ROBERTO C. GOIZUETA 1931-1997
The Coca-Cola chairman's destiny was intertwined with Emory's
Roberto C. Goizueta, chairman and chief executive officer of The Coca-Cola Company and namesake of the Goizueta Business School, died on October 18 from lung cancer at the age of sixty-five. At the time of his death, the Cuban native, whose success at the helm of one of the world's most widely recognized companies fueled a parallel period of growth at Emory, was lauded as a visionary corporate leader and a valued friend of the University.
"Roberto Goizueta embodied a style of leadership that grew out of a blend of deep culture and great discipline," President William M. Chace said. "It was a valuable trait to exhibit among university students, and he did it with zest and grace."
Goizueta's death came just three weeks after the September dedication of the $25-million building that bears his name and houses the University's burgeoning business education programs. More than eleven hundred Emory alumni, trustees, faculty, students, staff, and friends gathered in the building's Howard M. Jenkins Courtyard to dedicate the 120,000-square-foot facility and pay tribute to Goizueta. His son Roberto S. Goizueta spoke on behalf of his family and especially his father, who was unable to attend the ceremony due to his illness.
"I hope we are seeing the dawn of a new day for business education in general," said the younger Goizueta, a theology professor at Loyola University, reading his father's words. "Business schools today cannot just reflect business the way it is. They must teach business the way it will be.
A little more than two years earlier, on the occasion of the building's groundbreaking in 1995, the elder Goizueta expressed his hope that the project would make tangible the dreams he and others shared for the Goizueta Business School.
"We are here today to take one more important step in achieving the great aspirations we have for this institution," he told the four hundred guests. "As we take this step of breaking ground in the physical world of soil and bricks and steel and concrete, we know we must continue to break ground in three other worlds as well," he said. "First, we must continue to break ground in the world of people. Second, we must continue to break ground in the world of ideas. And, third, we must continue to break ground in the world of dreams."
Of the University's 1994 decision to name not only the structure but also the business school in his honor, Goizueta was characteristically modest. "Although I am honored by the association I have with the business school, I don't really see it as a one-time, individual connection between us," he said. "To me, it is yet another step in the long and progressive relationship between The Coca-Cola Company and Emory University."
That relationship has been a profoundly important one for the University. During Goizueta's sixteen-year
tenure as CEO, The Coca-Cola Company's market value rose from $4 billion in 1981 to nearly $150 billion today, and the University's endowment, some 60 percent of which is invested in Coca-Cola stock, showed similar dramatic gains.
Goizueta's stewardship of this symbiotic relationship between commerce and the common good prompted President Chace to comment, "[His] uncanny double vision-keeping an eye on the bottom line but also on the far horizon-made it possible for his company to reap spectacular returns but also, as important, to be socially responsible around the world. That is a lesson that should be taught to every generation. Emory is fortunate to have linked its story to one such as this."
Roberto Crispulo Goizueta's story began in Havana, Cuba, on November 18, 1931, when he was born the only son of an architect and a sugar heiress. After attending the Cheshire Academy, a private school in New Haven, Connecticut, he entered Yale University in 1948, graduating with a degree in chemical engineering in 1953. The next year, he turned away from the opportunity to join his family's architectural and construction business and instead joined The Coca-Cola Company after responding to a blind advertisement for a bilingual chemical engineer.
In August 1960, a year and a half after Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba, Goizueta, his wife, Olguita, and their three children left for what he said would be a two-week vacation in Miami, taking with him only $40 and one hundred shares of Coca-Cola stock. They never returned. He recalled the experience in his 1982 Commencement address to Emory graduates.
"Material things--your property--can be lost, stolen, or even forcibly confiscated. This happened to me and many of my countrymen some twenty years ago in Cuba," he said. "I hope you never experience anything like that, but it has left a lasting impression with me. No one can take away from you what you have stored inside."
In the United States, Goizueta rose quickly through the ranks at Coca-Cola, eventually becoming executive vice president with control of the laboratory, legal department, and general administration.
In November 1979, he was selected one of six vice chairmen of the company, a move which ultimately placed him on a path to succeed chairman and chief executive J. Paul Austin. He was named president of the company on May 30, 1980, and upon Austin's retirement nine months later assumed the posts of chairman and chief executive.
In addition to his wife, Goizueta is survived by sons Roberto, the former director of Emory's Aquinas Center, and Javier; daughter Olga Maria '77C-'80L; and eight grandchildren.--A.B.
