years after it first
appeared, she continues to feel aftereffects. Like about
half of all CFS sufferers, she has very slowly gotten better
but is still recovering. Yet even during the depths of her
illness, the medical mystery of CFS and its surrounding
controversy fascinated Snyder. "The storyteller part of me
was intrigued. The more I learned, the more I wanted to tell
people about it."
Eventually she went on to write, produce, and direct her
first film, I Remember Me. The searing documentary
examination of CFS from both a personal and societal
perspective has won awards and recognition at film festivals
in Denver, New York, and Sarasota, Florida. In November, the
film opened for a limited engagement run in New York City
and followed with openings in art-house cinemas across the
nation.
Starting with a mysterious outbreak of a flu-like disease
that afflicted more than 300 people in Lake Tahoe, Nevada,
in the mid-1980s, Snyder's film explores how the illness was
identified and subsequently disregarded by some in the
medical profession. Although the Centers for Disease Control
named the malady Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in 1988, critics
contend the federal agency has been largely unresponsive to
the illness. There has been relatively little research
funding, and some of the funds appropriated were spent on
other, unrelated projects, prompting a Congressional
investigation. As Snyder moves from the historical context
to the details of her own personal story, she captures the
frustration and, at times, outright hostility that CFS
groups feel toward the CDC and those researchers who dismiss
the seriousness of the illness.
"I've tried to create a documentary that has the feel of a
feature film," says Snyder of her directorial debut. "I like
documentaries that have a story arc. I tried to give a
feeling of someone who has somehow fallen into this world
and feels compelled to investigate, almost like Homer's
Odyssey."
Along the way, Snyder stops to interview film director Blake
Edwards, who has suffered from CFS for many years. She
visits a small town in Florida that may have had an outbreak
of the disease in 1956, and talks to survivors who vividly
recall the disease and how it affected their lives for years
thereafter. Snyder even manages to track down and interview
the young research scientist who was the CDC's chief
investigator of the 1956 event, former Johns Hopkins School
of Public Health dean D. A. Henderson, who recalls the
concern he and other researchers felt in confronting what
appeared to be an infectious disease, the cause of which
could not be identified. In the last half of the film, she
interweaves personal narrative and interviews with CFS
patients with the story of Stephen Paganetti, a Connecticut
teenager ill since the 10th grade who rides an ambulance to
his high school graduation, which he attends lying flat on a
gurney. His participation becomes, in effect, a celebration
of the human will.
"What I think this film explores is the ability to create
meaning and a sense of purpose in the midst of suffering,"
Snyder says. "When the name Chronic Fatigue Syndrome was
coined it touched a raw nerve among many in the general
population who feel themselves tired and overworked. It
sounded as if a new disease had been created specifically as
a way of letting some people step off the fast track. But in
reality this is a terrible and painful disease that has an
enormous impact on its sufferers, their families, and
friends. I wanted to try to give them a voice. It's
important for people not to be invisible in their
suffering." --Mike Field
Alfred Feldman, Engr '78 (MS)
"It bothers me a lot that people disappeared [in the
Holocaust] and nobody knows about them. Most are completely
lost. There's no memory, no nothing." As his own
contribution Feldman has written a book, One Step Ahead: A
Jewish Fugitive in Hitler's Europe, published in November by
the Southern Illinois University Press. A chronicle of his
family's flight from the Nazis through Vichy France into
fascist Italy, it is the story of how he and his father
survived the war that claimed the lives of their loved ones.
"It's a memorial to my family," says Feldman, who in 1990
retired from his career in chemistry and computers at the
National Institutes of Health. He spent the better part of
the following decade researching and writing the book.
At the outbreak of the war, Feldman, his parents, and three
sisters were living in Antwerp, where his father worked for
a German ore company. In May of 1940, as Nazi storm troopers
overran Belgium and the Netherlands, and Panzer divisions
raced across France, the Feldmans fled first west, then
south, sometimes only miles ahead of the invading armies.
Eventually they made it to Montagnac, in the unoccupied part
of France controlled by the Germans through the
collaborationist Vichy regime of Henri-Philippe Petain. Part
of a sizable contingent of Jewish refugees from all over
Europe, the family was able to survive for a time tending
vines and doing other agricultural work. But gradually more
and more restrictions were placed on Jews, particularly
refugees.
Feldman and his father spent the next three years on the
run, eventually making a perilous crossing of the Alps into
Italy. In their efforts to avoid capture by the Nazis and
Italian Fascists, he and other Jews were aided by the local
peasants. The resistance of the Italian country people is
something that until recently has received only scant
attention. Feldman hopes his book will help illuminate some
uncommon acts of bravery and kindness that literally saved
his life.
