Manchester-Harvard Project Will Serve as Incubator for Trans-Atlantic Policy Debates; Emeritus Professor at Yale Is Connecticut's New Poet Laureate; Ex-President of Colorado System Moves to Iowa

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By DAVID GLENN and PIPER FOGG

NEW CROSSINGS: In the 1998 book Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Belknap Press), the historian Daniel T. Rodgers argued that Jane Addams and other early 20-century American reformers were crucially influenced by their encounters with their British counterparts — and vice versa.

Now one of America's most prominent social scientists — Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard University — has announced plans to create a new center for incubating trans-Atlantic policy debates. Beginning in 2007, Harvard and the University of Manchester, in England, will collaborate on a five-year program titled Social Change, which will bring together professors and graduate students from both institutions. Manchester is financing the project and will serve as its headquarters.

Mr. Putnam says that the university originally approached him about a part-time appointment. "But I thought it would be more interesting," he says, "to create some kind of institutional partnership that would allow people from both universities to work collaboratively on these shared problems of contemporary society."

Mr. Putnam adds that he intends to maintain his full course load at Harvard, but will spend a significant amount of time in Manchester each year. "I expect to build up plenty of frequent-flier miles," he says.

The project expects to generate papers on such topics as immigration, civic engagement, and work-family policies. "This will be first-class scholarship," Mr. Putnam says, "but we want it to be presented in a way that will reach a broad audience."

Mr. Putnam is the second high-profile American to be snagged by Manchester recently. Last December, the university created the Brooks World Poverty Institute, which is led on a part-time basis by the Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz, a professor of economics at Columbia University.

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CROWNED IN CONNECTICUT: John Hollander does not know exactly what his new post as Connecticut's poet laureate will entail, but he says he is brimming with "enthusiasm and willingness."

Mr. Hollander, 76, a professor emeritus of English at Yale University, was recently chosen by the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism to fill the honorary position. He will succeed Marilyn Nelson and hold the title from 2007 through 2011, receiving an annual stipend of $1,000.

Mr. Hollander, who retired from Yale in 2003, has written more than a dozen books of poetry, as well as books for children and musical works with composers like Milton Babbitt and George Perle. His handbook on the craft of poetry, Rhyme's Reason, is considered a classic.

Mr. Hollander already has some ideas about how to promote poetry in Connecticut: "A very important matter is what could be done in the schools, particularly early on," he said. The poet laments that young people have few opportunities today "to hear English prose articulated intelligently. ... Talking heads on TV can't read a sentence out loud and make it make sense."

His solution? Have children memorize and recite poetry so that they begin to understand the importance of syntax and articulation. To that end, he would like to assemble a collection of good poems for different age groups to memorize.

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MIDWESTERN RETURN: Elizabeth Hoffman, who resigned under fire last year as president of the University of Colorado System, has been named executive vice president and provost of Iowa State University.

Ms. Hoffman was an economics professor and dean at Iowa State from 1993 to 1997. She was also provost at the University of Illinois at Chicago and has held faculty posts at Northwestern and Purdue Universities and at the Universities of Arizona, Florida, and Wyoming.

But she is best known for her five years of leadership in Colorado, a time in which a perfect storm of controversies ended up wrecking her presidency. The trouble began with accusations that the Boulder campus's football team had used alcohol and sex to lure top prospects to enroll. A year later, Ward Churchill, an ethnic-studies professor at Boulder, drew outrage for suggesting that victims of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were akin to a top Nazi.

Ms. Hoffman will start at Iowa State on January 1, 2007.

"It feels particularly great to be back at Iowa State," she says. "I spent four wonderful years there as dean of the college and know lots of wonderful people there. ... It's like a homecoming."

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