College of Social Studies - Newsletter 2001

Table of Contents:

This, the seventh issue of our Newsletter, is devoted to CSSers who have pursued careers aimed at advancing the public interest. As always those individuals singled out for attention are but a small fraction of the pertinent total and were selected in an arbitrary manner. Breaking with tradition, in this year's profile the generative role of CSS training in alumni/ae success was pared to a minimum. True though it be, a letter from Andrew Kleinfeld makes anything that the author Andy Crawford or the editors might say an awkward redundancy. Indeed, the Kleinfeld letter is of such quality and penetration that we accord it pride of place.

As many of you know, for several years CSS alumni/ae have been concerned that their contribution to the university's capital campaign might be given in such a way that it helps to insure the survival and prosperity of the College. Just how that could be done consonant with the university's academic planning procedures has proved a thorny issue. But finally, we have very good news to report.

Good News

You will soon be learning of a new Development Office initiative by which CSS alumni/ae can earmark their gifts to the Capital Campaign for the beneficial use of the CSS.

For the past three years discussions have been going on as to how this might be best achieved. Initially several tutors, as well as a devoted group of alums led by Donald Zilkha '73, argued that two or three internal appointments, as per COL and our 1962 warrant, was the best mechanism to insure the long-term survival and prosperity of the College. Not all agreed. After much debate the tutors arrived at unanimous proposal that three new positions might be funded by CSSers that would be wholly rooted in the departments of Economics, History and Government but those individuals recruited would seem to have interests and inclinations that would attract them to teaching in the College.

The Administration felt strongly that such appointments were not necessary and were not in keeping in with academic planning procedures vis-a-vis the allocation of relative teaching strength across the university.

After intense discussions, we arrived at a set of proposals that all parties enthusiastically support. In addition to the five proposed uses of the annuity income, the Office of Academic Affairs has formally committed itself to work in a proactive manner with the CSS and the relevant Departments to insure adequate staffing and leadership for the College over the long term. The official text is as follows:

The CSS Endowment Fund

The University will have as a goal to establish a College of Social Sciences (CSS) Endowment Fund. The Fund will consist of $2 million used to support and enhance the academic program the College of Social Studies. In particular, the useable return on this Fund (approximately $100,000 a year) would be used to support:

Curricular grants extended to first-time tutors coming into the Sophomore year. Faculty who are first-time tutors are expected to master an extensive literature in fields where they have limited prior knowledge. Funds would be available to support them in this task. The College will normally expect recipients of such grants to participate in the Sophomore tutorials for at least one year beyond the original grant period.

Substantial and continuing research grants for junior and senior tutors. These could be grants to support the scholarship of individual faculty of the CSS, or joint interdisciplinary research among several tutors, as long as this research is linked to the long-term plan of the College (for this plan, see below). These would be awarded by the tutors in consultation with, and the consent of, the Dean of the Social Sciences.

Grants to two or three faculty to finance one-time interdisciplinary teaching in the CSS. This might involve a single-year collaboration among two faculty, or a several-year project in which a number of faculty developed a course central to the College's mission. These would be awarded by the tutors of the College in consultation with, and the consent of, the Dean of the Social Sciences, and would be subject to the University's "guidelines for Team-Taught Courses."

The appointment of a distinguished visitor whose current teaching and research interests are closely matched with one or more of the intellectual pursuits of the College. Such a visitor might be in residence for a semester or a year; or the College might seek a distinguished visitor for a three-year period (on the order of the Visiting Writer Program in the English department).

The appointment of post-doctoral fellows who would bring to the College the latest ideas in the intellectual areas of interest to it. These would be one-year appointments; a post-doctoral fellow would be expected to teach in the core areas of the curriculum.

The tutors feel that this is an excellent outcome, both for Wesleyan and for CSS. We hope you will be generous!

The Good that the CSS Does
     (a Letter)

Reading Paul Halliday's article "CSS Alumni in the Professoriate" in the July 20, 2000 CSS Newsletter made me think that you probably need some comments on CSS Alumni in the law. Our experience may be different.

