More news of Yale people

Honored

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences conferred the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal on four alumni in October: cultural critic Fredric Jameson ’59PhD, the William A. Lane Jr. Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University; biologist Alan M. Lambowitz ’72PhD, head of the Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology at the University of Texas, Austin; political theorist Theodore Lowi ’61PhD, the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions at Cornell University; and editor/publisher Annette Thomas ’93PhD, CEO of Macmillan Publishers, Ltd.

Remembered

Calhoun College dean Leslie Woodard died unexpectedly in her home on October 14. She was 53. Woodard, who taught creative fiction, was the author of a collection of short stories and was writing a novel drawn from her years with the Dance Theater of Harlem. She had been dean of Calhoun since 2007. “She saw all the good things in people and brought them out,” freshman counselor Terrence Chin-Loy ’14 told the Yale Daily News. Yale College dean Mary Miller ’81PhD said Woodard’s death is believed to have been from natural causes.

Gabe Palmer

View full image

Alvin Eisenman, who founded the nation’s first graduate program in graphic design at the Yale School of Art, died at his home on Martha’s Vineyard on September 3. He was 92 years old. Eisenman came to Yale in 1951 as a professor and design director for the Yale University Press. He taught for more than 40 years, introducing generations of designers to the meticulous minimalism of Swiss modern typography.

Manson Whitlock, who kept Yale and New Haven typewriters in working order for more than eight decades, died on August 28 at the age of 96. He had been working in his York Street shop as recently as June. In an article in this magazine in January, Whitlock remembered when he had six assistants and “sold ribbons by the thousands” to countless Yale students, faculty, and staff.

Former Yale provost Charles Taylor ’50, ’55PhD, died in Paris on September 25 of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. He was 84. An English professor, he became provost in 1963. He was seen as a possible successor to President Kingman Brewster Jr. ’41, but he resigned in 1972 for a midlife career change, enrolling at the C. F. Jung Institute in New York to become a psychoanalyst.