the scholar: spring 2012
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Magazine of The Morehead-Cain FoundationTRANSCRIPT
SCHOLARTH E
MAGAZINE of thE MorEhEAd-CAIN
Kelly Almond
editor
Eric Johnson
editor and photographer*
Alison Duncan
designer
Published by the Morehead-Cain Foundation for
the alumni and friends of the Morehead-Cain
For questions or comments,
please contact the Foundation at:
The Morehead-Cain
Post Office Box 690
Chapel Hill, NC 27514
919.962.1201
www.moreheadcain.org
*unless otherwise noted
The Scholar | 1
spring 2012 contents
Venture Environmentalism • 2
Alec Guettel ’91 is crafting a solar energy overhaul one sale
at a time
A Rational Actor • 14
At NYU Stern, Peter Henry ’91 makes the case for classical
economics
Francis Wong’s ’14 Argentina • 20
Scenes from a Summer Abroad
Common Plays • 28
In Boston, Steve Maler ’87 brings the Bard to the people.
For free.
What We Leave Behind • 38
Original poetry by Sarah Bufkin ’13
Late Afternoon on the Red Line • 39
Original poetry by Sarah Bufkin ’13
Living Downstream • 40
In Kentucky coal country, Lisa Abbott ’92 finds defending
mountains harder than moving them
What I’ve Learned from Folk Music • 56
Libby Rodenbough ’13 on finding—and keeping—the groove
A Man Obsessed • 58
In more than three decades as a writer and historian, James
Reston, Jr. ’63 has chronicled the grand and the obscure. He
talked to The Scholar about tackling his most sensitive project
yet—a novel based on September 11th.
Dispatches from the Summer Blogs • 66
Akhil Jariwala ’14 ~ Nicola Vann ’14 ~ Max Seunik ’14
On Becoming an Institution • 72
Stepping down from her role as one of Silicon Valley’s longest-
serving executives, Ann Livermore ’80 reflects on three
decades at Hewlett-Packard
2 | The Scholar
The Scholar | 3
BY ERIC JOHNSONOAKLAND, CALIFORNIA
Just two years after collecting his
diploma, Alec Guettel ’91 landed his
dream job.
For a guy who spent four years at
Carolina leading environmental
groups, that first resume line reads like
an absurd fantasy: “Special Assistant
to EPA Administrator Carol Browner.”
Just below: “As Special Assistant for
International Activities, acted as chief
aid to EPA Administrator Browner for
international policy and operations.”
Guettel was 24 years old, and he had
arrived at the center of the policy
universe. “I really couldn’t believe I
got that job,” he recalled. “[Browner]
was a total powerhouse, and I just
thought we were going to do so much
good stuff.”
ventureenvironmentalism
Alec Guettel ’91 is crafting a solar
energy overhaul one sale at a time
4 | The Scholar
At the top of the agenda was Superfund, the 1980 law
governing the cleanup of the country’s worst toxic
waste dumps. Troubled from the start, Superfund
projects were floundering by the time Browner began
pushing for reform.
“It was a mess and everybody hated it,” Guettel said.
“She had Greenpeace behind her, and the Chemical
Manufacturers Association. She had everybody on
board.”
Browner also had years of Capitol Hill experience,
having been a Senate aid and served as legal counsel
to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural
Resources. She knew how to navigate the arcane
process of revamping and reauthorizing the
Superfund bill, and she had the full backing of
President Bill Clinton.
“And she still couldn’t get it done,” Guettel recalled
ruefully. “Just because politics are politics, and it
was coming up on the midterms.” In what the
New York Times called “a bitter disappointment,”
the administration withdrew the reform effort.
Dispirited and badly disillusioned, Guettel left the
fantasy job after little more than a year. “It was really
frustrating to watch and be a part of.”
And it convinced Guettel—the ardent activist and
devoted student of politics and policy—that the
After considering pricier space in San Francisco
and Palo Alto, Sungevity set up shop in a former
customs building on the sun-soaked Oakland
waterfront. “I really don’t understand why humans
live there,” Kennedy said, referring to San
Francisco. “It’s always covered in fog.”
world’s environmental woes might be better tackled
outside of government.
________________________
Oakland, California, is about as far away from Capitol
Hill as a continental American can get. So it should
come as little surprise that the Oakland waterfront—
right on Jack London Square, alongside a lovely little
marina—is where Guettel has chosen to launch a very
different sort of environmental effort.
Sungevity is innovative. It’s high-tech. It stands a
decent chance of pushing solar energy closer to
mainstream.
And along the way, it will likely make Guettel and his
business partners a good deal of money. The would-
be bureaucrat has become a successful businessman.
“By the time I finished at the EPA, I was pretty
committed to doing start-ups,” Guettel said. “Part of
my job there had been working with environmental
technology companies—so we could talk about jobs
or whatever it is we do in government—and I
thought, ‘Well that looks cool.’”
And it does, emphatically, look cool. In the lobby of
Sungevity’s offices, employees hustle past in jeans and
bright orange t-shirts emblazoned with the firm’s
logo, a geometric sunflower. The vibe is bustling but
unstressed; maintenance workers arrive to install
more phone lines, and
college-age employees
carry half-built cubicle
walls down the hall.
Danny Kennedy, the
company’s cofounder
and a longtime friend
of Guettel’s, served as
tour guide during a
September visit.
Sungevity’s third-
floor offices are an
BELOW: Guettel in the New York City offices of Axiom
Law, the successful legal venture he cofounded to
compete with established law partnerships. Axiom has
no associate-partner hierarchy, very little support staff,
and minimal office space. “Law firms are such a mess,”
Guettel said. “There had to be an alternative, and we
figured we could create a really profitable business.”
The Scholar | 5
6 | The Scholar
architectural stereotype of West Coast green-tech,
with an open floor plan and gorgeous casement
windows filled with California sunshine. The
employee kitchen features a full-sized pool table,
and a group of denim-clad technicians were racking
a fresh game at 11:00 in the morning.
Around the corner, movers and electricians assembled
dozens of low-walled cubicles, preparing to accommo-
date the next wave of Sungevity’s growing workforce.
The company has already spilled out of its main office
and into the cavernous shell of a defunct Barnes &
Noble across the street.
“For all I know, those guys might’ve just been stealing
stuff,” Kennedy said, motioning after a group of
orange-clad young people schlepping computer
monitors down a hallway. “Every day I’m looking at
people going, ‘Hi! Who are you?’”
With his low, gravelly voice and Australian accent,
Kennedy sounds wearily amused at everything going
on around him. He sports a mop of curly hair atop
a very furrowed brow, and it doesn’t take long to
realize he is, in fact, wearily amused at everything
going on around him.
As with so many great business partnerships, the tale
of Guettel and Kennedy begins with an oversized
penguin costume and an English pub.
It was the summer of 1990—after Guettel’s junior
year of college—and international delegates were
gathered in London to negotiate the first revision
of the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete
the Ozone Layer.
Kennedy, having proven himself a champion debater,
was tapped by the Australian government to serve as
a youth delegate to the conference. Guettel, having
secured Morehead funding to travel around Europe
building connections between student environmen-
talists, was standing outside the conference, shouting
unflattering things at the delegates.
“We went through awhole series of truly
bad ideas before wefinally sort of zeroed
in on Sungevity.”
Sungevity cofounder Danny Kennedy, an Australian
native and longtime campaign director for Greenpeace,
first met Guettel at a 1990 protest in London.
The Scholar | 7
“I was at this protest wearing a penguin suit—like
a penguin costume,” he recounted. “I can’t really
remember what the premise was.”
Kennedy ventured out to enjoy the commotion, and
the two struck up a conversation. “Being twenty-year-
olds in a foreign city, we both ended up in a pub face
down about twelve hours later,” Guettel said. “We’ve
been great friends ever since.”
That friendship endured through Guettel’s stint
at the EPA, through his years at Stanford Business
School, and through his first business ventures,
including the launch of a wildly successful alternative
law firm, Axiom Law. While Guettel spent a decade
establishing himself as a successful entrepreneur,
Kennedy rose through the ranks of Greenpeace,
becoming the activist organization’s campaign
director for Australia and the Pacific.
“We had always talked about starting a green
technology company together,” Guettel said. “We
went through a whole series of truly bad ideas
before we finally sort of zeroed in on Sungevity.”
________________________
The core concept is deceptively straightforward:
remote solar design.
It is the term of art for what all those just-graduated
kids are doing in Oakland, staring at satellite photos
of rooftops and plugging numbers into a complex set
of algorithms. A Sungevity technician, using publicly
available satellite images and aerial photography, can
design an entire solar rooftop without getting up for
a coffee break.
“They’re sizing systems from California to the Empire
State, which is pretty cool,” Kennedy said, surveying
Technicians use satellite imagery
and a sophisticated set of
algorithms to remotely design
solar panel systems. This
technique allows Sungevity
to e-mail a proposal within
24 hours of being contacted
by a potential customer.
8 | The Scholar
a row of busy orange t-shirts arrayed in front of
computer monitors. “I’m a solar geek, so it excites
me to this day to see this.”
We tend to romanticize this kind of innovation, to
imagine it as a sudden flash of genius—a break-
through in the lab or a eureka moment in someone’s
garage.
Listening to Guettel and Kennedy, though, drives
home the reality that innovation is most often a
slow-going, grinding process. Profound changes
flow from some very unsexy ideas.
“We’re not technologists,” Kennedy said, explaining
the beginnings of the company. “We didn’t know
Sungevity has been hiring steadily
over the past year. Across the
street from its main office, the
firm has rented a cavernous
space recently vacated by a
Barnes & Noble bookstore.
The Scholar | 9
how to make a better solar panel, and other people
were already working on that.”
Instead, he and Guettel set out to make solar less
annoying for homeowners.
If that sounds like a modest goal, consider the old
process of purchasing a solar system. For the past few
decades, an eco-conscious homeowner would have to
find a local solar installer.
Like any contractor, Local Solar, Inc. schedules an
appointment for an appraisal. The homeowner takes
an afternoon off work so that Local Solar can come
by, climb onto the roof, and crawl around taking
measurements. A few days later, an estimate arrives. If
she decides to go for it, our homeowner has to work
with Local Solar to file all of the permits and paper-
work necessary to get approval—paperwork from her
town, her county, and even her power company.
“Nothing about it was convenient,” Guettel said. “The
experience for customers on the residential end was a
disaster in so many ways.”
And to top it off, homeowners typically had to shell
out the full purchase and installation price—usually
tens of thousands of dollars. It takes decades for that
kind of investment to pay off.
To Guettel and Kennedy, this convoluted process
presented an opportunity. “There was a ton of energy
and effort going into solar hardware,” Guettel
recounted. “You could see with all of the investment
happening upstream, prices were going to come
down.”
Guettel describes entrepreneurship as the ability to
see a wave building. “You might not ride it perfectly,
but as long as you’re actually in front of a wave you
can make something good happen.”
By late 2007, he and Kennedy were lining up
Sungevity in front of a wave. Almost on cue, the price
of solar panels began to plummet.
They found a third partner, a former BP engineer
named Andrew Birch, and began to craft a better
experience for customers.
They developed and honed the remote-design tech-
nology, hiring an Australian math whiz to create the
sophisticated algorithms that allow employees with
three weeks of training to predict the effects of roof
slope, tree shade, and weather patterns on the output
of a solar array.
Within 24 hours of submitting an address, a potential
customer gets a straightforward answer about
whether solar is a feasible option. (If your roof faces
north, you’re probably out of luck.)
They hired teams of data crunchers to comb through
nightmarish piles of state, county, and town zoning
regulations.
(Quick: how many feet of clearance does the Pough-
keepsie fire department require on either side of the
peak in your roof? Sungevity knows.)
They located, vetted, and trained contractors and
electricians to handle the installation in different
markets, allowing Sungevity to scale quickly without
purchasing a fleet of trucks or directly hiring an
army of solar installers.
And they assembled a team of regulatory specialists
to track the ever-shifting patchwork of tax incentives,
subsidies, and energy programs in the eight states
where Sungevity operates. Though consumer subsi-
dies have played a role in determining which markets
Sungevity can profitably enter, both Guettel and
Kennedy voiced frustration at the unpredictable
schemes.
“We need certainty,” Kennedy said. “If you’re chang-
ing the rules in a given market every six months or
every year, building a business there is very fraught.
The technology works—it sits there on your roof
for twenty, thirty, even fifty years, day-in, day-out,
10 | The Scholar
generating electricity. It’s the people running the
energy markets who create all of this uncertainty.”
The biggest factor in deciding to enter a given market
is the cost of traditional power sources. Sungevity
has ventured into New York and New Jersey, where
electricity costs are high, but not a single state in the
Southeast, where power is generally coal-fired and
cheap.
