Tulane is Forever

I love this shot of some of my graduating girls in the French Quarter. 

Commencement is probably one of my favorite weekends of the year, and it’s usually a reminder of why I think I have one of the best jobs in the world. I say this because my colleagues and I all get to play that small role in helping students to select Tulane, mentor and advise them once they arrive here, and then finally get to watch them cross that stage for graduation.

Tulane has a way of taking hold of you and never letting go. We get to see this every day in the students we recruit. There really is no better feeling in the world than knowing that we as admission officers get to play even the smallest part in aiding a student to make that final decision to come down to NOLA for college. And knowing that four years later those very kids, who are now all grown up, just experienced some the best years of their life. All of a sudden, Maya Rudolph is singing the national anthem to you at graduation at the Mercedes Benz Superdome, you grab your diploma, and just like that, you have your Tulane degree, four years of the most remarkable memories and friends you could ask for, and one impeccably bright future ahead of you.

This concept has never been lost on me. Two years ago, I blogged about the Circle of Life at Tulane and how it always stays with you no matter how far you go. Even at 32 years old, that still rings true for me. Just this month I got to watch a fraternity brother and his Tulane girlfriend get married in Natchez, MS with a huge group of our friends from college by their sides. Tulane truly is forever, and to get to be there at the onset for the students we recruit is a dream come true. We get to be with them as they start this journey that will last a lifetime.

Team Tulane at the wedding. Loren and Jeff both went to Tulane and here we are with a bunch of my Tulane fraternity brothers. Ten years out of college and still going strong! 

So with graduation in the rear-view mirror, I thought I might take a bit of time to show you why this is the best job a guy could ask for. These kids I first met when they were 17-year-old high school juniors and seniors are all grown up. Now that we have officially said goodbye to the class of 2015, let’s take one last look at some of my former “kids,” and where they are today. Here we go!

Here is my man Andrew Dowley, who graduated with a BSE in Chemical Engineering and will be working for Schlumberger (oil field services) in their Dynamic Pressure Management group in Texas. I was lucky enough to recruit him from San Diego four years ago! 

Brooke and I go way back- I met her over five years ago when she was a senior in high school in Orange County. I'll never forget when she came to the admitted student event her senior year. Even better, Brooke came to the same event with me in the OC years later to help me recruit future students. I'm very proud of Brooke; she's getting a Masters of Science in Public Health in International Health Systems at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. She'll also most likely get a certificate in Vaccine Safety and Policy. 

I met Ethyn at Calabasas High School in California his senior year and I've gotten to know him really well over the years. He was a freshman back in the day on my NOLA Experience track (even getting to play on a very neat piano: http://tuadmissionjeff.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-nola-experience-photo-blog.html). He's an exceptionally talented singer and a member of Green Envy, one of our a capella groups. Ethyn's only a junior, but he's secured a Busy Season internship with Ernst and Young here in New Orleans this winter/spring. If all goes well with the internship, he'll be offered a full-time audit position with the firm when he graduates in 2016.

Look how excited Lena and I are for graduation! I met Lena Grossman when she was a high school senior at Beverly Hills High School. She also was one of my rockstar Greenie Camp counselors this past summer. Starting in June, she'll be attending the Columbia Publishing Course at Columbia University in NY. It focuses on all aspects of book, media, and digital publishing. 

Here are Piper and Erica, two of my fantastic leaders in our Green Wave Ambassador organization and also interns here in the Office of Admission. And all-around incredible ladies. This fall, they will both be staying here in New Orleans after being accepted into Teach for America. They will teach as a special education teacher and a kindergarten teacher at two charter/community schools here in NOLA. 

This is Rachel Garcia, who I will never forget meeting when she was a senior at New Roads School in Santa Monica, CA. I arrived at the high school visit a half hour late (thanks LA traffic!) and she and the rest of the group were so patient with me. It's been awesome to watch her grow at Tulane the past four years. She's officially moved back to Los Angeles and has been offered a position with Iron Mountain in Southern California. She's also moved forward to the second stage with the Page Program at NBC Universal! 

Here's Tess! Tess was one of my finest student tour guides. This fall, she's off to teach English in South Korea thanks to a Fulbright grant. She leaves in July for a six week orientation and then will be placed in a home stay and school. What an amazing opportunity! 

I'll never forget reading Katie Pearlman's application to Tulane. She'd sent me a recording of her singing a cover of the song Smokey Mountain Memories. It was so fantastic that I brought it straight to the Dean of Admission to play it for him and we admitted her on the spot. I was overwhelmed with pride to get to see Katie perform on stage at the Howlin' Wolf just a few weeks ago during Jazz Fest. She killed it, as usual.  Now that she's graduated, Katie is pursuing her dream of being a recording artist. She has a mentor that she's been working with who's been shopping her songs. She's moving back to her hometown of Los Angeles to try and get a publishing deal as a songwriter and to also continue performing. Check her out on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/katie-pearlman. Her song "Finally Free" is my absolute favorite.

