In Short: Sachs Scholars, Emily Mann, and More

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Photo: Matt Pilsner

EMILY MANN, who has served as artistic director and resident playwright of McCarter Theatre since 1990, will retire at the end of the 2019–20 season. Mann has been a strong supporter of works by women and people of color while overseeing more than 160 productions and more than 40 world premieres. McCarter said the upcoming season will be “Signature Emily,” featuring “a capstone series of plays celebrating diverse and emerging artists.”

From left: Tylor-Maria Johnson ’19 and Emily Geyman ’19

Courtesy Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (Johnson); courtesy Emily Geyman ’19

Tylor-Maria Johnson ’19, left photo, of Brooklyn, N.Y., and Emily Geyman ’19 of Seattle are recipients of the SACHS SCHOLARSHIP, named for Daniel Sachs ’60 and one of Princeton’s highest honors. Johnson, a sociology major pursuing certificates in African American studies and American studies, will work toward master’s degrees in refugee and forced-migration studies and in evidence-based social intervention and policy evaluation at Oxford. Geyman is concentrating in geosciences and will pursue a yearlong study in glaciology and permafrost research in Arctic Norway to better understand the role of ice in climate change.

In addition, Mary (Molly) Daunt, a classics major at Oxford’s Worcester College, received a Sachs Scholarship to study for a year at Princeton’s Graduate School.

Princeton has joined other colleges and universities in opposing a federal policy that would impose harsh and retroactive IMMIGRATION PENALTIES for mistakes made by international students, researchers, and professors holding F, J, and M visas. The University filed a friend-of-the-court brief in a lawsuit challenging the policy, which took effect in August. The new rule can shrink or eliminate the amount of notice international students receive even if they inadvertently fall out of legal status, which puts them in jeopardy of being banned from the United States for three or 10 years without a chance to correct the error.

Assistant classics professor DAN-EL PADILLA PERALTA ’06, appearing on a panel on the future of classics at the Society for Classical Studies (SCS) conference in San Diego Jan. 5, was the target of a racist comment by an independent scholar who said the Princeton professor was hired only because he is black. The remark followed her comment that the idea of Western civilization needs protecting.

Reports of the comment on higher-education websites, along with the news that two scholars of color at the conference had been asked to show their IDs by hotel security guards, prompted renewed discussion of diversity issues in the field. The SCS condemned the incidents. Padilla Peralta, who was born in the Dominican Republic, cited “whisper campaigns” about efforts to diversify faculty ranks and what he termed the “whites-only neighborhood” of journal publication in classics.

The Catholic organization Opus Dei disclosed last month that it had paid $977,000 in 2005 to settle SEXUAL-MISCONDUCT ACCUSATIONS against the Rev. C. John McCloskey, a priest who served as a campus ministry chaplain at Princeton in the late 1980s. The settlement was paid three years after a woman who was receiving counseling at the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C., filed a complaint that in 2002 she had been repeatedly groped by McCloskey, the center’s director at the time. Opus Dei’s statement came after the woman asked the organization to make the information public so that other potential victims might come forward. McCloskey was associate chaplain of the Aquinas Institute, Princeton’s Catholic campus ministry, for five years before stepping down in July 1990.