Guettel and Kennedy have little patience for those
who decry consumer solar subsidies, noting that
traditional utilities are regulated monopolies.
“The point of subsidies isn’t to be there forever,”
Guettel said. “It’s to help an industry get to scale.”
________________________
In large part because of the turbulence in the market
for renewables, the most critical leg of Sungevity’s
business model—consumer financing—was also the
most difficult to secure.
A leasing option would allow customers to skip the
prohibitively expensive up-front cost in favor of a
monthly payment. “I mean, who has thirty thousand
dollars to drop on this?” Guettel said.
But for all of Guettel’s foresight in predicting a
sharp drop in the price of solar panels, Sungevity’s
consumer-friendly business model was nearly
swamped by a wave he didn’t see coming.
“The leasing solution was planned from the
beginning,” Kennedy recalls. “But we launched in
April of 2008, shortly before the world went crazy
and the financial services industry stopped doing
financing or servicing.”
As credit markets froze and the economy entered a
sharp downturn, few banks were willing to finance a
new and unproven asset class. For almost two years,
Sungevity was stuck offering cash-only sales to
traditional early adopters in the California market.
Today, Kennedy counts that as a blessing. “We got
to perfect our design and sales systems for a couple
years,” he said.
“It’s a case of what doesn’t kill you makes you
stronger.”
When the leasing option debuted in 2010, sales
exploded. Volume grew by a factor of ten in a single
year, and now more than 90 percent of customers
opt for the leasing plan.
Partly as a result of that growth, Guettel has had to
learn a new skill: applying the brakes.
“When you have a good business and eighteen
different doors are opening, saying no to sixteen of
those is still the hardest part for me,” he said. “Most
of my time at Sungevity now is evaluating new
opportunities, and it’s hard to say no.”
Perhaps the best example of having to take things
slow is the company’s recent partnership with Lowe’s.
In May of 2011, the home improvement giant selected
Sungevity struck a partnership with Lowe’s Home
Improvement, placing Sungevity kiosks inside
Lowe’s stores across California. The arrangement is
slowly expanding to Lowe’s stores in eight other
states, giving Sungevity time to scale up operations.
The Scholar | 11
Sungevity to be its solar provider, offering to steer
customers in its 1,750 stores to Sungevity for solar
upgrades.
Kennedy’s eyes bug out at the thought. “We simply
couldn’t do that right now,” he said. “We’re on a very
intentional path to becoming a multi-billion dollar
business, and you don’t want to mess that up by
becoming the jerks who disappointed a whole bunch
of customers.”
So instead of leaping at the Lowe’s deal, Guettel
negotiated a phased introduction, beginning with a
trial run in northern California and slowly expanding
into other Lowe’s markets. In the meantime, Lowe’s
bought a sizable stake in the company.
The deal goes to the heart of Sungevity’s long-term
strategy, which is making the leap from quirky early
adopters to more mainstream consumers. It is the
reason their sales pitch focuses far less on environ-
mental concerns than on very practical economics.
They’re not preaching solar as a means to live off the
grid, but as a supplement to to traditional power.
“When you have agood business andeighteen differentdoors are opening,saying no to sixteenof those is still thehardest part for me.”
To help promote the Sungevity brand
along the East Coast, the company bought an
old delivery van and converted it into a biodiesel and
solar-powered popsicle truck. It was one of their most expensive
marketing decisions to date. “It worked a treat,” Kennedy said,
noting all of the free news coverage the truck garnered.
“And they’re damn good popsicles, too.”
PHOTO COURTESY OF SUNGEVITY
12 | The Scholar
Sungevity’s much-touted iQuote, the online estimate
a customer receives after submitting an address,
looks like a brilliant bit of activism, a kind of environ-
mentalist banner for the digital age. Why dress in a
penguin suit and chant protest slogans when you can
offer zero money down and drastically reduce energy
consumption?
To be sure, the iQuote pushes all the right environ-
mental buttons, showing how much carbon dioxide
a Sungevity system will keep out of the environment;
it’ll even calculate the equivalent car miles not driven
or the number of trees planted.
But it’s telling that the green angle is never front
and center; the very first thing that pops up in an
iQuote is a bold-faced estimate of monthly savings.
“We're trying to talk to normal people,” Kennedy
said, offering a summary of the Sungevity sales pitch.
“You know that stuff that comes out of the wall and
into the plug? We can get you that—easy. And for
less. Oh, and it’s green, as well, so it doesn't kill your
children."
________________________
That last bit—the not killing your
children part—hints at one of the
more intriguing aspects of the
whole Sungevity venture.
It is very much a business,
with investors and bank
partnerships and the
“People have noidea yet how fast
this is going tohappen.”
The Scholar | 13
prospect of making a number of people—not least of
all Kennedy and Guettel—significantly richer. But in
listening to the two of them, there is an unmistakable
sense of the profit motive as an afterthought.
Both men, for example, seemed nonplussed at the
fact that competitors are copying the satellite design
technique.
“From a missionary point of view, I like the fact that
most companies are trying to rip us off,” Kennedy
said. “It sort of has to be this way. We’re not going
to do millions of roofs in suburbia by driving trucks
into traffic [to visit houses]. We have to do it with a
more efficient model, and this is the best someone
has come up with so far.”
Neither of them preach it, exactly, but there is a
clear impression that getting solar panels on millions
of roofs is the whole point. Sungevity was born not
so much of the desire to be in business—Guettel
already has a successful legal business in New York,
and Kennedy worked for more than a decade at
Greenpeace—but of a long-held desire to upend bad
energy policy.
“People have no idea yet how fast this is going to
happen,” Guettel said about the growth of solar
energy. “It’s a political football right now, but three
years from now this is going to be the norm.”
In 1994, as Guettel collected recommendation letters
for graduate school, Morehead Foundation Director
Chuck Lovelace wrote to highlight Guettel’s environ-
mental work. “Few undergraduates are able to
focus on and remain committed to a single cause
throughout their four years on campus,” Lovelace
wrote. “Alec is an exception. He made significant
contributions on local, national, and international
levels in environmental policy and advocacy.”
Two decades later, it’s not hard to see Sungevity as
a highly evolved, market-friendly form of that same
advocacy. It is easy to imagine that Guettel, for all
the twists of his career, hasn’t lost focus at all.
“This is one of the biggest economic opportunities in
history, the retooling of the electricity grid,” Kennedy
said. “There are a lot of people who are going to make
a fortune and create a lot of good.”
And even more succinctly: “Save you money, save the
world. That’s the challenge.”
It is the challenge Guettel chose when he left the EPA.
It is the challenge that led him to reject offers at some
of the world’s best public policy schools in favor of
learning business at Stanford.
“The reasons things weren’t getting done were just
so illogical, and wrong,” Guettel said of his time in
government. “I was afraid of looking back at the
end and saying, ‘I can’t really point to anything I’ve
accomplished here.’”
At Sungevity, with keyboards clattering across scores
of new rooftops each day, that seems a very distant
worry. �
A Sungevity iQuote—the electronic
proposal sent to prospective customers—
shows the potential savings from leasing
a solar panel array. In this sample,
solar panels are projected to generate
45 percent of the household’s electricity.
14 | The Scholar
BY ERIC JOHNSONNEW YORK, NEW YORK
A few years ago, Peter Henry ’91 published “A Tale
of Two Islands,” a crisp, eleven-page parable about
Jamaica and Barbados.
Both Caribbean countries are former British colonies.
They have similar histories and similar governing
institutions. But they responded to economic
pressures of the 1970s with wildly different policies.
Jamaica nationalized industries and imposed trade
barriers; Barbados didn’t. The result was modest but
respectable growth for Barbados and utter disaster
for Jamaica.
“Countries have no control over their geographic
location, colonial heritage, or legal origin,” Henry
wrote. “But they do have agency over the policies that
they implement. “Pedestrian as it may seem to say,
changes in policy . . . can have a significant impact
on a country’s standard of living within a single
generation.”
It’s not exactly a prose poem, but by the standards
of economics writing, it was downright elegiac.
Decisions matter, Henry’s paper proclaimed. There
are correct and incorrect answers to the world’s
problems.
It was a full-throated defense of economic theory at
a time when the discipline badly needed defending.
The paper was published in December of 2008, just as
the global economy plunged into the worst downturn
since the Great Depression. It struck a chord not just
with fellow economists but with a wider audience
hungry to make sense of a volatile world.
Henry’s work inspired an in-depth segment on
National Public Radio’s This American Life, part of
an episode on “The Social Contract.”
“This is a smart man, a man with a big heart, who
meant to do well,” Henry said during the broadcast,
explaining the disastrous economic interventions of
a rationalactorAt NYU Stern,
Peter Henry ’91
makes the case for
classical economics
The Scholar | 15
Peter Henry in his office at NYU’s
Stern School. He took the helm of
the business school in January 2010
amid continuing struggles on Wall
Street and in the global economy.
16 | The Scholar
Jamaica’s then-president, Michael Manley. “This is
why I think it’s all the more powerful a lesson. Even
in places where governments are trying to do the
right thing, trying to empower their citizens, if they
follow bad policies, there will be substantial long-run
consequences.”
What makes a “A Tale of Two Islands” such a
compelling story is that Henry didn’t just research
Jamaica’s slow-motion economic collapse. He lived it.
“I lived in Jamaica for nine years before we moved to
the U.S.,” he recounted last summer, leaning back in
his chair on the top floor of New York University’s
Stern School of Business. “My parents decided it was
going to be easier to raise four kids in the United
States, so we emigrated.”
“That was a really formative experience for me,” he
continued. “Why is Jamaica poor and the United
States rich? Economics gives you metaphors—
models—to begin thinking about the answers to
those kinds of questions.”
________________________
As Henry likes to tell it, he was relishing a low-key,
run-of-the-mill career at Stanford when he got a call
about the dean’s job at NYU Stern. “I was happily
enjoying the quiet life of a professor,” he said.
That’s admirably modest, but it elides some key
details. By the time Stern came calling in late 2009,
Henry was one of the world’s best-known experts on
emerging markets and international trade policy. His
papers on debt relief, developing nations, and capital
markets were widely cited.
He was also heavily involved with the Barack Obama
campaign and the presidential transition, thanks to a
friendship with Obama economic advisor Austan
Goolsbee. Henry and Goolsbee were classmates at
MIT, where Henry earned his doctorate after studying
at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship.
“The economist’s jobis to use the tools to
figure out what’s goingto be good for society.
It’s society’s job totake that advice and
figure out what’s politically feasible.”
A congratulatory note from Chancellor
Holden Thorp was amidst the piles of paper
on Henry’s desk. “Peter — Congratulations
on the NYU gig,” Thorp wrote.
The Scholar | 17
“I ended up working on a lot of issues in interna-
tional economics related to the International
Monetary Fund, issues that were really critical with
emerging markets during the crisis of 2008,” Henry
recalled. “The financial crisis hit in the U.S. and in
Western Europe. Nobody wanted to lend to emerging
markets.”
There was also that whole business of the NPR story,
various CNBC appearances, and a prestigious book
contract with Oxford University Press. His life was
quiet like a jet engine.
Still, the decision to leave Palo Alto and take the
helm at Stern was difficult. Henry had given up the
chance to work in the White House for the sake of his
family—he and his wife Lisa have four young boys—
and a dean’s schedule is far less flexible than a
professor’s.
“The difference now is that so much of what I do
involves me being physically present,” he said.
“Meetings, lunches, dinners. The flexibility to pick
up the kids from school, to coach baseball . . . it’s
not as easy as it used to be. But there are trade-offs
in everything. Lisa and I talked about it a long time
and decided this was a trade-off worth making.”
Prestige was certainly a factor. Stern has long been
one of the top business schools in the world, and
Henry isn’t shy about touting its global reach. NYU
has a campus in Abu Dhabi and will be opening
another in Shanghai next year.
The dean’s
office has a
fantastic view
of the 1929 art
deco building
at One Fifth
Avenue, on
the north side
of Washington
Square Park.
18 | The Scholar
“We’re at a point when emerging markets are more
important to the international growth story than
ever before,” Henry said. “I’m an immigrant kid, an
international economist—there were a number of
parts of the story that I felt really fit.”
________________________
January of 2010 was, to put it mildly, a challenging
time to take the lead at a major business school.
Manhattan-based Stern, both geographically and
culturally close to Wall Street, was badly hit by the
financial crisis. Donations fell, job opportunities for
graduates evaporated, and business schools in general
began to lose a bit of their swagger.
Stern retained a top spot in the global rankings—
number 17 in the 2012 Financial Times MBA survey—
but Henry was forced to contend with a tide of public
distrust toward business.
