Fall semester round-up

The semester ended last Friday and, with students tucked quietly into study nooks, I’m going to take some time today (and maybe on a couple of future days) to tie up loose blog ends.  Specifically, I have a zillion notes to myself to feature this event, or that bit of news, or something else that could be of interest, but that’s where things stopped — as notes, but not as blog posts.  There are so many ways to gather information about Fletcher, and I don’t assume that anyone relies solely on the blog, but some information is important enough to share, even if I know you may have read it elsewhere.  With that out of the way…

There’s this Tufts Now article about Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., F92, and his new role as Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.

And there’s this November interview that Professor Antonia Chayes gave to the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law about her new book Borderless Wars: Civil-Military Disorder and Legal Uncertainty.  The current Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, Alexander Ely, is a Fletcher MALD graduate from the Class of 2013, and a former editor of The Fletcher Forum.

Another Tufts Now article highlighted research conducted by second-year MALD student (and U.S. Marine Lieutenant) Matthew Cancian and Professor Michael Klein about quality and preparedness of Marine officers.  A special melding of a security studies topic and economic analysis.

And yet another article quotes Matan Chorev, F07, about the impact that a member of the Tufts University faculty had on his career.  (Scroll down about midway through the article.)  I recall Matan as a young (direct from undergraduate) Fletcher student, but an especially well-prepared one.

Until this fall’s talk by Gerry Ford, F84, the founder and chairman of Caffè Nero, I knew he was a graduate of Tufts University, but I didn’t know he was a Fletcher graduate.  Now I do!  A new Caffè Nero was opened in downtown Boston this year.

Last (for today) a bit of history.  In 1990, Tufts President Jean Mayer convened a group of university presidents from around the world to sign the Talloires Declaration, a plan for incorporating sustainability into higher education.  The University’s celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Talloires Declaration (named for the Tufts European campus where the meeting occurred) included events related to climate change organized by many Tufts student groups, departments, and offices.  The events were detailed on this web page.