Says the author, "If it had not been for other people, no
one would have been saved." --Mike Field
Reaching Out to the Children of
September 11
Faculty and staff are also contributing to a separate
scholarship fund initiated by the dean, called the September
Eleven Memorial Scholarship Fund. Faculty and staff are
asked to make contributions, which will be matched by
Krieger School monies. "What these six alumni [who died] had
in common--both with one another and with us as Krieger
School faculty and staff members--was their Hopkins
experience," wrote the dean in a letter to all faculty and
staff. "It seems appropriate, therefore, that a tribute to
them would make that shared Hopkins experience accessible to
other young people." --ER
Constructive Capitalism: A New Initiative
at SAIS
As I spend time on college campuses, I find an anti-business
bias among many faculty members. This bias is not
universal, but general enough to be disturbing. The
perception is that CEOs are committed only to the bottom
line, are seemingly indifferent to the human cost of staff
reductions and plant closings, avoid environmental issues in
favor of profitability, and advocate for tax reductions
over societal concerns. This picture is not representative
of top business leaders I know.
There do exist in our society pockets of inequality,
poverty, inadequate education, and poor health and
environmental conditions. On the other hand, we have in
recent years seen the creation of new industries, millions
of new jobs, greater access to medical and educational
benefits, and social justice as never before. And American
businesses are certainly among the leading contributors to
the progress.
Why did I choose SAIS?
No one solicited my support on behalf of the School. I
sought out SAIS because I wanted to have an impact on our
society, government, and the world economy. I chose SAIS for
four reasons.
One is relevancy. SAIS is shaping the debate, it's part of
the national debate. The school addresses real issues in
real time. It is not a purely academic institution, but a
world institution that's in the real world taking on real
issues.
Second, SAIS is in the center of influence, the center of
power: Washington, D.C. There's a strong relationship
between SAIS and people in the government who are making
policies. Graduates and faculty and former faculty are
working there. They have access to centers of influence.
Other graduate schools or think-tanks are not as well
positioned. The relationship that SAIS has to the center of
power is a very important differentiator.
Third, SAIS has a world vision--an integrated global and
national view, leading to insights based on actual
experience.
And last, there is an aura of excellence, not only about
Johns Hopkins but about SAIS. The Nitze School is a
first-class performer on the stage of excellence.
When you put those elements together, I see a difference
between SAIS and almost every other like institution around
the country. I came to SAIS because I wanted to have an
impact. I came because SAIS has something of great value to
offer.
"Democracy and free markets will continue to expand over
time as the dominant organizing principles for much of the
world," according to Francis Fukuyama, the Bernard L.
Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at
SAIS and author of the international best-seller The End of
History and the Last Man. "Modernity is a very powerful
freight train that will not be derailed by recent events,
however painful and unprecedented," he wrote recently in the
Wall Street Journal.
Fukuyama, who joined the SAIS faculty in 2001, a year
earlier inaugurated the Forum on Constructive Capitalism
with a discussion of globalization's relationship to social
capital, defined as the ability of people to cooperate in
groups based on their sharing of common norms and values.
The forum has also featured:
Bernard Schwartz, whose generous support led to the creation
of both the forum and the Schwartz Professorship at SAIS,
said at the inaugural lecture: "It is important for
Americans to understand that we are not out to win over the
world but--hopefully--to bring better progress to it and to
our country as well."
Memories
When Peabody alumnus George Steiner harks back to the days
when women first joined the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, he
chuckles and notes that the biggest concern was, "My God,
what will they wear?" Steiner, Peab '38, '40 (MM), shared
his reminiscences recently with Peabody Institute archivist
Elizabeth Schaaf, who is collecting Peabody oral histories
for a new project, Homecoming.
Homecoming is the brainchild of Schaaf and the Steering and
Homecoming Committees of the Peabody Alumni Council. At a
meeting last year, members of the Peabody Alumni Steering
Committee mourned the recent loss of an elderly alumna.
"We were talking about how sad it was that we didn't get a
chance to record her memories and stories," says Deborah
Kent, Peab '94 (DMA), chair of the Steering Committee. The
project will record the memories of alumni selected jointly
by Schaaf and the Alumni Council. Interviewers include
Schaaf and a handful of trained alumni volunteers, including
Kent.
When asked about anti-German sentiment in the music world
during World War II, Irving Cooperstein, Peab '34, SPSBE
'41, said, "The only contact I had with Germans in those
days was when we did The Messiah with a German singing
society. In those days about a third of the orchestra was
Jewish. We came into the hall for rehearsal with one of
these [German] groups, we sat down, and we saw a swastika
hanging down over the choral terrace among all these flags.
At that, Gittleson, who was the concertmaster and a very
fine violinist, he just got up and walked out. We all walked
out."
These tales of societal strife, of pivotal historical
moments (like racial integration, for instance), are only
part of what Homecoming will collect and preserve. The
other
aspect of the project looks toward the future, with
interviews with recent alumni that will explore the
transition from student to professional.
Two hundred years from now, historians will have a firsthand
account of 21st century Baltimore, Peabody, music, and
education, all through the lives of a handful of alumni who
participate in the project. --ER
The Johns Hopkins Alumni Council includes 150 people from
every division of the University and nearly 30 states. The
group's mission: to promote the welfare of the University,
broaden and sustain friendships among its alumni, and
stimulate alumni interest in Johns Hopkins.
Council members, who serve for up to two consecutive
three-year terms, meet on the Homewood campus one weekend
each October.