“Society at large is really skeptical—and rightly
skeptical—about what business schools are doing,”
he said. “I think that business schools in general
have become . . .”—here he takes an exceedingly
diplomatic pause—“a little too transactional, and
not as transformational as they should be.”
Transformation is a rather delicate thing to under-
take at a world-class business school, and it highlights
the fundamental tension between Henry the dean
and Henry the economics wonk. For a great many
students, especially in executive MBA programs,
business school is a combination of resume-enhancer
and networking tool. Inspiration is rarely at the top
of the list for career-minded students.
Henry wants it to be.
“Education is subversive, in the most positive sense of
the word,” he said. “The goal of classical education is
to create a mind that will, in some sense, undermine
the teacher. We need to get that spirit back into the
business school environment.”
Doing that without alienating faculty, business
constituents, and students will require more of those
diplomatic pauses that Henry has mastered. I ask
him if the aim is to toss MBA students off of their pre-
determined career paths. He pauses, lowers his voice.
NYU’s Stern School is in
Greenwich Village, about
two miles from Wall
Street. The dean’s office
overlooks Washington
Square Park.
The Scholar | 19
“People will toss themselves off the path!” he says,
holding his fingers beneath his chin like a yogi and
then bursting into laughter. “Look, we’re not saying,
‘Don’t be an investment banker.’ We’re just inviting
people to think about the world differently.”
I ask Henry if the past few years—with the spectacular
collapse of the mortgage market, the near-death of
Wall Street’s investment banks, and a huge shift in
growth toward the developing world—has given him
cause to fundamentally rethink his discipline. Is the
field of economics in need of some root-and-branch
transformation?
“Modern economics is not dead,” he replied, leaning
forward in his chair. “Far from it.”
If anything, Henry thinks the crisis of confidence
brought on by the Great Recession calls for a more
robust defense of economics as a disciplined, rigorous
science. His book—out sometime in 2012—will make
exactly that case, laying out data from the developing
world to show how economists can help separate good
policies from bad.
“The economist’s job is to use the tools to figure
out what’s going to be good for soci-
ety,” he said. “It’s society’s job to
take that advice and figure out
what’s politically feasible.”
Now as he enters his third
year in the dean’s chair,
Henry is finding
the divide between
politics and policy
not quite as clean.
“I’m a researcher and a
teacher who was asked to
lead an institution,” he
said. “And I’m fool enough
to think I can do this because
I haven’t tried to do it before.” �
“Look, we’re not saying,‘Don’t be an investmentbanker.’ We’re just invitingpeople to think about the world differently.”
20 | The Scholar
Francis Wong ’14 has been running his own photography business since his jun-
ior year of high school. He collected the images below during his Morehead-Cain
public service summer in Argentina. He has never taken a photography class.
A note from the photographer:
The first part of my summer lasted
for eight weeks, and was spent
with Fundación Mediapila in
Buenos Aires. Mediapila creates
jobs for traditionally low-income
women, giving them decent working
conditions and steady pay to
produce hand-sewn clothing. My
internship often sent me to rather obscure parts of greater Buenos
Aires to run errands for the organization, exposing me to aspects of
the city seldom noticed by most visitors.
For the second part of my journey, I spent three weeks traveling around
South and Central America. I explored the cities of Salta, Mendoza,
and Bariloche in Argentina; Santiago and Viña del Mar in Chile; and
Panama City and Pedasí in Panama.
My travels offered me the most spectacular photographic opportunities
of my life. From the often-gritty streets of Buenos Aires to the spectacu-
lar Andes, I did my best to capture the unique qualities of each location.
francis wong’s ’14
argentina
ABOVE: Timotea. This woman, a former cartonera (a woman who sorts
through street trash), works for Mediapila in the garment production
process. Here she is cutting potatoes, preparing lunch for herself and
the other women at Mediapila.
original work~ photography
Scenes from a Summer Abroad
The Scholar | 21
Caballito Neighborhood,
Buenos Aires. Taken
from the balcony of the
apartment I shared with
Josh Barrett ’14.
Recoleta Cemetery,
Buenos Aires. Compiled
from several layers of one
RAW image adjusted to
different exposure values.
Colonia, Uruguay.
22 | The Scholar
Memorials north of Salta, Argentina.
Quebrada, meaning broken or
cracked, refers to the mountains
looming in the background.
The Scholar | 23
24 | The Scholar
Milonga in Palermo Neighborhood, Buenos Aires.
Taken at a four-second exposure at f/5.0.
Viña del Mar, Chile.
Taken at a 30-second
exposure at f/4.0.
The Scholar | 25
26 | The Scholar
Calle Florida, Buenos Aires. Calle Florida, in the
downtown area, offers a wide variety of shop-
ping opportunities, from upscale department
stores to one-dollar handmade garments.
Nahuel Huapi Lake,
Bariloche, Argentina.
The Scholar | 27
“My travels offered me the most spectacular photographic
opportunities of my life.”
28 | The Scholar
The Scholar | 29
BY KELLY ALMONDBOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
Tonight’s play is being performed on Boston
Common, the city’s oldest public park. In earlier eras
it played host to grazing cattle and offered public
hangings for spectacle. Today it is an improbably
idyllic place in the middle of this big city, still spring-
green in early August and awash in brilliant, well-
tended summer blooms. The atmosphere is flush
with the romance of Swan Boats and weeping willows,
patinaed bridges and early evening lamplight.
For weeks the east coast has suffered an unmoving
and pitiless heat. It is expected now, and the custom-
ary concessions have been made—less and lighter
clothing, iced coffee rather than hot. Tonight, then,
is a bit of a surprise: 72 degrees and falling. It’s
delightful and unprepared for; I hear a boy behind
me call after his dad to bring him a sweatshirt.
I’m here to see All’s Well That Ends Well, one of Shake-
speare’s lesser-known works. It is 7:00 p.m., one hour
before curtain, and everywhere on the vast lawn that
In Boston, Steve Maler ’87 brings
the Bard to the people. For free.
commonplays
30 | The Scholar
makes up this corner of the Common there is the
hum and mill of people laughing, arranging blankets,
rifling through picnic baskets and coolers, greeting
one another, scoping spots for viewing. By now there
are very few open spaces left, and no especially good
ones. People arrived as early as 1:30 this afternoon to
claim the best of them.
I take a low seat just in front of the stage in an area
marked off for reserved seating. Remarkably, though
the show is being performed by Boston’s highly
regarded Commonwealth Shakespeare Company
(CSC), these few reserved seats are the only ones that
require payment. There is no box office here, no ticket
lines. Admission to this, and all of the CSC’s outdoor
performances, is free.
For all of this charming atmosphere and for the
evening’s entertainment, I and the 7,000 Bostonians
filling the lawn owe Steve Maler ’87. Maler helped
found the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company
fifteen years ago on the premise that Boston required it.
On Boston Common, the city’s
historic Swan Boats paddle visitors
around the park’s scenic pond.
The Scholar | 31
Um.
What?
And right there a conclusion forms for many a
student: this is not for me. It’s a conclusion that often
proves very hard to overcome.
“If your first experience with Shakespeare is bad,” says
Maler, “we have so much work to do to bring you
back.”
“Shakespeare is incredibly difficult to read, even for
me,” Maler continues (and bless him for it). “When I
think about how most people are introduced to
Shakespeare in this country—in middle school or
high school, by reading his plays—I think we’ve got it
all wrong.”
To get it right, Maler suggests we must first under-
stand how a play is different from other literary
forms, like a novel or a poem.
“Unlike those things, which are products designed for
the purpose of being read, the script of a play is not.
A play is more like a blueprint,” he explains. “If you’re
an architect or a contractor looking at a blueprint,
you can visualize maybe 95% of what a building is
going to look like, but a layperson can’t, and isn’t
expected to. The blueprint isn’t the product—the
building is the product.
“Boston styles itself the Athens of America,” he
explained. “You can’t really claim to be Athens
without outdoor theater.”
But to fulfill Maler’s vision and that of his partners,
outdoor theater wasn’t going to be enough. Nor was
outdoor Shakespeare. Nor was even free outdoor
Shakespeare (which in their view was essential). To
get it right, it needed to be free outdoor Shakespeare
of world-class production quality.
In 1996, the Company’s first production, A Midsum-
mer Night’s Dream, was a low-budget affair that
borrowed heavily for staging, decor, costumes, and
actors from an earlier production Maler worked on. It
ran for only a few days, but the encouraging response
from the city was enough to launch what has become
both a beloved summer tradition in Boston and the
centerpiece of Maler’s career.
________________________
At some point we all experience it. The moment
in middle or high school when, under fluorescent
lighting, we are given the assignment: Shakespeare. It
will be good for us. He is The Embodiment of English
Literary Genius. We are handed our books, instructed
to turn the page on Romeo and Juliet, or Othello, or
Henry V, and we come face to face with this:
SCENE: At the beginning of the Play, lies in England; but afterwards wholly in France.
Enter Chorus.
Chor. O for a Muse of fire, that would ascendThe brightest heaven of invention!A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,Leash’d in like hounds, should famine, sword,and fire,Crouch for employment.
32 | The Scholar
“The same is true of a play. The script is not the
play in the way that a novel is a novel or a poem is a
poem. The script, or the written play, is a blueprint
of something else—of the production of the play.”
To truly appreciate Shakespeare, Maler contends we
must see his plays performed, and performed well.
And when we do, it is good for us.
“What’s miraculous about Shakespeare,” Maler says,
“is that his plays are four hundred years old, but they
might have been written today. They are so much of
the stuff of life, they resonate every bit as much with
modern audiences as with those of his time.”
He goes on, “Back when settlers were heading West in
America, if they had books, they had two: they had
the Bible, and they had the Collected Works of Shake-
speare. Shakespeare was a profoundly populist writer
until relatively recently, when he became sort of the
domain of the intellectuals and the intelligentsia in
our country, which isn’t as it should be.”
That belief has fueled Maler’s life work and made
him a missionary of a kind. Finding ways to return
Shakespeare (and more broadly, the theater) to the
masses fills some part of his every day. It is manifest
most evidently in his fifteen years’ work with the CSC.
Love’s Labour’s (nearly) Lost
It is a storyline so classically human, Shakespeare
might have written it.
A man creates a company from a cherished idea. He
nurtures it, sacrifices for it, watches it grow. With
thought and care, he takes on a partner to help
advance its enterprise. And for awhile, all is well.
Until it’s not.
From 1996 to 2003, Maler devoted himself and much
of his career to the advancement of the CSC. And
except for the summer months when the curtain was
readied and raised for each year’s production, it was
largely a one-man show.
Obviously for Maler the point wasn’t merely to stage
a play each year, but to stage it well—to do justice
to the material and to the audience. There was stage
setting, and costume selection, and lighting, and
sound, and, perhaps paramount, there was casting.
The Scholar | 33
Pulling the team together to do all of this well is
challenge enough for a long-established company in a
traditional theater.
Add to all of this the CSC’s relative youth, the
challenge of being outdoors, of creating a stage where
none existed, in a theater made of grassy acres, for an
audience that didn’t pay to see the show, and it was
reasonable for the CSC to look for help.
“We have an insane business model,” Maler says,
“in that we give our product away.”
When not working on the play itself in those days,
most of Maler’s time was spent raising funds to make
the whole endeavor possible. There were dreams to
expand the CSC’s reach to indoor performances and
summer academies, but there was neither the staffing
nor the resources to do so.
In an effort to secure the company’s long-term
viability, Maler and the CSC’s board of directors
sought to partner with what Maler now obliquely
refers to as “a larger organization.” And in 2003, they
did so.
Before the conversation turns to the matter of this
larger organization, Maler speaks easily, fluidly, about
his work with the CSC, about the current play, his
love of the stage, and the necessity of making it
accessible to more people.
As he talks, he takes me on a tour of the small trailer
city that comprises the backstage for All’s Well. And
as we walk, he frequently interrupts his broader train
of thought to point out all the myriad moving parts
that make the summer’s three weeks of performances
come off so smoothly.
The Commonwealth
Shakespeare Company
offers free performances
of the Bard’s plays
for three weeks each
summer. The plays
draw audiences of
approximately 100,000.
Maler is fun to listen to—not only because the subject
is interesting, has obviously been considered at
length, and is discussed eloquently, but because he
has a voice like a deep well. His laugh is rich and
resonant, and he has a knack for picking up a line
of thought after some significant interruption and
returning without pause to precisely the word or
phrase he left off on. As someone who can lose her
way in the most shopworn of thoughts, I’m envious—
and frankly a little in awe of—this evident inner
focus.