After graduating from Wesleyan in 1966 I went to Harvard Law School, then to a clerkship with Justice Jay A. Rabinowitz of the Alaska Supreme Court. Then I practiced law for 15 years in Fairbanks, Alaska. I was appointed to the United States District Court for the District of Alaska in 1986. In 1991 I was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

The value of a CSS education to a lawyer who works as an appellate judge is incomparably great. I mean "incomparable" literally. My law clerks are generally graduates at the top of their class from the best colleges and law schools, yet their general educations are rarely as good as what I got at CSS. Likewise for my wife, at Wellesley, and my best friend from high school, at Harvard. I read in the Halliday piece that my old friend, Bob Hanson, had to do a lot of catching up in economics when he went on to graduate school. In my experience, as I have gone on in law, I have been ahead all the way on account of having a fairly general background in philosophy, political science, history and economics and would have been impaired by specialization. Specialization would have been an impairment because it would not have left enough time to learn enough of the other disciplines.

I actually use my CSS education frequently, and I mean "use" literally, too. For example, I have recently written two decisions, one on price discrimination under the Robinson Patman Act, and another decision on who was responsible for some environmental pollution. Both decisions used material I learned in Louis Mink's philosophy colloquium. Our appellate panel found the price discrimination case extremely difficult, and it became resolvable when we applied some Mink thinking about intentional and extensional definitions. The pollution case was another puzzle which was solved by an explicit allusion to a discussion of causal overdetermination that a fellow CSS student, Louis Loeb, and I had after another Mink colloquium. Lou later turned the discussion into his Ph.D. thesis, and I wound up citing his article as the best source.

The case was a puzzle because both companies had contributed to the pollution, yet the remediation expense would have been identical had the defendant not polluted at all. Thus, the defendant was without question a contributor (most of the pollutants came from the defendant) but the defendant's activity was not a "but for" cause of the remediation expense.

I have recently worked on three cases on widely different subjects, which have been difficult and which have turned resolvable on account of material I learned from Dick Buel in our history tutorials. In one case, an obscure, still-in-effect statute was passed during Reconstruction, and it was hard to understand what it meant without understanding the historical context in which it was passed. In the other case, an equally incomprehensible statute was passed as a federal response to some Jim Crow laws, and the same need to understand historical context turned me to my junior history tutorial. In the third case we had to consider eighteenth century American attitudes toward religion.

What stimulated me to write this letter was an occurrence today of yet another difficult case (I don't really have to pull out my college texts on easy cases), this one on securities fraud. As I sat here today in my office trying to figure it out, I remembered something from E.J. Nell's economics tutorial. I pulled my college copy of Keynes' General Theory off the shelf, (I keep all my old college books right here in chambers), and sure enough, there was the critical passage that I had highlighted 35 years ago, and that really cleared the case up.

Besides all this vocational usefulness, it is also just plain fun to have a CSS education. Mostly, life is just more interesting when you can view it as an educated person. Secondarily, issues arise all the time where education outside one's vocation is called upon. Last week I had dinner with a fellow who had a lot to say about imperialism. All he knew about imperialism was what Lenin had said. Fortunately, I had a wonderful imperialism tutorial with Professors Barber and Butler, still remember what they said and what we read and enjoyed being able to pass some of it on.

Despite their tremendous educational achievements, my law clerks can rarely help me with this sort of contextual thinking, because their educations just aren't general enough. By and large, their college educations prepare them to be graduate students going on to be professors, but they aren't professors, and they don't have enough general education to know what questions to ask or where to look for answers outside their university specialties. Life is more fun and I like to think that the population of the Ninth Circuit suffers from fewer Kleinfeld errors than they otherwise would because of my CSS education. The professors mentioned above (and some others, such as Reggie Bartholomew and Nelson Polsby) provided us with what those of us who went into law, and probably others who have gone into public policy professions, have needed.

