PRESIDENT'S CORNER - July 29, 2016 | School of Public Health

The End. Will you look at the calendar? It’s the end of July this weekend! Barely more than two weeks left in our summer term and the middle of August always brings two important events: road work and the opening of the fall term at WVU. It has got to be a joke with many of us that it felt like the Dept. of Highways seemed to schedule local road repaving at exactly the same time that the students were moving back in and trying to get to classes.

Just Mercy: Do you know about the new class to be offered one time only on Monday, August 1? This is about the book that WVU is urging everyone to read this next year, Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. Bonnie and I heard Bryan speak at Chautauqua three years ago on this book. He is a dynamo that has established a fine career in helping people wrongly convicted of crimes, mostly in the deep South. The book is NOT a walk in the park with its stories of tragic miscarriages of justices, but it is also a very inspiring story about how injustice can be turned around. The leader of the campus program will share with us the reason for this book, so I urge you to register—Monday, 10-12.

Robin Williams: I was just flabbergasted to greet 58 people this week to look at the Film Legacy of Robin Williams. A couple of people told me they had never heard about the “Inside the Actors’ Studio” programs. This is a Bravo network program that has been going for quite a few years, but which has slowed down quite a bit since its host, James Lipton, has moved into his mid-80s. The good news is that you can easily get most of the programs on DVD through Amazon.com at very reasonable cost. This also leads me to wonder how many of you would like to enjoy a Robin Williams film festival since there isn’t time to do more than show clips from many of his films. I propose a once a month starting with the fall Film Forum. Comments???

Books: I know most of you are good readers, so I am curious why my in-box has not been deluged with your suggestions. Do you need my email? Here it is: Jim.Held@mail.wvu.edu Send me your suggestions and a brief paragraph about why you love these books and I’ll put them in here.

Midsummer: Learn something new every day. Recently, I was wondering what was the actual day of the middle of summer. Since summer begins on June 21, I reasoned that it must be around August 5-7. In Googling “What is the date of the middle of summer?” this popped up:

Summer Solstice: Always The Longest Day In Middle Latitudes; Rarely The Hottest. The sun marches north for about six months, then, on the summer solstice, does an about-face at 23-1/2 degrees latitude and heads south. The sun will be farthest north this year on June 21.

From A Midsummer Night’s Dream, here’s Theseus musing on imagination:

More strange than true: I never may believe,
These antic fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

[William Shakespeare]

Jim Held, President