In keeping with his voice, Maler is an elegant man,
trim thanks to a habit of running, and dressed in
unembellished grays and blacks. His salt-and-pepper
hair is close-cropped, and his rimless glasses frame a
face that is serious at rest but animates quickly in
conversation.
But as the topic turns from the interests that fuel
him to his experience partnering with “the larger
organization,” his eyes turn downward and each word
becomes palpably weighed.
“We believed the partnership made sense at the time,”
he begins slowly. “We were aiming for long-term
sustainability for the Company, and the partnership
was going to give us all of this infrastructure
overnight—a marketing department, a development
department, a back office—all the things that are
essential to sustaining the Company over time. All
of this was going to allow us to focus solely on what
we do, which I thought was great, obviously.”
And for a while, it was great. Maler became a full-time
employee of the larger organization, maintaining his
role as artistic director of the CSC. He watched the
Company’s budget grow substantially, easing the task
of putting on world-class performances. The merger
also opened new avenues for bringing affordable the-
ater to the people, and this time not just to Boston.
For the first time ever, the CSC got to fulfill the
dream of taking its outdoor production on the road,
offering shows to Boston’s neighbors in Springfield.
But before long, Maler began to notice attitudes
shifting. “I felt it building,” he says, “but it took a
while—a change by degrees. There was an inner circle
I was a part of that I . . . became not a part of. And I
began to hear rumors that there was a sense the work
of the CSC might be done more cheaply.”
The Scholar | 35
More cheaply, and perhaps without Maler’s
participation.
By the end of year three with the larger organization,
Maler’s job as the artistic director of the company he
founded was terminated, its budget slashed in half,
and its number of performances on the Common cut
by two-thirds.
“It was a very tough time,” he says plainly. “It was
pretty much the hardest time in my life apart from
one other, when I was dealing with a friend’s very
serious illness.”
“The most challenging thing,” he continues softly and
without the emotion the words suggest, “was seeing
this thing that I’d created, that was like a child, all of
the sudden being ripped away from me.”
To add insult to injury, it wasn’t something he
could manage in private. The dispute between the
beloved CSC and the less-beloved Citi Performing
Arts Center—the larger organization—became fodder
for the Boston Globe, playing out above the fold of its
front page for three straight days.
It seems the Citi Center had made other, earlier
management decisions that threatened various
artistic traditions held dear by the citizens of Boston.
With the CSC’s Shakespeare on the Common now
under threat of shuttering, a cry rang up, and the
narrative of the CSC’s David to the Citi Center’s
Goliath took hold.
Maler came off well in the press coverage, being cast
by the Globe largely in the role of the victim, but there
was nonetheless open discussion of his salary and the
CSC’s budget, the Citi Center’s uncertain faith in his
abilities, and the general discomfort of having one’s
business become top news across the city.
“The most challengingthing was seeing this thing I’d created... all of a sudden being ripped awayfrom me.”
36 | The Scholar
In the midst of the upheaval, Maler faced a choice.
Let go and watch the Commonwealth Shakespeare
Company fold, or fight for its independence from the
Citi Performing Arts Center.
He chose to fight.
“I became convinced that if I didn’t fight for it and try
to regain control of it, Shakespeare on the Common
would no longer happen,” he explains. “And I’m sure
of that now. Or it would be happening in a context
very, very different and not at the level of excellence a
project like this has to have.”
It was a fight he won. With a groundswell of
community support, Maler regained control of an
independent Commonwealth Shakespeare Company.
It was the summer of 2008.
All’s Well That Ends Well
Since then, Maler has worked tirelessly to get the
Company back on its feet during an extraordinarily
challenging time for the arts. He has employed
myriad tactics, from indefatigable fundraising to
selecting—strategically—the popular A Comedy of
Errors as its first play post-independence.
Maler describes Comedy as a “simple, silly little play”
with “one set and no costume changes” (and
surely no small amount of irony in the title). These
attributes allowed him to produce the play far more
cheaply than others—a necessity after seeing the
CSC’s budget drop to one-third what it had been
at the high-water mark of the merger with Citi.
After only its first year of independence, Maler and
the CSC doubled revenues, an achievement all the
more impressive for having occurred during the
financial crisis. At the same time, the Company
continues to receive rave reviews.
________________________
“I became convincedthat if I didn’t fight
for it and try to regain control of it,
Shakespeare on theCommon would
no longer happen.And I’m sure of
that now.”
“Backstage” at Shakespeare on the
Common is made up of a small village
of trailers that serve as makeshift
dressing rooms, offices, and the like.
The Scholar | 37
On this night, and I suspect on others, All’s Well That
Ends Well appeared a beautifully conceived and pro-
duced performance. The stage was set minimally and
cleverly (the floor included a track-like Lazy Susan—
a Lazy Susan!—to expedite changes of scene and
allow the actors to move more quickly). And happily,
nothing about the production was weird. No directo-
rial insecurities on display here, just straightforwardly
good acting; simple, stylish props thoughtfully
employed to help the audience navigate the play’s
many different settings; and sound and lighting qual-
ity that—and I mean this in the most complimentary
way—never came to mind. The costumes, designed
according to late-nineteenth century fashion, were
also beautiful.
In short, it was Shakespeare in good, sure hands.
As an audience, we remained rapt throughout, and
our long, raucous applause suggested collective
satisfaction with fulsome entertainment. We had
been treated to a show, and had experienced stretches
of pin-drop silence, the occasional cat-call, the
sudden hush, and sustained, side-splitting laughter.
The stuff of life, indeed. �
Maler, the founder and artistic director of the Commonwealth
Shakespeare Company, is on hand to welcome the sprawling
crowd each night of three weeks of performances.
SARAH BUFKIN ’13
He let us have the house for the summer
because the dog needed to be walked and
there’s always the danger of a pipe breaking
and souring the oak shelves. He never said
her name as we toured the quilt of rooms
—though the closet spills
with her heels and unworn sweaters;
her initials trot across the pillowcases.
But the dog, the dog needs someone
who will care, the shelves might
rot. These are million-dollar homes,
he told us. You can’t be too careful. Afterwards,
we would pretend she had gone on vacation—
vanished off to an island somewhere azure
and blowsy with white linen. It’s easier that way,
to sleep on the patterned sheets, to smile
at the blond children photographed
beside the mirror vanity, to snatch a chocolate
from the stash in the bedside table late at night,
if we pretend death doesn’t leave behind
thriving closets, half-filled jars
of peanut butter, Christmas card collections.
And so we dust the shelves, take the dog
to the park, forget to water the pansies.
what we leave behind
original work~ poetry
38 | The Scholar
The Scholar | 39
SARAH BUFKIN ’13
A day passes like a rain drop spattering
on the concrete walk, flattened
so fast that you didn’t feel its cast
upon your cheek before it no longer
was. Flinging itself down the tunnel,
the train sweeps people in and out
like droplets passing across a car windshield
in that crooked slide all things take
to infinity. The people flinging themselves
through doors closing fast, here a briefcase,
the wheel of a stroller, the last syllable
of a word severed by the sweeping shut
of an alloy door. Skeins of lost conversations
clutter the escalator, catching in the automaton
of its gears as the individual stairs rise
and flatten again, but then the call
of a violin from above and someone loses
an old receipt in the casting of the wind.
late afternoon on the red line
JAR
RA
RD
CO
LE ’12
40 | The Scholar
living downstreamIn Kentucky coal country, Lisa Abbott ’92 finds
defending mountains harder than moving them
“Coal has always cursed the land in which it lies. . . . It mars but never beautifies.
It corrupts but never purifies.”
—Harry Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands (1961)
The Scholar | 41
BY ERIC JOHNSON & KELLY ALMONDBEREA, KENTUCKY
Along Route 160, not far beyond Pine Mountain
Ridge in southeastern Kentucky, the old mining
towns of Benham and Lynch crowd the narrow valley.
Once among the largest coal camps in the world,
the twin townships now offer a sleepy reminder of a
bygone age.
Home to the Kentucky Coal Mining Museum,
Benham and Lynch have been transformed into
tourist attractions, trading on the faded icon
of gritty, determined men venturing deep
underground with headlamps ablaze.
The star attraction is the No. 31 Mine
Portal, a truck-sized, half-moon tunnel
where a small army of men once ventured
into the mountainside, extracting coal for
U.S. Steel. For $10.00, visitors can don helmets
and venture into the hollowed-out earth, touring the
tunnel for a glimpse of mining’s past.
A glimpse of mining’s present is free. A few miles
down the road, as Route 160 crosses Black Mountain
and begins a steep run of switchbacks into Virginia,
the Looney Creek Surface Mine bursts into view.
The contrast is staggering. The thousands of miners
who worked the old No. 31 tunnel used jackhammers,
pickaxes, and railway wagons to painstakingly extract
coal and bring it up to the surface.
At Looney Creek, a few dozen workers use earth-
movers and dump trucks the size of schoolhouses to
bring the surface down to the coal. They are steadily
removing a mountain.
There are a lot of reasons for the shift from under-
ground mining to strip mining. The remaining
Appalachian coal seams are narrower, heavy equip-
ment is heavier, and our collective demand for inex-
pensive energy is greater. For mining companies, it is
often cheaper and safer to simply knock the top off a
mountain or a ridge and scoop up the coal beneath.
But that ease comes at a price.
The land around Lynch, above the old U.S. Steel
mine, is still heavily forested mountainside. Extract-
ing Lynch’s coal was dangerous and dirty, but the
No. 31 Mine Portal is now a tiny surgical scar on an
otherwise healthy mountain.
The Looney Creek Surface Mine is a gaping wound.
It is a vast moonscape of churned rock and mechani-
cally terraced escarpments. It is a barren recess where
a mountain used to be.
For Lisa Abbott ’91, that is too much to pay for cheap
energy.
________________________
42 | The Scholar
At the wizened age of ten, Abbott informed her
mother that she wouldn’t be having children.
Children, she decided, meant you couldn’t care
about work anymore. Already, Abbott felt she had
too much work ahead to hazard distractions.
A few decades have passed since Abbott issued this
declaration to her blinking mother, but it hasn’t been
forgotten. Instead it’s made its way into family lore
and is gleefully recounted when the family, including
Abbott’s two young sons, gets together.
There’s nothing particularly remarkable about ten-
year-olds issuing precocious declarations. There’s
certainly nothing remarkable about precocious
declarations going the way of irresolute things like
campaign promises. What’s remarkable about young
Abbott’s is that it may be the single instance of
inconsistency—ever—between a thing she said and an
action she took.
You will seldom meet a person more conversant with
her beliefs and values than Abbott, nor one more
committed to practicing them. “I’ll act as if what I do
makes a difference,” she is quoted as saying in her
eighth-grade yearbook.
By her teen years, Abbott began the work she felt
compelled to do at age ten, immersing herself in
environmental issues. In high school, she was a
research assistant at a water quality station on the
Hudson River. In college, she served as co-chair for
the Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC),
where she helped organize the group’s first national
conference.
Before her junior year, she designed her own summer
internship with the Natural Resources Defense
Council and completed an impressive report on the
Chattahoochee River Basin. That, in turn, became the
basis for a grant proposal for a clean water campaign
in Georgia.
“They’ve just simplystopped enforcing
the laws.”
A photo of a family hiking trip adorns a
bookshelf in Abbott’s Berea, Kentucky, home—
right next to a novel by Wendell Berry.
The Scholar | 43
As an undergraduate, Abbott pursued a degree in
biology, expecting to build a career doing the kind of
fieldwork she enjoyed during her summer internship.
But through her involvement with SEAC she discov-
ered community organizing—as she describes it,
“a way in which committed activism takes place off a
college campus”—and immediately shifted plans.
While still at Carolina, Abbott attended workshops
at the Highlander Research and Education Center
in Tennessee to learn more about the mechanics of
organizing and to figure out how her skills stacked
up against the work. Highlander is a social justice
leadership and training center perhaps best known
for working with Rosa Parks prior to the Montgomery
Bus Boycott.
While at Highlander, Abbott became familiar with
a small but sophisticated organizing group called
Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC), broadly
committed to social justice, but heavily focused on
mountaintop removal mining.
Her first job with KFTC landed her in a remote corner
of eastern Kentucky, where mountaintop removal
mining was most prevalent in the state. For five years
she lived and worked there alone, a full hour and a
half from her nearest colleague. It was an isolated
start to adult life, so she got a dog to keep her
company. Her dog was soon stolen.
“It was a country song,” Abbott laughed, describing
those early years. “I was robbed three times, and by
Mountaintop removal mining is largely kept out of sight.
Access is strictly limited, and very few sites are visible from
main roads. Here, a missing summit hints at the strip mine
operation over the ridge.
44 | The Scholar
the third time, they had taken everything—there was
nothing left. I had a jar where I kept change, and it
had one quarter in it because everything I had put in
there before had been stolen already. They took the
quarter.”
