Newsletter  Volume 6 Issue 10
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Upcoming Events


Lunch Colloquium
Ren Davis
TUESDAY
January 21, 2020


WEBCAST ONLY
Ren Davis
January 21, 2020




Lunch Colloquium
John Banja
February 3, 2020


WEBCAST ONLY
John Banja
February 3, 2020



January 13, 2020

This issue of our newsletter is sent to members and friends of the Emory University Emeritus College (EUEC). I hope the newsletter will help keep you informed about our activities and help you feel connected with our members throughout the U.S.  On the left are links to our website and links to contact either me or the EUEC office.   

 
With best wishes,
Gray 


Gray F. Crouse
Director, EUEC
In this Issue:
DirectorMessage from the Director
 
The interest in, and success of, our Lunch Colloquiums seems to be a recurring message and our first of this year was no exception. Because of the space limitations in our meeting room, we ask that everyone who plans to attend register. There was a great interest in this Colloquium and we twice increased the registration limit to the maximum we thought the room could hold. Even so, there was a waiting list of over 5 people who wanted to register but could not. Those of you who were able to attend realize that we reached our room limit this time! Thanks to Harvey Klehr for a great talk, to Holly York for her excellent summary of the talk that you can read below, and to Don O'Shea for help in getting the recording of this Lunch Colloquium processed so that it can soon be placed on our website. Our Lunch Colloquium next week on Emory's doctors and nurses in WWI also promises to be fascinating, and we look forward to hearing from Ren Davis on that subject.
 
There are some significant changes being made in the next few months to Emory's 403(b) retirement plans, and you will be getting a brochure detailing the changes in the next week. I am grateful to Felicia Smith, Director of Benefits in HR, for meeting with me to discuss these changes so that I can give you a brief summary of what these changes will be. The good news is that these changes will be beneficial and also that if you don't do anything, the changes that will be made to any accounts you have in the 403(b) plans should be fine for you. You can read a summary of these changes below and will get a detailed brochure from HR.
 
Many thanks to Marilynne McKay and Jim Roark for leading a very successful Interdisciplinary Seminar on the South last fall. Marilynne has put together a summary of the topics covered in this seminar that you can read in this and the next newsletter. When the Emeritus College talks about "interdisciplinary" we mean it: represented in the seminar were faculty from three colleges and universities, four schools and colleges within Emory, and disciplines from Physics to Theology!
 
It is always difficult for us to lose members and particularly so when it is someone who has been active in EUEC. Below, we note the death of Sidney Kasfir, who was a Heilbrun Fellowship recipient and later an EUEC Distinguished Faculty Awardee.
           
I am very grateful to Gretchen Schulz, Ann Hartle, and Marge Crouse for help with editing and proofing.  
LCJan21TopLunch Colloquium--Tuesday, January 21






When Emory Doctors Went to War: Honoring the Centennial of the Emory Medical Unit's Service in the  
First World War
 
The Luce Center
Room 130
11:30-1:00 






Ren Davis, Retired Administrator and Consultant, Emory Healthcare. Author of Caring for Atlanta: A History of Emory Crawford Long Hospital 


Click here to read more below about this Lunch Colloquium


LCJan6TopLunch Colloquium--Monday, January 6










The Millionaire Was A Soviet Mole:  
The Twisted Life of David Karr










Harvey Klehr, Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus of Politics and History

 



Changes are Coming to the Emory 403(b) Retirement Plan
 
   
 
If you have funds in Emory's 403(b) Retirement Plan, you will be getting a brochure within the next week that will detail the changes that are being made in the plan and that could affect you. The Emory Retirement Plan uses three vendors: Fidelity, TIAA, and Vanguard. If you have moved your retirement assets so that you no longer have funds in the Emory 403(b) plan, these changes will not affect you. These changes have been discussed with appropriate committees throughout the University, including the University Faculty Council, Employee Council, and Senate (and the University Senate Fringe Benefits Committee). I am particularly grateful to Felicia Smith, Director of Benefits in HR, for also discussing the changes with me.
 
