Peace Corps Director, Chinese Dissident, Internet Pioneer, Child Abuse Expert Among Yale Speakers This Week

The following talks at Yale University the week of Oct. 19-25 are free and open to the public, unless noted otherwise.

Peace Corps director will be guest at master’s tea Mark D. Gearan, director of the Peace Corps, will be the featured guest at a tea on Monday, Oct. 19, at 3:30 p.m. in the Saybrook College master’s house, 90 High St. Gearan was confirmed and sworn in by the U.S. Senate as the 14th director of the Peace Corps in 1995. He is overseeing the agency’s expansion, which includes increasing the number of overseas volunteers to 10,000 by the year 2000. Gearan has also launched the Crisis Corps, a new program that allows current and former Peace Corps volunteers to provide short-term assistance to countries during humanitarian crises and natural disasters. He has visited volunteers in more than 20 nations and has worked to strengthen the ties between current and returned volunteers. Prior to becoming the agency’s director, he served 1993-95 as an assistant to President Bill Clinton and was his director of communications, as well as White House deputy chief of staff. In the 1992 presidential campaign, he was the campaign manager for then-vice presidential candidate Al Gore. In the same year, he was appointed deputy director of President-elect Clinton’s transition team.

Chinese dissident will speak about human rights activism Chinese dissident Wang Dan will speak on the topic “Human Rights Activism in China: An Eyewitness Account” on Wednesday, Oct. 21, 4:15-5:45 p.m. in Levinson Auditorium of the Law School, 127 Wall St. His talk is sponsored by the Law School’s Orville H. Schell Jr. Center for International Human Rights. Wang was one of the leaders of the Tiananmen Square democracy movement in 1989. He was jailed for nearly four years for his role in leading the student protests, and became one of China’s principal human rights advocates after his 1993 release from prison. In 1996 he was arrested again and convicted of “conspiring to subvert the government” for his actions to promote democracy and human rights. Wang was released on medical parole and exiled to the United States in April of this year.

Talk will explore necessity of federal ban on cloning George J. Annas, the Edward R. Utley Professor and chair of the health law department at the Boston University Schools of Medicine and Public Health, will assess the debate on human cloning in a talk on Wednesday, Oct. 21, at 7:30 p.m. at the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale, 80 Wall St. His talk, titled “Frankenstein’s Monster or Just a Doll(y)? Do We Really Need a Federal Ban on Cloning and Attempts to Design a Better Human?” is free and open to the public. A reception will follow. The event is part of the forum on “Bioethical Issues in Society,” jointly sponsored by the Institution for Social and Policy Studies and the Slifka Center. Annas has written extensively on issues of medicine, the law, genetics and bioethics. His books (as author or coauthor) include “The Rights of Hospital Patients,” “Reproductive Genetics and the Law,” “Standard of Care: The Law of American Bioethics” and “Informed Consent to Human Experimentation: The Subject’s Dilemma.” He is coeditor of the three-volume “Genetics and the Law” and of “Gene Mapping: Using Law and Ethics as Guides.” He writes the “Legal Issues in Medicine” feature for the New England Journal of Medicine, and formerly wrote regular features for the Hastings Center Report and the American Journal of Public Health.

Gertrude Stein scholar to give reading at master’s tea Harriet Chessman, who teaches creative writing and literature at Wesleyan University and is the author of a book about Gertrude Stein, will join Yale archivist Timothy Young for “A Reading of Correspondence between Gertrude Stein and George Platt Lynes” on Thursday, Oct. 22. The reading will be held during a tea at 4 p.m. in the Jonathan Edwards College master’s house, 70 High St. It is being offered in conjunction with the parallel exhibitions of George Platt Lynes’ photography, correspondence and other materials at Jonathan Edwards College and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Chessman will read Stein’s letters to Platt Lynes, while Young, an archivist at the Beinecke Library, will read Platt Lynes’ letters to Stein, including some the photographer wrote while he was a student at Yale. Chessman is author of a literary interpretation of Stein’s works called “The Public is Invited to Dance,” published in 1989. She also is coeditor of The Library of America’s two-volume edition of Stein’s writings. Chessman also edited “Literary Angels,” an anthology of stories and poems about angels, and is the author of a forthcoming novel titled “Ohio Angels.”

Leader in Internet services to give Dean’s Lecture Alumnus Robert Glaser, founder and chief executive officer of RealNetworks, the recognized leader in “streaming” media products and services for the Internet, will be the next Dean’s Distinguished Lecturer in the Faculty of Engineering. His talk, titled “The Internet as the Next Mass Medium,” will be presented Thursday, Oct. 22, at 4:30 p.m. in Davies Auditorium at Becton Engineering Center, 15 Prospect St. The event will be followed by a reception in the adjacent Becton Faculty Lounge. Since 1995, RealNetworks has played a pioneering role in media delivery over the Internet through its RealAudio, RealVideo, RealPlayer and RealSystem products. Prior to founding RealNetworks, Glaser worked for Microsoft from 1983 to 1993. He began his career there managing Microsoft Word and later became vice president of multimedia and consumer systems, focusing on the development of new business relating to the convergence of the computer, consumer electronic and media industries. He was instrumental in advancing the Multimedia Personal Computer (MPC), the multimedia platform standard announced in 1992 by Microsoft and eight of the world’s 10 leading PC manufacturers. Glaser, who earned B.A., M.A. and B.S. degrees from Yale, was appointed by President Bill Clinton to the advisory committee on public interest obligations of digital television broadcasters.

McKinsey & Company director to talk at SOM Rajat Gupta, managing director-worldwide of McKinsey & Company, will deliver a talk on Friday, Oct. 23, as part of the School of Management’s Perspectives on Leadership lecture series. His talk, titled “Leading a Professional Services Company: The Case of McKinsey & Company,” will take place 10-11:30 a.m. in Rm. 114 of Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall, corner of Grove and Prospect streets. Gupta joined the New York office of McKinsey & Company in 1973. He managed the Scandinavian offices in Copenhagen, Stockholm and Oslo 1982-86. He returned to the U.S. in 1987, when he joined the company’s Chicago office, and was appointed office manager in Chicago in 1989. He was elected managing director of the company in 1994 and was re-elected in 1997. Rajat has a range of consulting experience with a variety of industries, including telecommunications, energy and consumer goods. Since joining McKinsey & Company, he has directed a number of projects aimed at helping companies develop new product and market strategies, and to reorganize to improve effectiveness and operations capabilities.

Prevention of child abuse is subject of Bush Center talk Brenda Jones Harden, assistant professor of psychology at the Institute for Child Study at the University of Maryland, will give a talk titled “Home Visitation as Early Intervention: The Case of the Healthy Families Program” on Friday, Oct. 23, at noon in the weekly lecture series sponsored by the Bush Center in Child Development and Social Policy. The event will be held in Rm. 211 of the Hall of Graduate Studies, 320 York St. Harden earned a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Yale in 1995. She is the training and evaluation consultant for Healthy Families of the Metropolitan Capitol Area (Washington, D.C.). Healthy Families is a national program, being tested in some areas of the U.S., that aims to prevent child abuse and neglect before it begins by working with families considered at some risk of developing these behaviors. For further information, call 432-9935.