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Class Notes: December 3, 1997
CLASS NOTES FEATURES
Ambassador for the Information Age
WHEN J. STAPLETON ROY '56 became executive secretary of the State Department in 1989, he discovered that almost none of the principal officers had computers in their offices. He also discovered that the State Department was not electronically connected to other cabinet departments. Paper documents were hand-delivered, as they were in the 19th century, and manually reentered into computers on arrival.
Roy, now U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, was appalled. "The computer is taking over the role of the telephone," he says. "Everyone needs a computer on their desk."
One of the difficulties in adapting technology to the workplace is that those who understand the technology are not always the same people who use it. In the State Department, Stapleton took a pioneering role in bridging that gap. He had a computer installed in his office and began communicating with the deputy secretary through e-mail. Soon, all the under secretaries were asking for computers.
Today, Stapleton communicates with Indonesian cabinet ministers and officials in Washington by e-mail. He uses the Internet to check electronic editions of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, as well as Kompas, Indonesia's leading newspaper, and Tempo, the banned weekly news magazine. In a keynote address at a 1996 conference on "The American Embassy in the 21st Century," Roy envisioned a "digital embassy" which "would not be clock- or space-bound."
While advances in information technology have made Roy's work easier, they have also added new dimensions to his job. The increased speed at which information can move has had a significant impact on diplomacy. Roy remembers the day in August 1991 when, as the newly appointed ambassador to China, he presented his credentials during the overthrow of Gorbachev. While discussing the events in the Soviet Union with the president of China, he realized that they were speaking on the basis of the same information--coverage on CNN.
Roy is particularly aware of the powerful political influence of visual images presented by news broadcasters like CNN. Strong visual images, he believes, "can contribute to misunderstanding as well as understanding" of countries like China and Indonesia. He recalls how, in the wake of Tiananmen Square, the image of the student standing in front of the tank was used on American TV every time China was mentioned, even if the story was about positive changes in China.
An interest in technology lead Roy to enter Princeton as an engineering student. Later he switched to history and wrote a thesis on revisionist interpretations of Pearl Harbor. He met a State Department recruiter on campus during his senior year, and entered the Foreign Service after graduation. His first assignment was to Hong Kong, but when a position suddenly opened in Bangkok he was sent there instead, without preparation. "It was a good introduction to life in the Foreign Service," he says. "I haven't had an uninteresting post."
As a career diplomat, does Roy worry that communications technology will some day make the Foreign Service obsolete? No, he says. People need personal relationships. "Humans will always recognize that there is a difference between talking over the computer and, for example, going out on a date."
--Tamsin M. Todd '92
Fashioning fire
Princeton ignited Dunham's interest in glass blowing
TALL GLASS GOBLETS marked with petroglyphic squiggles stand on drunken, weak-kneed stems, as if the champagne they hold has made them tipsy. "Flow Goblets" perch atop wavy stems that resemble branches bent by gale-force winds, inviting you to imbibe before it is too late. Still another goblet fascinates for its witty play on form. A golden lightning bolt joins the drinking bowl with a base that is an inverted version of the bowl, as if whatever you drink from it will surely turn your life upside-down.
These are just a few of the unconventional drinking vessels created by Prescott, Arizona, artist Bandhu Scott Dunham '81, who playfully blends the geometric and the biomorphic. His goal, he says, is to highlight "the versatile nature of glass, from pristine to earthy or rough."
Dunham, whose first name, Bandhu, was given to him by a meditation teacher, does his work by an ancient technique called lampworking. Although the ancient Egyptians and Romans used this method to create perfume vials and beads, it is only since the late 1970s that contemporary glass artists have explored the aesthetic potential of lampworking. Instead of an oil lamp, however, today's equipment consists of a special torch fueled by propane gas and oxygen to intensify the heat.
Dunham's interest in scientific glass blowing ignited while he was studying chemical engineering at Princeton. He initially taught himself with books checked out from the library. Then the alchemy of flame and glass snuffed out the chemistry career.
He took classes at the Urban Glass Workshop in New York and the Pilchuck School near Seattle. To start, he created a lot of small animal figures, which he sold in gift stores and at arts-and-crafts fairs.
