Honoring Scholars
9/6/2005 10:20 AMBy Patricia Kelly
Ashley Haase
Regents Professor of Microbiology
As a boy, Dr. Ashley Haase enjoyed looking at scummy pond water through his microscope, but his true love was his chemistry set. “I destroyed my mother's dining-room table with various gunpowder experiments,” he says.
Haase still exhibits destructive tendencies, but only at work; for the past 20 years, he's been battling the HIV virus with everything he's got. “HIV has developed such wiliness, such cleverness in the way it can get around host defenses,” he says. “It's a beautifully complex, horribly fascinating infection.”
Haase thinks about the virus “a good portion of the time” and carries a small tape recorder to record ideas that come to him-usually while driving. “I'm a self-confessed nerd,” he says. “And I'm pretty intense. But I love this stuff.”
Haase first became intrigued with slow infections, or “lentiviruses,” when he was doing his medical internship at Johns Hopkins after earning his M.D. at Columbia. Lentiviruses-which infect the host long before any symptoms appear-had been discovered in sheep in the 1940s. Then, in the late 1960s, one of Haase's colleagues at Johns Hopkins discovered the first human transmissible slow infection: the Kuru virus, found in tribes in New Guinea. “This just galvanized the field,” Haase recalls. “We thought: What else is out there that we don't know about?”
Haase spent the next 15 years at the University of California, San Francisco, studying the viruses that caused slow infections in sheep. But it was after he came to the U to head the microbiology department in 1984 that AIDS was discovered to be a distant relative to the sheep lentivirus. Haase's path was clear: He had a new fight on his hands. “HIV packs a real wallop for a very small genome,” he says.
Haase and his U colleagues have made many significant breakthroughs over the years, discovering how the virus “hides” within certain cells and subverts the immune system, how it triggers a suicide reaction within the immune system, and how it is most vulnerable the first week after infection. But a cure remains elusive. “We've had a really good year this year,” he says. “But who knows? We may go back into a period where we work long and hard and not see any stories to tell.”
Still, Haase is optimistic: “The commitments are there; the human and physical resources are there. If we can get together, work better as a community, I'm quite hopeful that in somebody's lifetime, we'll solve it.”
Phyllis Moen
McKnight Presidential Chair in Sociology
Phyllis Moen (Ph.D. '78) married at 18, had her first child at 20, and was widowed at 32. She'd earned an M.A. in sociology when her two girls were small, primarily through correspondence courses at the University of North Dakota, about 20 miles from her northwestern Minnesota farmstead. “But I really had no skills,” she says. “And suddenly I was the breadwinner.” Those life experiences shaped her scholarly interest in work-life issues, she says. “All that I think and write about has to do with work and family and gender, and how to put the pieces together, which is very hard to do.”
Moen came to the University on a fellowship, lived in student housing with her kids, and completed her Ph.D. in only three years. “I wanted to start paying back my college loans before I had to pay back my daughters' loans!” she jokes.
Moen—who taught at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, for almost 25 years before returning to the U in 2003-has a new book, The Career Mystique. In it, she examines the current structure of work in the United States, which follows what she calls a lockstep “clockwork” of education, followed by continuous full-time work, followed by retirement.
“My book is all about how we presume that the path to success and fulfillment is to work full time continuously,” Moen says. “But this clockwork doesn't work anymore-for anyone.”
In today's world, most jobs are no longer secure, most families are dual-income, and most households have no full-time homemaker. “That's why there's so much burnout and overload and stress,” she says. “We are all struggling with how to rethink work in our own lives-to be more effective at work and be effective in family life.”
At the same time, health insurance, unemployment insurance, and Social Security are all based on the outdated paradigm. Moen wants to create new policies and practices to change this. She and colleague Erin Kelly, assistant professor of sociology, are heading up a new project, funded by the National Institutes of Health, in which they are working with a large Minnesota corporation to create new work options that focus on results, not the clock.
When results become apparent, Moen predicts, “I think change will happen right away because when one very productive company has something that works, everybody else starts doing it.”
Dominick Argento
Regents Professor Emeritus of Music
On Sundays, young Dominick Argento sat in his father's empty café in York, Pennsylvania, and taught himself to play the piano. Early in World War II, his father decided to dispense with the café's dance band, and Dominick asked to take the old upright home. Instead, on his 16th birthday, his parents gave him a brand-new baby grand. “From then on, I felt my career was doomed!” he says. “I had to be a musician.”
Sixty-three years later, Argento has enjoyed a “doomed” career of extraordinary success. He has composed song cycles, operas, orchestral compositions, ballets, and works for voice and orchestra all marked by strong melody and lyricism. He has won countless awards, including the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Music for the song cycle From the Diary of Virginia Woolf and a 2003 Grammy Award for the song cycle Casa Guidi.
Argento earned his M.A. at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore and his Ph.D. at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. He came to Minnesota in 1958 to teach at the U (“to earn a living, actually,” he says with a laugh) and to write music. The Twin Cities gave him every kind of client he needed: a major orchestra, a chamber orchestra, an opera company, many choruses and music schools-and not much competition.
Argento's dual careers were mutually beneficial; midway through his 39-year U career, he could easily have lived on royalties and commissions but found that teaching enhanced his composing. “The greatest thing about being a teacher is that it requires one to remain open-minded,” he explains. “You have to impart to students all of the possibilities-all of the different styles that one can consider. You're constantly reexamining your own theories and attitudes. And that can be nothing but healthy. Contact with the young is very salubrious too. When you're middle-aged, it just makes you feel more alive!”
Argento is hard-pressed to say which of his accomplishments gives him the most satisfaction, but he does single out one particular pleasure. Years ago, Canada made his Six Elizabethan Songs part of the required repertoire for all music school graduates. “[Students] have to learn my work the way they have to learn Bach or Schubert,” he says. “To me, that is such an honor.”
Argento still composes every day. He's currently composing a large work for the 150th anniversary of the Harvard Glee Club. “I work at it like a banker-all day long,“ he says. “I don't write to change anyone's life . . . but I'd like to enhance it. I write because it's a way of leaving calling cards here on Earth. When you're not here, at least it's a little signpost that says you were here.”
 | | | |  | | About the Scholars Walk | | A grand new walkway across campus will include monuments to more than 600 of the University's greatest faculty and students-Nobel Prize winners, national academy members, regents professors, Rhodes Scholars, and others. The 2,200-foot Scholars Walk will extend from the McNamara Alumni Center's Gateway Plaza westward across Northrop Mall to Appleby Hall on the Mississippi River bluff. The project was conceived by landscape architecture professor Clint Hewitt, then head of campus master planning, during the U's sesquicentennial in 2001 as a way to recognize the U's intellectual life. The Scholars Walk-which features limestone benches, landscaping, and illuminated monuments-is nearing completion and will be dedicated in 2006. |
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