Johns Hopkins Magazine -- November 1998
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NOVEMBER 1998
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a record-breaking gift... Mourning at Public Health... the value of very old trash... Tutorial Project celebrates 40 years



Bloomberg boosts gift to $100 million

As an undergraduate at Hopkins in the early 1960s, Michael R. Bloomberg '64 parked cars at the faculty club and took out loans to help cover the cost of his annual $1,000-plus tuition. Now the news entrepreneur has taken a giant step toward ensuring that future generations of students will be able to afford a Hopkins education: on October 10, Bloomberg announced that he has upped his contribution to the Johns Hopkins Initiative by $45 million, completing his record gift to the university at $100 million. Two-thirds of his new gift--some $30 million--will go primarily toward providing financial aid for undergraduates in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and the Whiting School of Engineering. The money will be used primarily for grants, rather than loans, according to Hopkins officials. The gift comes at a critical time: Over the past decade, the average indebtedness of graduating seniors at Hopkins and elsewhere has doubled.

"There are lots of young men and women we would love to have as students--the Nobel Prize winners, the Pulitzer Prize winners, the Lasker Award winners of the future," said Bloomberg. "It would be a sin if society is deprived of the fruits of their work down the road because those of us today, who could have helped, didn't." The new gift brings especially good news for the School of Public Health, which will receive $15 million, including $5 million of the financial aid funding.

The chairman of Hopkins's board of trustees made his initial commitment to the university's Initiative in October 1995, with a $55 million gift that was divided among the university's divisions. His completed gift, which takes the Hopkins Initiative past $1 billion, to $1.04 billion, is also twice the size of the second largest gift in Hopkins history: $50 million from the Zanvyl and Isabelle Krieger Fund.

Nationally, Bloomberg's $100 million ties for ninth place among the largest private gifts to U.S. higher education since 1967, according to a list compiled by the Chronicle of Higher Education. It ranks fifth on that list among gifts from living individual contributors.



A passion for public health: Clements-Mann and Mann
A painful loss

Public Health faculty members Mary Lou Clements-Mann, who devoted her life to preventing infectious diseases, and her husband, Jonathan Mann, a champion of human rights and health for the world's disenfranchised, were among the passengers killed when a Swissair jetliner crashed off the coast of Nova Scotia on September 2.

Colleagues remembered Clements-Mann as an indefatigable vaccine researcher who often showed up at work before sunrise. She was exacting about her data but tended to neglect small details such as where she had left her car keys. "She was the classic absent-minded professor," says Ruth Karron, an associate professor of international health whom Clements-Mann hired. "But about her work she was an absolute stickler for detail and getting things right."

Clements-Mann, 51, cut her teeth in the vaccine world in 1975 when, fresh out of residency training, she was enlisted to head the World Health Organization's smallpox eradication campaign for the State of Uttar Pradesh, India, whose population was nearly as large as the United States'. Under her direction, Uttar Pradesh became smallpox-free.

At Hopkins, Clements-Mann established and directed the Center for Immunization Research, where she spearheaded efforts to develop and test vaccines against numerous bacteria and viruses, including HIV. In recent years, she advocated a more aggressive approach to testing AIDS vaccines. She urged colleagues not to wait for the perfect AIDS vaccine but to begin testing candidates that held some promise. She was a professor of international health and held joint appointments in medicine and molecular microbiology and immunology. She and Mann were married almost two years ago.

Jonathan Mann, 51, founded the World Health Organization's Global AIDS Program. He believed that the right to a healthy life was dependent upon a guarantee of human rights, and spent much of his career advocating for both. Last year Mann became a visiting professor of health policy and management at the -- MH



The site of the new Student Arts Center (above) may yield historical artifacts.
When littering was not a "grievous sin"

Hopkins officials broke ground for the university's new Student Arts Center in October, but before major work begins on the complex in February, some experts would like to look around the excavation site for trash. Very old trash.

The center will be built on the wooded knoll through which a long driveway once wound--a driveway that connected Charles Street to Homewood House, the 19th-century home of the Charles Carroll family. Today, that wooded area is bordered on the west by Whitehead Hall and on the north by the Merrick Barn (home of Theatre Hopkins).

Why would an 1850s driveway have historic import? "Littering was not the grievous sin that it is today," explains Lili Ott, Hopkins director of historic houses. "People were always pitching stuff out the windows of their carriage"--stuff like glassware, buttons, and food scraps. "It's always amazing the little interpretive things we can do in the Homewood House from what might be seemingly insignificant archaeological finds elsewhere on the property."

The university plans to start with a test dig--a series of small pits no more than 18 inches deep, that will tell urban archaeologist Esther Doyle Read, director of the Baltimore Center for Urban Archaeology, if there are any interesting artifacts that should be dug out before construction begins.

There's even the chance that Read may uncover evidence of slaves' quarters, Ott says. The earliest map she has of the property is from 1876. It shows Homewood House, the road going around it, and the Merrick Barn. The map doesn't show any outbuildings by the area where the arts center will go. "But people had to pay to put their houses on this map, so the map is skewed very much in favor of well-heeled white people. The fact that there aren't any buildings on the map doesn't mean there weren't structures there," she says.

At the time restoration of the Homewood House began, in the 1980s, much of the historical focus was on the Carroll family, Ott notes. "What's happened in the historic house museum field in the last 15 years is that people are much more interested now in servants and slave life," she says. "So we're particularly interested in finding more information about slaves. We know there were slaves at Homewood. Some of the remains of slave cabins undoubtedly are still around. We are trying all the time to present a more balanced picture of life on that spot from 1800 to 1815." --DK



Photo by Jay Van Rennselaer
Tutorial Project celebrates 40 years

Take a stroll around Homewood's Lower Quad on a pleasant autumn afternoon, and you'll see pair after pair of students intent on the hard work of learning.

The Hopkins Tutorial Project, considered one of the country's oldest such programs, matches Baltimore City elementary school children who need remedial help with Hopkins undergraduate tutors. Each Monday and Wednesday afternoon, 50 Hopkins volunteers work one-on-one with youngsters from East Baltimore; on Tuesday and Thursday, 50 different tutors work with students from the southwestern side of the city. Together the pairs go over phonics, spelling, long division--or whatever other reading or math skills the child needs help mastering.

"Many [Hopkins] students tell me this is the best part of their day," says project director Weslie Wornom, who is assistant director for the Office of Community Relations and Volunteer Services. "They find it to be a great stress reliever--to focus on something other than themselves and their own grades." Their young pupils benefit not only from the individualized instruction, she's found, but also from the broadening experience of spending time on a college campus.

The program, which will celebrate its 40th anniversary on November 19, got its start during the Civil Rights movement under the direction of Hopkins chaplain, Chester Wickwire (see Editor's Note). For information on the anniversary events or to receive a copy of the project's anniversary newsletter, past Hopkins tutors may contact Wornom at (410) 516-7673 or via e-mail: [email protected]. --SD

Written by Sue De Pasquale, Melissa Hendricks, and Dale Keiger.


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