Alas for her concerned parents, neither the solitude
nor the serial pilfering was enough to deter Abbott.
“I had a job that aligned most closely with my values,”
she explained. “It was a job that I loved, and for five
years that was enough.”
By year six, however, she began to grow restless and
to question long-held assumptions. “I realized that
the work just wasn’t enough anymore, whatever I
might’ve thought when I was ten. And what was I
going to do with that?”
What she did was give her notice to KFTC, get
married, have her first child, and pursue an advanced
degree in public policy at the Woodrow Wilson
School at Princeton—all in the span of three years.
She didn’t stay gone long. Shortly after completing
her coursework at Princeton, Abbott and her young
family returned to Kentucky and settled in the
charming college town of Berea. Though she hadn’t
envisioned returning to Kentucky, resuming her work
with KFTC was a happy homecoming.
“It’s been almost a decade since we’ve come back, and
one of the biggest joys has been that I don’t have all
those questions anymore,” she said. “I’m sure they’ll
come back at some point in my life, but right now I’m
doing what I love, living where I want to live, with a
fantastic family and group of friends.”
________________________
Among the more pressing challenges for groups like
KFTC is that much of the behavior they seek to stop
is, in fact, already banned.
As a matter of law, mining companies cannot pollute
streams, cannot permanently destroy wildlife habitat,
cannot fill valleys with mining waste—cannot legally
do a great many of the things that are part and parcel
of strip mining.
But as any speeding driver knows, there’s a difference
between what is prohibited and what is punished.
And in Kentucky, that gulf is vast.
“They’ve simply stopped enforcing the laws,” Abbott
said. For advocacy groups, this presents a trickier
challenge.
Nothing illustrates that better than a fascinating chart
Abbott assembled from state environmental data.
Under the federal Clean Water Act, mining companies
are obliged to monitor nearby streams and report a
variety of water quality measures to state regulators.
The strip mine along Raccoon Creek, near Rick
Handshoe’s home in Floyd County. Only a handful
of cars are parked at the mine site; strip mining
requires far fewer workers than a traditional,
underground mine. (Photo courtesy KFTC)
The Scholar | 45
Among those indicators is conductivity, the ease with
which an electrical charge passes through water. “Con-
ductivity is useful as a general measure of stream water
quality,” the EPA explains. “Significant changes in
conductivity could be an indicator that a discharge or
some other source of pollution has entered a stream.”
Lower conductivity is generally better; organic
material (the stuff that’s supposed to be in a stream)
doesn’t conduct electricity well, but various inorganic
compounds (nitrate, sulfate, magnesium, sodium,
calcium, iron; the stuff that mining runoff puts in a
stream) conduct it swimmingly.
On Abbott’s chart, mining companies reported a
perfectly stable amount of conductivity—just within
the EPA standard—month after month, in stream
after stream. In heavy rains and drought, across all
manner of geological formations and stream sizes,
ABOVE: Abbott leads a strategy session
of volunteers in the deserted cafeteria of
the legislative building.
LEFT: Abbott and a group of KFTC
volunteers talk about their protest
strategy as they make their way through
a tunnel at the Capitol building.
46 | The Scholar
the lines on the graph remained flat; different mines
across the state were reporting identical data.
In 2010, the EPA had a change of heart and required
mining companies to aim for a more stringent
conductivity standard. As Abbott’s chart shows, they
were more than happy to comply. Instantly, and in per-
fect unison, every stream in Kentucky dropped to the
new standard.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Abbott asked sardonically.
And it gets more so. After a years-long lawsuit by KFTC
and other interested parties, a state judge
ordered independent tests of all those company-
monitored streams. This sudden bout of regulatory zeal
is illustrated on the right side of the chart as a kind of
color explosion. Liberated from their brazen lockstep,
the lines shoot upward at wildly different angles, like a
covey of startled quail. This is what real water quality
data looks like.
“None of them are compliant with the standard,”
Abbott said. “We’re talking about 20,000 of these
violations.”
The point that’s worth dwelling on here is that none of
this blatantly fraudulent data was being hidden from
state regulators; it was sitting in filing cabinets at the
Kentucky Division of Water.
But knowing and caring are two very different things. In
a sense, KFTC’s work on mountaintop removal
“The issue of mountaintopremoval has gotten a lot ofpress coverage nationally,but within the state, it’s just sort of a shrug-your-shoulders attitude.”
The Scholar | 47
amounts to an extended plea for Kentuckians and their
elected officials to care about the damage in plain sight.
________________________
For most of us, the iconic images of modern political
protest are ’60s-vintage. There are banners, loud
marches, plenty of chanting, maybe even some arrests.
“Protest” calls to mind a dramatic affair.
So it was a little jarring to see Abbott and her
colleagues quietly seated in the waiting area of
Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear’s office, turning
down offers of coffee and candy from the governor’s
diligently polite staff.
It was June 23rd, a Thursday, and the legislature was
not in session. The State Capitol in Frankfort had
an empty, hushed feel. Even the handful of tourists
wandering through to see the ornate, Beaux-Arts
building with French replica staircases were quiet in
their appreciation.
Assembled in the governor’s anteroom were Abbott
and three volunteers from the KFTC office in Berea;
a man named Rick Handshoe, who lives downstream
from a mine in Floyd County; and an exceedingly tall,
courtly fellow in a tan suit.
Handshoe was there because his creek keeps turning
orange, and he would like someone to take an interest
in the problem. The tall fellow, Wendell Berry, was
there because President Barack Obama recently
awarded him the National Humanities Medal, and it
seemed unlikely the Capitol police would make a scene
by evicting him.
Berry is an oddity in Kentucky, a man regarded as a
civic treasure for decrying the general direction of soci-
ety. He has written more than forty books of poetry
and essays, mostly about mankind and our conflicted
relationship with nature. He owns a farm in Henry
County, and he has publicly described the government
of Kentucky as “a wholly owned subsidiary of the coal
corporations and of any other corporations that bid
high enough.” Still, everyone in the Capitol seemed to
adore him.
After Berry visited the White House last year to collect
his National Humanities Medal, Kentucky Attorney
General Jack Conway was kind enough to send a
congratulatory note. He invited Berry to call on him if
he could ever be of service.
Berry promptly took Conway up on the offer, request-
ing a meeting for Handshoe and KFTC to discuss the
orange creek issue. Berry has been an ardent supporter
of KFTC, offering his lanky frame and understated
gravitas wherever it might do some good.
The half-hour meeting wasn’t scheduled until the
afternoon, but Abbott and her volunteers had no
intention of wasting a trip to the Capitol on a short,
Abbott and Wendell Berry just outside the governor’s
office in the State Capitol. “Working with Berry is a
major job perk,” Abbott said.
48 | The Scholar
closed-door session. So there they all were at 10:30 in
the morning, patiently waiting for Governor Beshear
to return to his office so that he might be urged to
hear Handshoe’s petition.
“Two state agencies have said, ‘You know what, Rick?
We don’t respond to calls about orange water any-
more,’” Abbott explained. Handshoe had been through
this routine before, the last few times the upstream
mining operation released wastewater into his creek.
“Now they’re just throwing up their hands and not
responding at all.”
Even though it was as quiet as a library in the gover-
nor’s office, a half-dozen people sitting around and
looking aggrieved was enough to attract the lone
reporter prowling the Capitol building on a languid
summer morning. It is to KFTC’s everlasting luck that
the reporter was Ronnie Ellis.
ABOVE: Rick Handshoe holds a sign about the mine runoff polluting his Floyd County creek.
The Scholar | 49
Ellis’s mere presence in an out-of-session, news-free
Capitol attests to his status as a dying breed in jour-
nalism. Few news outlets can afford a full-time re-
porter in the statehouse, and fewer still employ a
multi-decade veteran like Ellis.
He serves as the Frankfort reporter for Community
Newspaper Holdings, Inc., and his stories get picked
up by local papers and websites across Kentucky. He
wandered in wearing a sport coat and an open-necked
shirt, sat down next to Handshoe, and began taking
notes.
Whether out of boredom, genuine sympathy, or a
deep-seated belief in the journalist’s creed of comfort-
ing the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, Ellis
decided to lend a hand.
He called the governor’s press secretary and found
that Beshear had already returned—through a side
door—and would be exiting again shortly, with no in-
tention of seeing the aggrieved citizens in his lobby. A
small press conference on an unrelated matter was
scheduled to begin just down the hall.
This presented a choice
for Abbott. Be
content with a
mild-mannered
sit-in here in
the governor’s
lobby, or use the press conference as a chance to make
some news?
“The issue of mountaintop removal has gotten a lot
of press coverage nationally,” Abbott said. “But within
the state, it’s sort of a shrug-your-shoulders attitude.”
Abbott took a quick poll and found that the group
was not inclined to shrug and go home.
________________________
To give Governor Beshear his due, the brief in favor of
coal is as compelling as it is succinct: we need it.
The United States has the largest proven reserves
of coal in the world, and almost half of our electric
power comes from burning it. On this, industry
supporters and environmental activists agree: we are
the Saudi Arabia of coal.
The coal lobby has developed a catchy slogan to drive
the point home: Coal Keeps the Lights On!
It is so pithy that it fits on a license plate, which you
can see within a few minutes on any eastern Kentucky
highway.
Drivers wishing to show their support for coal can get
a jet-black specialty plate—“Coal Keeps the Lights
On!” running in bright yellow across the bottom—
through the state’s Motor Vehicle Licensing System.
It costs $44.00, including an automatic $10.00
donation to the Kentucky Coal Association.
The prevalence of the plate hints at another of
KFTC’s challenges: support for the coal industry
is deep and sincere among many Kentuck-
ians, especially those in elected office.
“The powers that be in this state
are firmly aligned behind the
status quo,” Abbott said. “The
coal industry dominates at every
level of state government.”
50 | The Scholar
As a result, KFTC spends a lot of time and energy
prodding reluctant Kentucky officials to enforce
federal laws. Environmental lawsuits tend to become
case studies in federalism.
During the 2011 session of the Kentucky legislature,
the state senate easily passed a resolution declaring
Kentucky a “sanctuary state from the regulatory
overreach of the United States Environmental
Protection Agency,” apparently in the belief that coal
companies are suffering an excess of regulation.
This was in response to the EPA’s renewed efforts to
enforce the Clean Water Act. Under federal law, the
Army Corps of Engineers can issue a permit allowing
strip mines to dump thousands of tons of waste—
all of the non-coal parts of a mountain—into
neighboring valleys. As the EPA describes it:
Mountaintop mining is a form of surface coal mining in
which explosives are used to access coal seams, generating
large volumes of waste that bury adjacent streams. The
resulting waste that then fills valleys and streams can
significantly compromise water quality, often causing perma-
nent damage to ecosystems and rendering streams unfit for
drinking, fishing, and swimming. It is estimated that almost
2,000 miles of Appalachian headwater streams have been
buried by mountaintop coal mining.1
1EPA Press Release. “EPA Issues Final Guidance to Protect Water Quality inAppalachian Communities from Impacts of Mountaintop Mining / Agencyto provide flexibility while protecting environment and public health.”7/21/2011. http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/bd4379a92ce-ceeac8525735900400c27/1dabfc17944974d4852578d400561a13!
The Corps of Engineers has historically taken a
laissez-faire attitude in issuing these permits, and the
EPA has rarely exercised its authority to review them.
The Obama administration sought to change that,
pushing the EPA to more closely assess the environ-
mental impact of valley fill.
“The EPA is, for the first time, making some efforts to
enforce existing laws that have been on the books
since 1977,” Abbot said. “It’s not a new law; they’re
just saying, ‘let’s take this seriously.’”
This has not gone over well among industry
supporters.
“They are career bureaucrats who sit in their ivory
tower in Washington, D.C., and decide what the
science should be,” said David Gooch, president of
the Kentucky Coal Operators and Associates, during
testimony last year before the state legislature.
Inside the State Capitol,
Rick Handshoe, left, and
a pair of KFTC volunteers
hold signs cataloging
alleged damage from
eastern Kentucky mining
operations.
The Scholar | 51
In Kentucky, that represents a mostly bipartisan
sentiment. Governor Beshear is a Democrat, and his
2011 State of the Commonwealth speech earned one
of its strongest ovations in response to a demand for
Washington to butt out.
“Coal provides 90 percent of our electricity and—
because our rates are low—has helped us build a
robust manufacturing industry,” Beshear said.
“But all that is in jeopardy because Washington
bureaucrats continue to try to impose arbitrary and
unreasonable regulations on the mining of coal. To
them I say, ‘Get off our backs! I will fight you for the
right to cleanly and safely mine coal.’”
