PRESIDENT'S CORNER - September 9, 2016 | School of Public Health

Get ready…get set…REGISTER FOR OLLI CLASSES TODAY! Yes, this is the day. By now you should have your catalog in the mail or, if not, check it out on the website. And then mark your calendar for next week’s activities, also detailed in the Bulletin. Issues in Aging Lecture and the Fall Reception on Wednesday.

Recently, we had a session with Susan Lantz, who is coordinating the campus reading project for “Just Mercy.” She passed out a few copies to those present and some of us have already finished it. Wow! What an amazing chronicle of people saved from death row and legal changes made right up to the Supreme Court. Bonnie and I heard Bryan Stevenson speak at Chautauqua three years ago when this book first came out…he is an amazing guy doing very important work. The book is pretty depressing in spots but ultimately very uplifting, so I can’t think of a more important book to read, and since WVU is reading it this year, why not join in the experience?

There are quite a few campus events being planned in conjunction with “Just Mercy,” including the School of Theatre’s production of “Race” by David Mamet. Mamet has never been one of my favorite playwrights, but that does not detract from his brilliance and courage in dramatizing some very tough issues. “Oleanna” was a two-character drama about a college student charging a professor with sexual harassment—the conflict between these two on stage is astonishing, so much so that you can see both sides of the issue and have to decide who is guilty…or not.

Here’s the description of “Race” from the School of Theatre website: Three lawyers are forced to confront their own feelings about race when they’re offered the chance to defend a white man charged with a crime against a black woman. “Race” will play at the CAC September 23 – October 2.

Bryan Stevenson will be speaking at WVU on November 7 as part of the David C. Hardesty Festival of Idea series in the ballrooms at the Mountainlair.

Money is boring. When you get to be my age, you don’t know what to spend it on. When I was your age, I was “money, money, money”…”save, save.” Now, what does it matter? [Director Billy Wilder]

Living is strife and torment, disappointment and love and sacrifice, golden sunsets and black storms. I said that some time ago, and today I do not think I would add one word. [Actor Lawrence Olivier]

Here’s a poem to get you thinking about the coming change of season:

Sonnet V by William Shakespeare

Those hours, that with gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,
Will play the tyrants to the very same
And that unfair which fairly doth excel;
For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter, and confounds him there;
Sap checked with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o'er-snowed and bareness every where:
Then were not summer's distillation left,
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it, nor no remembrance what it was:
But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

Jim Held, President