Alumni Weekend

It was 2 days of alumni events non-stop... for three different schools. In particular two US universities: Franklin College which is in my home-town of Lugano, and Vassar College, my Alma mater.

First of all, the Franklin evening.

A quick word on the college: founded in 1969, it is a liberal arts college with both US and Swiss academic accreditation. It sits on a beautiful hillside over-looking most of Lugano, and boasts one of the world's most loved Italian professors: my mother Ornella Gebhardt.

Friday's event was a social reception with a brief presentation on sustainability projects on campus. I thank Franklin for extending the invitation to me, other than an occasional summer course I did not attend the college myself. The presentation was interesting and I was fully introduced to the great friendliness and diversity of the Franklin student body.

It was a great evening of meeting new people (and seeing a couple of known faces as well), all of whom were friendly, interesting and enthusiastic about their lives. A thoroughly enjoyable night out.

Saturday was the Vassar Sesquicentennial event in London. It was a long but interesting day of talks, presentations and some social time as well.

After a morning coffee we heard opening remarks about Vassar and the Liberal Arts: Then and Now by the woman who was my adviser at the college, Rachel Kitzinger (this woman is one of the main reasons I chose to major in Classical Greek).

I may have to enquire if she will distribute a copy of her speech. She spoke of course about the purpose of a liberal arts education: what the term means and how Vassar evolved throughout the years. She quoted from the Antigone to highlight the complexity of "learning" in higher education. As I am typing from memory I don't have the exact words, but she concluded to the effect of: to each question there are many equally valid answers, all plausible, correct, destructive and irreconcilable.

This was followed by Susan Kuretsky's talk The Transformation of Shadows, about how the tools for teaching history of art have evolved. This incorporated a classroom lecture by Andrew Tallon on the Hagia Sophia using live graphics and 3D modelling.

We broke for a buffet lunch - equally interesting and entertaining as being surrounded by Vassar grads of different eras often is.

The afternoon brought two more lectures and a brief presentation.

We started with Ron Patkus' 40 minute lecture about different version of the front page of Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica over the course of about 150 years. Yes, just this:

It sound so strange and yet it was sincerely interesting. Amazing how much this page can tell you about the author, the publisher, the place and time, and society.

My personal favourite was the edition "for use the by the ladies".

Ellen Silbergeld followed this with a talk on the use of mapping in the field of public health. Again, fascinating points about the use of maps throughout the history of public health, right up to Google as the most successful indicator for predicting flu outbreaks.

I also learned about Darwin's views on women as evolutionarily challenged (I think that's the PC term): "We may also infer from the law of the deviation from averages, that the average mental power in man must be above that of women." (just to choose one quote).

We ended with a brief presentation by the Royal Society's head librarian about the collection he manages.

And here also ends today's post. If I manage to get my hands on Rachel's speech I will link to it here.