Henry Kissinger is supposed to have said that once you get into government, you work off the intellectual capital that you accumulated before you got there. I would go a little further for lawyers and judges (he was an international relations professor) and say that once we begin the practice of law or go on the bench, we work off, to a very great extent, the intellectual capital that we accumulated in college. Our subsequent accumulations rest on the ability our college educations gave us to read rapidly and understand new materials (or new to us) in the fields we studied in college. It sounds as though (from what I have read in the CSS Newsletter) the program lacks the self-confidence that it had when I was at Wesleyan. That is too bad. There is no reason to feel bad about Harvard, Yale, University of Virginia having programs like CSS. That's an affirmation. CSS isn't' original either.

The College of Social Studies is based, as I recall, on the philosophy, politics and economics program at Oxford, and had more than its share of Rhodes scholars who had done PP and E (like Professors Nell and Barber if I recall correctly) getting it going. That Oxford PP and E program was especially valuable when Great Britain dominated the planet.

For the last half-century, the United States has dominated the planet, and it looks as though we will have the job for a while longer, so it really is desirable to have highly selective colleges turning out some graduates with appropriate educations to do the sort of work necessary for a great nation. Many graduates of elite schools wind up affecting public policy one way or another, most frequently as lawyers. As far as a useful and pleasure undergraduate education goes, it doesn't get any better than what CSS was when I had the good fortune to be there.

Sincerely yours,

Andrew J. Kleinfeld, '66
Circuit Judge

The World Beyond
Andy Crawford ‘97

Andy Crawford ’97 is an international affairs analyst at the U.S. General Accounting Office in Washington, D.C. Karla Bell '74 and Peter Kilby made contributions to this article

Not only in the Law, in Commerce, and in the Professoriate, but so too have CSSers achieved prominence in the Public Service.

The nine individuals whose stories we recount come from diverse professional specializations and, not unexpectedly, have acted in very different settings. From international economic adviser to the U.S. President, to NATO ambassador, to U.S. Attorney in Louisiana and West Virginia, to a leadership position in the NAACP, to Corporation Counsel for the City of Hartford , these CSSers have sought to calm world markets during the Asian meltdown, to control violence in the Balkans, to settle refugees from Rwanda and Sierre Leone, and to reign in homicide in New Orleans. Perhaps a common theme of their endeavors is one of imposing order on a disorderly world. And only because they, and others like them, have pursued the public welfare directly are the rest of us free to pursue it indirectly - following Adam's Smith's invisible hand.

With so much of the CSS curriculum focused on events and phenomena outside the United States – indeed, before the United States – it should be no surprise that a number of CSS graduates have excelled in the world of foreign affairs.

We begin appropriately with Robert Hunter, a member of the CSS's first graduating class in the year 1962. Like most of the protagonists of our story, his career path was initially uncertain. Prefiguring a pattern that has since become a fixture, by his senior year Bob seemed inclined toward Law School. But he was also drawn to public policy. His strongest suite in the CSS had been Government, and following a summer internship in the Navy's Special Projects Office, he wrote his senior thesis, under Mort Tenzer, on Congressional budgeting and the development of the Polaris Weapons System. This plus a class with Douglass Cater, a visitor at CAS on leave from the White House, would prove to be key events.

After graduation a Fulbright took Bob to the London School of Economics for a planned year before heading to Law School. But an invitation at year's end from Cater to assist with speech writing in the Johnson White House further delayed entrance into Law School. The excitement and intellectual stimulation of that experience led to a decision to forego the career in Law, and instead return to LSE and pursue a PhD in international relations.

With his PhD in hand Hunter returned to Washington where he served as foreign policy analyst and speech writer in the Democratic precincts of Capital Hill and in the White House. He advised Democratic presidential candidates including Walter Mondale in 1984, Richard Gephardt in 1988 and Bill Clinton in 1992. When not an insider he was perched at the Overseas Development Council, Brookings or the Rand Corporation producing a flood of articles on foreign aid, OPEC, U.S.-Asian economic relations and NATO- related issues.

