The Yale Class of 1987 | 35th Reunion | Update

 

Class of 87 (aka the greatest Yale Class ever!)   We are running full steam ahead to plan our 35th reunion! If we CAN have it, we WILL have it!   Last week's note from Yale outlined all the ways reunion might be DIFFERENT-- vaccine requirements, no childcare, masks. Super important facts to ensure that we will all be safe and that we all understand the uncertainty that comes from trying to hold an in-person event at this time.   What we want to do is share all the ways reunions will be the SAME, AND ACTUALLY EVEN BETTER! 1. Pizza, 80's music, and Pierson .... what more do you need? 2. No tech, just talk 3. YOU, and the best classmates ever!   Our class endured a dining hall strike, classes in movie theaters, typewriters, a hurricane, protests, and (can you even imagine?) no internet, just table tents and library cards -- we know what matters.   It's just about being together with our class in the place we called home for 4 years!   So, hold those dates (June 2-5) on your calendar! Check out the Reunion website at alumni.yale.edu/reunions. Listen to the Class Podcast, Y87. Call your friends and get them to come! We are going to Rock 35 like no other class has rocked it before.   In Person, In Pierson!   Boola Boola, Lisa, Darcy, Matt and Tim   P.S. If you have not already created your page in the Class of 1987’s 35th Reunion digital Classbook please take just a few minutes to answer some short questions, upload pictures and reconnect with your classmates at https://yale.brightcrowd.com/1987! We promise it is fun, easy and fast.

Sharon Buccino -- new podcast episode

 

Please join the conversation with Sharon Buccino, who has worked at the Natural Resources Defense Council for decades.  Having devoted her life to the defense of the wild and environmental advocacy, Sharon's perspective is both informed and insightful.  You can read more about her work here: https://www.nrdc.org/experts/sharon-buccino.

Click here to listen in!

Lorraine Wang -- new podcast episode

 Lorraine Wang enjoyed success as a journalist, becoming a senior editor of the LA Times.  With journalism changing and becoming less of a stable career, Lorraine pivoted, earning a second bachelor's degree and ultimately going to law school.  She is now starting again as a junior lawyer.  In this episode, she shares her journey of reinvention.

Listen by clicking here.

Kristin Hoganson -- new podcast episode

Listen to Kristin talk about her perspectives as a professor of history who has considered America's Heartland -- what it is and what it means.  She also shares her perspective on teaching in the pandemic.

Kristin is a Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (Yale, 1998) and Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920 (University of North Carolina, 2007). Her recent Journal of American History article, “Meat in the Middle: Converging Borderlands in the U.S. Midwest, 1865-1900,” won the Ray Allen Billington prize offered by the Western Historical Association for the best article in Western History and the Wayne D. Rasmussen Prize offered by the Agricultural History Society.. She has received ACLS support for her current research, which considers the making of the heartland myth – and its implications for how we think about security and empire -- in light of the long history of circulation through this region. She is also working on a document collection on American empire around 1898 for Bedford Press. Hoganson has served on the editorial boards of Diplomatic History, the Journal of American History, and the Journal for the History of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. She has co-chaired the SHAFR program committee and served on SHAFR’s Bernath Book Prize committee. In the spring of 2011 she taught at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich as a visiting Fulbright professor. At Illinois, she teaches introductory U.S. foreign relations classes and upper-level courses on American empire, the United States in the world, and food in global history.

Sonya Baker -- new podcast episode

 Sonya Baker is an accomplished singer and gifted educator who shared her journey so eloquently.  Please listen through the end, where you will hear from Sonya about what it meant to her to sing "Ride the Chariot" as part of her time in the Glee Club.  Thanks to the Yale Glee Club we have a recording of Sonya singing her powerful solo of that spiritual, which is a real treat.

Click here to listen in!

Catherine Slusar -- a new podcast episode

Our classmate Catharine Slusar has built a life as an educator and an actor.  Listen in as she discusses representation on stage, teaching undergraduates and learning along the way. Catharine also discusses how acting fits into a liberal arts education.  Here is a bit more about Catharine: https://www.brynmawr.edu/people/catharine-slusar

Karen Painter -- New Podcast Episode

Take a listen to our podcast with Karen Painter, a professor of music who has spent her academic career studying classical music.  Her work concerning the use of music as a tool of political propaganda in Nazi Germany is interesting and relevant today, as is her more recent study of the poetry of German women.  Take a listen!

