College of the Liberal Arts Electronic Magazine, Issue 6

Issue 6, 5/20/02

Contents:

Hemingway Project

Professor Robert N. Proctor

German Ambassador Visits

College of the Liberal Arts

Alumni Relations and Development

CLAFLIN AND ROCK NAMED 2002 DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI

In June 2002, Penn State’s Board of Trustees will confer upon Bruce Claflin and Douglas L. Rock the University’s highest alumni honor, the Distinguished Alumni Award.

    Bruce Claflin of Palo Alto, CA, is a remarkably successful business professional and original thinker in the competitive field of computer technology who has kept strong ties to Penn State. He graduated from Penn State with a bachelor of arts degree in political science in 1973. He has maintained a strong connection ever since, through a career that has taken him to IBM, Digital Equipment Corp., and now 3Com. In 1998, he received the distinction of Alumni Fellow.
    Claflin’s rise in the business world has been meteoric: in just five years he went from general manager, products and brand management of IBM’s personal computer unit to 3Com Corporation’s president and CEO. Not least among his accomplishments was his key role in the introduction of IBM’s wildly successful ThinkPad line of products as well
as transforming Digital and 3Com.
    Since 2001, he has served as chief executive officer and president of 3Com Corporation, Santa Clara, CA, which produces networking products and solutions for enterprise and telecommunications customers. Claflin originally joined 3Com as president and chief operating officer in 1998. Previously, Claflin had served as senior vice president and general manager, sales and marketing for Digital Equipment Corporation where he had also served as vice president and general manager of the Personal Computer Business Unit. Claflin was also an executive officer of the company and Executive Committee member.
    His distinguished career in the field of technology began with a twenty-two-year run with IBM, where he held sales, marketing, and general management positions, including assistant group executive and general manager responsible for all of IBM’s operations in Asia and South Pacific, excluding Japan. In 1992, he joined IBM’s PC Company as general manager of mobile computing. Later he held the positions of president, PC Company Americas and general manager, Products and Brand Management.
    Claflin has been a consistent supporter of Penn State over many years. At present, he is a member of the College of the Liberal Arts’ Grand Destiny Campaign Committee through which he provides significant advice and support to the college as well as other areas at Penn State.
    He has played a leadership role in leveraging support for Penn State. While at IBM, he oversaw the shared university research program, during which IBM granted several million dollars of cash and equipment to support research initiatives in the interest of Penn State and IBM. Through Claflin’s advocacy at IBM, they provided more than $200,000 in equipment for the Center for Language Acquisition. 3Com is also a major contributor to the College of Information Sciences and Technology, providing a grant of cash and equipment worth $1.5 million. Of his support of the University, Claflin has said, “I hope my involvement improves the quality of education, resulting in more learned and capable students graduating from the University.”
    Claflin also gives dedicated service as a member of the board of directors of Time Warner Telecom, as well as his own company’s board.
He is married to Kerry with whom he enjoys a family of three children: Christopher, Elizabeth, and Amy.

