August
29 , 2003
Front-Page
News
Mount Holyoke was
much in evidence in the media this summer. This week’s Front-Page
News presents the first half of an overview of significant College-related
stories that have appeared in recent months.
London Calling Trustee Barbara A. Cassani ’82 has
been the subject of a profusion of news stories in the United
Kingdom and the U.S. since mid-June, when she was tapped to become
the chair of London’s efforts to bring the Summer Olympics
to the British capital in 2012. Olympic games have not been held
in London since 1948.
In fact, Cassani’s
appointment represents another first both for her and for the
Olympics. It’s believed that this is the first time that
an Olympic bid has been led by a foreign national. Cassani is
a U.S. citizen who has lived in England for more than a decade.
Cassani was also the first woman ever to head a commercial airline.
In addition to London and New York, numerous other cities around
the globe are expected to bid for the games.
“We are going against world-class cities,” Cassani
told the Associated Press. “I am very confident we will
be successful. I wouldn’t have taken the job otherwise.
I feel there is tremendous potential for the games to come back
to London for the first time in over 60 years. This is our chance
to do it.”
In 1998, Cassani launched Go, the budget airline affiliated with
British Air. Go was sold last year to another airline.
Gillian Reynolds, a graduate student at Mount Holyoke in 1957–1958
and the radio critic for London’s Daily Telegraph
newspaper, wrote a portrait of Cassani in the June 19 Telegraph.
“Brave, shrewd, and practical, sunny and strong,”
Reynolds wrote. “If anyone can put together a winning bid
for the 2012 Olympics to be in London, it’s Barbara, the
startup person with the seriously strategic brain and the lighthouse
smile.”
Quality TV A decision by New Jersey prisons to have prisoners
watch six hours of educational television a day has won praise
from Mount Holyoke criminologist Richard Moran, according to an
Associated Press story in early August.
“It’s a brilliant idea,” Moran told AP. “For
most prisoners, their intellectual sense has been neglected. If
they learn to think more deeply and learn to be more culturally
aware, that is an excellent thing.”
According to the wire story: “State Corrections Commissioner
Devon Brown replaced what he calls junk television—tawdry
talk shows and soaps—with programming he hopes will reshape
the 27,000 inmates’ values and instill in those with a shot
at parole a social sensibility to guide them after they’re
released.
“The eight hours of television inmates are offered when
they aren’t working or in classes are now filled with six
hours of instructional programs about hepatitis, HIV, AIDS, and
finding employment, and documentaries like A Walk through the
20th Century, Malcolm X: His Own Story and The Rain Forest. Inmates
are also allowed to watch two hours of news and sports shows.”
On another front, Moran’s new book, Executioner’s
Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention
of the Electric Chair (Knopf, 2003) received a lengthy review
in the August 14 New York Review of Books.
Mercury Rising Martha Ackmann’s new book,
The Mercury 13: The Untold Story of Thirteen American Women
and the Dream of Space Flight, has blasted off since publication
in early summer to receive positive reviews and press coverage
of nearly stratospheric proportions. In the book, Ackmann, a senior
lecturer in women’s studies, recounts how 13 American women
aviators were shut out of this country’s space program in
the early 1960s by bureaucratic inertia and rampant sexism. One
of the first reviews of the book came in the June 2 issue of Time
magazine, which hailed the book as “a revealing snapshot
of a country simultaneously caught up in the romance of the future
and snarled in the prejudices of the past.”
“The quest to
put an American woman in space,” the Time review
noted, “devolved into bureaucratic infighting and congressional
subcommittee meetings, complete with cameos by John Glenn and
Scott Carpenter and predictable old-boy jokes about the need for
women to populate alien planets. In the end the Soviets would
be the first to put a woman in space—in 1963, 20 years before
Sally Ride blasted off in the Challenger.”
In the weeks since, Ackmann’s book has been favorably reviewed
in dozens of other publications, from USA Today and Newsday
to the Houston Chronicle and the Boston Globe.
At the same time, the book has also garnered wide-scale coverage
in the electronic media. CNN and National Public Radio did stories
on The Mercury 13, including interviews with the author. Numerous
other television and radio programs conducted interviews with
Ackmann as well, including Today, The News with Brian Williams,
The Diane Rehm Show, and CNBC’s Special Report. C-SPAN-2
also featured Ackmann reading at the Odyssey Bookshop.
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