If you haven't popped into Rockefeller since hearing the Aims of Education address as a first-year, here are some ways to make a virtual visit:

In April, Lavi helped guide WIDEawake’s purchase of the infamous rap label Death Row Records and its back catalog, which includes recordings by Tupac Shakur, Dr. Dre, and Snoop Dogg. It’s hard to imagine anyone more different from Death Row’s enormous and terrifying founder, Suge Knight, who, according to legend, once dangled rapper Vanilla Ice off a hotel balcony to get him to sign over rights to the song “Ice Ice Baby.”

Lavi recently spoke to UChiBLOGo's Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93, by phone.

Did you like gangsta rap when it first came out?

No. But I’ve grown to appreciate it, I will say that. Sort of.

No, I’m kidding. I appreciate all well-done forms of music. Am I the kind of person, demographically, that would gravitate towards gangsta rap? Probably not. I don’t think I should fool anybody or myself on that point.

People ask me all the time, what were you thinking? This is music that relates to gang violence, mistrust of the police, and misogyny. I have had to give this tremendous thought.

On a business level, this is an asset that is continually generating significant income. And on a substantive level, I’ve come to realize that a lot of this music in many ways is protest music. You have to peel back the swearing and understand that these guys were trying to find a way to align. They were trying to express the fact that they do not feel part of mainstream society. This was alternative socioeconomic folk music in some degree.

How did your company end up acquiring Death Row?

I was recruited in 2005 to evaluate the viability of a new-breed entertainment company that cross-collateralized its divisions of music, film, production, and technology. About a year ago I got the green light to acquire a significant asset. And quite to my surprise, we publicly bid $18 million for Death Row and not a penny over that, and we were the winners.

Now in retrospect, I can see why people were reticent to acquire this asset. The books and records were in very poor order. But the biggest challenge has been trying to figure out a way to work with the artists, because they’re very hostile toward the brand at this point. They never got paid royalties under Suge Knight. He basically kept all the money, I guess. I still don’t really understand what he did.

Our practice is to pay royalties and have excellent relationships with artists. I could never live with myself if we were doing things that were disreputable. Amazingly, I thought the most difficult relationship was going to be with the Tupac Amaru Shakur estate, and as it turns out, it is our absolute best relationship. [Shakur, one of the best-selling hip-hop artists of all time, died in 1996 at age 25.] That’s 50 percent of our income.

Are there upcoming Tupac projects?

Yes. We’re entitled, as per the court documents, to 13 unreleased Tupac compositions. We’re going to put those out in June 2010. That’s the goal. And Afeni Shakur [Tupac’s mother] is trusting me with the creative control of it. I intend benchmark production value on All Eyez on Me, one of Tupac’s best-selling albums, which I think will make fans happy, because they’re looking for pure Tupac. We’re trying to honor Tupac and what he intended.

Tupac also wrote a screenplay for a film, Live 2 Tell, when he was in prison. I’m looking for ways that we can option that. The script is fabulous.

What was your time at the University of Chicago like?

I loved the academic experience, absolutely loved it. I have very fond memories of my Chicago days. I realize now I was very privileged to take economics classes, which have helped me greatly in my business.

I was getting good grades, fulfilling all the requirements, but for financial reasons I had to drop out. I started working as a waitress at the Kingston Mines Blues Bar. By the time I was done, I was singing with [Chicago blues legend] Jimmy Johnson, who’s 80 now. He used to drive me home to Hyde Park on his way back to Harvey, and sing me blues licks and teach me blues inflection.

How did you end up working for an Indian tribe?

With my science and environmental background, the obvious job if you want to stay pure––not end up on the polluters’ side––is to work for one of the tribes. So I ended up working for the Muckleshoot. I think I was making all of $18,000 a year.

Working for the tribe was a huge influence on me. I would periodically go to powwows, and spend time with elders. I ended up forming a group called the Songcatchers with a very dear friend of mine, Charles Neville, the saxophonist for the Neville Brothers. The group merged rock with full-on Indian powwow singing and drumming. That project toured all over the place, with Peter Gabriel and the Neville Brothers.

What kind of music do you like to listen to?

Anybody that knows me knows that I am a die-hard and absurdly neurotic Bruce Springsteen fan. I have no apologies. Bruce, if you’re out there, and you’re reading the University of Chicago alumni blog, I love you. I will always love you.