Karen is on the faculty at the University of Minnesota, as an associate professor in the School of Music and a faculty associate in Jewish Studies and at the Center for European Studies. She writes on the history of musical listening, especially in the context of German ideology and social history. The framework for her research has involved early bourgeois musical culture, fin-de-siècle cultural debates, World War I, Austro-German socialism, and Nazism, addressing reactions to Mahler and Mozart, but also Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler, Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Hindemith and Orff.

Painter holds a BA in music and philosophy (Yale University, 1987) and PhD in music (Columbia University, 1996). Her previous faculty appointments were at Dartmouth College (1995-1997) and Harvard University (1997-2007), and she was Director of the Office of Research and Analysis for the National Endowment for the Arts in 2005-2006. She served as Maître de conférences invitée, at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, in 2010. Author of Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900-1945, Painter has also edited Late Thoughts: Reflections on Artists and Composers at Work (with Thomas Crow) and Mahler and His World

In 1999-2000 she was recipient of Humboldt fellowship as well as the Berlin Prize of the American Academy.

For more about Karen, visit: https://cla.umn.edu/about/directory/profile/kpainter

A note from Jose Egurbide

 

Here is a great note I received from Jose.  I have also recorded a podcast episode, so keep an eye for that.  Here is what Jose had to say:

In October 2017, I lost my older sister Cristina. Those of us who have experienced the loss of a sibling know it can have a profound impact on our lives, which was certainly the case for me. In the face of my own mortality, I developed a growth mindset, discovered Mindfulness in the process, saw what a valuable tool it was in helping me deal with my own trauma, and quickly incorporated it into my professional work.

In 2018, I embraced an opportunity to teach Restorative Justice at Pepperdine’s School of Law. I took over a class previously taught by Daniel W. Van Ness, a renown restorative justice scholar and one of the principal authors of the United Nations‘ Basic Principles on Restorative Justice.

In March 2020, I was invited to be a guest panelist at Wisdom 2.0 in San Francisco, where I had a chance to share the benefits of Mindfulness in the context of successful diversion strategies for eligible petty offenders as alternatives to a more punishment-based Criminal Justice System. In that context, Mindfulness can be a more effective tool towards behavior modification than punishment because it addresses the root causes of criminal behavior in the first place.

 In October 2020, in the middle of the COVID pandemic, I spearheaded the very first Criminal Justice System Mindfulness Summit in Los Angeles. This virtual convening was attended by hundreds of judges, police officers, prosecutors, public defenders, CBO representatives and other key justice system stakeholders.

 2021 marked for me my 26th year as a career prosecutor with the LA City Attorney’s Office, the second largest municipal law firm in the U.S. In March, I was appointed Chief of the Criminal and Special Litigation Branch and currently oversee 480 employees, including 255 attorneys. Based on my experience developing therapeutic alternative prosecution models for the most vulnerable criminal justice-involved populations (like individuals experiencing homelessness, mental illness and/or drug addiction) I’ve spent the first six months of my tenure re-structuring our Criminal Branch to reflect my vision for more transparency, consistency, and accountability, as we redefine the role of a prosecutors’ office in the 21st century.

Under my leadership, this office is implementing a more balanced and restorative approach to fighting crime by focusing on public safety and recidivism reduction, smart prosecution, leading with diversion first whenever appropriate, while still aggressively prosecuting our most serious crimes and protecting the rights of victims of crime.

We are in the midst of a lot of changes in the Criminal Justice system but while legislators and justice reformists are busy decriminalizing certain behavior and funding community-based alternatives, nobody is supporting progressive prosecutor offices, notwithstanding the fact that we remain the gatekeepers for the system, wield broad discretionary powers and understand better than most that meaningful and long lasting change, whether on a personal level or on a system-wide level, must start from within.

For this reason, I am calling out to all in our Yale family with Public or Private Foundation connections: If you are passionate about criminal justice reform, alternatives to prosecution for young offenders, expansion of more whole-person, therapeutic, trauma-informed approaches to addressing the root causes behind non-serious, non-violent crime, let’s connect and let’s talk! I desperately need your help, support and assistance! Ashe!