Committee has full complement
The remaining members of the committee that will conduct the search for President Shapiro's successor have been selected. The committee was scheduled to hold its first meeting toward the end of the week of Oct. 16.
The faculty and staff representatives were chosen by their respective constituencies in elections earlier this month.
The staff member elected is Kathleen Deignan, dean of undergraduate students.
The faculty members elected include one from each of the four academic divisions and one non-tenured member. They are: humanities Mark Johnston, professor of philosophy; social sciences Alan Krueger, the Lynn Bendheim Thoman, Class of 1976, and Robert Bendheim, Class of 1937, Professor in Economics and Public Affairs; natural sciences Shirley Tilghman, the Howard A. Prior Professor in the Life Sciences and professor of molecular biology; engineering James Sturm, professor of electrical engineering; and non-tenured Jeffrey Carbeck, assistant professor of chemical engineering.
The faculty and staff members join these previously announced members of the committee: trustees Robert Rawson Jr., who is the committee chair, Brent Henry, Dennis Keller, Spencer Merriweather III, Heidi Miller, Robert Murley, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, John Wynne and Paul Wythes; undergraduate students P.J. Kim and Lisa Lazarus; and graduate student Lauren Hale.
Thomas Wright, secretary of the University, is serving as secretary of the search committee.
The committee is charged with making a recommendation to the full Board of Trustees on a successor to Shapiro, who Sept. 22 announced his decision to complete his presidency and return to the faculty at the end of this academic year.
Earlier this year, about 3,000 people nearly all of them women attended the "Weigh-Down Workshop" in Nashville, drawn by the promise that thinness is godliness. Their guru is Gwen Shamblin, a thin, stylish woman who is part corporate executive, part Southern belle and part evangelist, who preaches, weeps and consoles on stage.
"She teaches that God's grace is poured upon those who are disciplined and thin, strengthening her message of bringing one's eating entirely under God's control," says Marie Griffith, associate director of Princeton's Center for the Study of Religion.
Griffith is researching Shamblin's Weigh-Down Workshop and similar groups in America's growing religious diet movement as part of a project on religion and body obsessions in American culture. Most interesting, Griffith says, is that Shamblin is turning her devotional weight loss program into a much larger religious movement, calling for the creation of churches across the country that would follow the principles of disciplined submission to authority God's and hers.
"The people who attended this meeting love Shamblin so much that they may well join her, bringing about a new revival movement in American evangelicalism," Griffith says.
Shamblin harshly criticizes mainstream Christianity, presenting what Griffith calls "one of the most radical critiques since the Jesus Movement of the 1960s." Griffith, a specialist in contemporary Christianity, has researched Christian diet literature and related practices, such as fasting, through American history. She believes that religion has played an important role in the cultural body fixations of our own time.
|
October 23, 2000 Contents • Neuroscientists
put heads together to develop new theory on
depression • Trussell and colleagues call for better HIV prevention • Alumnus
wins Nobel in economics • Committee
has full complement • Community
Day/Staff Day was Oct. 14
|
