LAFF Society

LAFF PARADE

News about Former Foundation Staff

 

Melvin L. Oliver has been named president  of Pitzer College, its sixth president and the first African American to head one of the five undergraduate institutions in the Claremont Colleges cluster in Claremont, Calif. He will assume the position in July.
 
“I want to deepen the commitment of Pitzer to recruiting, supporting and graduating those students (of color),” he said, “because I think it’s an exceptional education and I want it to be available to as many of them as possible.”
 
His appointment comes at a pivotal time of national campus unrest over racist, ethnic and gender equity issues that has roiled many colleges and recently led to protests that forced the resignation of the dean of students at Claremont McKenna College, one of the cluster institutions. 
 
“It’s very important for students to be able to see someone like them become the president of one of the five Cs,” he said. 
 
Dr. Oliver comes to his new position with a reputation as a champion of racial diversity on college campuses, most notably in his current position as executive dean of the University of California’s Santa Barbara College of Letters and Science, where he helped increase minority graduate student enrollment in the social sciences by 40 per cent since he became dean in 2004. He also began a program to recruit and prepare minority and low-income students for doctoral programs in all fields.
 
As Vice President of the Asset Building and Community Development Program at Ford, he helped develop such pioneering initiatives as the Self-Help Fannie Mae Program to secure home mortgages for 35,000 low-wealth households and change the methods banks use to evaluate mortgage applications, and the Leadership for a Changing World Program, which identifies and supports community leaders. 
 
He taught sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles from 1978 to 1996 and, in 1989, co-founded the UCLA Center for the Study of Urban Poverty to train more quality researchers of color.
 
A book he co-wrote in 1995, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality, won many awards, including the Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award from the American Sociological Association.
 
He has a bachelor’s degree from William Penn College and a master’s degree and doctorate from Washington University. 
 
Raymond Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America, will be the commencement speaker at Warren Wilson College, a private liberal arts college near Asheville, N.C., with an innovative curriculum that “combines academics, work and service in a learning community committed to environmental responsibility, cross-cultural understanding and the common good”.
 
The liberal arts college is one of the few in the country whose students work for the institution as a graduation requirement. The campus includes a working farm, a market garden and a vast area of managed forest. It has more than 100 work crews, and students must work 240 hours a semester to help pay their college expenses.
 
The work crews include those who maintain the college’s vehicles; work on the campus’s electrical and plumbing systems; work on the farm and in the garden; provide tech support; clean and maintain laboratories, and do all the landscaping. 
 
The president of the college is Steven Solnick, who worked for the Foundation in its Moscow and New Delhi offices from 2002 to 2012, when he left to become head of the college. 
 
In making the announcement for the May 14 ceremony, he said, “For a campus where our students are dedicated to making a difference in the world, this is an excellent opportunity to hear from a person and about an institution doing just that.” 
 
Offenheiser joined Oxfam America, an affiliate of Oxfam International, after working in the Foundation’s offices in Dhaka and Lima from 1986 to 1996. 
 
“Our world today,” he said of the opportunity to speak at Warren Wilson, “is starved for a new idealistic generation that cares deeply about poverty, human rights and the planet, is committed to challenging the status quo in constructive ways and is filled with hope and confidence. 
 
“I’m delighted to join the 2016 class of Warren Wilson College and their families to celebrate turning this year’s group of practical radicals loose on the world. Those of us in this work await you.” 
 
A new book that examines the intersection of scholarship, activism and sociocultural politics in mainland Southeast Asia is edited by a former Ford staff member and includes a chapter written by a LAFF member.
 
Oscar Salemink said the book, Scholarship and Engagement in Mainland Southeast Asia, was inspired by the work of Achan Chayan Vaddhanaphuti, “an academic who has worked tirelessly in Thailand and beyond to foster critical social-science scholarship that engages with marginalized communities.”
 
Rosalia Sciortino wrote a chapter, titled “Learning Across Boundaries: Grant-making Activism in the Greater Mekong Sub-region”, that she describes as a study of “paradigmatic shifts in philanthropy and international aid and their implications for local programs and institutions”. It can be accessed at academia.edu. 

One reviewer said the book, which is published by Silkworm Books of Thailand, “demonstrates convincingly that rather than compromising or trading off against one another, engagement and intellectual endeavor can be mutually reinforcing. The quality and breadth of the contributions in this book reflect and build on the totality of Achan Chayan’s work….”
 
Salemink, a professor of the anthropology of Asia at the University of Copenhagen, worked for the Foundation from 1996 through 2011 in Thailand and Vietnam on grants for higher education, arts and culture, and sustainable development.
 
Sciortino worked in the Jakarta and Manila offices of the Foundation from 1993 to 2000 and now is regional director of the Southeast Asia and East Asia International Development Research Center.
 
Gowher Rizvi, who is the International Affairs Advisor to the prime minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina Wazed, was the chief guest recently at an evening of music and dance to commemorate the sixth anniversary of the Indira Gandhi Culture Centre in Dhaka, an institution that promotes cultural exchanges between India and Bangladesh to foster cooperation between the countries.
 
The High Commissioner of India, Harsh Vardhan Shringla, the guest of honor at the program, noting that the literature, language, culture and heritage of the two countries is “identical”, said the center “has been promoting not only the culture of Bangladesh and India but also the genres of art and culture of the subcontinent.”
 
Dr. Rizvi was the Foundation’s representative in New Delhi from 1996 to 2002.

 

 

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