Philip Roth, AM'55, sits down with Tina Brown to talk about writing and his latest novel, The Humbling. Watch one of the six segments from their chat:

• "Writing and Rewriting"
• "Writing about Sex"
• "Will the Kindle Save the Novel? Not Really"
• "If You Think Turning 60 Was Fun..."
• "Is Barack Obama a Good Writer?"
• "Looking Back at Portnoy’s Complaint"

Okay, I’ll just come right out and admit it: I may have two degrees from the University of Chicago, but until Homecoming this past Saturday, I had never, ever been to a Maroons football game. But then again, I had never had six-year-old sons, who—in a triumph of nature over nurture—already know more about sports than I do.

“What’s the U of C, Division Six?” a friend of mine, a DePaul alumnus and former sports reporter, had asked when I told him about our weekend plans.

“Divison Three,” I corrected him snippily. “And founding members of the Big Ten.”

“Which actually has eleven teams,” he said. “And oddly, Chicago is still not one of them.”

Well, I didn’t know that either. I know what a touchdown is and what a first down is, and that’s about it. In fact, my ignorance of football was so deep and abiding that although I have lived in Hyde Park off and on since 1988, I could not even find the stadium entrance.

“Where are we going, Mommy?” one of the six-year-olds wanted to know.

“Why is this taking so long?” asked the other one.

“How are we supposed to get in?”

“Where’s the gate?”

“How did all those people get in?”

“Do we have to climb the fence?”

“We’re missing it! We’re missing it!”

“We’re never going to get in!”

For the record, fellow English majors, the entrance to the stadium is not on 55th Street. It is on 56th.

As usual, we were late in the first place, so by the time we arrived, it was the start of the second quarter. We walked along the bottom of the stands, looking for somewhere to sit, and—to my amazement—the stands were almost entirely full. True, they would hold perhaps 300 people, about as much seating as was provided for my high school's junior-varsity team, but still.

With just under 15 minutes to go in the first half, the Maroons were up 14-0. “The Maroons are good!” said six-year-old A. Later, apropos of nothing, he amended his opinion to “Whoever they’re playing must be really bad.” I explained that the opposing team was Denison (since I know as much about liberal-arts colleges as about Division III sports, I had to Google it to discover it was in Granville, Ohio). Six-year-old A, perhaps dreaming of Chicago’s storied Big Ten past, kept referring to them as Minnesota.

We ended up sitting crisscross applesauce at the bottom of the stands, just inside the fence. We could hardly see past the football players standing on the sidelines, so I watched the cheerleaders instead, which is what I mostly did at high-school football games anyway. I was hoping for some of the infamous University of Chicago cheers, which I had read about but never heard, such as:

Themistocles, Thucydides,
The Peloponnesian War,
X squared, Y squared,
H2SO4.
Who for? What for?
Who we gonna yell for?
Go, Maroons!

Or perhaps:

Gimme the speed of light.....C
Gimme Planck's constant.....H
Gimme root negative one.....I
Gimme carbon.....C
Gimme the Bohr radius.....A
Gimme the gravitational constant.....G
Gimme the additive identity of a non-trivial group.....O
What's that spell?.....Chicago!

Sadly, no. The cheerleaders did some cool lifts and round-offs, but the cheers were nothing more original than “Maroon and white, all right all right, let me see you win tonight” and “First and ten, do it again, go fight win.”

By halftime the score was 17-0, despite a dramatic interception by Denison that gained 54 yards but no touchdown, and the six-year-olds were ready to leave. I managed, by offering a bribe of popcorn, to persuade them to stay for the halftime show, when 13 members of the original 1969 varsity football squad—the first varsity team since Robert Maynard Hutchins famously abolished football in 1939—were recognized.

The final score, as I discovered later by checking the athletics department’s Web site, was 38-7. I cut and pasted the headline “Maroons Celebrate Homecoming with a 38-7 Victory!” into the subject line of an e-mail to my sarcastic DePaul friend. “Over Denison,” I wrote, thinking that, as a Chicago native, he would have to be more up on Midwest colleges.

But to no avail. “Congratulations on a resounding victory over a college that you clearly just made up,” he wrote back, “to hide the fact that U of C doesn’t actually have a football team.”

Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93

PBS Nightly Business Report's Susie Gharib interviews Chicago Booth professor Richard Thaler about behavioral finance and its practical implications.

Public television journalist Ray Suarez, AM'92, talks about immigration as it relates to business, politics, culture and demographic changes in our schools.