I will very briefly outline below the changes that are being made (you will get a lot of detail in the brochure being mailed to you), but the main point I would like to make is that the changes are very reasonable and that you don't have to make any changes yourself--if you have money invested in funds that are being eliminated, that money will be moved to appropriate choices. There are two significant changes being made: the selection of available funds in which to invest is much more limited, and the costs to administer the plans will be charged as a flat fee, rather than being buried as part of the expense ratio of the funds. Those fees vary by vendor and will range from $8.50 to $11.25 per quarter (i.e. $34 to $45 per year), no matter how much money you have invested with the vendor. Note that the administrative fees you will pay will likely be substantially lower than previously, as the expense ratios of the new funds will generally be significantly less than those of the current funds.
 
Why are these changes being made?
 
Reduction in fund choices
 
There is a very large range in investment knowledge among Emory faculty and staff. We have conducted a number of Retirement Seminars on retirement funding, and many faculty attendees have questions of the type "How much should I have invested in stocks and how much in bonds?" For those of us in that category, it is very daunting to be faced with a large number of investment options. How does one even begin to choose? Although many individuals can afford to have investment advisors who can help them make sophisticated choices, that is not true for many others. There is likely another factor that may have had some influence in the Emory changes. As reported in the April 10, 2017 issue of this newsletter:
 
This plethora of funds spread over three companies, in fact, is the basis of various lawsuits against universities for their savings plans; see  https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/08/18/retirement-plan-lawsuits-could-be-just-beginning for example.  Emory is one of the universities being sued.  There was an article in The Emory Wheel last year about that suit (http://emorywheel.com/emory-sued-over-retirement-plan-fees/) with a link to the filing against Emory (http://emorywheel.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/emory.pdf).  The plaintiffs argue that the large number of investment possibilities tends to increase fund fees, and thus substantially lower investment returns.
 
At that time, many thought that these lawsuits had no chance of success. However, a recent article documents that four universities have made settlements (University of Chicago, Duke University, Brown University, and Vanderbilt University) although admitting no wrongdoing. For whatever reason, the expense ratios of the new funds are generally lower than those of the current funds. For example, Fidelity Contrafund Class K with an expense ratio of 0.73% will map to Fidelity Contrafund K6 with an expense ratio of 0.45%. Although that difference might seem small, if you had $100,000 invested in Fidelity Contrafund, your savings would be $280 per year, considerably larger than the fees that would be charged to your entire investment account with that vendor.
 
Note: If you (or your financial advisor, if you have one) would like more investment options, you will have the choice of opening a self-directed brokerage account with any one of the three vendors. Such accounts would give you a very large array of investment choices.
 
New Fee Structure
 
The reason for instituting a flat fee for fund administration rather than burying the administrative fee in the expense ratio is that the administrative costs do not really scale with the investment size. Moreover, there are a surprisingly large number of employees who have very small accounts with some vendors (less than $1,000 total). In many cases, these small accounts are a result of an employee switching to another vendor soon after beginning 403(b) contributions and never bothering to move the money in the initial account. The flat fee will more accurately account for the administrative costs for these small accounts and will reduce the administrative costs for those with larger balances. Even if you have your investments spread across the three Emory vendors, unless you have small total investments with one of the vendors, you would likely gain with the lower expense ratios and new fee structure.
 
The Bottom Line
 
You don't have to do anything and your funds will be transferred to appropriate choices of new funds and you will likely end up paying less to have your funds administered. One of our members, Peter Sebel, who has an MBA in addition to his MD, has been very helpful in giving retirement seminars on retirement financing. I asked him to look through these changes. Although he cautioned that his advice was worth only what we paid (nothing--thank you Peter!), he stated that the changes "Look okay; the old funds map over to the new funds appropriately. The brokerage window is still available to those who want to go outside the restricted choices."

IDSTopInterdisciplinary Seminar--THE SOUTH--Fall, 2019--Part I


The Interdisciplinary Seminar held this past fall was a great success.  Many thanks to Marilynne McKay and Jim Roark for leading this seminar, and to Marilynne for compiling and writing the summary of the seminar that is presented here and in the next issue.

Click here to read Part I of the report


NewMemTopNew Members




InMemTop


We note the deaths of members Larry Byrd and Sidney Kasfir.



AwardsTopCall for Distinguished Awards Nominations

 

One last reminder that nominations for our EUEC Awards are due January 24.