Hunter's PhD dissertation had been on "The Brussels Treaty and the Origins of NATO," so that he was uniquely qualified when the newly-elected President Clinton appointed him to serve as U.S. Ambassador to NATO in 1993. In his most important role to date, Hunter helped to guide the alliance through a period of uncertainty and new directions following the dissolution of NATO’s historic raison d’être, the Soviet Union. During his tenure, NATO shed its Cold War mantle to seize new opportunities among former adversaries and to confront the eruption of ethnic violence in the Balkans. He was instrumental in advancing the cause of NATO enlargement to include former Warsaw Pact adversaries in Central and Eastern Europe, a process which so far has yielded the accession of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. During his tenure, he also secured approval for NATO’s historic deployment to Bosnia in 1995, the alliance’s first true combat operation. He looks back on his tenure positively. "I was very lucky to have been at NATO from 1993-1998 to help remake the alliance. I was fortunate to have been given a lot of latitude by the President to work on these issues."

Throughout his career, including in his current role as a senior advisor at the RAND Corporation, he has also been a prolific author of books, articles, and opinion pieces on a wide range of foreign affairs issues. He has also served on the University Board of Trustees.

Reflecting on his nearly 40 years in the public sector, Hunter concedes, "The inspiration for entering government is not what it used to be and the allure of public service is not what it used to be." He points out that Wesleyan was a very "public-spirited" place back during the early 1960s amid the excitement about Kennedy and the New Frontier. But he is nonetheless encouraged by the apparent renaissance of interest in public service among young people today. "I would recommend it to anybody."

For Jan de Wilde '68, entry into public service occurred early on. His father had worked in the State Department and the World Bank so that foreign affairs was a likely path and "CSS seemed like the best place to prepare." He wrote his senior thesis under Peter Kilby on "Patterns of Political Leadership in Modernizing States." On more than one occasion Jan had announced to his tutors, with a twinkle in his eye, that his career would have three acts--the foreign service, a stint in the academic world, and then Secretary of State.

Act I came to pass and de Wilde joined the State Department after graduation. Following assignment to Princeton to obtain an MA in international relations he became a political officer in the Foreign Service. He held posts throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe, where he often found himself in challenging positions, each with historical significance. He served at a consulate general in China during the Tiananmen crisis of 1989. While serving in Southeast Asia in 1992, Mr. de Wilde speculates that he was perhaps the very first American official since the 1955 Geneva Accords to drive from Hanoi to Bangkok via Saigon and Phnom Penh, which he did in the context of the first indirect steps to re-initiating U.S. assistance to Viet-Nam since the war. He also logged two tours in Rwanda, the first during the relatively stable 1980s when the country was widely hailed as the Switzerland of Africa and the second immediately following the ethnic massacres in 1993, where he found "with alarm how quickly I got used to working among corpses."

Several years ago our protagonist embarked on ACT II, albeit slightly different from the 1967-68 script. De Wilde is now one of the top officials at the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Geneva, where he helps to coordinate the organization’s response to humanitarian and refugee crises such as in Kosovo, East Timor, and Sierra Leone. In reflecting on his State Department service and current work at IOM, he offers an interesting retrospective on his CSS training. "After thirty-two years on the job, I can think of no better orientation to what motivates people, no better remedy for the occasional disappointments of public life, no longer-lasting inoculation with a life-long interest in trying to make what sense can be made of life, and no surer disinclination to try to make too much sense. Having Isiah Berlin tattooed on your cortex is a real Godsend."

We await Act III.

John Stremlau ‘66 has distinguished himself in a range of positions in the international affairs arena, but his current assignment might well be the toughest.

After CSS, John earned masters and doctoral degrees from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He then worked for many years for the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and other institutions researching issues of conflict, particularly those affecting Africa. From 1989 to 1994, Stremlau served as the deputy director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State. In that role, he provided policy analyses and options to the Secretary of State and led U.S. delegations to bilateral and multilateral policy planning talks with Japan, Korea, Canada, the European Union, Brazil, and India. He describes his service as "a wonderful experience, especially with the end of the Cold War taking place."

