More news of Yale people

Yale Public Safety

View full image

Remembered

Gregory Swiantek (left), an officer with the Yale Police Department for 17 years, died of an apparent heart attack on March 12 after responding to multiple high-stress calls. He was 47 years old. Swiantek was honored with a line-of-duty funeral service, with hundreds of officers from Yale and other area departments. “Officer Swiantek was the best of us,” Chief Anthony Campbell ’95, ’09MDiv, told WTNH News. “He exhibited a degree of humanity you’d want from every and any police officer.”

Keith Thomson, who was dean of the Graduate School from 1979 to 1986, died on February 21. He was 86. A native of England who got his PhD in evolutionary biology at Harvard, Thomson was a biology professor at Yale from 1965 to 1987. He was director of the Peabody Museum, where he was also curator of vertebrate zoology, from 1977 to 1979. After stepping down as dean, he led the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia then returned to the UK to be the director of the Oxford University Museum.

Alphonsus J. Mitchell, who was editor of the Yale Alumni Magazine from 1979 to 1986, died on February 15 at Whitney Center in Hamden, Connecticut. He was 93. A graduate of Fordham University, Mitchell served as an Army infantryman in the Korean War before beginning a career in journalism. He worked for the New Haven Register and for Wesleyan University before his tenure at YAM, and he was later director of publications at Fairfield University.

Honored

Eight writers have been honored with the 2025 Windham-Campbell Prize, a $175,000 award inaugurated in 2013 and administered by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. This year’s winners in fiction are Anne Enright (Ireland) and Sigrid Nunez (US); in nonfiction, Rana Dasgupta (UK) and Patricia J. Williams (US); in drama, Matilda Feyisayo Ibini (UK) and Roy Williams (UK); and in poetry, Anthony V. Capildeo (Scotland/Trinidad and Tobago) and Tongo Eisen-Martin (US). The recipients will come to campus in September to speak at the Windham-Campbell Festival.

Stepping down

James Bundy ’95MFA will step down as dean of the David Geffen School of Drama and director of the Yale Repertory Theatre in June 2026. Having been appointed in 2002, Bundy is the longest-serving dean in the drama school’s history and the longest-serving current dean of any of Yale’s schools. During his tenure, the school became tuition-free, thanks to a $150 million gift from David Geffen that resulted in the renaming of the school. Bundy also oversaw the creation of the Binger Center for New Theatre and has helped raise more than $100 million toward a new building for the school.

Jack Callahan ’80, Yale’s senior vice president for operations, plans to retire this year. Callahan, a veteran of private-sector corporations, returned to Yale in 2016 to take on the newly created position, which encompasses facilities, finances, human resources, and other areas. President Maurie McInnis ’96PhD noted that “as Jack oversaw significant, sustained growth, he also demonstrated exceptional agility in the face of unprecedented challenges,” most notably the Covid-19 pandemic.