From the Archives
Class Notes - April 5, 2000
Class notes features
In the 1930s, r.o.t.c. cadets at Princeton were required to undergo six
weeks of training at Madison Barracks in New York during the summer between
junior and senior years. This picture, taken by Fred Ritter '37, shows Class
of 1937 members (l-r) Bill Montgomery, Bud Sauter, Jack Eberhardt, Dick
Bell, Jack Irwin, and Bob Clary during the summer of 1936.
CFO Heidi Miller '74 moves to priceline.com
Heidi G. Miller '74, called by Fortune magazine the No. 2 most powerful
U.S. businesswoman in 1999, in March left her job as chief financial officer
of Citigroup to join the e-commerce company priceline.com as senior executive
vice president and CFO.
Miller studied history at Princeton and went on to earn a Ph.D. at Yale in 1979, writing her dissertation on Argentine railroad unionization from 1912 to 1920. When she was finished, she began looking for a job in business. "I spoke Spanish and Portuguese," Miller says, "and I was looking for growing businesses in Latin America. Someone told me to look at banks." She joined Chemical Bank as a management trainee, worked there for 13 years, and left as managing director in the emerging markets area. She joined Primerica in 1992; that company bought Travelers, and in 1995 Miller became CFO. In 1998 Travelers merged with Citicorp and became Citigroup, with Miller as CFO.
"Financial control is a great area," Miller says. "And with priceline.com, which is a hyper-growth company, appropriate controls are critical, as are safety issues."
Going from Citigroup, with more than 200,000 employees, to priceline.com, which has fewer than 500, is a change in size for Miller, but not in substance. "I've done a lot of deals at Citigroup," Miller says, "and at priceline.com I expect to do more as we look for affinity relationships." In addition to building relationships with other businesses, Miller will lead the company's strategic development efforts domestically and internationally.
At priceline.com, an Internet company that offers users "name-your-own-price" purchasing, consumers can purchase airline tickets, hotel accommodations, cars, groceries, and even gasoline. Miller, who so far has bought only groceries through priceline.com, has two children and is a trustee of the university.
Don Michael Randel '62 *67 was chosen last December to be the next president of the University of Chicago. Randel, currently provost of Cornell University, will assume the job July 1, succeeding Hugo F. Sonnenschein, a former provost at Princeton, who plans to return to teaching and research. Randel, who holds a Ph.D. in music from Princeton, has served over the years in numerous administrative posts at Cornell, where he was hired as an assistant professor in 1968. A distinguished scholar of music, with special interests in music of the Renaissance and Middle Ages, Randel believes in the contributions of faculty. "In my various administrative capacities," he said, "I have tried to remember that most of the good ideas come from the faculty, and it is the job of the administrators to help make them realities."
Felix E. Browder *48, professor of mathematics at Rutgers University and president of the American Mathematical Society, on March 13 received the 1999 National Medal of Science from President Clinton. Born in Russia, Browder came to the U.S. when he was five, graduated from M.I.T. when he was 16, and earned his doctorate from Princeton two years later. The award recognizes Browder's pioneering mathematical work in the creation of nonlinear functional analysis, his opening up of new avenues in nonlinear problems, and his leadership in the scientific community to broaden the range of interactions among disciplines.
Volunteers who help foreign governments
Andrew Spindler *83 and the FSVC open up economic bottlenecks
Andrew Spindler *83 regards the two years he spent at Princeton as among the most formative in his life. Paradoxically, though, the most profound impact of his M.P.A. studies at the Woodrow Wilson School came not from anything that happened on campus, but from a summer spent 11,000 miles away, in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta.
In the summer of 1974, the Wilson School's internship program placed Spindler in Jakarta, where he worked closely with the new American ambassador, David Newsome. Twenty-six years later, he says, "The experience . . . sowed the seeds of my interest in the political and economic problems of developing countries."
Spindler is the executive director of Financial Services Volunteer Corps, a New York-based nonprofit that sends financial services professionals-bankers, government regulators, attorneys-to developing countries to advise government officials on all manner of economic issues.
Concentrating primarily on Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union, hundreds of FSVC volunteers have traveled to eastern Europe and beyond in the past decade. The volunteers are sent on short, highly targeted
missions, to address so-called bottleneck problems-where a developing economy is being held back by a lack of knowledge or experience.
The free advice they have given since the organization was founded in 1990, on everything from establishing a central bank in Lithuania to combating money launderers in Bosnia-Herzegovina, would have cost more than $100 million if delivered by private consultants.
Spindler took a break in 1983 from his career as an international banker to return to Princeton to earn his Ph.D. He worked for a time at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York before joining FSVC in 1993.
"Princeton had a tremendous impact on me. It changed my career," Spindler says. He remembers specifically an M.P.A. seminar taught by Paul Volcker '49, who would go on to spend eight years as the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Volcker also serves as cochairman of FSVC.
Spindler couldn't help reflecting on his time as a Princeton student last month, when, 26 years after his first visit as a graduate student, he traveled back to Jakarta, this time in the company of Volcker.
