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Nina Gelbart
Professor of History and Anita Johnson Wand Professor of Women’s Studies
Years at Occidental: 48

How did you wind up at Occidental?My husband [William Gelbart] and I were living in Berkeley at the time, where he was teaching, and he was basically poached by UCLA. He came in as a full professor at some absurdly young age. I had finished my Ph.D. just a couple years before, and I had just had our first child, so I thought an adjunct position of some kind would be perfect.

Arthur F. Saint-Aubin
Professor of Spanish and French studies
Years at Occidental: 44

What’s been your favorite class to teach and why? I teach three different categories of courses, and I have a favorite in each: first-year courses that target principally language acquisition; second-year courses that further develop students’ language skills with an increasing emphasis on exploring the diversity of Francophone cultures; and advanced seminars in literature and culture—courses aimed principally at majors, minors, and native speakers.

Sunshine and show business have always fueled the Los Angeles mystique. But the city’s earliest impressions gushed from an altogether different source, one whose hazardous legacy is felt more than a century later in some of the region’s more vulnerable neighborhoods.

Mekong Medicine: A U.S. Doctor’s Year Treating Vietnam’s Forgotten Victims, by Richard W. Carlson ’60 (McFarland). In 1966, along with nearly half of his 1964 med school classmates, Richard Carlson was drafted into the U.S. Army Medical Corps. He applied to Vietnam’s Military Provincial Hospital Assistance Program—and as Carlson led a team in Bac Liêu province in the Mekong Delta from 1966 to 1967, he “religiously” chronicled his daily activities as well as life around him.

Eight Occidental sophomores and juniors, including four first-generation college students, have been selected as Occidental’s 2023-24 cohort of Barack Obama Scholars. The prestigious leadership training program seeks to empower exceptional students committed to the public good.

On March 4, Occidental’s 1-megawatt solar array turned 10 years old. Since “first light” on March 4, 2013, the array has produced 17.85 gigawatts of electrical energy—12 percent of the College’s usage over the same time period.

Occidental aims to be the country’s principal destination for a distinctive urban liberal arts experience by 2030, according to the College’s new integrated strategic plan unanimously endorsed by the Board of Trustees at its April 21 meeting.

In an article this spring, the influential Chronicle of Higher Education addressed the phenomenon of college students’ post-pandemic alienation and anxiety, as manifested in their disconnection from conventional curricula and pedagogical approaches.

Jack Griffith ’64 has always been attracted to new frontiers. He grew up on the rim of the Arctic Circle when Alaska was still a territory and started flying bush planes as a teenager. Even now, he still tries to scrape his plane’s wings on the mountainsides when he flies through narrow Alaskan valleys—a dangerous feat in less experienced hands.