What is it about Philip Glass’s music that gives everything a hypnotic, monumental quality? With Glass, AB'56, on my iPod, even the morning commute feels epic. The rattle of the ‘L’ merges with the relentless, repetitive bass line; wires against the gray sky become a metaphor for human futility. Every person on the Red Line seems to brim with existential angst—especially me, with the soundtrack from The Hours blaring in my ears.

If you like Philip Glass, his music makes you want to throw yourself off a cliff—but in a good way. If you hate him, you want to throw him off the cliff. As a member of the former group, I was thrilled to nab a ticket to his sold-out performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art last week. And I had questions. What would he play during an evening of solo piano? Would he get jiggy with the artwork, like the Glass Ensemble used to do in the 1970s? Would the Chicago math and philosophy grad give a shout-out to his alma mater and former hometown?

Answers—like Glass’s thundering left hand—came fast and furious. Although last month he premiered an opera and released a new recording of his “Toltec” Symphony No. 7, the composer mined older material (the 1989 Metamorphoses and 1994–99 Etudes) for his one-hour MCA gig. Casually dressed in black pants and a gray button-down shirt, his demeanor was courteous and contained. He played with concentration but made no overt connection to the 300 people gathered in the small theater.

Which leads to another question: why, at 72, does Glass even bother to play live? Certainly not to showcase his virtuosity; introducing the second set, he joked, “I’ve composed 16 etudes, and I’ve learned ten of them.” Glass’s newer operas, film scores, symphonies, and chamber music are lush and lyrical, shattering early categorizations of his work as minimalist. The piano compositions, in contrast, seem spare and workmanlike.

Glass hinted at an explanation in a recent interview, arguing (like John Cage) that one of the principles of modernism is that “the audience completes the work of art, that a work of art has no independent existence; it’s a transaction.” For the performer, the encounter is necessary. And for the listener, there is something riveting about hearing a composer play his own work, regardless of the technique. When Glass trundles through Etude No. 2, we feel excitement and a sense of privilege, as when a master architect unrolls an old blueprint and guides us through the drawings, many years after the house is built.

Elizabeth Station

Photo courtesy Giorgio Constantine.

Listen to "Allegro inquieto" from music professor Easley Blackwood's Symphony no. 5, op. 34, as performed in 1992 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and conducted by James DePreist.

Neurology professor Steven Small kicked off the festival with fair warning that he aimed “not to make you laugh, but to inform you about how laughter is mediated in the human brain.” He explained that laughter, “an exquisitely human phenomenon,” was also an anatomical reflex. Down the street in Fulton Recital Hall, philosopher Jonathan Lear dissected irony with the help of funny folks like Kierkegaard and Socrates. His goal was to explain irony’s basic structure and isolate what happens to us psychologically in the “ironic moment.”

Were there chuckles and appreciative nods? Sure. But no one really laughed out loud until the noontime session, “Deconstructing the Latke-Hamantash Debate,” in Mandel Hall. Following a brief history of the annual tradition, philosophy professor Ted Cohen emceed a mock version of the debate for the CHF audience. In full academic regalia, two presenters made their pitch. Opera expert Philip Gossett theorized about Verdi’s love of fruit pastries and showed how key passages in a newly analyzed manuscript of Rigoletto revealed the composer’s long passion for hamantaschen. Biologist James Shapiro (who showed his sense of humor with a 2007 journal article entitled “Bacteria are Small But Not Stupid” (pdf)) did a genomic analysis that proved the latke’s inferiority. The hamantash’s morphology, cortical development, and tasty “poppy-seed endoplasm” proved its intelligent design, Shapiro argued. Belly laughs followed.

Later in the day, audiences heard scholarly presentations on Molière’s comedic mission and the role of laughter in opera. The Chicago Humanities Festival—and the fun—will continue November 2–15 around the city.

Elizabeth Station

Economics professor Steven D. Levitt talks about controversial findings in his new book SuperFreakonomics, the followup to Freakonomics.

That hope is, admittedly, slim. The University owns the parcel on which the community garden’s 143 ten-by-ten-foot plots sit, and ten years ago when the place was vacant administrators invited a few community members to establish a garden. The agreement was always temporary, though, and the University has decided it needs the land back. Next spring, when construction begins next door on a new home for the Chicago Theological Seminary, the garden will be converted into a staging area for the project. On October 30 the garden will officially close, and two weeks after that the gardeners must move all their belongings off the lot.

