In Review

Meliora Weekend Quotes

“When I ran for office, every time I made a speech and thought I did well, people would come up to me afterward and say, ‘You have great hair.’”

—Marie Wilson, president of the White House Project and the Ms. Foundation for Women, and the founder of Take Our Daughters to Work Day, during a roundtable discussion sponsored by the Susan B. Anthony Center for Women’s Leadership. The discussion focused on the difficulties women face in running for political office.

“Bad leadership can ruin a company overnight. Good leadership can move mountains over time.”

—Ann Mulcahy, Xerox chairman and CEO, talking about her efforts to turn around the copier company and about the legacy of the late Joseph C. Wilson ’31, who as CEO founded the company under the Xerox name. Wilson’s family received the University’s Eastman Medal on behalf of Wilson during the Weekend.

“It kind of gets you going in the morning. It gets your juices going to know that if you make a buck, you get to keep more of it.”

—Larry Kudlow ’69, cohost of CNBC’s economic news show, Kudlow & Cramer, and former economic advisor to the Reagan White House, on the economic incentives behind lower tax rates.

“I figured I could bluff my way through it.”

—Edward P. Jones, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Known World, talking about the research on slavery that he attempted but never completed for his novel about a black slave owner. Jones read from his work as part of the Andrew H. and Janet Neilly Library Series.

“Thinking about health and human rights is something best not left to experts, but to [audiences] like this one; everyone has a stake in it.”

—Paul Farmer, a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and founding director of Partners in Health, discussing his work as a physician and anthropologist to bring health care to impoverished countries. Farmer spoke as part of the 2004 Lewis H. Morgan Lecture Series in the Department of Anthropology.

“My first political lesson was that the meaning and impact of racism could be changed by what people of color do collectively.”

—Manning Marable, professor of public affairs, political science, and history at Columbia University and founder of Columbia’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies, discussing some of the lessons for society that stem from the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine.

“Music is extremely important to me. It enters at the bloodstream level and the level of breath. Poetry is another way of singing.”

—Rita Dove, former poet laureate of the United States, whose reading, sponsored by the Department of English’s Hyam Plutzik Memorial Series, featured compositions by two Eastman School graduate students, Aaron Travers and Kevin Ernste, setting Dove’s poetry to music.