So with that, I bid adieu to my kids-become-adults. I’ll spare you the quotes from Oh The Places You’ll Go and just leave you with the idea that while your four years here may be done, your Tulane adventure has only just begun. I am so proud of you all and so glad that my office got to strike a match to that little Tulane fire, one that will burn with you for the rest of your life. Oh, and need more proof that Tulane is forever? Below is me with Jacob Sotsky. I spent this past weekend with a group of friends in Pensacola Beach and Jacob was there. Why is this significant? Jacob gave a young Jeff Schiffman a tour of Tulane fifteen years ago. That's right... I am still friends with the guy who encouraged me to attend Tulane in the first place.

Tulane is forever? You bet.

Jacob and Jeff. 

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Chide That Name!

Whether you realize it or not, names are a part of language, and a by no means unimportant one. I am not even referring to such a somewhat esoteric phenomenon as a proper noun becoming a common one—e.g., Sandwich, Mackintosh, Wellington boots—but to proper names improperly used and a threat to correct usage.

Consider the shocker when a prize-winning racehorse bears the misspelled name American Pharoah. Pharoah, alas, is a fairly common misspelling of pharaoh, but it does not usually get this kind of publicity and fame. The Times of May 23 has an article, “American Pharoah’s Misspelling Mystery,” that sheds light on the matter.

You cannot, of course, blame the horse itself, which, however much horse sense it may possess, does not know with what moniker it has been blessed or cursed. Its chief owner is a rich Egyptian, Ahmad Zayat, owner of Zayat Stables, and you would expect an Egyptian, of all people, to know how to spell pharaoh. But oh no. To be sure, I wonder how many Americans can spell Roosevelt correctly.

Still, no matter what Ahmed Zayat may or may not know, surely there ought to have been a decent speller in his stable—his son, Justin, perhaps. It turns out, however, that not even the Jockey Club took steps to rectify the error. As James L. Gagliano, the Club’s president and CEO put it, “Since the name met all of the criteria for naming and was available, it was granted exactly as it was spelled.”

It now emerges that the Zayat Stables hold an online contest for the naming of their horses, and thus there was the invitation to the public in 2014 to name their crop of two-year-olds. And who won the contest for naming this future champion? It’s all there in the Times: Marsha Baumgartner, of Barnett, Mo., depicted in the paper with her husband, Dave, and described as “a 64-year-old registered nurse in a tiny central Missouri town.”

Unfortunately, though there is a register for nurses, there is none for illiterates. If you inspect the picture, you will find two typical unglamorous Midwesterners of the small-town variety, she even, as one suspects from her chubby cheeks, overweight, but when it comes to learning and refinement, clearly lightweight.

When asked, she commented: “I don’t remember how I spelled it; I don’t want to assign blame. I looked up the spelling before I entered.” That she won’t assign blame is understandable, given on whom it would fall. It also figures that she doesn’t remember how she spelled it, since she managed to forget the spelling in the comparatively short time between looking it up and sending it out.

There is also the question of where, if she isn’t fibbing, she did that looking up. Does she own a reputable dictionary? Or did she find the word in some other worthy publication, say the Sears catalogue or the Farmer’s Almanac. “Pharaoh,” I suspect, is one of the most misspelled words in America, whether the perpetrators are from the ranks of born-again Christians or college students.

What I find somewhat more surprising is discovering that the Jockey Club found the name within the rules, “which include an 18-character limit (Pioneerof the Nile was rendered that way to conform to the guidelines) and a ban on obscene or offensive phrases.” Personally, I consider “pharoah” not just offensive, but actually nothing less than obscene. And, speaking of “less,” Melissa Hoppert, author of the Times article, states that up to six names per horse can be submitted, although “the average is two or less.” Though “fewer” would be correct here, even that seems problematic where “one or two” would be more natural.

T. S. Eliot has written compellingly about the naming of cats, and thus influenced the nomenclature of the musical of that name. Nobody has weighed in on the naming of horses, which strikes me as bizarre in the extreme. But then again, no more so than the naming of some people.

Consider if you will the name of a promising black tennis player, a young man named Frances Tiefoe. Yes, Frances, not Francis. Now whatever may have prompted the parents to give their son a girl’s name—ignorance being the most charitable interpretation—you would think that he himself, with or without friendly advice, would see fit to have his name legally transgendered.

