2015 Newsletter

2015 Message from the Director

Anonymous — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 20:49:14 +0000

2015 Message from the Director Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/03/2015 - 14:49 Leland Giovannelli

Our two newest hires, Andrea Kowalchuk and Paul Diduch, have just completed their first year—and they did a terrific job. In them, Herbst has found two excellent teachers, generous colleagues and strong supporters of the Great Books tradition. In the spring of 2016, Paul and Andi will be hosting a colloquium on artificial intelligence, and they have been working with the Department of Computer Science to make this a success.

Wayne Ambler retired at the end of May. He is now is Professor Emeritus Ambler, and he is busy with writing about Rome and tending his garden. I know how much he loves teaching, but I must say he looks mighty happy now.

We have a new professor rostered in the Herbst Program: Joel Swanson, a visual artist who runs the Technology, Arts and Media (TAM) Program in ATLAS, the Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society. Joel’s teaching and service will mostly be centered in ATLAS, but one of his courses each year will be cross-listed with Herbst.

Scholarship Opportunities

Here at Herbst, we are thinking of ways in which to commemorate two of our past directors, Thanasi Moulakis and Wayne Ambler, and we could use your help.

Ambler Scholarship for our Maymester course, Culture Wars in Rome. Wayne worked hard to keep prices low for his students, typically by sidestepping travel agencies. It seems perfectly appropriate then, to establish a scholarship in his name. Are there any Culture Warriors out there who would be willing to contribute to this scholarship? And can you recommend ways in which to distribute this money? For example, should we try to give each student a small amount, or a few students a large amount, or one student a free trip? We would appreciate your thoughts on creating the Ambler Culture Warrior Fund.

Moulakis Fund. We hope that many of you would be willing to contribute to a scholarship commemorating Thanasi. The question is what kind of fund should it be? Which of his broad interests should it support? Literature, philosophy, the arts, languages, international relations or others? Should it support students by helping them pay for books? Or subsidize tickets to the opera? Or pay for framing student artwork from HUEN 3100? Please send me your thoughts on how best we can commemorate this amazing person.

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Remembering Athanasios Moulakis, 1945-2015

Anonymous — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 20:48:49 +0000

Remembering Athanasios Moulakis, 1945-2015 Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/03/2015 - 14:48 Leland Giovannelli

Anyone who did their Herbst coursework in the first decade of the program will remember Dr. Athanasios Moulakis, the founding director of the program who turned Linda and Clancy Herbst’s dream into a reality. Thanasi, as he was known to us all, passed away in July 2015.

Thanasi was an extraordinary person: erudite, energetic, passionate, and a true citizen of the world. He was born in 1945 to a family of prosperous Greek merchants in Athens. He was groomed to be the family’s polyglot trader, and so he was packed off to London and Paris as a teenager and to Germany for university. When not in school, he travelled often between Greece and Italy. As a young man, he thus became completely fluent in five languages; indeed, he spoke these languages so well that he repeatedly passed for a native speaker of them. By the time he got to university, he had lost all interest in the family business, however; he was enamored with the life of the mind. Drawn by philosophy, literature, and history, he eventually earned his doctorate in political theory from the Ruhr-Universität-Bochum.

In the late 1960s, Thanasi travelled to the San Francisco area. There he met Eleanor Gail Durham. They married in 1965 – first in California, and then in Athens, in a very traditional wedding. Thanasi’s entire family was in attendance. In retrospect, he described it as the most intimidating experience he could imagine for a blonde, blue-eyed Californian, but Gail showed her mettle and rose to the occasion. Thanasi loved her all the more for it. He and Gail embarked upon an international life – they migrated many times, changing languages, countries, and continents. Their one constant was a lovely villa in the hills outside of Florence; some of you reading this obituary will remember it.

So how did he end up in Boulder? In 1988, Mortimer Adler decided that Athanasios Moulakis was the right person to launch the Herbst Program. Adler was the man who had introduced Clancy Herbst to philosophy, in a seminar at the Aspen Institute. As a result of that seminar, Clancy wanted to create a discussion program for engineering students; naturally, he asked Adler’s advice about possible directors. That is how the College of Engineering and Applied Science contacted Thanasi. Throughout the 1988-89 year, Thanasi (then teaching at St. John’s College in Annapolis) worked with CEAS Dean Richard Seebass and Associate Dean David Clough to design such a program within the college. They encountered significant opposition from those who thought that a college of engineering should not teach the humanities – and from those who opposed the Great Books Curriculum as old-fashioned and irrelevant. In the end, Thanasi successfully defended the plan, and the Herbst Program of Humanities for Engineering �鶹��Ժ was established under the directorship of Athanasios Moulakis.