    Douglas L. Rock of The Woodlands, TX, is a national leader in the energy industry and a philanthropic pioneer at Penn State. Rock graduated from Penn State with a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1968. He also attended the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business Administration.
    He is president, CEO, and chairman of Smith International, Inc. (SII: NYSE), Houston, TX, a supplier of products and services to the oil and gas exploration and production industry, the petrochemical industry, and other industrial markets. Rock has been with Smith International since 1974. Before becoming president in 1987, he served as president of both the Smith Tool and the Drilco divisions as well as vice president in charge of research and engineering and of manufacturing at Smith Tool. He was named chief executive officer in 1989 and chairman of the board in 1991.
    Rock’s contributions to Smith International have been enormous. In 1986 the company faced huge challenges—it had declared chapter 11 bankruptcy. Through Rock’s leadership the company sold some of its holdings and invested in others to regain Fortune 500 status.
    Well known for his conscientious and innovative approach to business, Rock pursues a vision to drill for oil and gas without throwing anything away—leaving an environmentally responsible “small footprint.” Such an approach is almost unheard of in those third-world areas where environmental regulations are lax. In addition, he has established a worldwide ethics hotline for Smith International. Under this successful program, employees may call to speak to an ethics officer not employed by the company; he wanted employees to feel they had a neutral place where they could air grievances, report unethical behavior, or simply ask questions. In addition, through Rock’s advocacy, Smith International has contributed significantly to engineering science and mechanical research at Penn State.
    Rock has received considerable honor for his work and was designated one of Worth magazine’s 50 best CEOS, 2001. Rock is former chairman of the Petroleum Equipment Suppliers Association, and is currently vice chairman of the American Petroleum Institutes General Membership Committee.
    He believes that his education in Liberal Arts from Penn State is the cornerstone of his success in the business world. As a member of both the Development Council for the Liberal Arts and that college’s Grand Destiny Campaign Committee, he has brought the ethics, insight, and commitment for which he is famous in his profession to bear upon University life. The College of the Liberal Arts named Rock an Alumni Fellow in 1995.
    His $5 million endowment of the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State underscores Rock’s commitment to ethical action. The institute will enable faculty to educate students across all disciplines in “moral literacy”—a concept that encompasses the ability to recognize moral issues, think rationally about them, and formulate and critically support responses to contemporary moral and ethical dilemmas. Rock endowed the institute because he believes that Penn State must provide its students not simply with knowledge but also develop their wisdom and character. Says Rock, “I hope that our work will contribute to a better, more humane world, one in which barriers between different educational and political spheres are broken down so that real dialogues occur.”
    Rock's family includes wife, Julie, a son, Jason, a stepdaughter, Alisson, and three grandchildren.

SPANIER TO HEAD HEMINGWAY LETTERS PROJECT

    A long-term project has begun to publish the complete letters of Ernest Hemingway. The project, a cooperative venture of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation, Hemingway’s family, and Penn State, will be directed by general editor Sandra Spanier, associate professor of English at the University.
    Spanier will be responsible for editing and annotating all of Hemingway’s correspondence, a collection estimated to be 8,000 to10,000 letters strong, for publication in a multi-volume edition. She will coordinate an international team of scholars in this effort. In addition, a single-volume edition of selected letters will be published with the general public in mind. The undertaking will be known as the Hemingway Letters Project at Penn State.
    “I’m very pleased to see this project is being undertaken because so much of Ernest Hemingway is in his letters,” comments Ernest Hemingway’s only surviving son, Patrick, about the project. “He had many friends and devoted a great deal of time writing to his friends, and for this reason his letters give a very complete account of the twentieth century.”
    Through the years, Hemingway’s letters have been carefully guarded. Only two books of selected letters have ever been published, and about 90 percent of his letters are as yet unpublished. “Hemingway once said that his letters were ‘often libelous, always indiscreet and often obscene,’” says Spanier. “These are private writings, unguarded and uncensored. They capture his emotions in the heat of the moment, and reveal a far more interesting and complex personality than one might expect from Hemingway’s public persona. Sometimes he would vent his anger in a letter and then not send it—usually wisely. He could be vulnerable, tender, critical, and self-critical, and he could be wickedly funny.”
    For the complete story by Amy Neil, click here.

PROFESSOR ROBERT N. PROCTOR NAMED FELLOW OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

