AitN: February 17, 2020

The Law School will present Franklin A. Thomas ’56, LAW’63 with the Medal for Excellence Award for his achievements in law and his service to Columbia. From the press release: “Thomas’s achievements regularly include the word ‘first.’ He was the first African American to captain an Ivy League basketball team. (The three rebounding records he set in 1955 still stand today.) In 1969, he became the first African American to sit on the board of Citibank — a seat he kept for 40 years; and when he took over the Ford Foundation in 1979, he was the first African American to lead a major philanthropic foundation.” The ceremony will be held on February 28 at Cipriani 42nd Street.

Erin Gregoire ’19 is at the center of a running controversy. As reported in a February 7 article in Runner’s World, even though Gregoire recently ran the Houston Marathon with a chip time of 2:42:55 (which qualifies her to race in the Olympic Trials), she is disqualified from the trials because she started the marathon in the second tier start corral. From the article: “‘Obviously it was an incredible experience to just get to run the marathon, but I knew in the back of my head that the [Olympic Trials qualifier] was what I wanted,’ Gregoire told Runner’s World. ‘To get that, and then in some sense feel like it was taken away from me, it was heartbreaking.’”

Jeremiah Crowell ’96’s docuseries Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak debuted on Netflix in January to rave reviews. From a February 4 review in The Guardian: “While coronavirus dominates news headlines, Netflix is streaming its six-part series on how prepared (or not) the world is to deal with a new pandemic. Pandemic … starts with a theory: that we’re due for a new, fast-moving deadly virus. It’s been 100 years since a deadly influenza virus killed 50–100 million people, at a time when the global population was just 2 billion.” The reviewer went on to note, “I was moved to tears multiple times — not from fear of what might be coming for us, but from the kindness and dedication of those who work in the field.”