The two met with President Abdurrahman Wahid, who had asked Volcker to serve as an economic and financial adviser to the government. The former Fed chairman agreed, and FSVC will play a supporting role in the relationship. "We also hope to undertake a broad program of technical assistance work, to help pull Indonesia out of its current banking crisis," Spindler says.
-Rob Garver
Rob Garver is a journalist working in Washington, D.C.
Robert S. Miner, Jr., was a great bear of a man-a warm, welcoming gentleman
with a charming twinkle in his eye. When I first joined the Governing Board
of the Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni (APGA), he was said to be
one of its senior members; when I left the board 15 years later, he was
still the senior member. He remained on the board until he died, on January
14, 2000.
On the board, I soon learned that Bob was the soul of the APGA. By the time he received his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1956, he had come to love the idea of an organization that would enrich the lives of Princeton's graduate alumni the way class organizations and the Alumni Council were helping Princeton's undergraduates.
Bob's work for the APGA, which began in 1948, was legendary. When a group of us suggested in 1975 that Princeton's graduate alumni should have a June reunion comparable to undergraduate reunions, Bob not only agreed to work with us, but reproved the board, tongue-in-cheek, for not having thought of the idea sooner. Bob was one of the eight "heroes" who constituted the first Graduate School contingent in the P-rade of June 1975; by 1978 he had become the chairman of the APGA Reunions committee. Under his relentlessly enthusiastic guidance, the graduate Reunions program came to include many receptions and seminars for all alumni. As time went on, the number of returning graduate alumni continued to grow, in large part due to Bob's tireless efforts.
When, in 1996, Bob won the Alumni Council Award for Service to Princeton, it was a perfect recognition of the good he had done and the quiet, tireless way in which he had done it.
In 1982, I wrote a sonnet about Bob, which I'll share. It captured the spirit of the man and his work for Princeton.
Bob Miner mounts a creaking P-rade cart,
And pulling up in front of Nassau Hall,
Announces the parade's about to start,
And revels in the magic of it all.
His Grad Alumni troops are armed with flags,
His "Heroes" ride the golf cart unto Glory;
His men are keen: attention never lags;
Bob Miner revs the motor of his lorry,
Then OFF: the Grad Alumni hit the grass-
Across McCosh's campus roll the crew,
With old Bob Miner burning up the gas,
And armies of the faithful marching through.
A P-rade's not as simple as it looks:
Bob Miner cracks the Princeton history books!
-Marvin Harold Cheiten *71
Marvin Cheiten is C.E.O. of Water Master Company in New Brunswick.
From camouflage to tweed
Paul Miles *99, a former military man, teaches history courses at
Princeton
Paul Miles *99, a lecturer in the Department of History, often gets
compliments on a camouflage jacket he wears when it's chilly. "Where
can I get one?" someone is always asking him.
"Go down to Fort Dix and hold up your right hand," Miles says cheerfully. He earned his camouflage jacket with 34 years of active duty in the U.S. Army, including two tours of duty in Vietnam, and three years at the Pentagon as aide and research assistant to General William C. Westmoreland, who was then Army chief of staff.
When Miles retired as a colonel in 1990, he came to Princeton to finish up a Ph.D. that he had started in 1976. The Army had sent him to the Center of International Studies at the Woodrow Wilson School, where he stayed on for a couple of years and started on the Ph.D., getting as far as his orals. Then he went to West Point to organize its new program in International and Strategic History and taught military history and strategy there until 1990.
Back at Princeton, it took him nine years to write his dissertation, "FDR's Admiral: William Leahy and the Making of Grand Strategy in World War II." It will be published by the Naval Institute Press next year, and Princeton awarded him a lectureship.
Miles, who grew up in Metter, Georgia, went to West Point when all cadets studied engineering; he won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, where he read modern history.
He went to Vietnam in 1965 as the U.S. was beginning its military buildup. He was a captain, commanding a construction and combat support company. He won the Wheeler Medal from the American Society of Military Engineers for the way he and his company managed to install a floating dock in the "no-man's-land" (as Peter Arnett described it in True magazine) of Cam Ranh Bay, where millions of tons of supplies could be unloaded.
In January 1973, he went back to Vietnam with the plans division of the American military command in Saigon and was a member of the military delegation that represented the Saigon command at the Paris peace talks. He served on the Joint Military Commission that supervised the implementation of the Paris Accords and volunteered to stay after the withdrawal of military forces to work on the Missing-in-Action problem, negotiating with North Vietnam in Saigon and Hanoi.
Now embarked on a second career, where a tweed jacket is de rigueur instead of camouflage, he is a preceptor in courses all over the map-The New American Nation, 1789-1850, and The United States since 1920 last fall, and U.S. Foreign Relations in the 20th Century and Civil War and Reconstruction this spring. He advises seniors who are writing theses in American military and diplomatic history.
Miles has found few differences between students at Princeton and students at West Point. "The cadets are more assertive in expressing their own viewpoints," he said, "but Princeton students are more inclined to engage the literature in more detail, possibly because they have more time. Athletics and drills are not compulsory here."
-Ann Waldron
Ann Waldron is a freelance writer living in Princeton.
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