But in 1998, Stremlau returned to a familiar environment to embrace a new challenge. He is now back in Africa, the heart of so much of his research and passion, to serve in his first full-time teaching position. Yet his mission is much broader than lecturing alone. As the chair of the International Relations Department at the University of the Witwatersrand he has dedicated himself to helping to develop the capacity among young South Africans to respond to the new post-Apartheid challenges the country faces. He is committed to reforming the departmental curriculum to better serve South Africa’s rapidly expanding regional and global economic and national security interests. Personally, the depth of his commitment to this mission is demonstrated when he sold his house in the United States and became a "permanent resident" of South Africa. "To serve here at a time of the most amazing if difficult period of nation-building is one of the most compelling and challenging experiences of my life." He continues, "George Washington and Thomas Jefferson lived in a 7-mile an hour world…the fastest a horse could travel. Mandela and Mbeki have had to build a nation in an era of globalization, with the vast majority of the population still bound by the most disadvantaged of circumstances. South African foreign policy has to be one of the most interesting in the world. Never a dull moment."

In "Ending Africa’s Wars", in the July 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs, Stremlau highlighted the lack of Western concern for conflict in Africa compared with Eastern Europe and other third world regions and argued the need for greater resources in addressing these problems. "The problem is clearly one of will, not means, for any African with access to a television or newspaper knows the scale of the U.S. role in Yugoslavia. African governments are similarly aware that the United States, with 1.4 million armed troops on active duty and an annual defense budget that equals 80 percent of the combined GDPs of all 48 sub-Saharan countries, could do more if it wanted."

In Pursuit of Justice

While some CSS alums have focussed on foreign relations, others are leaving their mark in the public sector through the law.

"As a CSS student, I certainly did not visualize myself sitting in the office I’m in now." Indeed, until his senior year, Judge Andrew Kleinfeld ’66 of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Fairbanks, Alaska, intended to become an academic. But he embarked on a legal career nonetheless, beginning in private practice before serving the past 15 years on the federal bench. Having come from private practice, however, Kleinfeld was initially "astonished" by the limits on productivity when he arrived on the federal bench in 1986. One of his jury clerks tapped out memos on a Commodore 64. In his personal offices, there were no computers at all.

Kleinfeld also notes that issues of volume often affect the quality of government work. When he was in private practice, he was able to pick and choose his clients. A federal court does not work like that; there is always business. This pressure of volume sometimes leads to odd juxtapositions of the momentous and the mundane. In the early 1990s, Kleinfeld was responsible for one aspect of the litigation stemming from the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Prior to hearing that case, however, he had to conduct a twenty-minute hearing to adjudicate a routine traffic infraction on a local military base. Despite these realities, he is very content with his current work. "There is a tremendous sense of satisfaction when you have caused more justice to be done in the world."

Ted Shaw ‘76 has dedicated his life to advancing issues of civil rights and racial equality. As associate director and counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, he stands as one of the influential civil rights advocates in the country. Looking back, Shaw credits Wesleyan and CSS with being very important in his development. He was attracted to CSS because it was one of the most academically rigorous, if unorthodox, programs on campus. "The constant pressure to write and read extensively was an enormously formative experience, although I didn’t know it at the time." On top of CSS demands and playing varsity basketball, he also served as co-chair of Ujamaa and a campus leader on issues of racial equality and affirmative action. (Shaw continues to be a leader on campus, albeit in quite a different capacity, as Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees.)

Following Wesleyan and Columbia Law School, Shaw began to work on civil rights issues for the U.S. Department of Justice. Tensions with his Reagan-appointed division chief prompted him to leave after only a short tenure yet he soon landed a position at the Legal Defense Fund, where he has been since 1982.

