Alumni Gazette

In the News

Bucknell Names Mitchell ’81 (PhD) President

Historian and longtime college administrator Brian Mitchell ’81 (PhD) is moving 250 miles east to become the president of another highly regarded Pennsylvania university. Mitchell, a specialist in 19th-century social and ethnic history, takes over as president of Bucknell University in July.

Since 1998, he has served as president of Washington & Jefferson College near Pittsburgh. Before that, he was president of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Pennsylvania, an organization representing many of the state’s private colleges and universities.

In announcing his decision in March, Mitchell said Bucknell’s reputation as a premiere undergraduate institution made it an attractive place to work. “Bucknell University is among a handful of the leading universities in America,” he said. “It is a tremendous honor to be selected as the university’s new president.”

Bucknell, located about 50 miles north of Harrisburg in central Pennsylvania, has about 3,500 students in undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs.

Racing to Beat Illegal Steroids

When investigators want to know the chemical breakdown of increasingly sophisticated versions of anabolic steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs, they often turn to Don Catlin ’65M (MD).

According to Time magazine, Catlin, professor of pharmacology at UCLA and director of the Olympic Analytical Laboratory, helped federal investigators analyze the drug that led to indictments last March for a San Francisco–area company whose clients are alleged to include Major League Baseball players.

Catlin, who has directed the only lab in the United States that’s accredited by the International Olympic Committee since it was created to test for drug use in the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, says the competition to create nearly undetectable performance-enhancing substances is like an arms race. “People are developing designer drugs of all sorts,” he told Time. “That’s the bitter part. The sweetness is that [this time] it was discovered.”

French, Italian, Russian . . . and Elvish?

Renee Fleming ’83E (MM) has added some new languages to her repertoire, if you count two Tolkien dialects in which the soprano sang for the soundtrack of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, composed by Howard Shore. Music for the blockbuster movie won an Oscar last February.

They Are the Champions—Again

The women’s basketball team of Monroe Community College in Rochester won a second national basketball championship last winter under coach Tim Parrinello ’91. Since the former Rochester linebacker took over the head coaching spot in 1996, the Lady Tribunes have won 92 percent of their games, and 21 players have gone on to Division I basketball.