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COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY CLASS NOTES
Lee continues to speak on many
campuses about his award-winning
biography, Branch Rickey: Baseball’s
Ferocious Gentleman, and is slated
to talk baseball in December before
Columbia alumni groups in Tampa
and Sarasota, Fla.
After 40 years, Burt Brody is retiring
as professor of physics from
Bard College. He’s keeping his
home upstate (an 1817 farmhouse
overlooking the Hudson) but
spending most of his time residing
in his apartment near Lincoln Center,
enjoying New York City.
Our regular Second Thursday
lunches are a great place to reconnect.
If you’re in NYC, try to make
the next Class of ’63 lunch, scheduled
for December 8, and then on
January 12 and February 9. Check
cc63ers.com for details.
In the meantime, let us know
what you are up to, how you’re
doing and what’s next.
64
Norman Olch
233 Broadway
New York, NY 10279
norman@nolch.com
I write as the first fall chills hit
New York City. But the passing of
summer has its rewards.
The informal, once-a-month
class lunches have resumed. Howard
Jacobson, Fred Kantor, Beril
Lapson, Steve Rodner and Allen
Tobias attended in September and
we discussed everything from
Beril’s three weeks in China to the
resignation of the College dean, all
while enjoying the food and drink
at the Columbia University Club in
Manhattan.
After lunch, walking toward the
subway with Howard and Fred,
I recognized Richard Heffner ’46,
the host of public television’s longrunning
and informative interview
program, Open Mind, which first
broadcast in 1956. As the crowds
pushed past us on the street the
four of us discussed Open Mind
and Columbia.
Remember, we meet for lunch at
12:30 p.m. on the second Thursday
of the month (December 8 this
year), so join us.
Ivan Weissman reports on Class
Day: “On a rainy May day, Howard
Jacobson and I carried our class banner
during Class Day ceremonies.
To our amazement, the flag carriers
received loud cheers from the graduates.
We also were thrilled to receive
Columbia College ponchos to help
us survive the rain. Five members
of our class had signed up to march,
but the downpour may have kept
our classmates away.”
Richard Muller has published
The Instant Physicist: An Illustrated
Guide, which incorporates material
from his previous book Physics for
Future Presidents: The Science Behind
the Headlines (college.columbia.edu/
cct/jan_feb09/columbia_forum)
and his college lectures to answer
questions about physics with the
use of color cartoons.
Steve Rosenfeld has retired
from his New York law firm, where
he specialized in securities litigation,
and now devotes pro bono
time to representing children in
need of legal assistance. A former
president of the Legal Aid Society,
and a subject of a special New York
Law Journal report “Lawyers Who
Lead by Example,” in 2010, Steve
contributed 630 hours to helping
children. “Representing children
is about as different to what I had
done in my career as you could
imagine. I still wanted to be a lawyer
when I retired, but I wanted
to do something entirely different.
Of all the things Legal Aid does, I
thought that children, and particularly
children in neglect cases, are
among the most vulnerable and
most in need of representation.”
Steve also is chair of New York
City’s Conflict of Interest Board and
chair of the Board of Visitors at the
CUNY School of Law. “For the sixth
straight year, New York attorneys
have named me a ‘Superlawyer’ for
appeals,” Steve says. “Because this
comes from my peers, I am greatly
honored.”
In the late spring my wife, Jacqueline,
and I spent 10 days traveling
through Virginia’s Shenandoah
Valley. It was a wonderful trip filled
with history and beautiful vistas.
We even learned that the Charlottesville
area has many vineyards
(Thomas Jefferson purportedly
said Virginia wines could one day
equal those of France). High in the
Allegheny Mountains we bathed
in Jefferson Springs, whose healthy
98-degree mineral waters have been
enjoyed for hundreds of years. It
was all great fun.
Send me a note. We all want to
hear from you.
65
Leonard B. Pack
924 West End Ave.
New York, NY 10025
packlb@aol.com
For some reason, this column has a
particularly literal bent, as the items
below were gathered from publicly
available information. Future appearances
of this column will be
enlivened if you would write to me
at packlb@aol.com giving me news
of your personal doings.