The outcry from gardeners has been intense, and organizers Jack Spicer and Jamie Kalven, U-High'65, spent months trying to persuade the University to rethink its plans, to find an “elegant solution,” as Kalven calls it, that would spare the garden while allowing the construction to go forward. University officials offered to help the gardeners find a new location and move their topsoil, but they remained firm on their plans: no alternatives exist to closing the garden. Surrounded by three schools within a two-block radius and hemmed in by the University Press building, a University steam plant, and a busy Dorchester Avenue, the construction site offers few options, says Sonya Malunda, the University’s associate vice president for civic engagement. “We have a responsibility to make sure everyone is safe,” Malunda says, “whether they’re on site or nearby.”

Negotiations with the University are no longer active, Kalven says, though he, Spicer, and other gardeners still hope the place will be saved. In the meantime, Kalven, a journalist, last week began posting an online “live documentary” on the garden, featuring “The Garden Conversations,” two- to five-minute interviews with gardeners standing amid the verdant lushness of sunflowers, pole beans, tomato plants, corn stalks, peppers, and marigolds.

In the videos Debra Hammond, AM'90, MBA’95, describes how the garden helped temper her once-corporate existence: “It’s really changed me,” she says. “It teaches you about food, and it teaches you about yourself.” Marvin Hoffman and Rosellen Brown describe summers full of “garden meals” supplemented by the 61st Street farmer’s market, which along with Experimental Station next door to the east, forms a kind of "synergy," Hoffman says, with the garden. Leaning on a rake, retired Army veteran and first-time gardener Mike Slatton describes the bounty he shared with his Woodlawn neighbors: red cabbage, golden potatoes, sweet corn, watermelons, string beans, collards, kale, five varieties of tomatoes, and more. “I got three celery plants—big celery,” Slatton says. “I fed people celery all summer long.”

According to Kalven, one purpose of "The Garden Conversations" is to show how "the garden speaks in multiple voices" and articulate its meaning and value, not only to the gardeners, but to its neighbors, including the University. The videos are part of an ongoing effort, he says, “to describe and evoke what is unrelocatable about the garden, and what we’ve been nourished by all these years.”

Praising the work the gardeners have done, Malunda says she's sympathetic to their sorrow. But she hopes that in the end they'll take their trowels and trellises to another site. Gardeners say they can't "just pick this up and replicate it somewhere else,” Malunda says. “And I get that. But you also have vacant lots in the neighborhood that need community-building. What about them?”

Lydialyle Gibson

Music by Philip Glass, AB'56, accompanies "Geometry of Circles," an animation created thirty years ago for Sesame Street.

The stark reality of so much suffering sounded as if it demanded not only action, but also an action hero. Enter GHI director Olufunmilayo Olopade. Or, as Singer called her, “the Arnold Schwarzenegger of global health.”

As Chicago’s associate dean of global health, Olopade has no special effects at her disposal—and the initiative’s agenda makes California’s budget issues seem trivial by comparison—but she and her colleagues do not lack for ambition. “We want to be working on the biggest problems of our time,” said Donald Levy, vice president for research and national laboratories.

Under the sprawling umbrella of “global health,” the problems are so big that the term itself remains open to interpretation. “There is no widely agreed-to definition,” said Singer, director of the University of Toronto’s McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health and a former fellow at Chicago’s Center for Clinical Medical Ethics.

His September 30 lecture at the Knapp Center was a call to action on “the mother of all ethical challenges.” The nature of that challenge struck him when he worked on end-of-life care. It might take “$100 to save a baby’s life from cholera in Bangladesh,” he said, “but we spend $100,000-plus to extend life a couple weeks in Toronto.”

To Singer, such a disparity reflects the mission at the heart of global health—fostering a sense of shared humanity across continents. “The more important value even than equity is the issue of solidarity,” Singer said. “Until we feel a sense of moral linkage between my daughter in Canada and a farmer’s daughter in Uganda, these inequities won’t matter.”

That is, they will not spark the sense of urgency necessary to match the depth of the need. Toward that end, the GHI’s 15-member interdisciplinary steering committee is charged with developing solutions from more than just a medical perspective. The committee includes Susan Gzesh, AB’72, director of the Human Rights Program; anthropologist Kathleen D. Morrison; and Dali L. Yang, a political scientist who directs the Center for East Asian Studies.

Global health is not a discipline unto itself, Singer insisted, but a combination of many. “It’s about leveraging existing strengths and knowledge to help a much larger group of people. I want you to imagine unleashing that power of discovery against the problems in the developing world.”

