'Genius awards' go to two on faculty
It's a grant you can't apply for. And an honor for which you're nominated by people whose identities you'll never know. And even if you're a scientific researcher who well knows to expect the unexpected, an out-of-the-blue phone call from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has to come as a bit of a shock.
   The news it brings with it? A $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship that comes with no strings attached: You can do anything you want with the money, and, at the end of the five-year-period it covers, you're not expected to write a report on how it was used.
   This year, the foundation made 23 of those phone calls, and, in a rare occurrence, two of them were to recipients at the same institution: Kay Redfield Jamison and Geraldine Seydoux of Johns Hopkins. Jamison is a professor of psychiatry; Seydoux, an associate professor of molecular biology and genetics, both in the School of Medicine. Full story...

Learning from Sept. 11
On March 24, 1965, thousands of people, predominately students, gathered on the University of Michigan campus to hear three faculty lectures criticizing the U.S. government's Vietnam policy. The landmark occurrence, which filled four auditoriums and lasted 12 hours, is said to be the first American teach-in and the catalyst for similar anti-war lecture formats at other universities and communities.
   The teach-in derives its name from the sit-ins of the civil rights era. A sit-in, however, was an organized protest against discrimination, whereas the teach-in's goal, as the name would imply, is to educate--whether it be about the moral concerns of a war, or the implications of and alternatives to a particular foreign policy. Full story...

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