Well, some tennis players do have odd names: no fewer than two women—one white, one black—are called Madison (Keys and Brengle), and one can’t help wondering whether it is derived from a president or an avenue. But a male Frances is unique.

Why does any of this matter? Because where famous persons or equines are concerned, such misguidedness becomes influential and widespread. And the instigators don’t even need to be famous. I doubt whether the first person who mispronounced “grocery” as “groshery” was a celebrity, yet behold the result.

Egypt, for example, is an unlikely culprit. But look: not only Pharoah, but also Pioneerof the Nile. Does it have to be an Egyptian river? Were there no pioneers of the Amazon? Never mind, though. Misnomers will always be among us, only let it not be on account of a prominent horse or sportsman. Granted Tiefoe is not yet celebrated, but he could well become so. And then what might be the names of his future male colleagues: Mary, Josephine, or, tomorrow, Tamara?

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Hidden Tulane Part VIII: Greenbaum House

With finals in the rear-view mirror and graduation tomorrow, I thought it might be nice to take a break from all the hustle and bustle and pay a visit to another hidden spot on campus: our newest residence hall, Barbara Greenbaum House. Want to check out some other hidden spots that you won't see on a campus tour here at Tulane? Scroll to the bottom of this post to check out the other places we've been to over the years.

And now, on to Tulane's brand new residence hall, Greenbaum House. Greenbaum just celebrated its first year as a residence hall for our students, and the feedback from students living in this LEED-Silver certified building has been great. Affectionately known as Boot Dorm due to its vicinity to the popular off-campus watering hole, Greenbaum has quickly grown into one of the most popular places for students, freshmen all the way up to seniors, to live. We brought our camera crew to do yet another MTV Cribs-style dorm tour this week, so you can get the full skinny here. Looking for tours of the other freshman halls? We've got you covered.

Greenbaum houses over 250 students throughout six stories. And let me tell you, this place has it all! From a gourmet demonstration kitchen to the 35-seat James MacLaren classroom, this is truly a forward-thinking residence hall that was designed to be all-encompassing to students' social and academic needs. Greenbaum, like its fellow Living Learning Community at Wall Residential College, has a professor-in-residence who lives in an apartment within the hall. Study and social lounges are present on nearly every floor, and the whole community is tied together by a beautifully landscaped internal courtyard.

Demo Kitchen!

The Get Engaged Living Learning Community is housed in Greenbaum and caters to students who are interested in integrating their experiences on campus with the greater New Orleans community. Throughout the year, participants live together on a designated floor in the building and work with each other, their RAs, and their Faculty-in-Residence to move beyond the residence hall and Tulane's public service requirements to create opportunities that shape their identities as Tulane students and NOLA residents. Programs and initiatives include guest speakers, cooking demonstrations, community discussions, and volunteering with local and national community partners.

Pretty neat, huh? Check out more photos below!

Lobby of Greenbaum

Front entrance 

View of Newcomb Lawn from the top of Greenbaum.

Oh yeah, and in case you wanted to see previous Hidden Tulanes:

Reily Recreation Center
Garden Level of the LBC
Middle American Research Institute
Pace-Wilson Glass Blowing Studio
Tulane Hillel
The Cassat Courtyard
The Glazer Community Gardens

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Gunter Grass

With Gunter Grass, who just died at age 87, I had a brief friendship. I translated for him on a popular radio show, and I introduced him at his reading at the Y. I also met his charming first wife, Anna, a Swiss dancer, and acquiesced in his friendly cavil: why must I everywhere find some fault, i.e., be hypercritical (though not of him). Our ways parted amicably, and there was no further contact. Incidentally: can a critic be hypercritical? An architect, hyperarchitectural? An ophthalmologist, hyperocular?

He was a major writer. Though of interest in his early poems and later plays, and of real charm in his drawings (I never saw his sculptures), it was with two of his early novels, “The Tin Drum” and “Dog Years,” that he achieved international stature: two novels of lasting luster, both of which I reviewed with due enthusiasm. Later, even as good a novel as “The Flounder” seemed a bit overlong: too many over-drawn-out parts among the indisputably brilliant ones.

He did also publish his political writings, many of them stomping speeches for Willy Brandt, but political writings tend to be primarily of specific, temporary interest, and only secondarily transcending into universality, into permanence.

Especially remarkable in his later years was his outing of himself. That he had been a member of the Hitler Youth can be readily excused, comparable to our youthful joining of the Boy Scouts. But subsequent time in the Waffen-SS was less innocuous, even if, as the Times obituary pointed out, it was “near the end of the war, and [he] was never accused of atrocities,  [though] the fact that he had obscured the crucial point of his background while flagellating his fellow Germans for cowardice set off cries of outrage.”

