Class Notes

1974 Fred Paillet (PhD) (see ’68 College).

1978 Anne Mitchell Hawkins (PhD) (see ’67 College).

1986 Bill Spohn (MS) sends news about his e-commerce business, TruTechTools.com. “In addition to receiving our third INC 5000 award in four years as we grew to 15 full-time employees this year,” he writes, “my co-owner and I were named finalists for the 2019 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for the East Central Region”.

1989 Jay Heffron (PhD) writes that he has published a book, The Rise of the South in American Thought and Education: The Rockefeller Years (1902–1917) and Beyond (Peter Lang), “much of it based on my dissertation.” Jay writes that his advisor, Christopher Lasch, a professor of history at Rochester who died in 1994, “played a critical role, pouring his energies into it, his wife once confided in me, as she had never witnessed before. Although five out of the eight chapters have appeared piecemeal either as peer-reviewed books chapters or journal articles, colleagues in the history of education have been encouraging me over the years to pull it all together as a full-blown book.” Jay is a professor of educational history and culture at Soka University of America in Aliso Viejo, California.

1993 Beth Docteur (MS) (see ’90 College).

1995 Daniel Diermeier (PhD) was named in December as Vanderbilt University’s ninth chancellor, with a term beginning in July. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Guggenheim fellow, Daniel is the provost at the University of Chicago, where he holds the title of David Lee Shillinglaw Distinguished Service Professor at the university’s Harris School of Public Policy. At Chicago, he and his team is credited with pioneering a model of funding for PhD students. He also oversaw increases in faculty for computer science and data analytics, economics and policy, urban studies, and molecular engineering, culminating in the creation of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering in 2019. Before Chicago, Daniel taught at Stanford and Northwestern. He and his wife, Ariela Lazar, director of visual arts education and outreach at the University of Chicago, have twin sons.

1998 Jay Goodliffe (PhD) coauthored Who Donates in Campaigns? The Importance of Message, Messenger, Medium, and Structure (Cambridge University Press). Jay, a professor of political science at Brigham Young University, and his colleagues used a new data set from the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections to produce a systematic and complete analysis of donors to presidential nominees.

1999 Tadeusz Lewandowski (MA) published Ojibwe, Activist, Priest: The Life of Father Philip Bergin Gordon, Tibishkogijik (University of Wisconsin Press). Tadeusz, a professor at the University of Ostrava, Czech Republic, and at the University of Opole, Poland, offers the first scholarly biography of the American Indian Catholic priest and activist Father Philip Gordon. . . . Ronian Siew (MS) (see ’97 College).

2008 James Johnson (MS) (see ’07 College).

2009 Daniel Gillion (PhD) wrote The Loud Minority: Why Protests Matter in American Democracy (Princeton University Press), scheduled for a March release. Drawing on historical evidence, statistical data, and detailed interviews about protest activity since the 1960s, the book argues that protests affect who runs for office, how people view issues, and—perhaps most important during an election season—voter turnout. Daniel holds the title of Julie Beren Platt and Marc E. Platt Presidential Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written several award-winning books and journal articles on the subject of political protest, racial and ethnic inequality, political discourse on race, political institutions, and the American presidency.