Westling heads up Boston University

Jon Westling '64 was inaugurated as the eighth president of Boston University on October 29. Dudley Ladd, Reed trustee and chair of the Parents Fund, represented the college at the inauguration.

Westling, a history major at Reed, was recruited by then-president John Silber to Boston University in 1974. He has served in various positions at the school, including provost and twice as acting president. According to Silber, Westling has sought to continually strengthen the university's academic resources by major initiatives in the sciences and the appointment of world-class scholars; he was instrumental in establishing a core curriculum in the school's college of arts and sciences.

Westling was born in 1942 in Yakima, Washington. He attended public school in Yakima and was awarded a full four-year scholarship to Reed College. While at Reed, Westling was president of the student body and an active participant in the civil rights moment. He was imprisoned nearly two weeks in Danville, Virginia, the summer before his senior year at Reed for protesting Jim Crow laws.

Upon completion of his B.A. at Reed Westling was elected a Rhodes Scholar and studied medieval history at Oxford University. He returned to the U.S. to teach at Centre College of Kentucky and then joined the faculty at Reed College to teach history and humanities. In 1971 Westling resumed his graduate studies at UCLA and resumed teaching at University of California, Irvine.

When informed of his appointment, Westling said, "I am honored to have been chosen to preside over the next stage of Boston University's development, and am deeply grateful to the trustees for their confidence in me. I look forward to working with the university's outstanding faculty and staff as we continue the exhilarating pursuit of excellence in every aspect of teaching and research."

History students publish papers

An article by history major Mithran Tiruchelvam '97, "Crossing the Boundary: The Framing of a Qing Political Community in Frontier Taiwan," was printed in the October 1996 issue of China Report, a journal published in India. Tiruchelvam wrote the article as a paper for the junior seminar in history. Professor Douglas Fix recommended to Tiruchelvam that he present it at the June 1995 conference of the Association for Asian Studies on the Pacific Coast. There a copy of the paper was picked up and sent on to the China Report. Tiruchelvam, who cames from Sri Lanka, graduated in January and plans to attend graduate school.

Silas Geneson '95, whose thesis adviser was Fix, has an article coming out in the 1997 issue of the San Francisco-based journal Chinese America: History and Perspective. Geneson's article on the boycott of 1905 is a thoroughly revised version of a thesis chapter; it represents original research with archival materials, some of which were never used before, and it was refereed before being accepted by the journal.