 

 

Click here to read full details about making nominations, either of someone else or a self-nomination 

 

LCJan21BotLunch Colloquium--Tuesday, January 21

Ren Davis's grandfather, Edward C. Davis, organized Emory's WW1 unit


When Emory Doctors Went to War: Honoring the Centennial of the Emory Medical Unit's Service in the First World War


Ren Davis, Retired Administrator and Consultant, Emory Healthcare. Author of Caring for Atlanta: A History of Emory Crawford Long Hospital

 

Following the United States entry into the Great War in April 1917, the U.S. Army Surgeon General and the American Red Cross called on the country's medical schools and major hospitals to organize units to provide care to the soldiers deploying for combat in France.  Emory University School of Medicine Dean, William Elkin, MD, asked faculty member and military veteran Edward Campbell Davis, MD, the presenter's grandfather, to recruit physicians and nurses and to organize the Emory Medical Unit.  After training at Camp Gordon, the Emory Unit arrived in France in July 1918, and established Base Hospital 43 in the city of Blois.  The hospital would care for over 9,000 patients, earning praise from AEF commander, Gen. John J. Pershing, before returning home in March 1919.  This presentation also will highlight selected medical and surgical advances that arose from the war, and provide a brief overview of the second Emory Unit that served in North Africa and France during World War II.

 

About Ren Davis

 

Ren introduces himself as follows:

 

I am an Emory alumnus [Emory College, 1973] and served in the administrations of Crawford Long and Emory Healthcare from 1976 - 2009, working with Dr. Wadley Glenn, Dan Barker, and John Henry.

 

For the past 30 years, I have been a freelance writer and photographer, working with my wife Helen Davis [Emory DAST, 1989] on many projects.  We currently have seven books in print.  Our book Atlanta's Oakland Cemetery: An Illustrated History and Guide [UGA Press, 2012] received the Georgia Historical Society's 2013 Lilla M. Hawes Award for the most outstanding book published in 2012 on local Georgia history. That same year, it won the Georgia Writers Association's Author of the Year Award in the Specialty Book Category. More recently, our book Landscapes for the People: George Alexander Grant, First Chief Photographer of the National Park Service [UGA Press, 2015] debuted at the Decatur Book Festival and later earned the American Library Association's 2016 INDIEFAB Gold Medal for the most outstanding photography book published in 2015 by an academic or independent press. During the 2016 National Park Service Centennial, we gave presentations about Grant and his work at more than 20 national parks and monuments, as well as the Carter Presidential Library and the National Archives.  

 

In recognition of America's entry in World War I, I have developed a presentation titled "When Emory Doctors Went to War," highlighting the service of the Emory Medical Unit that served in France in 1918 - 19.  The unit was organized by my grandfather, Edward Campbell Davis, MD, who was co-founder of the Davis-Fischer Sanatorium that was later re-chartered as Crawford W. Long Memorial Hospital [now Emory University Hospital Midtown].

 

Ren's article in Emory Magazine may be read by clicking here.

 

Information about the Davises' books can be found on their website:  https://www.davisguides.com/  

 

 

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LCJan6BotLunch Colloquium--Monday, January 6


The Millionaire Was A Soviet Mole: The Twisted Life of David Karr  

Harvey Klehr, Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus of Politics and History
 
During his thirty years of research into the life of David Karr, Harvey Klehr discovered a man of many contradictions: Communist sympathizer and U.S. Office of War Information official, muckraking columnist and PR flack, corporate raider and corporate executive, international businessman and Soviet asset. Like Forrest Gump and Zelig, Karr seemed to pop up at key moments beside significant historical figures, but unlike the stories of these fictional characters, his story is one of "worldly success corroding the soul." He was variously described as "one of the good guys," "slightly pathological, slightly slimy," and "a vicious, vile scoundrel who worked both ends against the middle."
 
Born David Katz in 1918 to an upper-middle class family in Brooklyn, Karr was an indifferent student who dreamed of becoming a newsman. When the rise of Fascism pushed him toward the political left, he began writing for the Daily Worker, the arm of the Communist Party in the U.S. Despite the Party's opposition to the re-election of Franklin Roosevelt, Katz joined the President's campaign in the late 1930s. After Pearl Harbor, he was hired in the Office of War Information based on his false claims to be fluent in French, Spanish, and German. This job ended in 1943, after he was caught in a number of lies about his Communist past, not the least of which was that J. Edgar Hoover himself would willingly vouch for the fact that he was not a Communist agent.
 
