For the Record

An inventive incentive
The new LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University professorship has been named in honor of LeRoy Carlson Sr., AB'38, and his wife, Margaret, AM'43. The Carlson professor will be a scholar in the humanities or humanistic social sciences whose work is making a contribution nationally or internationally and who can inspire students and faculty.

A touch of Gray
An endowed chair has been established in honor of Hanna Holborn Gray, president emerita and the Harry Pratt Judson distinguished service professor emerita in history. Chicago's president from 1978 to 1993, Gray continues to teach in the history department, specializing in the history of humanism, political and historical thought, and Renaissance and Reformation politics.

A key prize
The Phi Beta Kappa society's Ralph Waldo Emerson award for outstanding studies of the intellectual and cultural condition of mankind has gone to Peter Novick, professor emeritus in history, for his book The Holocaust in American Life. Novick's book shows how historians choose their subjects and how their evaluations are shaped by their ideologies and the institutions in which they work.

Gymboree
The Chicago Maroons football homecoming game on October 28 against UAA rival Washington University was preceded by a groundbreaking ceremony for the Gerald Ratner Athletics Center, to be located between 55th and 56th Streets at Ellis Avenue. As part of the ceremony, architect Cesar Pelli presented Ratner with a watercolor of the new building. Construction of the Ratner Center will begin in early 2001.

Expensive theories
The David and Lucile Packard Foundation has named Sean Carroll, assistant professor in physics and the Enrico Fermi Institute, a 2000 Packard Fellow, an honor that includes a five-year, $625,000 research grant. Carroll, a theorist of space and time, will use the funds to bring together scientists whose research interests overlap his own.

Hoover gets a house
Gary Hoover, AB'73, founder of Hoover's, a business-information company, has donated $1.5 million to to improve Chicago's international-studies programs and foreign-language training and to help create the University of Chicago Paris Center, the future home of the European-Studies Program. In thanks, the U of C will name one of the new dorms in the Max Palevsky Residential Commons Hoover House.

Heavy medals
Gary Becker, AM'53, PhD'55, professor of economics and sociology, has been awarded the National Medal of Science. Also among this year's 12 winners are three other U of C alumni: Jeremiah Ostriker, PhD'64, provost and professor of astronomy at Princeton University; Gilbert White, SB'32, SM'34, PhD'42, professor of geography at the University of Colorado; and John Griggs Thompson, SM'56, PhD'59, professor of mathematics at the University of Florida.

A living legacy
In November Bernard S. Cohn, professor emeritus in anthropology and history, was honored with a lecture program at the American Anthropological Association conference in San Francisco. The presentation, titled "Institutional Histories, Colonial Knowledges: The Scholarly Vision of Bernard S. Cohn," featured talks by 14 scholars, all of whom received their Chicago Ph.D.s from the 1970s through the 1990s.

Distinguished graduates
The Graduate School of Business honored three alumni this fall: Joseph Mansueto, AB'78, MBA'80, founder and chair of Morningstar, received the distinguished entrepreneurial alumnus award. Karen Katen, AB'70, MBA'74, president of Pfizer U.S. Pharmaceuticals Group, earned the distinguished corporate alumnus award. The distinguished public sector alumnus award went to Gary Mecklenburg, MBA'70, president and CEO of Northwestern Memorial Hospital.