INVITING THE WORLD TO EMORY
Steven E. Sanderson is the new vice president for Arts and Sciences and dean of Emory College
Steven E. Sanderson arrived at the University of Florida in 1979 as an assistant professor of political science. Tenured four years later, he became chair of the department in 1994. Sanderson was quite content in Gainesville and had no particular desire to leave. It took what he saw as a unique offer from a special place to get him to pull up the roots that had grown deep into the sandy Florida soil and head north to Atlanta.
"I was really very happy at the University of Florida, and I had a big investment in my programs and in my discipline there," says Sanderson, who became vice president for Arts and Sciences and dean of Emory College in July. "But when I had the opportunity to choose a new life, it was clear to me that when you stepped on the Emory campus something was happening, and it was very inviting. It was almost mesmerizing. It was not a difficult choice in the end because I really feel that Emory is in a position, as the president has said more than once, of being able to choose what it wants to be over the next couple of decades. And there are very few places in the country that can say that.
"I think this place, the administrative leadership, and the faculty are brimming with great ideas. And combined with that, Emory is well positioned. Atlanta is a city on the move, the Southeast is a really attractive region, Emory students are really high quality, and the financial condition of the University is good."
Sanderson earned a bachelor's degree in history from the University of Central Arkansas in 1971 and a master's degree in political science from the University of Arkansas in 1973. He then attended Stanford University, earning a master's degree in 1975 and a doctoral degree in 1978, both in political science. Much of his scholarship has been focused on conservation issues and the sociopolitics of Latin America, and he is the author of three books, including The Politics of Trade in Latin American Development. Even with all of his high-level scholarship, Sanderson admits to being happiest in the undergraduate classroom.
"I've always felt like I was an enthusiastic undergraduate teacher, and that's where my heart has always been," he says. "I like graduate education, and I think it's important and I've been active in it, but the kind of teaching experience I really enjoyed was an undergraduate seminar or a lecture course on Latin America or something like that."
That attitude undoubtedly helped Sanderson garner one of the ten annual University Teacher of the Year awards the University of Florida gave out in 1990. That honor is also indicative of the high regard Sanderson's colleagues had for him in Florida.
"In the twenty or so years that I have been immersed in academic and foundation environments, both in the U.S. and abroad, I can truthfully say that I have never encountered an individual who possessed a more effective combination of scholarly excellence, programmatic imagination, and administrative skills than does Steve Sanderson," Charles H. Wood, director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida, told Emory Magazine.
"Steve Sanderson was one of my most valued and highly rated department chairs," comments Willard W. Harrison, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida. "He was an outstanding administrator as chair of political science, one that I dearly hated to see leave the University of Florida. Steve is bright, articulate, and dedicated."
Sanderson was one of some one hundred candidates for his new position. Thomas G. Walker, the chair of Emory's political science department, chaired the committee that helped choose him. "Initially the members of the search committee were drawn to Steve Sanderson's candidacy because he was an accomplished scholar with an excellent record of building programs at theUniversity of Florida," says Walker. "After his interview we became increasingly convinced that he had the necessary skills, values, and creativity to become an outstanding dean. Sanderson's commitment to interdisciplinary study, environmental concerns, and internationalism constituted a wonderful fit with Emory's announced agenda for the future."
University President William M. Chace also gives high marks to Sanderson. "Steve Sanderson brings to Emory an abundance of enthusiasm, a remarkable record throughout his career for picking the right kind of projects and getting them done, a high level of interest in international matters, and a love of the virtues of the academic life. I believe he will wear well at Emory, and I look forward to working with him in forwarding the interests of Emory College."
One aspect of Sanderson's career that stood out for many at Emory was his international experience. A fluent speaker of Spanish and Portuguese, Sanderson spent two years in Brazil in the mid-1980s with the Ford Foundation working on issues of rural poverty and resource management. Emory's recent measures on curriculum reform in the College stress foreign language skills and the study of international history and culture, and Sanderson hopes he can use his expertise to enhance those programs. He not only hopes to build on Emory's already strong study-abroad programs, but he also foresees bringing more cultural diversity to the University itself.
"I think what we will do in the next couple of years that will be unique is that we will invite the world to come here," says Sanderson. To accomplish that goal, he points to a new fund recently created between Emory College and the central administration that will finance bringing leading scholars, educational administrators, and policy activists from around the world to Emory. Sanderson says these people will come here "not only to speak to us about their work in a traditional way but to help us as informal advisers to find our special signature and to locate the real opportunities and problems that maybe the world hasn't figured out yet. It will be an ongoing colloquy, discussion, and debate and a kind of festival of ideas that's going to start right away."