Karr went to work for columnist Drew Pearson, where a successor described him as "more of a promoter than a newsman." There he was known for getting stories by questionable means, such as eavesdropping in men's rooms, misrepresenting himself as a secretary for Vice President Wallace, and passing off the words of others as his own. He cooperated closely with a number of Washington officials later accused of espionage by Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers.
 
By 1947 the Cold War made it politically expedient for Karr and his boss, Drew Pearson, to play down their pro-Russian views. While Pearson fired another employee for his Communist affiliation, Karr could have stayed on, having ingratiated himself to J. Edgar Hoover. However, his ambition took him to New York as Vice President of William Weintraub Public Relations Agency, where among his clients was Lewis Rosensteil, head of Schenley Industries, one of the largest liquor manufacturers in the world. A staunch anti-Communist, Rosensteil was a confidant of Roy Cohn, aide to Senator Joe McCarthy. Despite his own Communist past, Karr was able to charm Rosensteil into a close business relationship. However, his career at Weintraub was marred by congressional investigations into his pro-Communist activities, notably in 1950 when he became a target of Senator McCarthy, as well as complaints from colleagues who accused him of stealing clients by such dirty tricks as providing them with prostitutes, then blackmailing them with compromising photos. So in 1953 he set out to start his own PR firm.
 
In an attempt to deflect Communism accusations, in 1955 he hired Major General Buck Lanham, a decorated World War II hero and former aide to General Eisenhower, as the firm's President. Lanham resigned after only five months for reasons that were, he said, "as grave ethically as one could imagine."
 
Karr turned his business toward public relations in proxy fights for control of publicly traded companies. With MGM among others, he played both sides of the table, accepting pay from one side while secretly meeting with the other. He and Washington businessman Art Landa perfected a strategy of counter-attacking proxy raiders and trying to take over their companies. After one such maneuver, it was reported in the Congressional Record that House Unamerican Activities Committee Chairman Francis Walters had accused Karr of unscrupulous practices that threatened not only American business but also the American way of life.
 
In 1959 at age 41, Karr had a net worth of over $70 million and was CEO of his own diversified company whose most famous subsidiary was Colt Firearms. Thus, he needed a security clearance, which was problematic given his Communist baggage. This, along with corporate infighting, disrupted the company's operations. An ambitious desalination project in Israel briefly inflated share prices but faltered. At the end of 1962, Karr was ousted and the new CEO noted "this is the worst company I've ever seen."
 
Karr headed next for show business, where, with a Hollywood producer and one-time owner of United Artists, he developed movies and Broadway shows. Off stage and screen, his personal life provided drama of its own. Already twice divorced, he broke his engagement to a starlet to marry a wealthy Frenchwoman and moved to Paris. Using her family connections to the Rothschilds, he brokered the sale of the prestigious Hotel Georges V and became its general manager. He befriended U.S. Ambassador Sargent Shriver and advised Aristotle Onassis and Armand Hammer on business deals. He used his Soviet government connections to enable Onassis's daughter Christine to marry a Russian executive with whom she had fallen in love.
 
All the while, Karr was involved in undercover intrigue, with connections to the Mossad, the PLO, and Black September, the group responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes in the 1972 Munich Olympics. With Hammer and Shriver, he travelled to Moscow just as the Nixon-Kissinger policy of détente was taking off. Karr soon split off on his own to broker deals for American and European companies with the USSR, working for such companies as Mitsubishi, Peugeot, and Gulf Oil.
 
During one of his trips to the Soviet Union, Karr was recruited by the KGB, which enabled him to become a very wealthy man. Among the lucrative perks he received was the right to market Misha the Bear, symbol of the Moscow Olympics. He provided certain services to the Soviets in return for these rights. For example, he reported to them on the 1976 presidential campaigns of his friends Sargent Shriver, Scoop Jackson, and Jerry Brown. He offered favors to members of the Gerald Ford White House. He set up a back channel through which Ted Kennedy could offer to work with the Soviets to combat anti-Soviet proposals by Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. He arranged for the Soviets to receive Western financing for important economic projects.
 
