by SHARLA GRASSThe Dartmouth Staff
Fifty years after graduating from Dartmouth, David Birney '61 and Michael Gazzaniga '61 reflect on their college years and their variety of experiences some expected and others unexpected after their time at the College.
DAVID BIRNEY
Although there was no theater department when Birney matriculated at Dartmouth, he always found a way to participate in several annual dramatic productions.
"We did, at that time, six productions a year of everything from Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams to Ben Johnson to John Milton," he said. "It was an extraordinary range of material."
During Birney's senior year, English professor Henry Williams and the head of the English department John Finch approached Birney about producing a version of "Hamlet" in order to "prove to other people on the faculty that the study of theater was not simply learning a craft but that it also had a high scholarly content and commitment," Birney said.
Finch and Birney worked one-on-one for 10 weeks to produce the play after thoroughly researching everything from how the play's first performances were produced to character analysis, Birney said. Even today, Birney continues to use the method of deeply studying a play to prepare for a performance, he said.
"I'm going to be doing Propsero in The Tempest' this summer and I spent about a week in the [New York Library for the Performing Arts] just studying the history of the play how and where it's been produced, different thoughts of the production," he said.
Birney majored in English literature at Dartmouth, and later received a master's degree in theatre arts at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Birney was drafted into the army during the Vietnam War, but he did not let this interrupt his passion for theater. While in the army, he won the All Army Entertainment contest and received the Barter Theatre Award, a season-long acting and directing contract with a theater in Virginia, he said.
Birney went on to perform in "Amadeus," "Benefactors" and "Man and Superman" on Broadway and acted in the American Shakespeare Festival, New York's Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre, the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Shakespeare Festival of Washington, D.C., and many other regional theaters.
Birney was a member of the Theater Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1990s, he said. He worked as part of a group that distributed money to various professional theaters that apply for grants.
He also established an endowment fund entitled "The Class of '61 Legacy: The American Tradition in Performance" in order to ensure that performing arts remained prominent at the College, he said.
The Class of 1961's participation in the English department's productions set in motion the creation of the Hopkins Center for the Arts which opened one year after Birney's performance in "Hamlet" and the development of the theater department and theater major a few years later, Birney said.
When the Class of 1961 was deciding on a class project, a program involving theater was personally important to him, Birney said. Art programs are often the first programs cut when schools face tough economic times, so an "arts-specific endowment" seemed essential, Birney said.
"It seemed to me like an endowment that was permanently dedicated to the performing arts at Dartmouth would enrich both the College and the students' life and the larger community," he said. "It's interesting because a lot of guys that had stopped or never even started to donate to the College did come out and did contribute to the legacy."
MICHAEL GAZZANIGA
Gazzaniga, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is also the head of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind, which promotes research on the relationship between the brain and the mind.
Gazzaniga graduated from Dartmouth with a degree in zoology and later received a PhD in psychobiology from the California Institute of Technology, he said.
By his senior year at Dartmouth, Gazzaniga knew he wanted to pursue "basic research" instead of going to medical school, he said. This decision followed the junior fellowship he received that enabled him to study at the California Institute of Technology during the summer before his senior year.
"The idea was I was going to go out and work with Roger Sperry on specificity of nerve growth," he said. "What I wound up doing [was] figuring out how to put the half brain of a rabbit to sleep. So you don't wind up doing what you think you're doing."
At Dartmouth, psychology professor William Smith inspired Gazzaniga while he worked as his research assistant, he said.
Gazzaniga said he considers the time he spent helping epileptic patients through his study of the functions of the brain's hemispheres and their interactions with each other as his "biggest accomplishment."
Gazzaniga founded the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth in 2005 in order to ensure that the College remained up-to-date with the then-new field, he said.
"[The founding of the Center] fell in line with the fact that the psychological approach to understanding behavior of mind and so forth was just taking off like a rocket, and it was taking off in [the] context of a deeper understanding of biology," he said. "And so people put together the two approaches and called it cognitive neuroscience."
As the director of the Law and Neuroscience Project for three years, Gazzaniga researched how the evolving field of neuroscience will impact legal decision-making. For example, as brain scans become more detailed, people may have to decide whether a criminal with a brain lesion can be assigned criminal responsibility, he said.
Gazzaniga also worked on former President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics, he said. The Council evaluated the effects of technologies such as stem cell use, memory enhancement drugs and performance enhancement drugs, he said.
"There were certainly strong divisions among the Council of who thought what about what and it was fun to be part of that," he said.