Under Shaw’s leadership, the Legal Defense Fund is forging ahead on a range of key lawsuits addressing equality issues: electoral violations in Florida, electoral redistricting, affirmative action in higher education, over-incarceration of non-violent drug offenders, racial inequality in the application of capital punishment, racial profiling. The list goes on. Helping to direct the organization’s many legal efforts leaves little time anymore for him to do what he loves doing, arguing cases in a court room. Shaw is pragmatic on his work at the Legal Defense Fund. He is committed to these issues and appreciative of the opportunity to work at the Legal Defense Fund: "I’ve been blessed beyond imagination. Not a day goes by when I come to work not enjoying what I’m working on." He takes pride in working for the organization founded by Thurgood Marshall and which litigated the landmark Brown v. Board of Education. "There is no better place to work on racial discrimination issues than the Legal Defense Fund." Still, he keeps the nature of the work in perspective. "I’d love for the Legal Defense Fund to be put out of business, but there is still a lot of work to be done."

Civil rights and equality issues have also been a preoccupation for Paul Sheridan ’77 since graduation. He lauds the faculty of CSS for their "remarkable job of creating a scholarly community in which students felt a part. I didn’t realize how remarkable this was until I went to law school with the hopes of returning to a similar environment, and found that aspect so absent." He remembers "a deep sense of belonging" in the CSS community. After graduation, Sheridan moved to West Virginia to become involved as a community organizer in poor and rural mining areas. While working in grassroots organizing, his work exposed him to legal work on environmental issues and for the poor. "It seemed like a good integration of head and heart." In his first job following law school, he worked in a legal aid program for a range of clients. "Many of my cases were in front of a local judge who was not so subtle or clever in his contempt for my clients and me, and so I lost a lot of cases initially and had many wonderful opportunities to do appellate work."

After 6 years of legal aid work, a second child on the way precipitated a change – "one of the hardest things I have ever done" – to a more manageable job by joining the West Virginia Attorney General’s Civil Rights Division. This change required Mr. Sheridan to reevaluate his perception of state government: "Most of my previous work experiences had taught me to think of the state as an obstacle to whatever form of justice I was seeking in a particular case."

His current work as Senior Assistant Attorney General largely revolves around litigating discrimination cases of all kinds. One of the most satisfying elements of this work has been organizing an interagency/inter-organizational working group on hate crime. Launched by Mr. Sheridan in 1992, the task force has "brought to the table a remarkable range of agencies and organizations" including the ACLU, NAACP, and police agencies such as the ATF and the FBI. He writes, "The Task Force work, especially facilitating unlikely collaborations, and helping to move police agencies in a positive direction, has been extremely satisfying." Still, the work has its mundane downsides. "Sometimes I feel that I pay for the good cases that I get to handle by also handling a number of not-so-good cases which the investigatory machinery cannot seem to weed out efficiently. And the internal politics can sometimes be maddening."

Serving Chief Executives and Communities

As a key international economics adviser to President Bill Clinton for six years, few economists have had the front-row experience on international economics and economic policy making that Dr. Lael Brainard ’78 has.

Following Wesleyan, Brainard earned masters and doctoral degrees in economics from Harvard. Prior to joining the White House staff, Brainard worked as a consultant at McKinsey and Co. and as an Associate Professor of Applied Economics at MIT, where she researched and authored articles on topics as varied as strategic trade policy, the debate over structural vs. cyclical unemployment, and small business lending in Africa. (Brainard is also an University trustee emeritus.) This work ultimately led to her initial foray into government through the venerable White House Fellowship program in 1994. "I initially thought I would just stay in government for one year. But I kept extending. Eventually I had to tell MIT that I was going to stay down here."

In six years at the White House, she served as a principal economic advisor to President Clinton, lastly as Deputy National Economic Adviser. As Special Assistant the President for International Economic Policy, she served as the White House staff coordinator for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Leaders Meetings in Vancouver and Manila, the President’s three-year review of NAFTA, and the G7/G8 Jobs Conferences in the UK and France.

Perhaps the defining experience, however, was the global financial meltdown of 1998. As the contagion ricocheted from its source in Mexico to Russia, Brazil, and Thailand, she worked closely with the President and other key staff to decide what tools – IMF program support? U.S. Economic Support Funds? – would be best to use in responding to this unprecedented crisis. During the crisis, she was struck by the sheer imbalance between public and private sector resources. The economic tools at the President’s disposal were actually relatively limited compared with the enormous volume of capital that seamlessly flitted around the world. But during a crisis, the President’s ability to project an image of confidence is critical to reassure shaky markets and investors around the world. Throughout this and other episodes, she kept in mind her role as an adviser responsible for offering the very best counsel possible, even in trying situations. "It is very important to give your advice unvarnished."