That kind of rhetoric—pitting hardscrabble, salt-of-
the-earth, coal-loving Kentuckians against meddling
environmentalist outsiders—particularly galls Abbott.
“That charge gets bandied around a bunch because
it’s effective,” she said. “But it simply isn’t the case.
The folks who are working against mountaintop
removal in Kentucky are the people who are drinking
the water, living with the dust, people whose children
have asthma because they live near the coal prep
plant. If you look at the people protesting in the
governor’s office, they’re the people who live with
this day-in and day-out.”
________________________
“The folks who are working on
mountaintop removal in Kentucky are the people who are drinking the
water, living with the dust . . . ”
52 | The Scholar
Abbott’s upbringing is about as far from that of those
she works with as you can imagine. Raised in New
York, she was a celebrated student at the prestigious
Groton School in Massachusetts.
She came by her commitment to social causes
honestly, crediting her parents and unique childhood
on the pastoral campus of Millbrook School where
her father was headmaster with instilling in her “a
deep sense of responsibility to live as an engaged,
questioning, compassionate, and equal citizen of
our global world.”
It’s the kind of earnestness that might, in less self-
aware hands, trend toward tedious. So it’s important
to note that while Abbott is serious-minded, she
hardly takes herself seriously. With an easy laugh and
nimble sense of humor, Abbott is more a calming
presence than a rabble-rouser. And while deeply
committed to acting on her beliefs (she drives a
Prius), she isn’t in your face about them (there are
no bumper stickers on it).
When asked about an op-ed she wrote for The Daily
Tar Heel in protest of the first Iraq War, she responds
with a sheepish laugh. “I think I’ve grown a little bit. I
don’t think I’m quite as self-righteous as I used to be.”
For all her devotion to environmental causes, it seems
an unlikely dream for a 22-year-old to leave Chapel
Hill for an isolated life in the mountains of eastern
Kentucky, much less so for a Groton School Crocker
Prize recipient and Morehead Scholar. Did she ever
worry that she was giving something up to become a
community organizer?
“I never have,” she responds simply. “I absolutely love
the life I lead. I try pretty hard at what I’m doing, yes.
But I don’t see what I’m doing as somehow noble or
sacrificial. I’ve gotten to work with some of the most
courageous, smart, caring people I’ve ever encoun-
tered. I live in this really neat town with an amazingly
diverse community of friends. And I get to talk to
Wendell Berry once a week. And that’s pretty neat.
“I think I’m one of the luckiest people I know,” she
assures. “I’ll let you know if I meet someone who I
think is luckier than I am.”
________________________
Back in the Capitol building, Abbott made a decision.
If Governor Beshear was going to stiff-arm Rick
Handshoe and his orange-water problem, then
KFTC would make an appearance at the governor’s
afternoon press conference.
Suited dignitaries gathered in the press room just
down the hall from the governor’s office, waiting
to see a trade representative from Taiwan present
Governor Beshear with a $20,000 check for flood
relief. The KFTC members filed in quietly and made
their way to the back. Berry sat down closer to the
front and began taking notes—“I like people to know
The Scholar | 53
I’m paying attention,” he explained later—and a
volunteer unfurled a small poster (“Water Trumps
Coal”).
The facial expression of the Taiwanese trade
representative progressed from genial to confused
to deeply displeased.
The governor and his aides kept their camera-ready
smiles glued in place, and Ronnie Ellis failed to
suppress a grin.
There was no shouting, no chanting, no interruption
of Governor Beshear’s remarks about the generosity
of the Taiwanese people. But as the press gaggle
ended and Beshear made his way to the door, Rick
Handshoe was waiting.
Polite but persistent, he made his way to the
Governor and pressed a thin sheaf of papers into
his hand. Beshear thanked him and walked down
the corridor, glancing at the detailed autopsy of
An excerpt from Abbott's
1992 application to the
Southern Empowerment
Project for additional
training in community
organizing before begin-
ning her job with KFTC.
54 | The Scholar
Handshoe’s dead creek. The Governor ducked into a
side door and was gone.
This, for KFTC, is a victory. The afternoon’s meeting
with the attorney general was downgraded to a
brief sit-down with an assistant AG—he cautiously
promised to “make the attorney general aware” of
KFTC’s complaints—and Ronnie Ellis wrote a fine
story about the glaring failure of state government to
do anything whatsoever about polluted mine runoff
in Floyd County.
Abbott wasn’t quoted anywhere in the article, which
is a deliberate element of KFTC’s strategy. “One of
the bedrock principles of KFTC is that our staff
don’t speak on behalf of the organization,” Abbott
explained. “If anything is going to be said in the name
of KFTC, it’s going to be said by volunteer leaders.”
That stance is both a defensive measure, helping to
diffuse the charge of KFTC as a bunch of meddling
outsiders, and part of the long-term goal of building
civic know-how in politically isolated regions of
Kentucky.
“It reinforces that the organization’s mission is really
and sincerely leadership development,” Abbot said.
“It helps people find their own voice and build the
skills and confidence to speak out on the issues that
are affecting them.”
“Each of us, whatever course of life we take, needs to pursue our lives as if
our actions matter.”
Last year, KFTC moved its Berea
office from an airy downtown house
into a charmless strip mall. Since
then, Abbott has spent a fair amount
of her time working from home.
The Scholar | 55
And so it was Handshoe who emerged front-and-
center in Ellis’s coverage. “These are good tax-paying
people,” he told the reporter. “We may be from the
hills, but we’re supposed to be part of Kentucky. We
don’t feel like it.”
Despite Ellis’s best efforts, few outlets picked up the
protest. Handshoe’s creek continued to turn orange
without turning into a scandal, and Beshear cruised
to reelection a few months later with almost 57
percent of the vote.
“It’s not that people don’t care,” Ellis said, explaining
the tepid response to stories like Handshoe’s.
“They’ve just given up.”
Abbott has not. In a 2010 speech marking the 100th
anniversary of Carolina’s Campus Y, Abbott urged a
crowd of UNC students and alumni to avoid the
sense of paralysis that can take hold in the face of a
seemingly indifferent world.
“Each of us, whatever course of life we take, needs to
pursue our lives as if our actions matter,” she said,
hearkening back to her own eighth-grade promise
and the guiding principle of her life. “This is, I think,
an operational definition of hope.”
It’s a good one. And in eastern Kentucky, Abbott’s
hope is making the mountains just a little bit harder
to move. �
Abbott and Wendell
Berry making their
way down the
sidewalk after a long
day at the Capitol.
56 | The Scholar
BY LIBBY RODENBOUGH ’13
Reprinted from the October 2011 issue of Campus BluePrint
I suspect that the words “folk music” conjure one
of a number of images in your mind. Perhaps it’s a
handful of grungy hippies crooning Kumbaya around
a campfire, some decrepit hillbillies clogging on a
crumbling porch in the Appalachian backwoods or
even (for those of you really worldly college students
who have been beyond our national borders) a band
of vagabonds with strange, foreign-looking instru-
ments making strange, foreign-sounding noises.
Well, pat yourself on the back, you ethnomusicologi-
cal scholar, because that’s exactly what folk music is.
That and a lot more. It’s people singin’ and dancin’
and playin’ together in the spirit of a common
tradition. It’s an animated, acoustic homage to the
lives and rituals of our predecessors.
That might sound a bit too schmaltzy or fuddy-
duddy for your taste, but having dedicated the last
year or so of my life to both learning how to pick and
shuffle at the Old Town School of Folk Music in
Chicago and to Irish fiddling in pubs across the
Emerald Isle, I feel compelled to make a case for the
stuff. Here are but a few life lessons I’ve learned
from my adventures in folk.
It’s always better when we’re
together
(or says folk demigod Jack Johnson). Folk music is an
inherently communal activity. Even solo “folk artists,”
or the good ones, at least, are happiest when joined by
other voices.
I saw American folk revival hero Pete Seeger, now
a sprightly 92, this summer at the Newport Folk
Festival in Rhode Island. The man has been
performing for seven decades, and yet his fundamen-
tal objective today is exactly as it was in the 1940s:
to get his audience singing along.
This is the gist of folk music: finding something
we can all agree on. And in the complex microcosms
of political, racial, and cultural diversity that are
American communities, we would do well to better
appreciate areas of common ground.
Respect your roots
Though no musical tradition can survive without
innovation, folk music emphasizes paying tribute to
those who came before, and not only in the sphere
of musical performance. Folk songs immortalize
all manner of heroes, from naval captains to labor
organizers to dear ol’ Granny.
what I’ve learned from folk music
The Scholar | 57
Cultural history is one of our most invaluable
resources, providing us with a wealth of figures to
emulate— and, of course, plenty of grisly cautionary
tales. Speaking in broad generalization, the western
world tends to view history from a distinctly
socio-political vantage point, and folk music reminds
us that our cultural history can be equally, if not
more, instructive.
Fewer spine-crushing solos;
more complementary fills
Folk music recognizes musical virtuosity, but it
reveres a good ear and a sense of empathy. Egos don’t
last long, especially in a field that has never been
exactly lucrative. To earn genuine respect, a folk
musician must know when to back off and how to
make somebody else look good (this is particularly
welcome news for the non-virtuosos among us). An
earth-shaking lead guitar does not a good jam make.
In the university world and in American society
at large, we often use hierarchies of personal
achievement to evaluate the quality of our lives,
where perhaps instead the happiness and success
of our communities should be the yardstick.
Don’t lose the groove
The great thing about collective music-making is that
you can and should depend on the group to absorb
your blunders. So don’t cry over that errant F note;
hop right back in as soon as you feel the pulse again.
As long as you’ve got the community playing along
around you, there’s no need to sweat the minutia of
individual notes.
A lot of us seem to have the mantra “DON’T MESS
UP” running incessantly through our brains, but
I will make the bold claim that every last one of the
world’s best and brightest have dropped the ball
on occasion. The ones who pick it right back up
again—or maybe even allow someone else to pick it
up for them—are the ones who start getting at the
core of living.
Before I descend entirely into Mr. Rogers-esque
philosophical rambling, I’ll give it a rest. Suffice it to
say, I have grown to have great respect for both folk
music and the theoretical principles derived, however
loosely, therefrom. I’m not claiming that folk music
isn’t cheesy; only that most of us could use a little
less self-importance, a little less stress, a little less
seriousness, and a lot more cheese in our lives. �
Libby Rodenbough ’13
(with the violin) plays with
Chapel Hill Americana
group Mipso Trio as they
shoot a music video in
UNC’s Forest Theater.
58 | The Scholar
In more than three decades as a writer and historian,
James Reston, Jr. ’63 has chronicled the grand and the
obscure. He talked to The Scholar about tackling his most
sensitive project yet, a novel based on September 11th.
a man obsessed
The printed manuscript
of The Nineteenth Hijackerstacked neatly on Reston’s
coffee table.
The Scholar | 59
BY ERIC JOHNSONCHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND
For a long time, James Reston, Jr. ’63 resisted the idea
of becoming a writer. As the son of famed New York
Times editor and columnist James “Scotty” Reston,
the younger Reston wasn’t interested in making
journalism a family business.
“Certainly, through my first couple of years at Chapel
Hill, I rejected all of that,” Reston recalled during
an interview at his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
“I didn’t want to go in that direction at all.”
It wasn’t until his junior year, studying abroad at
Oxford, that he began to reconsider. Writing and
defending two essays each week for his Oxford tutors,
he found that the work suited him well.
After graduation, he served as a speechwriter for
Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, followed by
a stint writing political essays for the Chicago Daily
News. During the Vietnam War, Reston volunteered
to serve in in a U.S. Army intelligence unit, which
afforded him the time to write his first novel.
To Defend, To Destroy was published in 1971.
“I was stationed in Hawaii, and on weekends I would
fly off to outer islands and hole myself up in hotel
rooms and try to write,” he said. “That’s how I got
into the writing business.” Fifteen books later, he’s
still very much in the writing business, though he
now holes up in a cozy home office decorated with
framed covers and illustrations from his books.
Reston found his calling in nonfiction, and he has
written on an eclectic range of topics—an exploration
of cult leader Jim Jones, a celebrated biography of
Galileo, a memoir of his experience raising his
daughter Hillary, who suffers from a severe
neurological disorder.
He is most widely known for his role in the 1977
interviews between British journalist David Frost and
former president Richard Nixon. Reston served as the
lead researcher for Frost, uncovering new material
about the Watergate scandal and helping turn the
interviews into a legendary moment in political
history.
Reston chronicled the experience in The Conviction
of Richard Nixon: The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon
Interviews, and he served as a consultant to the
Broadway play Frost/Nixon and the 2008 film
adaptation. “What a trip that was!” Reston said,
referring to his work on the film.
