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Glenn wary, Glenn crossed In the last two weeks an opinion piece by women's studies professor Martha Ackmann has played in numerous dailies across the nation. The piece looks at the recent global circumnavigation by John Glenn in light of the experience of the Mercury 13 crew--thirteen female test pilots and aviators evaluated and trained as astronauts by NASA in 1961 but never given the chance to get some space time. Why? John Glenn's testimony before Congress was one key element that kept these women astronauts on the ground. "The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order," the then-younger elder statesman opined. Among the papers where Ackmann's piece has run are: the "Philadelphia Inquirer", the "Miami Herald", the "Atlanta Journal", the "Providence Journal", the "Anchorage Daily News", the "Dayton Daily News", the "Idaho Statesman", the "Christian Science Monitor", and the "Boston Globe." To read a copy of the opinion piece, go to http://www.mtholyoke.edu/offices/comm/press/.

They beseech: Don't impeach Ford Foundation Professor of History Joseph Ellis was among some 400 prominent historians who signed a full-page advertisement in the October 30 New York Times warning of "serious implications for our constitutional order" if President Clinton is impeached. Headlined "Historians in Defense of the Constitution," the ad noted that the Constitution's framers "explicitly reserved [impeachment] for high crimes and misdemeanors in the exercise of executive power. Impeachment for anything else would, according to James Madison, leave the president to serve 'during pleasure of the Senate,' thereby mangling the system of checks and balances that is our chief safeguard against abuses of public power." The historians added, "Although we do not condone President Clinton's private behavior or his subsequent attempts to deceive, the current charges against him depart from what the Framers saw as grounds for impeachment." Ellis was also part of a November 2 colloquium at UMass, "The Politics of Impeachment: High Crimes and Misdemeanors from 1787 to Today."

D'lovely, but not perfect Emily Dickinson Lecturer Brad Leithauser reviewed the new book "Cole Porter: A Biography", by William McBrien, in the November 5 "New York Review of Books", and found this study to be of interest but far from perfect. "It seems that there's still a grinning, truant figure out there who has mostly escaped his biographers," writes Leithauser.

Leithauser joined Mark O'Donnell for "An Evening of Poetry and Farce" October 27 at the Odyssey Bookshop. Leithauser (below) read from his works "The Odd Last Thing She Did" and "Let Nothing You Dismay."