Although he has been at Emory only a short time, Sanderson has identified some long-term goals for himself. One is to strengthen the intellectual and social community at the University, and another is to forge a more solid identity and signature for Emory.
"For us to get to the point where people really turn around and say, Oh, you went to Emory, more than they do now--and it's already a fine degree--we have to find a special signature that identifies us, where at the end you can say, I went to Emory, and we're known for these things. So I want to figure out how we can improve on that."--J.D.T.
ERIC POSES A QUESTION
Alumnus' board game is a hit
For many, graduation from college is the time to stop playing games. For Eric Poses, it was the time to start.
After earning his bachelor's degree in history from Emory in 1995, Poses interned at The Carter Center and then returned home to Miami to work for an advertising agency. While employed there, he came up with the germ of an idea for a game.
"I thought of a question, 'If you were president of the United States, what would be the first measure you'd enact while in office?'," he says. "I thought it was a fun question to ask people and a fun question to answer,but I wasn't really sure how you would just pop that question out in a discussion."
Poses ended up quitting his job at the ad agency, and he spent the next three months writing down every interesting question he could think of: What is your favorite soft drink? If you were invisible, where would you go? What is the worst movie you have ever seen? Slowly he came up with the structure of a game he could build around those questions. Poses says he was looking for "something original, something fun, and a good way to test players' knowledge of how well they know each other."
The result is Loaded Questions, a board game that can be played by three to six players and is designed for teens and up. Here's how it works: The person rolling the dice reads out a question, and the other players write down their personal answers to that question. After the answers are collected and read aloud by the previous roller, the current roller then guesses who said which response. It's sort of like the Newlywed Game without having to get a marriage license to play. To win, a player must land on the final spot on the board and correctly match all the responses.
After he finished creating the game, Poses had five thousand copies made. As a small-time inventor with no connections in the toy and game industry, he realized there was only one way to get the word out about Loaded Questions--he had to load up his car and take the game around the country.
On April 1, 1997, Poses left Miami in his 1992 Honda Accord on a four-month, 12,500-mile promotional loop around America. He visited thirty major U.S. cities, including New York, Seattle, and Los Angeles. In each one he contacted the local press, told them about his trip and his game, and then visited toy stores to interest them in his product.
In addition to being written up in half a dozen cities, Poses was also quite successful in placing Loaded Questions. By the time his trip was over, more than one hundred stores were carrying the game, which retails for about twenty-five dollars. Poses says it's a fairly safe bet that he will eventually sell out his initial run of five thousand, which means he'll break even on both the venture and the adventure.
"I was able to mix business with pleasure pretty well," he says. "I went to baseball games in different cities, I went kayaking on the Potomac, and I went hiking in six national parks." The trip, however, was not without its misadventures. In Cincinnati, he was leaving a toy store and rear-ended a car; the accident put him about a week behind schedule. But that was nothing compared to what happened in the Mount Rushmore State.
"I camped out in the Badlands of South Dakota on my way out West in a sixty-five-mile-per-hour wind storm with torrential rain and lightning," says Poses. "There is a question in my game, What is your greatest phobia?, and any of my good friends know the answer for me is lightning; I'm scared to death of it. So you can imagine [how bad it was for me] in this tent in the Badlands with sixty-five-mile-per-hour winds and lightning everywhere around me."
Now that he has one game under his belt, Poses is ready to start on another. "I would definitely like to be a board game inventor," he admits. This time it's a card game, but that's as far as he'll go for fear of possible corporate espionage. "When I get back to Miami I'm going to go to a trademark/copyright attorney and protect myself, and then I can talk about it a little more freely."--J.D.T.
1525 CLIFTON BUILDING OPENS
The facility unites several initiatives in preventive medicine and wellness
The new 1525 Clifton Road Building, which opened in August, unites several initiatives in preventive medicine and wellness offered by Emory Healthcare and the Rollins School of Public Health. The five-story, eighty-thousand-square-foot facility houses twenty-five Emory Clinic primary-care physicians, the TravelWell program specializing in health issues for those traveling abroad, the M.B. Seretean Center for Health Promotion, and the Earle B. and Stephanie S. Blomeyer Health and Fitness Center.
"This kind of interaction is one of the things that makes health care at Emory so distinctive and so strong," says Michael M. E. Johns, executive vice president for health affairs. "Programs offered at the 1525 Building should place Emory at the forefront of preventive medicine available to Atlantans as well as patients from across the nation and around the world."--A.O.A.
