CLASS OF 1960 | 2014 | ISSUE 3

I read the notification in the most recent Wesleyan magazine that Rudy Kalin died on Aug. 16, 2011. Rudy initially came to Wesleyan from Switzerland as an exchange student. He served as a faculty member in psychology at Queens University in Canada for 33 years, which included 10 years as department head. He enjoyed playing golf in his retirement. He is survived by his wife, Jane, of 45 years, three sons and their spouses, and four grandchildren. On behalf of the Class of 1960, I offer our belated condolences to his family and friends.

Jay Levy was invited to be the keynote speaker at the annual science retreat at Wesleyan on Sept. 18, 2014. He reviewed the history of AIDS from discovery to future challenges. In addition, he met with students to discuss science as a career.

Congratulations to Dave Major, who received a Fulbright Scholar award to teach and do research at the University of Helsinki, Finland, for two months in each of the fall terms of 2014 and 2015. Dave’s research will focus on urban adaptation to climate change, especially in small- and medium-sized coastal cities.

Rob Mortimer wrote the following: “Mimi and I have been doing some academic tourism of late. Last fall (2013), we were in Algeria to attend a conference on the Algerian writer Assia Djebar at the University Mouloud Mammeri in Tizi Ouzou. The university is named for another Algerian author who was born not far from there in the Berber Kabyle region of the country. We knew Mammeri, who was an activist in the movement to celebrate Berber culture, from our days as grad students in Algeria in the 1960s, and we remain in touch with his widow and children. Then this past spring we traveled to the other end of the continent to give some talks at the University of Pretoria. Once a bastion of apartheid, the university now is a true rainbow institution celebrating South Africa’s diversity. We also spent some time at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and, of course, visited Mandela’s former home in Soweto, now a prime tourist attraction. We had been in South Africa in the early 1990s right after the release of Mandela from prison during the period that our daughter Amy ’87 was a Peace Corps volunteer in Lesotho. South Africa has come a long way since then but much remains to be done. We spend a fair amount of time in France as well, thanks to a house exchange that we do with a French couple. Indeed, we have seen Charlie Smith and Bruce Dow in Paris over the past few years, and would always be happy to see other classmates who might be passing through that great city.”

Paul Tractenberg edited the recently published Courting Justice: 10 New Jersey Cases That Shook the Nation (Rutgers University Press, 2013). In addition, he wrote the introduction and one of the chapters. He is spending his sabbatical year working on a comparative study of public education reform processes in Ontario, Israel, and Finland, where he was appointed as a visiting professorial scholar at the law and education schools of the University of Toronto, Tel Aviv and Haifa Universities, and University of Helsinki, respectively.

SAL RUSSO | salandjudy@hotmail.com