In 1980, Dunham moved to Arizona and opened Salusa Glassworks, where he began producing the goblets, which sell for $125 to $200 in more than 35 galleries around the country. One goblet, with a stem made of glass jelly beans, has made it to the glass-artist equivalent of the Hall of Fame, the permanent collection of the Corning Museum of Glass, in Corning, New York. Dunham, the author of Contemporary Lampworking (Salusa Glassworks, $32.95), still has apprentices who produce "sun-catcher kinds of things" to pay the rent. But he has moved into work that sells through galleries, which includes functional items such as vases, goblets, and sake sets.
In his nonfunctional work, a darker mood takes over and he is "interested in the scars that things take on--some of my sculptural work has warts and tentacles on it," says Dunham.
Dunham says he often does demonstrations and never fails to hold an audience captive. "There's something hypnotic and primordial about staring into a fire," he says--not to mention watching something beautiful emerge from the flame.
--Mary Daniels
This story, which originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune, was reprinted with permission.
Of pleated skirts, penny loafers, sneakers, and white hosiery
ROBIN GIVHAN '86, who covers fashion for The Washington Post, admits that the route to her job was extraordinarily circuitous. Growing up in Detroit, Givhan spent eight years in a Lutheran school where the dress code all but mandated a pleated plaid skirt, a white blouse, and penny loafers. "To say I was even aware of the fashion magazines would be an overstatement," she says. "Never in a million years did I ever think I would go into fashion."
When she enrolled at Princeton, Givhan planned to be premed. She chose English as a major, and though she never worked on campus publications, she did take some creative writing courses, including one with Joyce Carol Oates. But Givhan recalls that unlike some of her classmates, she lacked the "voice" that Oates encouraged, and it was hardly clear that she was destined to write for a living.
Upon graduation, Givhan took just about every graduate and professional entrance test there was, and late in the game she spurned Columbia Law School to pursue a journalism degree at the University of Michigan. In 1988 she landed her first real reporting job on the features desk of The Detroit Free Press, where she toiled as the paper's second-string movie reviewer. Enduring a flood of tacky films convinced Givhan--who had "begun to understand the meaning of Armani" for the first time during a junior semester in Rome--to jump at the chance to take over the fashion beat in 1990.
Though Detroit is not as well known for its fashion sense as New York or Beverly Hills, the city has long exhibited a passion for haute couture, and even today, the Free Press remains one of the few newspapers to send reporters to the major European shows. As the men's fashion reporter, Givhan was sent immediately to Europe; knowing very little, Givhan watched as her predecessor circled the events she needed to attend, then hoped for the best. "It was the most angst-filled two weeks of my life," Givhan recalls. "But I met other writers, a lot of them older, and they took me under their wings."
Fashion writing, she notes, is unusual in its demographics: About 90 percent of newspaper fashion reporters are women, and many of the handful of men are gay. But African-Americans like Givhan may be rarest of all--not only within the reporting ranks but also in the fashion industry as a whole. Givhan, however, stuck with it. After a nine-month hiatus with The San Francisco Chronicle, she returned to the Free Press to edit its fashion coverage. Then in 1995, almost as a lark, she applied to fill the Post's vacant fashion slot. She figured there were many more qualified fashion writers than she, but to her surprise, the Post chose her.
Givhan says she's tried to steer the Post toward more consumer- and business-oriented coverage. Several of her predecessors, she says, covered the beat either as industry boosters or as observers of cutting-edge aesthetics. By contrast, "I want it to be more about the business of fashion, and the players, and less about where hemlines are going or what the hot color is going to be," she says. "A colleague said to me early on, 'Follow the money,' and that's what I try to do."
Givhan dismisses the rap that Washington is a bureaucratic backwater short on taste. Instead, she argues that Washingtonians--even the city's grungier folk, such as journalists--wind up looking reasonably snazzy because they consider fashion, in a low-key way, to be just another tool in the power game. Of course, there are always exceptions: Givhan's two most controversial columns railed against the wearing of sneakers to work and against women who dress in white stockings. Irate readers called and mailed letters for two weeks. "If people only had the same passion for solving homelessness . . . " she says with a sigh.
--Louis Jacobson '92
Louis Jacobson is a staff correspondent at National Journal.
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