Karr died suddenly, probably of a heart attack, in Paris in 1979 at age 60. Controversy literally followed him to the grave, as his fourth wife obtained a court order to stop his burial, charging that he had been murdered either by the KGB, the Mossad, the CIA, or the Mafia. Embroiled in many lawsuits at the time of his death, Karr continued to be at the center of lurid rumors, from reports of arms deals in the transfer of Soviet weapons to Idi Amin and Muammar Kaddafi to accusations that he had plotted to assassinate Robert Kennedy.
 
His estate, valued at $53 million in today's terms, was tied up in New York probate court for more than ten years--not surprising given the number of claimants: his surviving wife, three ex-wives, five children, and people representing numerous international business entanglements and lawsuits.
 
Columnist Jack Anderson, an early colleague, had once speculated that David Karr had been the model for the main character of the musical "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying."  But one might imagine that Karr's life would provide a basis for a much darker musical: one about the abandonment of beliefs and principles in favor of winning at any cost to satisfy his ego, amass a great fortune, and play a role in exciting and dangerous activities on the big stage of the world.
 
 
--Holly York

 
 
 
IDSBotInterdisciplinary Seminar--THE SOUTH--Fall, 2019--Part I


THE SOUTH

The topic for this year's seminar was chosen by John Bugge, the late and inspiring leader of the Emeritus College Interdisciplinary Seminar Series. Participants had offered ideas relating to The South in 2018, but it wasn't until Jim Roark and Marilynne McKay offered to organize the sessions in Fall 2019 that the group committed to a time and location. The topics were chosen by the participants for reasons varying from previous academic expertise to whimsical interest in a subject. Although the order of the presentations was somewhat random, it was agreed that it was remarkably easy to build on what we had learned from each previous session. The South is a subject we could easily discuss for years to come, but we will stop here for now and see if there is continuing interest.
 
Jim Roark (History) Introduced our Seminar on The South by asking "Was or Is the South Really Different?" He noted that scholars have identified distinguishing factors including slavery, Jim Crow segregation, disfranchisement, chain gangs, evangelical religion, the ethic of personal honor, regional food and music, cotton, one-crop agriculture, share cropping, one-party politics, the South's rural character, the special place of women, even the impact of the heat and humidity.
 
We read historian C. Vann Woodward's "The Search for Southern Identity" (1958), in which he argued that southern distinctiveness lay in no particular trait or feature. What made Southerners different, he said, was their history, their experience, which was in many ways fundamentally un-American. Instead of success, abundance, and victory, Southerners had known failure, poverty, and defeat. To make the argument that it was slavery that made the South different, Jim offered the comparison of the free black populations of the North and South in 1860, arguing that the very different choices and behaviors of the two groups rested in the fact that one lived in a free society and the other in a slave society.

 
Don O'Shea (Physics, GA Tech) discussed "The Cotton Kingdom" by Fredrick Law Olmsted, famous for his landscape architecture including New York's Central Park and Atlanta's Druid Hills, who traveled south before the Civil War as a reporter the New York Times.   His reports during the 1850s described the economy and sociology of the pre-Civil War South. This effort was published as The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States. We discussed this early period in the South and the consequences of an economy based on slavery. The discussion also touched on events that we experienced or stories that had been told to us by grandparents and others.



 
Woody Hickox (Geology) discussed "The 'Black Belt' Origin and Evolution"  A distinct band of dark rich soils extends from south-central Georgia across Alabama south of Montgomery and through Selma, wending its way northwestward into Mississippi. The soils have developed on the Selma Chalk that accumulated during the Cretaceous Period, approximately 100 million years ago, coeval with the famed White Cliffs of Dover. The chemistry of the soils produced a unique grassland ecosystem known as the Black Prairies. During the first half of the 19th century, farmers found these soils, along with abundant artesian water, ideal for growing the newly-developed upland or Mexican strains of cotton. Thousands of slaves were brought to the area to enable the development of extensive plantations. The legacy of this monoculture persists as a different sort of Black Belt, with African-Americans still making up a majority in most of the counties of the original Black Prairies. The Black Belt continues to be a distinct zone of liberal, Democratic politics--quite the anomaly in conservative present-day Alabama.
 