There was something likable even in Grass’s appearance. It is nice when an artist makes no attempt to look like one, avoiding the aura of regimentation of even that harmless bohemian kind. Grass was of medium stature, rather stocky, and with a walrus mustache more befitting a German general or emperor. That, and a certain glint in his gaze, gave him the aspect of a canny peasant whose wit had let him ascend to the ranks of the solid bourgeoisie, which in Germany has a way of looking even more bourgeois than its equivalent in other countries. He rather reminded me of the successful upstart Lopakhin in Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard.”

No other major novelist since Rabelais has, to my knowledge, made as much of eating—indeed gourmandising—as Gunter Grass has. And not only eating, but also cooking. He was himself a pretty good cook. Consider the following, from the memoirs of Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Germany’s preeminent literary critic. Not especially fond of Grass’s writing, R-R nevertheless accepted a dinner invitation from Grass: “He would, with his own hand, prepare a meal for us [R-R and his wife, Tosia]. I accepted despite my memory of a soup made by Grass, which I had recklessly eaten in the summer of 1965, on the occasion of the wedding of . . . Walter Hoellerer . . . . It had tasted disgusting. I expected the worst. But then a critic must have courage. . . . He served us fish. Now I hate and fear fishbones. And I did not realize that there existed any fish with quite so many bones. . . . Anyway, it was both a torture and a delight. Undistinguished as he may have been as a producer of soup, he was magnificent with fish. The meal was risky but tasty—and it had no ill effects whatsoever either for Tosia or myself. Yet it had some consequences. What was left of the fish, mainly its numerous bones, was sketched by grass the following day. And very soon this fish was at the center of a novel by him. It was a flounder.”

I would guess that having a grocer father was that much more likely to produce an esurient son. And so we have cooks popping up everywhere in his writings, most notably in the play, “The Evil Cooks.” But also in “The Flounder,” where we get a wonderful of nine (or eleven) noteworthy female cooks through the ages, some real  some fictitious. Hence the “or eleven.” As the critic Peter Demetz put it, Grass “initially intended to write a prose epic about the primary role of food in world history, but that at a later stage, coming to grips with an irrepressible crew of formidable women—some fictional, some real—who did the world’s important cooking, he confronted recent feminist ideas about women in culture at large. “The Flounder” is an ample, exuberant, and skillfully structured narrative about eating, cooking, procreating, women and a cunning fish . . .”

The book contains among other things, as Patrick O’Neill has written, “a generous selection of recipes for outlandish dishes,” but all sorts of details deal indirectly with food. In reviewing “The Flounder,” John Updike has written, “when at the end [Ilsebill]’s husband/narrator, watching her undergo a Caesarian operation, notes that ‘I also saw how yellow, like duck fat, Ilsebill’s belly fat is. A piece of it crumbled off and I could have fried two eggs on it,’ his tortuously ramifying theme of food is brought to a point that hurts.” This passage exemplifies Grass’s important use of the grotesque, and the way he so often manages to use springboards leaping back to food or cooking.”

Of equal importance is that he is writing fables, i.e., books in which there is an element of the fabulous. And fables almost always feature symbolic animals. Observe only his titles, in which cat, mouse, dog, toad, female rat, flounder, and snail make their appearances, even if the mouse is only a hypertrophic Adam’s apple, and the toad only a voice. These animals live; the flounder talks, the snail keeps a diary.

Eventually Grass got what was long prophesied for him, the Nobel Prize, although by that time most of his books were also seriously questioned and even, as in the case of “My Century,” poorly reviewed. Nor did it matter that he reused some of his subjects, as, for instance, the grinding poverty of Calcutta appearing in both his fiction and nonfiction.

My own notice of “The Tin Drum” for Partisan Review and reprinted in my collection “The Sheep from the Goats,” as well as being the lead essay in Patrick O’Neill’s anthology “Critical Essays on Gunter Grass,” satisfies me upon rereading, as not all of my earlier writings do, though some amaze me with their prescience. I recognized in Grass what Salman Rushdie did in his introduction to “On Writing and Politics, 1967-1983.” He spoke of “books which give [writers] permission to travel . . . become the sort of writers they have it in themselves to be. A passport is a kind of book.” And, inversely, a book can be a kind of passport.

It has been pointed out that Grass was a precursor of the “magic realism” that came to us much later from writers in South America. As Rushdie observes, what the wildest fantasy leads to may seem on one level absurd, but is hopeful underneath. And thus liberating.

P.S.: I regret not having the umlaut for the U in Gunter. The customary substitute, an added E as in Guenter, seemed to me awkward and alienating.

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