Environmentalist and recent "alternative Nobel" recipient David Suzuki, AM'93, shares his energy-saving tips.

Curious about the convocation tradition, I visited Andrew Hannah, the registrar. Hannah showed me a breakdown of all University graduates going back to spring 1893, the first time degrees were given out. Suddenly the University of Chicago didn’t seem like such an exclusive club: how exclusive can it be when 232,127 memberships have been extended? (More creative accounting: the 1893 ceremony was actually the third convocation. At the first two, in 1891 and 1892, there were speakers but no graduates. If you don’t count those events, though, we’re only at 498.)

Convocations at the fledgling University were tiny, as you would imagine. At the 1893 ceremony 34 degrees were awarded: one doctorate (awarded first, to make the point that this was a graduate institution, not just another garden-variety Baptist college), four masters degrees, 14 divinity, and 15 baccalaureate.

Of course, the numbers picked up quickly. By 1896–97 there were 205 grads, and the figure roughly doubled every ten years: 538 grads in 1906–07, 944 in 1916–17, and 1,697 in 1926–27. It stayed in the upper thousands—with the exception of a dip during World War II—until 1946–47, when returning GIs swelled the ranks to 2,269.

The hard figures clearly show the “small College” years: in spring 1965 the University awarded more master’s degrees than bachelor’s degrees, not even counting all the MBAs. The trend lasted until spring 1979, when ABs narrowly pulled ahead, beating the AMs 397–394. For the past 20 years, the AB number has been on the increase, cracking into the thousands for the first time in spring 2007. Last spring the University unleashed 1,097 freshly minted bachelor’s degrees upon the world.

Which brings me to another question: Why does UChicago make such a point of calling its degrees AB and AM? Yes, yes, I know, it’s Latin, Artium baccalaureus, got it. But if I think back to my creaky high-school Latin (Hi, Mrs. Zachry!), it is not a language—unlike German, for example—that puts much emphasis on word order. Why does the adjective have to follow the noun?

So I called over to the classics department to ask if anyone would humor me by answering a very basic Latin question. They not only humored me, they put me on speakerphone. “In basic prose composition, the convention is that the adjective follows the noun it modifies,” explained lecturer Jessica Seidman, AM’08. “In a longer work, you would have more variation in word order. But in a two-word type of situation, you would usually go with the canonical form.”

“College degrees came much later than classical times, but there was a long Latin tradition that lasted up until a century ago, and the AB word order would be part of that tradition,” added lecturer Alex Lee. “Having said that”—CAUTION: heresy alert—“grammatically speaking, it is not a violation to write BA.”

“Alas,” says University archivist Daniel Meyer, AM’75, PhD’94, today the language on the degrees is English. Originally the entire degree was written in Latin, including the graduate and faculty names. For example, on the doctoral certificate for Edith Abbott, PhD 1905, cofounder of the School of Social Service Administration, she is addressed in accusative case (Editham), and the signatures of University officials also appear in Latinate form: Guilielmus Raineius Harper, Martinus Antonius Ryerson, Henricus Pratt Judson. Another bygone characteristic: the degrees were printed on parchment.

At some point the language was changed to the vernacular and the medium to paper, but neither Meyer nor Hannah seems to know when. I considered e-mailing John Boyer, AM’69, PhD’75, dean of the College, who has written 14 monographs on University history, but didn’t. Early in the academic year, surely he must be attending to more pressing matters.

So I’m left with as many questions as I had when I started, but different ones. For example: Why does Columbia University’s undergraduate college continue to print its diplomas in Latin (“The only thing I could read was my name,” says my cubicle neighbor and Columbia alumna, Katherine Muhlenkamp) yet call the degree a BA? Why does no one at UChicago seem to know or care why the degrees are no longer in Latin, but when Harvard changed to English in 1961, 4,000 furious Harvard students took to the streets in the Diploma Riots?

Finally, why are some degrees still in Latin at all? While searching for institutions that award Latin degrees, I come across this Internet plea: “Please translate this Latin diploma from Howard University! The secretary’s office at Howard University is...less than helpful. They print their diplomas in Latin and won’t give you a translation unless the graduate fills out a form. My boss and I don’t need an authorized, sealed translated diploma; we just need something in English so Immigration doesn’t get mad, and we need it ASAP.”

Is there really some additional cachet to the fact that degree recipients—classics graduates excepted—can’t read their own diplomas? Surely it makes one feel less educated, not more. After all, tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. If you don’t know what it means, look it up on Wikipedia.

Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93