    Robert N. Proctor, Ferree Professor of the History of Science, has been named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Proctor specializes in twentieth century science, technology, and medicine, and controversy in those fields—including what he terms the cultural production of ignorance (agnatology).
    Proctor is internationally known for his research on the political history and philosophy of science, including environmental policy, bioethics, and the history of German and American anthropology and racial theory. The author of Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Harvard University Press, 1988) Value-Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge (Harvard, 1991), Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don't Know About Cancer (Basic Books, 1995), and The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton University Press, 1999), Proctor says he is presently “working on a book on Darwin, a book on human origins, and a book on figured stones and the secular sacred in popular rockhounding.”
    Proctor is also co-director of the Science, Medicine and Technology in Culture initiative (SMTC) at Penn State. SMTC is a diverse group of faculty and graduate students from Penn State’s departments of History, English, Philosophy, Anthropology, Women’s Studies, as well as various departments of the life and physical sciences dedicated to exploring the history, rhetoric, philosophy, and broader culture of science, technology, and medicine from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives. SMTC recently won a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to support graduate fellowships and postdoctoral fellowships in the field of gender, science, and medicine.
    Proctor was elected into the Academy as a member of the 2002 class, a class of 177 Fellows and 30 Foreign Honorary Members which includes a Senator, four college presidents, three Nobel Prize winners, six Pulitzer Prize winners, three MacArthur Fellows and six Guggenheim fellows. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, violinist Itzhak Perlman, Academy Award winner Anjelica Huston, author and physician Oliver Sacks, and Nobel Prize winning chemist George Olah are among this year’s new Fellows. This year’s Foreign Honorary Members include novelist Milan Kundera; Nobel Prize winning author Kenzaburo Oe; and Lord Anthony P. Lester, president of the International Centre for the Legal Protection of Human Rights.

GERMAN AMBASSADOR VISITS PENN STATE’S DEPARTMENT

On April 9, 2002, Wolfgang Ischinger, the German Ambassador to the United States, visited Penn State at the invitation of the Office of International Programs. In the afternoon, he spent an hour at the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, chatting with faculty and students. It was a lively conversation touching on many topics, ranging from the concerns of undergraduate and graduate students to current issues in German and world affairs and to Mr. Ischinger’s daily routine as the highest ranking German diplomat. As a souvenir of his visit to Penn State, Ambassador Ischinger was presented with a poster about the German heritage in Pennsylvania created by professor Jürgen Eichhoff.

DO YOU KNOW?

    For our last issue, we asked the following: "For this issue, the answer to the trivia question can be found on our Web site. Here’s the question: two of our academic units had name changes in the last three years. Who are they?"
    Surprisingly, no one ventured an answer. Therefore, we will keep the question open for one more issue, and meanwhile provide an additional question. The second question is, for whom was Moore Building named?
    Moore Building is currently home to the Department of Psychology.
    As always, we will provide the answer next time, and a prize to the first person to send us the correct answer. And since there are two questions, there will be two prizes.
On the off chance that someone provides us the first correct answer to both questions, we will have to come up with something out of the ordinary to send. Good luck!

PARTIBLE PATERNITY

    In Steve Beckerman’s office, you’ll find, among other things, a hand woven off-white skirt with red threads along the hem and a small rectangle of white and red heavy loin cloth. A wicker basket hangs in one corner. Many of the objects in the book-filled room are remnants of Beckerman’s twenty years spent working with the Bari people of Venezuela.
    An Associate Professor of Anthropology at Penn State, Beckerman has recently collaborated with Paul Valentine from the University of East London, U.K. to co-edit, Cultures of Multiple Fathers, a compilation of essays about the Bari people in South America. What differentiates this team from others like it in the Western World is that “We have empirical data. Others do not. They have studied concepts rather than numbers.”
    Beckerman’s research looks at how Bari children can have more than one biological father. The Baris believe in “partible paternity,” the concept that a child can have more than one biological father and that any man who has intercourse with the mother during her pregnancy is integral to the development of the baby. When it’s time for the child to be born, the woman retreats into the forest with other Bari women. When she returns, she announces to the tribe who the fathers are and those individuals then have an obligation to support the child.
    To investigate this concept, Beckerman and his team spoke with many Bari women about their reproductive lives. They found that 24 percent have a second father for their children and 67 percent have provided a second father for at least of one of their children (they have, on average, about eight children). These findings suggest that children who have a second father fare better than those who do not.
    The Bari are hunted like game by surrounding tribes. Therefore, the women have a one in three chance of being widowed. Because of this risk, it makes sense to have more than one father for her offspring. That way, the kids are more likely to survive. Beckerman explains that having another lover is "the closest thing they have to life insurance.”
    The study challenges the privileging of the traditional two-parent model for families. Beckerman explains. “The accepted belief is that if we trace back evolution to the primates, In truth, the male primate who cares for someone else’s baby is actually helping to continue propagation of the species by protecting the young.”