Having left government in 2000, Brainard now serves as a Senior Economic Fellow at the Brookings Institution, but she says that she certainly would entertain the possibility of returning to government in the future. Despite the overall satisfaction of the work, she concedes, "Those six years were enormously taxing. My pager was never far from me."

Our final two protagonists have focused their effort on solving the problems of a major urban area. From 1994 to early 2001, Eddie Jordan ‘74 served his native community of New Orleans as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana. As the top federal prosecutor for the region, he directed a staff of about 100 lawyers and support personnel. He placed a priority on programs such as "Weed and Seed" that serve poor and underdeveloped neighborhoods by linking targeted law enforcement efforts with effective community development.

A look at Eddie's curriculum at Wesleyan suggests that, unlike most, he knew where he was going. Outside the CSS almost all his courses dealt with the urban black experience - in history, religion, psychology and music. In the CSS he excelled in Government and American History. He wrote his thesis under Judd Khan on the Black liberation movement 1955 - 1963. After graduation he proceeded to Rutger's Law School, then on to a clerkship with a federal judge in Philadelphia. Until 1983 Jordan practiced law in Philadelphia.

It was 1984 when Jordan entered the public sector. Returning to New Orleans, he took up the position of Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana. Much of his work at this time involved narcotics prosecutions. In 1994 he was appointed to the top job by the Clinton Administration. Perhaps his most visible success was the prosecution of former Governor Edwin Edwards on racketeering, extortion and mail fraud. More importantly he pioneered the use of so-called "crack-house" statutes to prosecute the promoters of rave concerts, practices now in use across the country.

At the beginning of his term, Jordan made the controversial decision to use the U.S. Attorney's office to help local law enforcement authorities to reduce violent crime. "Traditionally, federal enforcement has focused on white collar crime and public corruption" says Jordan. "I believed the office was capable of ndertaking both a traditional and a non-traditional role, and that we could target the most violent crime, including drug crime". One indication of the success of that policy has been a significant drop in New Orleans homicide rate. With the Republicans back in office, Jordan is now of counsel at Rodney, Bordenave, Boykine and Ehret. But the attraction to public service is undiminished: he plans to run for District Attorney of Orleans Parish in 2002.

Evans Jacobs ’73 has served his community of Hartford for over 20 years. As senior assistant corporation counsel for the City of Hartford, he handles a range of legal issues for the city, including personal injury and policy litigation, labor relations, and grievance arbitration. He has enjoyed his work on behalf of his community. He notes, "I take pride in knowing that my service is on behalf of the public." Lessons covered in CSS on other forms of government have led Mr. Jacobs to recognize the benefits and responsibilities of our system of government. "Having gotten from the CSS a background knowledge of the historical differences in types of government, I have developed a keen sense of appreciation of our own government at all levels and I feel privileged to serve and be served."

Mr. Jacobs also values the role that CSS has played in his intellectual and personal development. He concludes, "In general I have always been proud of my CSS education. Beyond training, the most valuable tool that it imparted was an ability to find myself and to stay with myself. This happened soon after graduation, so the effect has been enduring. I have always thought of CSS as the Marine Corps of Wesleyan."

Help Wanted

We need a volunteer editor to put together next year's issue of the Newsletter. The current editor will be away on sabbatical leave. It would not be the end of the world, of course, if we skipped a year; yet it would be nice if the annual cycle could be sustained.

The volunteer editor would have the freedom to design any kind of theme and format that his or her creativity suggests. Fran Warren, CSS's Administrative Assistant, would take care of preparing the final text and of getting it on the web and to the printer. The Associate Editors would help with proof-reading, provide the necessary data base and supply advice and moral support. If you are potentially interested and would like more details about what is involved, please contact me at pkilby@Wesleyan.edu.

PK