Jeffrey Bell has a new book out,
The Case for Polarized Politics: Why
America Needs Social Conservatism.
It is scheduled to be published by
the time this issue of CCT reaches
you. According to the publisher’s
description, Jeffrey argues that
WINTER 2011–12
71
social conservatism is uniquely
American because it is in reality an
outgrowth of American exceptionalism.
It exists here because the
founding principles of the United
States — centering on the belief
that humanity receives its equal
rights directly from God rather than
from government — retain a mass
following among American voters,
even in the wake of abandonment
of belief in America’s theistic
founding by elites and institutions
that once espoused it. Jeff argues
that a worldwide upheaval in the
1960s set the stage for the rise of
social conservatism, which had no
earlier political existence. The 1960s
upheaval resulted in the triumph
of the social agenda of the left,
particularly the sexual revolution,
among elite opinion in the United
States as well as Europe, Japan and
elsewhere. In subsequent decades,
according to Jeff, the global left has
sidelined its century-long drive for
socialism and returned to its late–
18th-century roots in the thought of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the radical
French revolutionaries known as
the Jacobins, who believed human
fulfillment depends on liberation
from most civilized institutions,
particularly organized religion and
the family.
Despite the many predictions of
its demise, social conservatism has
gained and held popular strength
in the United States because of its
roots in a theistic version of the
European enlightenment of the
17th and 18th centuries, which
Jeff describes and analyzes as the
“conservative enlightenment.” It is
a rich, optimistic belief system that
not only dominated the American
founding but also transformed
society in the English-speaking
world and remains an attractive
alternative in the eyes of many of
the world’s peoples — certainly
in comparison to the competing
universalisms advocated by the
left enlightenment and by the
anti-egalitarian Islamic revival.
The ability of social conservatism
and of its parent, the conservative
enlightenment, to revive and
spread this natural law-centered
democratic vision could reshape
the battle of ideas that increasingly
defines our post-Cold War world.
Last June, Jeff spoke before a
Tea Party rally in Iowa. He said to
them, “The people of Iowa have
changed our politics. Iowa helps to
shape the national debate not only
because you are the first state, but
because caucus-goers are extremely
well-informed.” Jeff urged Iowans
to get informed and learn how to
organize and participate in politics.
“It’s up to you. You are the type of
people who have changed politics
in this country the past 30 years. It’s
urgent. You can change the country
and you can change the world.”
According to Publishers Lunch,
David Denby is working on a new
book, set in a public high school,
about how reading and engaging
with literature can build character
and create good citizens, and
what teachers and parents can
do to spark students’ passion for
reading. We all recall how David’s
Great Books chronicled his return to
Columbia for the Core Curriculum.
We certainly look forward to
David’s next work.
Niles Eldredge was featured in
a recent blog by Ritchie Annand
(blogs.nimblebrain.net, search for
“Niles Eldredge”). Niles is a proponent
of “punctuated equilibrium”
in the evolution of species, meaning
that evolution happens in fits
and starts instead of smoothly. In a
Los Angeles Times article, “Alternate
Theory of Evolution Considered,”
which appeared in 1978, Niles
was quoted as saying, “If life had
evolved into the wondrous profusion
of creatures little by little, then
there should be some fossiliferous
record of those changes; that is, one
would expect to find transitional
creatures that were a little bit like
what went before them and a little
bit like what came after them.
“But no one has found any evidence
of such in-between creatures.
This was long chalked up to ‘gaps’
in fossil records, gaps that proponents
of gradualism confidently
expected to fill in someday when
rock strata of the proper antiquity
were eventually located.
“But all of the fossil evidence
to date has failed to turn up any
such missing links, and there is a
growing conviction among many
scientists that these transitional
forms never existed. And if this
is so, then the gradualist view of
evolution is an inaccurate portrayal
of how life developed.”
The blogger points out that creationists
have quoted Niles’ article
What’s Your Story?
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