Last Thursday University President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg presented his new book, “Write Me a Letter!” along with three other GW professors who have recently published books.
“I feel a little bit like a fraud. (My book) is more of a dessert than a main course,” Trachtenberg said, comparing his book to those of his colleagues at Thursday’s Faculty Authors Book Signing Reception, one of several similar events hosted every year at Gelman Library.
University Librarian Jack A. Siggins, Librarian for History David Killian and Librarian for Management Services and Public Administration Shmuel Ben-Gad, introduced the authors to an audience of about 40 and presented copies for signing that will be housed in the faculty authors’ section of the Special Collections Department.
Trachtenberg described the process of assembling his book in which he selected cartoons from the New Yorker magazine and matched them with personal letters he has authored.
“It’s a modest souvenir of my time here. I dedicated the book to the GW community which has kept me laughing for two decades,” Trachtenberg said. He also spoke about a book he wrote that reflected on higher education and its problems. The book will be available by next winter.
“(The coming book) is an irreverent memoir in which I am at liberty to say things that would be imprudent to say as (a university) president. I talk about the state of American higher education and its future. There are aspects that greatly trouble me, and I give prescriptions on how it might be fixed,” he said.
Professors R. Emmet Kennedy’s book “Secularism and its Opponents from Augustine to Solzhenitsyn” highlights several European intellectuals and historical figures and their attitudes regarding religion in society and the state. Kennedy teaches courses at GW on the history of France, the French Revolution and French intellectual history.
Information Systems and Technology Management Associate Professor Subhasish Dasgupta edited and compiled more than 100 articles to produce his “Encyclopedia of Virtual Communities and Technologies.” The collection focuses on the social aspects associated with online communities.
In “Public Administration’s Final Exam: A Pragmatist Restructuring of the Profession and the Discipline,” Professor of Public Administration and Public Policy Michael Harmon describes problems public administrators have been trying to solve since the 1930s.
“Administrators can’t answer their final exam question which is justifying the right to speak to truth to power,” Harmon said. He said that administrators should stop worry about legitimizing this phenomenon and instead focus on their responsibilities of acting out public policy.
