Nixon Library Gets a New Director, at Last
Michael D. Ellzey’s shortcoming as the new director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, according to some historians and archivists, is that he is neither a historian nor an archivist.
Mr. Ellzey, 62, has a law degree and decades of experience in the private and public sectors. His most recent post was as chief executive of Orange County Great Park Corporation, a project plagued with spending problems. Taking charge last month of the Nixon Library is something he would never have envisioned, even in his wildest dreams, he says. His only previous association with President Nixon was while serving distantly under his command in the U.S. Marine Corps in California, during the Vietnam War.
Anthony Clark, a past speechwriter for Congress who has a forthcoming book on how presidents reshape their legacies, is a critic of Mr. Ellzey’s selection. The institution risks reverting to what it was before being brought in 2007 into the National Archives and Records Administration’s Presidential Library system, he says: “a tourist attraction full of slanted, biased exhibits” run by “an aggressively partisan” Richard Nixon Foundation.
Mr. Ellzey says that he respects the critics “on the technical, scholarly side of the research-library system,” but that he is confident of his qualifications. In a news release, David S. Ferriero, archivist of the United States, noted Mr. Ellzey’s “extensive experience in managing large cultural and civic organizations.”
Mr. Ferriero appointed Mr. Ellzey after a previous top candidate, a historian, withdrew from consideration following resistance from the Nixon foundation, which supports the library.
The last Nixon librarian, Timothy Naftali, stepped down in 2011 amid continuing foundation opposition to his frank presentation of Watergate history. Now at New York University, Mr. Naftali says his fellow historians and archivists should “support nonpartisanship and openness” of the kind he sees in Mr. Ellzey. Be realistic, he urges colleagues: By law, presidential libraries must be built by private organizations without Congressional funding, but then they are run by the National Archives in the face of pressure from “forces not interested in nonpartisanship and scholarship.”
Mr. Ellzey says he plans to carry forward what Mr. Naftali and previous directors have put in place, including further releases from the Nixon White House tapes, and to remain distinct from the Nixon foundation, which shares the library’s campus in Southern California. The foundation and family members “would like really to push one side of the equation, versus the entire equation, and that’s OK; that’s who they are,” he says—champions of Nixon’s “50-year legacy of public service.” —Peter Monaghan
College by Algorithm
After five decades in education, including more than a dozen years as a senior vice president with the College Board, Peter Negroni has joined vibeffect, an education-technology start-up. The Cuban-born Mr. Negroni, who is 72, spoke with The Chronicle’s Karin Fischer about how he expects to help the college-search company expand in the United States and abroad, with a focus on China.
Q. What attracted you to vibeffect?
A. We have a horrific situation with one of every two kids dropping out of college. Here is an organization that responds to this issue using technology so that young people get into colleges where they can be successful. We’ve taken 66 personal traits and we’ve taken the characteristics of distinct campuses to create a predictive algorithm. We are able to say, These are the places that have the qualities where you match. We could help so that kids are able to pick a college where they would thrive and graduate.
Q. Why are China and other foreign markets part of your strategy?
A. I worked at the College Board and was responsible for introducing Advanced Placement into the Chinese public-school market. There’s obviously a big market of Chinese parents interested in their students going to college in the United States. And there are hundreds of companies there charging exorbitant amounts of money and not giving families what they need. It is an unfulfilled market.
A parent’s perspective in China is that there are three colleges in the United States: Yale, Princeton, Harvard. But the reality is we have many, many places where they could send their students and they could get a wonderful education. I think there is potential in other countries. But the Chinese market is the one most wanting, the most ready.
Q. What do you bring to this position?
A. I bring an understanding of and a passion for helping children. I entered this field as a 21-year-old Latino who came to this country with the same dream that most young immigrants have. And I realized that dream. I got an education.
Dean of Collaboration
Will Kirk, John Hopkins U.
Beverly Wendland
Asked the secret to moving up in academic administration, Beverly Wendland says, “It sounds cheesy to say, but it’s the network of colleagues.”
Ms. Wendland, a cell biologist, was just appointed dean of arts and sciences at the Johns Hopkins University after serving since last July as interim dean. In 1998, she says, when she was still new to campus from graduate studies in her native California, “I asked how our seminar series was organized, and suddenly became chair of it.” As she raised her hand to take on a progression of new roles, expanding collegial ties “became enabling for getting things done.”
Among her most exciting priorities as dean, says Ms. Wendland, 50, will be to advance collaborations across divisions of science, social science, and humanities, and to seed such work even at the undergraduate level. Eighteen months ago, Johns Hopkins opened a laboratory building designed to catalyze undergraduates’ introduction to hands-on research techniques. It is, she says, “an inspirational, enlightening space.” —Peter Monaghan
Beyond Murals
Cynthia Main
Daniel Tucker
Daniel Tucker can draw from a broad palette of public-art approaches in his new job at Moore College of Art and Design, in Philadelphia.
One of his goals, as an assistant professor and graduate manager in social and studio practices at Moore, is to create “art embedded in a neighborhood.” What that will look like in 2015 and beyond is up for grabs, he says.
Murals will be one starting point for students in two new, low-residency M.F.A. programs that he is developing, along with managing the existing M.F.A. program in studio arts. The students will do course work and practicums with the well-established City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program.
But he expects them to branch out from there, using computer applications, political posters, or whichever media they can commandeer or create and effectively deploy for community-art projects.
One of the new M.F.A. programs will be in art and social engagement, and the other in community practice. Eight to 10 students will make up the first cohorts for each of the programs, which will begin this summer.
Mr. Tucker, who is 31, says he is reviewing the CVs of potential instructors, as well as applications from prospective students around the country and farther afield.
Among the students Moore hopes to attract, Mr. Tucker says, are community organizers and teachers who want to use art to press for social change or community cohesion.
Public artists may work with city approval, or as street artists who are often branded as vandals. Mr. Tucker says: “Whether they’re working from an approved position or agitating from the margins,” graduates from the new programs should have gained critical tools to assess what they are trying to achieve.
Mr. Tucker came to Moore in the fall from Chicago, where he worked for 14 years at the intersections of art, research, and social activism. Besides creating art and curating it, he developed documentary films and did journalism. He is the author, with Amy Franceschini, of Farm Together Now: A Portrait of People, Places, and Ideas for a New Food Movement.
—Peter Monaghan
Professor and Poet Dies
Philip Levine, a professor emeritus of English at California State University at Fresno who was U.S. poet laureate in 2011-12, died from pancreatic cancer on February 14. He was 87.
Mr. Levine portrayed the lives of the working class in his poems. His work earned him many honors, including a Pulitzer Prize for his collection The Simple Truth in 1995. He was on Fresno State’s faculty from 1958 until his retirement in 1992 and also taught at other universities.
He sometimes admitted unregistered but talented students into his classes, he said in a 1988 interview with The Paris Review. At Columbia University, he said, “it came down to my offering to quit on the spot to keep a student in the class.”
Val Logsdon Fitch, a professor emeritus of physics at Princeton University, died on February 5. He was 91. Mr. Fitch won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics with a colleague for their discovery of violations of fundamental principles of symmetry in certain particles and antiparticles. —Anais Strickland