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

moreheadcain@unc.edu

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