"We started out as a by-alumni-for-alumni organization, but
now we're expanding, reaching out to students, who are our
future alumni," says Council President Idy Iglehart, Med
'83. Last year, the Council awarded nearly $40,000 in grants
to student groups for projects ranging from community
outreach programs to Breast Cancer Awareness Day to the
prestigious Milton S. Eisenhower Symposium.
In March, Iglehart and Fritz Schroeder, executive director
of alumni relations, will convene the first Johns Hopkins
European Alumni Leadership Conference in Brussels. --ER
Chapter Chatter
In early December, 30 Johns Hopkins alumni and guests
attended the Van Gogh and Gauguin exhibit at the Art
Institute of Chicago. Hugely popular, the exhibit appeared
nowhere else in the United States.
The Chicago Chapter can add this event to a long list of smash
hits in its recent past, including a dinner lecture last spring
with Hopkins Associate Dean Steven David discussing Middle East
issues; the sell-out Hopkins Day at Wrigley Field, where the Cubs
defeated the Mets; and the popular annual Student Send-off
party.
For information about upcoming events in Chicago, send an
email to
chicago.alum@jhu.edu.
Recognizes personal, professional, or humanitarian
achievement
Recognizes outstanding service to the Johns Hopkins
University
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The Johns Hopkins Magazine | The Johns Hopkins University |
3003 North Charles Street | Suite 100 | Baltimore, Maryland 21218 | Phone 410.516.7645 | Fax 410.516.5251 |
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Nancy Grasmick makes more than 100 school visits each
year.
The testing system has drawn the ire of some teachers and
parents, who argue that too much valuable instructional time
is spent "teaching" to the test. And those who prize local
autonomy of schools resent the idea of the state taking over
poor performing schools.
In her fifth book, The History of the Wife, Marilyn Yalom,
A&S '63 (PhD), chronicles the changing role of married women
from Biblical times to the present. Given the enormity of
changes in marriage and gender relations, readers might
expect Yalom to focus on recent trends. In fact, the author
devotes only the last chapter to the past 50 years. As Yalom
shows, the previous 2,000 years trounce contemporary events
in terms of progress and reversals.
The Bride's Kimono by Sujata Massey, A&S '86,
HarperCollins (2001)
Faith of Our Mothers, The Stories of Presidential Mothers
from Mary Washington to Barbara Bush by Harold I. Gullan,
A&S '53, William B. Eerdmans Publishing (2001)
Like many other survivors of the Holocaust, Alfred Feldman
experienced the tragedy of September 11 in a very personal
way. "There is a particular sense of loss when you are
unable to find the remains," says Feldman, whose mother,
sisters, and other relatives perished at Auschwitz.
Then, in August of 1942, word came that the government was
rounding up the able-bodied men for deportation to work
camps. Feldman went into hiding while his father, who was
too sick to transport, and his mother and sisters remained
home. A local farmer and his wife fed and cared for the
young man for several days as he hid atop their concrete
wine vat. He eventually returned home, only to discover that
while the police had indeed spared his father they
unexpectedly had taken his mother and sisters. He would
never see them again. Many years later, he was able to find
their names on a German manifest of a train transport that
left Paris on September 11, 1942, and arrived in Auschwitz
two days later. Of the more than one thousand deportees on
board, only 13 survived the war.
In early November, the widows of the six Hopkins alumni who
were killed in the September 11 terrorist attacks on America
received a letter of condolence from Richard McCarty, dean
of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. McCarty offered
his sympathy and support--and also extended an offer of full
tuition Hopkins scholarships for the children (five in all,
ranging from 1 to 8 years of age) of the men killed.
To counter the prejudice against business, I believe our
campuses should be exposed to a more balanced view--not an
apologia or defense, but a fair and balanced debate leading
to a sound national commitment to economic growth and social
justice. And so I decided to establish the Forum on
Constructive Capitalism and a professorship of political
economy at the Johns Hopkins University Nitze School of
Advanced International Studies. 
"You can talk to almost anybody who's been around Peabody
and get a great story," says Kent, "and a different version
of that story," she adds with a laugh. "Homecoming is our
attempt to reach out and preserve all these stories, and it
will go on as long as we can find people with interesting
ones to tell."
Morton M. Mower, A&S '55, a renowned cardiologist,
co-invented the implantable cardiac defibrillator, first
used at Hopkins. He served on the Hopkins faculty for 20
years and at Sinai Hospital as chief of cardiology. He now
heads his own research firm and consults on the design of
cardiovascular devices.
Robert B. Welch, Med '53, has been an esteemed
ophthalmologist with the Wilmer Eye Institute and School of
Medicine faculty for more than 40 years. During that time
he has substantially advanced clinical diagnosis and
surgical treatment of eye disorders. He recently published
a 400-page history of the Wilmer Institute, The Wilmer
Ophthalmological Institute, 1925-2000, The First 75
Years.
Albert G. Laverty, Engr '53, is a generous advocate for
Johns Hopkins and its Whiting School of Engineering. He is a
charter member of the Society of Engineering Alumni, has
hosted Hopkins events in the Houston area, and serves on the
executive committee of the University's Alumni Council.