Thanasi was indeed the right person for the job. Only a person with his energy and optimism could have succeeded in that first decade. He had to convince engineering professors that the program was worthwhile, and he had to endure the microscopic scrutiny of those few who actually hoped that he would fail. He won over these detractors not only with arguments, but also with charm, for he was gracious and eloquent, with a razor-sharp wit and a twinkle in his eye. He ably guided the Herbst Program through the 1990s: finding and grooming instructors, deepening the program’s roots in CEAS, and strengthening ties with the College of Arts and Sciences.

Thanasi was an inveterate traveler and risk-taker. Once the Herbst Program was solidly on his feet, he wanted a new challenge. He and Gail left the mountains of Boulder for the mountains of Lugano. There, at the University of Italian Switzerland, he served as a director of the Institute for Mediterranean Studies. That must have seemed too easy, because he later moved on to become Acting President and Chief Academic Officer of the new American University of Afghanistan in Kabul. That led to his next adventure – in 2010, he accepted the presidency of the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS).

Sulaimani was then a young institution trying to define itself; it needed the guidance of someone with vision and energy. That someone was Thanasi. He dove into an ambitious project: creating an engineering program from scratch. To that end, he and Johan Brongers, rector at AUIS, visited Boulder to collaborate with David Clough and Vice Chancellor Stein Sture. Together they created a curriculum that could blend with the existing AUIS general education core. Dave, who became very involved with this project, told me, “I… have visited AUIS now nine times. [They now have] full degree programs in general engineering and mechanical engineering. We built the curriculum, science and engineering labs, and the faculty together. I gave a brief commencement address in Suli in May where the first generation of engineers (50 of them) graduated. Thanasi was very proud of this accomplishment.” As well he should have been! That class of graduates was a testament to his versatility, diplomacy and determination.

I will end with a completely different kind of accomplishment. Thanasi and Gail had one child, Anne. Like Thanasi, she was a polyglot with an international perspective; after college, she worked for the U.S. State Department. In 2010, on a visit to Boulder, Thanasi told me the latest news: Anne had married and now had a daughter of her own. He added that holding this child in his arms was overwhelming; it gave him both wild joy and absolute peace. He felt that he could finally stop striving—that he had done enough. He could finally stop striving. If you remember Thanasi’s burning, restless spirit, you will appreciate the significance of that remark.

It is impossible for me to encompass this man’s character in article. I invite you, if you remember Thanasi, to share your memories about him. We will post them here. If there are enough of them, we will send out a supplementary newsletter.

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Alumni updates: Cory Oldweiler and Lucky Vidmar

Anonymous — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 19:57:38 +0000

Alumni updates: Cory Oldweiler and Lucky Vidmar Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/03/2015 - 13:57

What happens to Herbsters once they leave the College of Engineering and Applied Science? Where are they now, and how did they get there? We asked two alumni for updates.

Cory Oldweiler

When I was a CU engineering student, there was always an answer, one a finite effort would delineate. But life proved a less soluble puzzle. I changed my goal, aiming to become the contemplative, probing polymath advocated by the Herbst program and epitomized in the Olympian mind of Thanasi. For a time I sought to educate both myself and the public through journalism. Then I fled north where, amid stints cooking, splitting firewood, refinishing floors, waiting tables and tending bar, I hesitantly embraced my fate as a writer, a field that allows me to explore, to learn, to teach, and to pretend as if perhaps I am finally figuring it out. In the winters I wander, often returning to Florence, Italy, for a month or three. The initial result is my novel “Testimony of the Senses,” a billet-doux to the arts and an exploration of how we craft identity and justify faith.

Cory remembers Thanasi: On a visit to Boulder after graduation, I stopped in to see Thanasi and to share with him impressions of my first trip to Europe. At some point I casually mentioned that I had been jazzed by the musicality of a Stuart Davis painting hung in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. Thanasi was incensed that I had wasted my time on something which could be found in America, instead of communing longer with Titian and Tintoretto in Venetian churches. It was a valid argument, and I found myself apologizing. The next time I went to Venice, I did not go near the Guggenheim, lest he somehow find out.

Lucky Vidmar

I left CU in 1997 with two computer science degrees and the full Herbst experience. I then spent several wonderful years on a U.S. Geological Survey team developing new technical ways to respond to earthquakes and tsunamis. Fulfilling my mom’s prediction that engineering is not the optimal career for me, I ended up going to law school, graduating in 2004. Today, I represent high-tech and engineering companies as a partner in the Denver law office of Hogan Lovells. I also serve as the Honorary Consul of Slovenia in Denver, helping promote closer ties between Colorado and Slovenia. These days, in my spare time, I am involved in something different altogether: running for the CU Board of Regents. I did not predict that my career would span engineering, law, diplomacy, and politics. But I credit Herbst for it all.

Lucky remembers Thanasi: I had dinner with a business contact recently. We were talking about what a true engineering education should be, and I told him about my time at Herbst and about Thanasi. Once, at the end of a spring semester, Thanasi told me how he planned to spend the summer sitting under the tree at his place in Florence, and reading Plato in Greek. It was nice to reminisce ...Â and then, the next morning, I learned he was gone.

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