1973

School days, school days... Paper was a constant during our college days and paper is still holding its own at the start of the 21st century, despite the promises of paperless offices and instant links anywhere worldwide. No one knows this better than Jan Seidler Ramirez, the new chief curator and director of collections of the World Trade Center Memorial Museum. As she prepares to tell the story of the September 11 terrorist attacks, paper will play a role that might have been surprising before the hijacked planes smashed into the two towers. While the buildings collapsed into clouds of pulverized concrete and debris, and computers, desks, chairs and file cabinets were crushed, tons of paper blew from the buildings onto the streets of lower Manhattan, collected around utility poles and swirled up against fences, creating a blizzard of memos and letters, travel receipts and other documents. The days and weeks after the buildings fell also are documented by paper, from the notes written when cell-phone service failed to the missing persons posters that proliferated throughout the city to the messages of sympathy sent from around the world. The museum, scheduled to open in 2009, is expected to be a repository of September 11 artifacts, from videos, documentaries and oral histories to crumpled cars and crushed PATH trains and the sheared-off steel remnants of the buildings. It will be the place to start for information about what happened on that day, as hightech as computer links, as low-tech as the scraps of paper. Jan will oversee the collections development, preservation and documentation. She describes her task as "a brutal reductive exercise." It is as much about what must be left out as what she selects from JFK Hanger 17 and elsewhere.

Another educational constant: books. For a while now some of us have been writing tomes of various types as well as reading them. Sex, Politics& Religion at the Office: The New Competitive Advantage by John Boogaert and Doug Noll, published by Auberry Press (www.sprattheoffice.com) explains how sex, politics and religion are potent forces for attaining a sustainable competitive advantage in the workplace. "Treating sexuality, politics and religion as powerful forces in the formulation of a productive workplace in a post-modern culture puts you well ahead of the power curve. As a society we've spent the last 150 years creating a body of law to get rid of harassment, discrimination and inappropriate attitudes in the workplace. Let's dedicate the future to making healthy attitudes towards sex, politics and religion become the competitive advantage that is so desperately needed in the 21st century."

Though 'round the girdled earth we roam: Digger Donahue, a partner and global head of investor services at Brown Brothers Harriman, spoke in late March at the firm's global investment conference in Beijing, China, along with Jack Brennan '76, chairman and CEO of Vanguard, while Ernie Schmider '79, president of PIMCO Funds, was an honored guest. Ever on the lookout for impromptu Dartmouth reunion possibilities.

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