Photo by Annemarie Poyo
UNDERSTANDING VIOLENCE
A new interdisciplinary minor explores the origins, nature, and representations of violent behavior
In 1993, when United Nations staff member Ebrima Jobarteh was stationed in Angola helping set up free elections during a civil war, his office was bombed.
"He phoned us [in New York] and said everything was all right," says Jobarteh's son, Dawda, an Emory College junior who was sixteen at the time of the attack. "But two security guards were killed."
As the son of two United Nations employees, Dawda Jobarteh, who was born in Kenya and grew up in Manhattan, has long been aware of the threat of violence in the realm of international conflict. "I went to the United Nations International School in New York during the Gulf War," he says, "and we had about two bomb scares a week because it was considered a prime target."
Jobarteh, an interdisciplinary studies major, is among the first Emory students to enroll in a new undergraduate minor in violence studies. The interdisciplinary program unites a wide range of existing, related courses on topics such as the politics of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the music of war, and literary representations of violence. It is the first of its kind in the nation, according to Michael Bellesiles, associate professor of history and director of the new program, and it offers a sequential course of study of the history,
representation, origins, and nature of violence.
"This focus of study goes across disciplines that haven't really been speaking to one another," Bellesiles says. "[This new dialogue enabled us] to put together the minor. People in the medical school, the law school, public health--they were all interested in teaching an undergraduate class."
The minor synthesizes insights about the nature of violence from a variety of perspectives, beginning with Violence Studies 101, a broad, introductory course on the theories and literature of violence team-taught by Cathy Caruth, professor of comparative literature, and Robert Agnew, professor of sociology. Seventy students were enrolled in the course last fall, of which twenty-one expressed interest in pursuing the minor. Candidates for the minor must also take four additional courses in violence studies, such as the history of violence in America or a sociology class in juvenile delinquency. A required internship places students with organizations that deal with issues surrounding violence, including Amnesty International, the DeKalb Rape Crisis Center, the Georgia Council on Child Abuse, and the Brain Injury Association of Georgia.
"I hope this minor will overcome the defeatism and depression that sets in on most undergraduates after a few years, the sense that they can't do anything," Bellesiles says. "Internships have an amazing ability to persuade students that they can do some little thing to make a difference."
Jobarteh, who is applying for a violence studies internship with either The Carter Center or the United Nations High Commission of Refugees, plans a career dealing with health issues in the arena of international conflict and violence.
"I'd like to work with refugees, people who don't really have a place to call home," he says. "I know how it is not to know where you're from and to be around people who aren't like you."--A.O.A.
CYBER GODDESS
Crystal Kile '89C shatters Internet barriers for women
When Crystal Kile '89C began playing around with the Radio Shack TRS-80 computer in her seventh-grade math class in 1979, she became hooked on computers for life. The trouble was, she was the only girl in her class interested in the machine.
"I was kind of a freak," says Kile, who majored in history at Emory before entering a graduate program in women's studies and popular culture at Bowling Green State University. "I just wasn't a part of that boy culture. But once I got into [learning about computers], nobody was going to stop me."
Seventeen years later, Kile, now education coordinator at Tulane University's Center for Research on Women, is still fighting to claim her fair share of that male-dominated subculture. She recently co-authored SurferGrrrls, a women's Internet guide, with fellow Bowling Green graduate student Laurel Gilbert. They chose the title "as a counter to the 'nice girls don't hack around with computers' message that society (still!) sends out," they write.
In a world where males account for almost eighty percent of Internet usage, Kile and Gilbert write, "our goal is to demystify the Internet for women who are still squinchy or nervous about going online, to show them what is possible and to provide a mentoring resource for women who constantly find themselves helping other women get wired."
In SurferGrrrls, Kile and Gilbert tap into their women's studies and popular culture studies backgrounds to blend take-no-prisoners feminism, a breezy and ironic Generation-X attitude, and the jargony milieu of cyberspace. The result is a practical and cultural guide to the Internet, beginning with a list of frequently asked questions and answers about the SurferGrrrls persona and a comprehensive Internet glossary. They offer a history of the Internet and women's roles in mathematics and computer science. A how-to section presents basic advice on getting started with equipment, software, and Internet service providers. Every section is liberally dosed with personal anecdotes, interesting web site addresses, and no-nonsense tips.
"We swell the listservs, we proliferate in the Usenet groups, we weave the Web, we chat and MOO, we upload and download, we help build and nurture our chosen online communities," Kile and Gilbert write in their CyborGrrrl Oath. "In the name of global good and human freedom, we vow never to surrender the Internet and its successors to dangerous, self-perpetuating myths of the technological incompetence of women."--A.O.A.
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