 
Don McCormick (Biochemistry) discussed "The Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee." In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt aimed to alleviate some of the poverty of the Southern Appalachian region as well as increase electrical power for the growing industries and cities of the Southern area. This led to constructing dams to harness hydroelectric power in a project named the Tennessee Valley AuthorityAs the USA entered World War II, it began to seek scientists, both from within the US and from abroad, to make an atomic bomb.  The project enlisted work-needy poor of the region to handle construction of roads, buildings, and shipment of uranium-rich ore, together with scientists who were American and European to build the bomb. Don's father was a chemist/chemical engineer with expertise in explosives, so he moved his family from Lookout Mountain, where he was helping Hercules make TNT, to the bigger but "secret" A Bomb project in Oak Ridge. Don spoke of meeting many of the leading scientists in Oak Ridge and attending classes in radioisotope techniques in the Oak Ridge Institute for Nuclear Studies.  
 

 
Spencer King (Medicine, Cardiology) presented "The Cotton States and International Exposition of 1895." This multi-structural endeavor in what became Piedmont Park was an audacious project by a city of fewer than 90,000, only thirty years after its wartime destruction. The innovative business leadership that co-opted black leaders to achieve federal funding is reminiscent of subsequent development of Atlanta as it aspired to become the "Capital of the South." Booker T Washington's speech to a white audience may have seemed groundbreaking at the time but was used the next year in an argument before the Supreme Court that separate and equal could coexist. The decision in Plessy v Ferguson led to legalization of segregation for the next half century. On the other hand, by being a bit less resistant to integration and black involvement, Atlanta did become the "Capital of the South" and 100 years later hosted the Olympic Games.


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NewMemBotNew Members

New members are the lifeblood of any organization. Please make a special effort to welcome them to EUEC! 

Patricia L. Baumann, MD, Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology, retired
 

 

InMemBotIn Memoriam


Larry D. Byrd, PhD, Research Professor, Yerkes, retired

Larry Donald Byrd, age 83, of Duluth, GA, passed away at home on Sunday, December 1, 2019, with his family by his side. Larry was born on July 14, 1936 in Salisbury, NC. After graduating from Granite Quarry High School in 1954, he enlisted in the United States Army to serve his country and pay for college. After serving in the Army Band as a trombone player, he earned Bachelor and Master's degrees from East Carolina University and his PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1970, he completed a Research Fellowship in Pharmacology at Harvard University's School of Medicine. Larry began his professional career under the mentorship of pioneering scientists at Harvard's New England Regional Primate Research Center. In 1974, Larry moved his family to Georgia to lead Emory University's Division of Primate Behavior at Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center. During his 24-year tenure at Emory, Larry served as a Professor for the Department of Pharmacology and a Training Faculty member for the School of Medicine. He published numerous articles in scientific journals and received many honors and awards for his professional and community contributions. He retired in 1998.
 
His complete obituary may be read by clicking here.    
 
 
 
 
Sidney Kasfir with Distinguished Faculty Award in April 2017 
 
Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, PhD, Professor Emerita of Art History 
 
There is a lot that can be said about Sidney Kasfir.  She received a Heilbrun Distinguished Emeritus Fellowship in 2013 and you can read her report about her activities during that fellowship period in Volume 1, Issue 14 of our newsletter.  She was subsequently given an EUEC Distinguished Faculty Award in 2017, and you can read about the achievements for which she was recognized in Volume 3, Issue 14 of our newsletter.  
 
Two obituaries have been found for her, containing the following excerpts:
 
YORK, Maine - Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, age 80, passed away peacefully Sunday, December 29, 2019 due to complications from a short illness. She was born January 18, 1939 and raised in York, Maine by Robert and Rose Littlefield. After graduating from Simmons College, she married Nelson Kasfir in 1962, obtained a PhD in African art, and taught in New England and then at Emory University for 23 years.

In 1991, she met her husband, Kirati Lenaronkoito, in Maralal, Kenya. Her funeral will be held in Maralal, Kenya with Memorials in Atlanta and York.
 