In recent years, he has made a name for himself in
the policy world by connecting his histories of the
Crusades to current events. With titles like Warriors of
God, Dogs of God, and Defenders of the Faith, his books
on conflict between Muslim and Christian civiliza-
tions made him a sought-after commentator on
American policy after September 11th, 2001.
recently by the co-chair of the 9/11 Commission,
Lee Hamilton. Lee is a wonderful man—a bit of a
raconteur—and I filmed a conversation with him a
few years ago about 9/11.
He mentioned that the 9/11 Commission never had
the time—or possibly the inclination—to look into
the individual lives of the 19 hijackers. There was one
in particular that really interested him, and my ears
perked up at this.
The hijacker he was talking about was the Lebanese
man who took the plane down in Shanksville,
Pennsylvania—flight 93. His name was Ziad al-Jarrah.
TS: Why the focus on him? Why not the other
eighteen?
Jim: He was particularly interesting, and in many ways
separate from all of the others. He was Lebanese, he
came from a very fine family in Beirut and was close
to his family even to the very end. He also had a
60 | The Scholar
For his latest project, Reston decided to tackle some
of those same themes in fiction. He has spent the past
few years writing The Nineteenth Hijacker, an imagined
account of September 11th and his first novel in
more than three decades. He hopes to see it published
this year.
“It’s a real roll of the dice for me,” Reston says. “I’ve
done it without a contract, something I haven’t done
since 1974. But it’s something I really wanted to do.”
In his first interview about the book, Reston explains
what drew him to such sensitive territory and why he
finds value in crafting a narrative from tragedy.
The Scholar: You’ve described your literary career as a
series of obsessions, where you spend years becoming
immersed in a particular subject. How did 9/11
become one of those obsessions?
Jim: I’m a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson
Center here in Washington, and that was run until
The desk where Reston
does most of his research
and writing. His basement
office gets a generous
amount of sunlight.
very deep romantic relationship with a woman in
Germany, and that kind of thing was very much
against al-Qaeda rules.
Perhaps most interestingly, he almost pulled
out of the operation in July of 2001.
TS: That does sound like a solid prem-
ise for a book.
Jim: As an author, the idea of a
choice between strong family
ties and a strong romantic
relationship or this sense of
conviction about a larger
cause appealed to me
immensely.
I thought, “Well, that’s
a good subject for me,
and I’ll do it as non-
fiction.” Then I come
“The idea of a choice between strong family ties and a strong romantic relationship or this sense of conviction about a larger cause appealed to me immensely.”
62 | The Scholar
to find out that much of the material surrounding
the 9/11 hijackers is still classified. So it just couldn't
be done in any other way but to imagine it.
TS: Are you concerned about negative reactions to fic-
tionalizing 9/11? The critical reaction to other novels
that have touched on 9/11 has been decidedly mixed.
Jim: From an author’s standpoint, I think you’ve got
to get beyond the big event before people really want
to open their mind up to it. When I published my
first novel in 1971, the Vietnam War was not over.
And in some ways, I think that book was published
too soon.
Now, with 9/11, the situation seems to have turned
around with the death of Osama bin Laden. It’s as
if we’ve won it now. We’ve brought it some kind of
closure . . . I hope.
TS: With so much of the official record still off-limits,
what kind of research could you do?
Jim: Well, I went to Beirut and I talked with the
uncle of this guy, Ziad. And I went to Hamburg;
Ziad’s trajectory was through Hamburg, part of that
Hamburg cell that included Mohamed Atta.
The journalism that is the best on this is largely
German, and it’s because of the Hamburg cell. A lot
of the writing and research that has been done in
Germany leads you to the conclusion that 9/11 was
really the result of about eight individuals.
The brilliance of the 9/11 operation, and the
immense luck from the standpoint of Osama bin
Laden, is that these individuals in Hamburg—four
young men from a sophisticated, westernized,
graduate-student background—wanted to satisfy
their obligation for jihad. It was not all about training
camps in Afghanistan, but about finding these little
cells of bright, westernized individuals.
The Scholar | 63
So I did those trips, and of course the 9/11 Commis-
sion Report itself is very useful. There’s a lot of
fascinating material in there. You have to master all
of that before you really start digging elsewhere.
TS: How did you find people to interview? And how
did you get them to talk about a subject so pro-
foundly sensitive?
Jim: This is really a standard problem for a journalist:
How do you get people to talk who really have a
difficult story? I’ve been around Washington for quite
a long time now, and I’ve got some good contacts.
There was a woman here who became my fixer in
Lebanon, setting up my interviews. In the case of this
particular story, Ziad’s uncle had become a kind of
press spokesman. He was the one who agreed to
interviews on behalf of the family.
In talking to him, I found that they’re in total denial.
Ziad’s family don’t believe he did it; they think he
was a victim. They think maybe he was going on a
vacation to California or something like that. So
they’re in total denial.
TS: How did you react to that? Was it hard for you
to hear them deny it?
Jim: That crime is so incredible, and so awful, I think
the normal human reaction is one of denial. But I
did, when I got back to Washington, mail them a
copy of the 9/11 Commission Report.
Handwritten notes from
Reston’s agent and editor.
64 | The Scholar
TS: How did the research shape the plot?
Jim: Well, the lover in Germany, Ziad’s girlfriend,
became a principal character. We see the life of Ziad
al-Jarrah through his lover, who professes not to
know anything about the 9/11 plot. Though they
were in a long relationship, Jarrah supposedly never
told her anything about it. She had her suspicions.
And so the construct of the book is such that the
action really happens after 9/11. The real woman
received a posthumous letter—this is actually true—
that Ziad had written the night before the operation
as a farewell to her. So what I have imagined in this
book is that he not only wrote that farewell letter,
but that he had been recording his recollections
about how this whole thing had been happening.
In my book, seven days after 9/11 she gets this
packet not only with his farewell letter but with these
tapes in which he has told her his whole story. Then
it becomes a question of whether she turns this over
to the police.
This is personal for her—she wants to know what’s
in it, what’s on the tapes, and it becomes a kind of
cat-and-mouse game between her and the police.
She knows that if she turns the package over, she’ll
never see the tapes or hear Ziad’s explanation. So it
becomes a sort of complicated construct where we
hear his story through the lens of the lover and the
relationship between her and Ziad.
TS: Were you able to speak with her before writing
the book?
Jim: No; she was long since lost to history.
To begin with, the German police put her into
protective custody and she was always barred from
the press. Then she dropped from sight, and nobody
knows where she is. I wrote her a letter, but it was
returned.
Lining the walls of his
home office, Reston
keeps mementos from the
Frost/Nixon interviews. He
served as one of Frost’s
lead researchers for the
high-stakes interviews
with the former president.
The Scholar | 65
So I have completely created her character, and in
some ways that’s a good thing. If she had actually
talked to me, and then she didn’t like the way she was
portrayed, then you could get into legal difficulty.
But I can now say that this is completely made up
out of whole cloth.
TS: What’s the value in taking a story like this and
turning it into a human-scale narrative? Do you
think people are going to rebel against the notion
of humanizing a 9/11 hijacker?
Jim: Well, the comfortable thing in America is for us
to leave these people as stick figures and monsters,
not as human beings. If we leave them as stick figures
and monsters, then we don’t understand anything
about how this kind of bestial act could take place.
I want to know, what’s the whole evolution of the
mindset that could lead a very attractive guy with a
lot going for him through this arc, from Beirut
through Hamburg to Florida and into the mud of
Shanksville, Pennsylvania? We need to try to under-
stand what that process can be like, what's the
motivation, what touches that, what leads one to
violence of that cataclysmic nature.
That would be my argument. We need to understand
these people if we’re going to protect ourselves. �
“It’s a real roll of the dice for me . . . But it’s something
I really wanted to do.”
Reston in his home office in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
66 | The Scholar
Akhil Jariwala ’14Yorita, Honduras. June 15, 2011
We were going to help them prepare their first ensayo
de maiz. This would serve as the first step in a long
community-driven research project to help the farmers
determine which corn and bean varieties would best
suit the soil, temperature, and humidity of their land.
Marvin brought with him twelve different corn
varieties, a measuring tape, and some yellow cord for
the plotting.
Watching Marvin instruct the community was magical.
I literally saw him transform these farmers—who had
worked with the same tools, land, and methodology
their whole lives—into experimenters and scientists.
Each summer, scholars working
abroad manage to overcome spotty
Internet connections and a lot of jet
lag to offer fascinating dispatches
from around the world.
Here are a few excerpts from the
summer blogs of 2011.
dispatchesfrom thesummerblogs
The Scholar | 67
To start, he unrolled his long yellow cord and had
them measure out and stake two 20m-long ropes to
mark the vertical boundaries of the ensayo and five
5m-long ropes to help mark where they would put the
individual corn seeds. Between surcos of three corn
seeds, Marvin had them leave exactly 40cm of space,
and between columns of corn varieties, exactly 80cm.
Everything was marked on the ropes to establish a
grid, and I was impressed by how systematically the
campesinos began to work once they understood the
process. They measured the distances between seed
holes with a measuring tape instead of with the
number of footsteps. They used the same number
of seeds for every single hole. They used land in the
middle of the plot instead of the very best or the very
worst. The whole task took two hours, but we left
the Huracan CIAL with much more than just two
repetitions of an ensayo de maiz. We left them with
a set of skills to make their lives better.
Los catrachos are probably the most hospitable
people I have met in my whole life. When we got to
the Huracan plot, the women quickly got us three
parasols so that we would be comfortable out of the
sun. When one of the CIAL leaders saw me eyeing the
fruit trees, he had some of the children climb them
and get us a bag of perfect, luscious mangoes. The
people of Huracan refused to let us leave without
feeding us a delicious lunch. The people here may not
have a lot, but they offer what they do, and that is
something we could all learn from.
68 | The Scholar
Nicola Vann ’14Almasu Sec, Romania. June 8, 2011
A thunderstorm has just begun outside. We’re
listening to it inside our little room. Poufy, the
neighboring corgi-mix-mutt-like-dog is hiding under
the car. We just fed him some.
I had a challenging conversation earlier. I was explain-
ing University and scholarship within a conversation
about the radically low salaries of many Romanians
and various hardships surrounding money and
education. The students asked me what I was
The Scholar | 69
studying at University and I told them Theatre. I got
this surprised head shake from one of the teachers.
I guess I understand: when I have so much set up for
me to be successful and secure, why would I study
something so impractical?
This is something I’ve felt insecure justifying even
in the United States. I believe so strongly in theatre
as an art, as a therapeutic adventure for both those
creating it and witnessing it, and as an important
and developing part of society and culture. But it
absolutely is a career, and particularly a field of study,
met with criticism. Yet I wish I could explain that
yes, yes, you could never study theatre and still be
incredibly adept at it. Or you could study it forever
and never begin to understand it. But if you do study
it, you will learn some of the most influential things
you may ever learn about people, emotions, bodies,
environments, and cooperation; not to mention you
develop quite a decent work ethic.
I can’t explain to these teachers who struggle on their
salaries that I do understand how incredibly fortunate
I am, and that I learn this more all the time. It is a
privilege to be able to study something that guaran-
tees me very little practically, but everything intellec-
tually and spiritually.
John Adams once said (this quote hung on the wall in
my high school Calculus class somewhat ironically)
“I must study politics and war, that my sons may
have the liberty to study mathematics and philoso-
phy, natural history and naval architecture, in order
to give their children a right to study painting, poetry,
music, architecture, tapestry, and porcelain.”
It is because I am so fortunate that I would not be
able to forgive myself if I did not at least try to do
what I really want to do. But this is hard to explain.
Particularly if you do not speak the language.
________________________
Max Seunik ’14Bamako, Mali, June 13, 2011
“Where are we going?” I asked my host-father Moussa
as we clambered into the back of his beat-up Jeep,
closely followed by his daughter Assitan and wife
Myriam.
“To see a spectacle,” he replied.
We drove from Kalaban-Cora across the Pont-des-
Martyrs and through Bamako, the city sweltering
under a reddish haze and choked with the smells
of fuel exhaust, garbage, and sewage. Myriam and
Assitan chatted amiably in the backseat in Bambara,
and I sat with my arm out the window gazing at the
people and places as we drove by, reflecting on my
first week here in Mali.
“So . . . uhh, where are we?” I inquired of Moussa as
we ascended the ridges that surround Bamako and
the road went from paved, to packed gravel, to
nothing more than a suggestion. The scene became
increasingly rural.
“On our way to a village outside Bamako; they are
celebrating the town’s founding—Myriam does
vaccinations there.” Myriam, a nurse, nodded from
the backseat—“You’ll meet my colleagues!” she added
with a laugh.
70 | The Scholar
Exiting the car we made our way through the crowd
and found seats ringing a large circle of packed earth.
