Olpadwala

Porus Olpadwala, professor of city and regional planning, will be the first professor and dean of Hans Bethe House, which opens officially in August 2007. The Hans Bethe House will be the third of five named residential buildings for Cornell sophomores, juniors and seniors in the West Campus House System.

Olpadwala, who was dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning from 1998 to 2004, has scholarly interests ranging from comparative political economy to urban and economic development in the Third World and environmental issues.

He has worked in the areas of urbanization and the environment, the development and transfer of corporate technology, international agricultural issues and social transition processes and has been a consultant to the Ford Foundation, agencies of the United Nations, the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development. In the 1960s, he worked in India with Price Waterhouse and an affiliate of Jardine Mathesen.

"We are extremely pleased that Porus will be joining the West Campus House System in this role," said West Campus Council co-chairs Michele Moody-Adams and Edna Dugan in a statement. "He brings a wealth of experience, which he hopes to share with the lucky undergraduates of Bethe House."

In other West Campus news:

• Sevin Seminar speaker named:

The West Campus Council Operations Committee has selected Katha Pollitt, an American feminist writer, as the 2007 speaker for the Sevin Seminar on American Values.

Pollitt is expected to visit Cornell in October. She also will interact with students and faculty and participate at house events in formal and informal settings during a brief stay in residence as the guest of Carl Becker House. Host duties rotate among the West Campus houses. The seminar was endowed by Cornellian Irik Sevin '69 in 2004.

Pollitt is best known for her column "Subject to Debate" in The Nation magazine. Her work has appeared in numerous other periodicals, including The New Yorker, Harper's, Ms. and The New York Times.

In 1994, she published "Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism," a collection of 19 essays that appeared in The Nation and in other journals. Most of her essays for The Nation from 1994 to 2001 were collected in "Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics and Culture," published by Modern Library. Before she became a regular columnist for The Nation, Pollitt edited its Books and the Arts section and won a National Book Critics Circle Award for a volume of her poetry, "Antarctic Traveller," in 1983.

• Alumni gifts:

Bill Kay, Class of '51, has made a $10 million gift for the continuing development of the $225 million West Campus House System. Former President Hunter Rawlings announced the gift June 10 during Reunion Weekend. One of the Court residence halls on North Campus also will be named for Kay.

The Class of 1966, whose members stayed at Becker House during Reunion, also has made a gift of more than $270,000 to the Becker House dean's discretionary fund, as part of an endowment to pay for programs on West Campus.