___________
 
Written on behalf of Jean Borgatti:
 
It is with great sadness that I pass on to you the information of the death of my friend and colleague Sidney Littlefield Kasfir on the 29th of December 2019. I last saw Sidney at the Triennial in Ghana in 2017 where ACASA formally recognized her distinguished contributions to the field of global African art as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. She will be remembered for her pioneering work on contemporary African art as well as her research among Idoma and related peoples of the Niger-Benue confluence.  
 
Sidney had remarried in Kenya where she lived for increasing periods of time each year, especially after retiring from Emory University's history of art department in 2011. In the last couple of years, she lived with her husband, Kirati Lenaronkoito, on their farm in Maralal for ten months each year. She would spend a month each year with each of her two daughters. 
 
She fell and fractured her hip in September 2019 and despite successful surgery in Nairobi, never quite recovered. About two weeks ago she suffered an attack of malaria and developed a pulmonary embolism among other complications. She was taken back to Nairobi Hospital too late to save her. She was buried on the farm outside Maralal that she shared with Kirati.   
 
The complete obituaries can be read by clicking here
 
 
 

AwardsBotCall for Distinguished Awards Nominations

 

Each year, the Emory University Emeritus College (EUEC) offers two categories of awards - EUEC Faculty Awards of Distinction and the Distinguished Service Award.  It is now time for nominations for this year's awards.  I would like to emphasize that self-nominations are not only permitted; they are encouraged.  Too often, retired faculty are not fully aware of the achievements of their colleagues, and we must rely on self-disclosure.  Please submit your nominations no later than January 24, 2020.  The selection committee, composed of a chair and several former recipients of the awards, cannot accept late nominations.

 

You may submit your nomination electronically to the EUEC office (emeriti@emory.edu) or mail or hand-deliver it to the EUEC office.

 

The eligibility requirements are as follows:

 

EUEC Faculty Award of Distinction (formerly Distinguished Emeritus/Emerita Award):

 

  •  All retired Emory faculty who have been members of EUEC for at least two years.   
  • Significant professional contributions since retirement to Emory University or its affiliated institutions as well as contributions to local, state, regional, national, or international communities or professional organizations that reflect the "spirit of Emory."  
  • A maximum of four awards given annually.
  • This award may be conferred only once.

 

Distinguished Service Award: 

 

  • All members of the EUEC, including those who have received the Faculty Award of Distinction.
  • Membership in the EUEC for at least two years.
  • Significant service to Emory University or its affiliated institutions as well as to local, state, regional, national or international communities or other organizations that reflect the "spirit of Emory."  These contributions must have been made since retirement and are beyond those used to support a previous Faculty Award of Distinction.
  • Limited to one award annually.  No requirement that an award be given.

 

When you make your nomination, please include the following:

 

Name of nominee

o   Department or unit with which the nominee is associated

o   Contact information (email, phone number, and mailing address)

Name of nominator

o   Department or unit with which the nominator is associated

o   Contact information (email, phone number and mailing address)

Description of why the nominee should receive this honor, in no more than two pages.  Please do not exceed this limit but be certain to include enough information for the selection committee to make an informed decision.  Please include a curriculum vitae if possible.

 

Previous recipients of these awards are shown on our website (http://www.emory.edu/emeritus/programs/distinguished-emeriti/index.html).  Please let us know if you have questions about this process.  Thank you in advance for your participation.

 

Sincerely, 

 

James L. Roark (jlroark@emory.edu)

Samuel Candler Dobbs Emeritus Professor of History

Chair, EUEC Honors and Awards Committee

    
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WalkBotWalking the Campus with Dianne

Happy New Year!  I hope your holidays were fun!

It's time to start walking again, so let's begin our year with some words of inspiration --  I discovered these in a rather busy building on the main campus.  As you can probably see, they are located at the landings of a stairwell.  Each level of the building has a special word.   
 

Where will you find these on the Emory Campus?




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Emory University Emeritus College

The Luce Center
825 Houston Mill Road NE #206

Atlanta, GA 30329

   

Emory University Emeritus College, The Luce Center, 825 Houston Mill Road NE #206, Atlanta, GA 30329
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