In the center of the circle, a group of three men
stood pounding out a rhythmic beat on large drums
engulfed by swarms of the town’s children—laughing,
jumping, and spinning in circles around the
drummers.
The circle of earth was bordered by many onlookers,
the entire village assembled as mic-checks were made,
outfits were donned and instruments tested. Within
the hour, the mayor of the village arrived and every-
one settled down to watch. During this time, Moussa
had been conferring with one of the villagers, who
urged him to make sure I stayed for the entire
performance, which would conclude well into the
early hours of the next morning. The villager looked
at me, gesticulating wildly with his hands and talking
in rapid streams of Bambara. Moussa translated,
“He’s telling you that there will be many spiritual
things—unexplainable things: at midnight three
mystical serpents shall appear.” I tried to probe fur-
ther, but Moussa raised his hands and resigned him-
self, “I am a city person, I know not of these things.”
Then the music started.
Over the next hour, the beats from an assortment
of drums large and small, the klak-klak-klak of
curious wooden bowls ringed with beads and the
shrill wavering notes of the wassoulou singers filled
the air. All manners of dancers took the floor—scores
of men with a variety of props (everything from a
Santa hat to a fake Burberry scarf) pounded their feet
against the earth, soon joined by women, and then
whoever wanted to dance. My personal favourite was
an old woman dressed in bright neon colours, who got
right in the middle of the festivities and went wild.
After the dancers had tired themselves out, the music
changed—taking on a more “tribal” tone. Soon, a
dancer appeared clad entirely in mud cloth with a
bulging stomach, sporting a fearsome painted mask
with golden horns affixed with the idol of a naked
pregnant woman. The dancer wildly circled the ring
of spectators, flailing his limbs and emitting bizarre
whoops and screams. The beat of the drums increased
in speed and volume, whipping the dancer into a
crazed frenzy until he collapsed on his knees near a
spectator, one hand clamped on his bulging stomach.
The dancer shook and heaved and pulled a long, red
cloth from his loins and presented it to the spectator,
an old man. Moussa leaned over to me, “Now, he
must dance.”
Sure enough, the man took the red cloth and paraded
into the middle of the circle and danced as energeti-
cally and in time as if he had been in training himself.
He returned the cloth to the masked dancer and sat
back down to applause from the audience.
The only thing I could think was: Please don’t choose
me.
I was spared—the dancer took the red cloth and
retreated from whence he had come.
Next came a bizarre bird-like creature led on by a
man with a pipe. The same pattern as with the
fertility-dancer —the beats would start out calm and
gradually increase in speed and intensity until the
dancers were going absolutely insane.
The bird soon retreated and a the crowd quieted.
Then, from both sides of the ring, two masked
The Scholar | 71
dancers came streaming in, red ribbons flying from
their hands. They circled the crowd, with hands up to
their eyes as if they were searching. Searching . . .
searching . . . but for what? Simultaneously, they both
turned towards where I was sitting and descended
upon me.
One of the dancers squatted at my feet, while the
other begin to pull red cloth from beneath the shirt
of the first one, extricating the cloth and handing it
to me. Hesitantly, I took the cloth. I looked to
Moussa; he gave me a raised eyebrow. “You must
dance. It is the way,” he said. Desperately, I looked
to his wife Myriam on the other side of me. She was
already bent over in laughter.
So, red cloth in hand, I rose from my seat, slowly
proceeded to the centre of the ring, and I danced.
Stamping my feet in tune to the music and raising
the cloth high above my head, and swishing it around
as I had seen done, I expected laughter from the
1,000-strong crowd; me, a big white guy, so obviously
foreign to this environment, attempting to imitate
their tradition.
But instead the crowd began to clap.
In unison, they clapped to the beat of the drums,
increasing the fervour and speed until I could scarce
keep up.
Joined by the two dancers, we spun around the circle
for what felt like an eternity stomping and kicking
and moving until the claps had turned into applause.
Sweating, I returned to my place.
As soon I had taken my seat, the villager who had
told me about the mystical serpents leaned over and
whispered to me in halting English, “You . . . you have
achieved maximum fertility.”
I expected to experience many new things during
my trip to Mali—but I will admit that an increase in
fertility was never one of them.
P.S. I didn’t get to see the serpents. Because of the
poor road conditions, unfortunately, we had to leave
early. Next time? �
BY ERIC JOHNSONPALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA
At Hewlett-Packard’s Palo Alto headquarters, just down the
hall from the executive suite, there sits an office-sized shrine
to company history. From floor to ceiling, behind a wall of pro-
tective glass, row upon row of beige and grey milestones mark
HP as one of the granddaddies of the technology industry.
To the left, a collection of square-edged computers that grows
smaller as the dates below them grow larger. To the right, a
selection of early printers that look more like seismographs.
The whole display is lightly garnished with vintage floppy disks.
And outside the door, arrayed in a display meant to entice
passersby into this corporate mini-museum, are the calculators.
“I actually didn’t know much about the company other than
the calculators, which is what they were famous for back then,”
says Ann Livermore ’80.
Back then was 1982, the year Livermore earned her MBA from
Stanford Business School and embarked on one of the longer,
steadier careers in an industry not much known for continuity.
on becoming
Stepping down from
her role as one of
Silicon Valley’s longest-
serving executives,
Ann Livermore ’80 reflects
on three decades at
Hewlett-Packard
an institution
72 | The Scholar
Ann Livermore’s office
is in the surprisingly
modest executive suite
of Hewlett-Packard’s
Palo Alto headquarters.
The Scholar | 73
74 | The Scholar
At the time she sat down with a recruiter from HP,
the company was making its first foray into the
uncertain field of personal computing. Hewlett-
Packard’s first consumer PC—the HP-85, with a
black-and-white screen the size of a piece of toast—
had been introduced in 1980, just two years before.
But it wasn’t technology that interested Livermore.
“HP was very famous for teaching people how to
manage—how to manage a business, how to manage
people,” Livermore said. “I thought I'd be here for
three or four years, learn a lot, then go someplace
small.”
That was almost three decades ago. Instead of ending
up someplace small, Livermore stayed with HP as
the company grew into the eleventh largest firm in
the Fortune 500, bringing in $126 billion in world-
wide revenue in 2010.
Livermore, as head of HP’s enterprise business, was
responsible for about half of it.
“I’ve been here 29 years,” she said, surveying her
surprisingly modest office. It had been just over three
months since the company announced Livermore’s
retirement from day-to-day operations, awarding her
a seat on the board. Livermore looked around at the
business tomes and company knickknacks lining her
bookshelf. “I'm starting to think about getting myself
out of here.”
It is clearly a bittersweet thought for Livermore. By
any definition, she has had a remarkable run at one
of the world’s best-known companies, overseeing a
division with more than 200,000 employees and
spending well over half her time traveling to HP
outposts around the world.
She has been on the shortlist for CEO more than
once, coming closest to the top spot in 1999 before
the company’s board settled on Carly Fiorina. She
has been a regular on the Fortune magazine list of the
world’s most powerful women, and she’s had a near-
constant stream of offers from other companies.
“When you live in Silicon Valley, you always have
opportunities,” Livermore said, deftly underplaying
the intensity of the headhunting. A 1999 Businessweek
story took a less effacing tack, asking right in the
headline “Is Ann Livermore the Hottest Property in
the Valley?”
At the time, Livermore had made headlines by daring
to say what everyone already knew was true—she
“I thought I’d be here for three or four years,
learn a lot, then go someplace small.”
74 | The Scholar
The ball caps atop Livermore’s book-
case give a sense of her life priorities.
wanted to be CEO of Hewlett-Packard. When she was
passed over for Fiorina, the business press was hoping
for drama and predicting a quick departure for Liver-
more. What they got instead was an impressively
smooth working relationship, a pattern that contin-
ued under Fiorina’s successor, CEO Mark Hurd.
“When you look at why people leave a corporation,
the number one reason is their boss,” Livermore said.
“I worked for people I really liked and learned from.”
Despite the occasional bout of professional tempta-
tion—she won’t name names—Livermore has stuck
by HP. “I had enough different opportunities within
the company, enough different moves so there
weren't many years or even months when I was really
bored,” she said.
Her rise at the company coincided with the shift of
computer technology from a novelty to a necessity,
and Livermore played key roles in helping HP
navigate the industry boom.
“I think part of the reason I stayed here was that the
company grew,” she said. “It changed a lot.”
Much of that growth would come overseas. During
our interview, Livermore talked about a recent visit to
Costa Rica, where HP has almost 8,000 employees in
a services and research center, and she was preparing
for a trip to visit customers in Amsterdam, Barcelona,
Paris, and London.
Before globalization became a buzzword, it was a
largely untested business strategy for companies like
HP. Livermore recalls making her first trips to China
in the late 1980s, and choosing to open a software
development office in India long before Bombay
became Mumbai.
Today, HP derives only about a third of its revenue
from the United States. Asked about the growing
unease toward globalization on the part of many
policymakers in the developed world, Livermore
didn’t offer much comfort.
“In a world where communications and the delivery
of many services can be done over the Internet, you
can provide services anywhere in the world from
almost anywhere in the world,” she said. “The whole
concept of geography has begun to disappear.”
“The work goes where the best people are, and that ties back to education.”
The Scholar | 75
Business and management books—along
with awards from her three decades with
Hewlett-Packard—line the bookshelves in
Livermore’s office.
From Ann Martinelli’s 1978 report to the Morehead Foundation following
her internship with DuPont:
“The businessman is faced with an environment over which he has limited control.
The salesman can have a good product, good services, and a good approach,
yet his volume of sales may be low because of other factors, such as general
economic conditions and his customers’ financial positions and limitations.
“Being able to adapt to variable conditions is a key to success in a business.
However, one must not overlook the importance of hard work and determination.
The old axiom about hard work being rewarded has some truth to it. Hard work
plays an integral role in most success stories.”
Ann Livermore, interviewed
in August 2011:
“I think careers always end up being
some combination of luck and hard
work. Some people are just downright
lucky for where they are and when.
There’s a certain amount of that. But
even behind the lucky people, there’s
a hard work component, too.”
wisdom through the ages
The Scholar | 77
“The work goes where the best people are, and that
ties back to education.”
That feedback loop between business and education
is what Livermore most lauds in Silicon Valley, and
she holds it up as a model for other states. “We want
attractive locations and costs and intelligent employ-
ees, and states want jobs,” she said. “When you look
at what makes Silicon Valley work, it’s the core
technology companies that are here, but it’s also the
universities—Stanford and Berkeley and Santa Clara.
It all ties back to education.”
And though she is quick to note North Carolina’s
attractiveness as a business location, the Greensboro
native is unlikely to move back east after she retires
from her day-to-day role at HP.
In her 1977 application for the Morehead Summer
Enrichment Program, 19-year-old Ann Martinelli
listed her top three placement locations as Palo Alto,
Menlo Park, and Los Angeles. “Frankly, the romantic
connotations of California are the primary reasons
for the ranking of my choices,” she confessed in tidy
penmanship. “I have never traveled on the West Coast
and am therefore eager to do so.”
After a few decades as a Californian, the romance
hasn’t faded for Livermore.
“I still believe that the Bay Area is one of the most
wonderful places in the world,” she said. “The willing-
ness to innovate and tolerate new ideas, wacky things.
It just has this respect for new, wacky ideas.”
There are plans for a sailboat sometime in the near
future, and perhaps a safari. Livermore will also be
keeping plenty busy with her role on the board of
UPS, where she has been a director since 1997, and as
a board member for the Lucille Packard Children’s
Hospital at Stanford.
And, of course, there is her spot on the HP board.
The company recently ousted CEO Leo Apotheker
after less than a year, replacing him with eBay veteran
Meg Whitman. In the fast-evolving technology sector,
industry mainstays like HP face a constant challenge
to stay relevant and recruit new talent.
“It’s not very often that you can be an operational
executive for a long time and then shift to the board
of directors,” Livermore said. “To have one of your
first things be a set of strategic choices as big as we’ve
had—it’s been interesting.”
And if there’s one thing Livermore has taken away
from her long tenure in the corporate world, it’s that
you have to stay sanguine when things get interesting.
“Some people think you should have every step
planned,” she said. “That’s just not the way it worked
for me at HP. The world doesn’t really operate that
way.” �
Just down the hall from Livermore’s office, the company
keeps an exhibit of old product lines. Long known for
its calculators, Hewlett-Packard introduced its first
personal computer in 1980.
78 | The Scholar
. . . all useful Learning shall be duly encouraged . . .
The Constitution of North Carolina, Article XLI
December 18, 1776
ELIZA KERN, CLASS OF 2012
www.moreheadcain.org