別のランキングは2004年からWorld University Rankings（世界の大学ランキング）として公表しているThe Times Higher Education Supplementがある。略称はThe Times Higher または THES。それはイギリスのタイムズが新聞の付録冊子として毎年秋に発行している高等教育情報誌。ここでも2010年、米ハーバード大学が１位。
Her mother also worries that Saudi men may be reluctant to marry not only Ms. Al Mashabi but her sisters if Ms. Al Mashabi brings Western ways back to the family. Ms. Al Mashabi says that many of her female friends who were scholarship students return home only to move back abroad, to Dubai or elsewhere. Many who come back to stay are unhappy, she said.
In the Saudi kingdom, more than 40% of young Saudi women job-seekers are unemployed because custom and religious code limit where they can work.
Indeed, conservative Saudi clerics have targeted the kingdom's scholarship program, saying it is detaching young Saudi men and women from their religious mooring. "The scholarships dragged woe onto our nation," Sheik Nasser al-Omar told Saudi Arabia's al Sharq newspaper in May.
Elite members of Saudi society have long placed faith in U.S. universities. There are more members of King Abdullah's cabinet holding U.S. doctorates—at least seven—than in President Obama's, which includes two, not counting honorary doctorates. Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz al Saud, brought closer in the line of succession by the June death of brother Prince Nayef, could one day become the first U.S.-educated Saudi king, thanks to his bachelor's degree from Redlands College in Redlands, Calif. in the 1960s.
Saudi students have been linked to U.S. universities since the first days of the kingdom. Standard Oil of California—based near the University of Southern California in Los Angeles—signed the first major oil deal with King Abdullah's father, in the 1930s. After that, many upper class Saudis sent their sons and a few daughters to USC.
"That first wave going to the U.S.—they had tremendous impact on the way this country developed," said Abdul Rahman al Zamil, a Saudi businessman and former deputy commerce minister who was one of six brothers to become a USC alum.
But the open door for Saudi students slammed shut in 2001.
"You can't imagine how they treated you," said Sami al Obeid, a Saudi businessman who attended the University of Oregon in 2005-2006. Mr. al Obeid said his U.S. visa was revoked mid-school year, without explanation, and he never finished his U.S. degree.
U.S. universities said they lost about $40 million a year in tuition from Middle Eastern students after 9/11.
After the 2005 meeting between King Abdullah and Mr. Bush, the U.S. government cleared a six-month backlog of Saudi visa applications, said Ms. Townsend, the former homeland security adviser. The visa application process was overhauled to be more efficient.
Behind the scenes, security was tightened. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency and Saudi Arabia's domestic intelligence agency intensified cooperation and screening of visa applicants, Ms. Townsend said. Diplomatic cables made public by WikiLeaks show U.S. and Saudi officials discussing increased monitoring of Saudi students in the U.S., and follow-up interviews by Saudi intelligence of Saudi students while home on school holidays.
On the U.S. political front, top State Department officials briefed members of Congress privately, detailing security measures, Ms. Townsend said. Supporters hoped to head off any scenario in which a member of Congress would "stand up and begin to lambaste the Saudis publicly," she said.
The heightened security for the students has yielded rewards. Both U.S. and Saudi experts credit Saudi counterterror officials under Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, a U.S. university alum, with alerting Americans to two Al-Qaeda-linked bomb plots since 2010. Cooperation on the student applications helped bring Saudi and U.S. intelligence agencies to a "level of transparency as good as it is with Britain," Ms. Townsend said.
A version of this article appeared July 27, 2012, on page A1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Saudi Students Flood In As U.S. Reopens Door.
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Todai is No. 1 in Asia but others slip
Wednesday, Oct. 3, 2012
Kyodo
LONDON — The University of Tokyo, known as Todai, was once again crowned Asia's best university in an annual global ranking released Wednesday, while other Japanese institutions slipped.
The Times Higher Education World University Rankings places the university in 27th place — up from 30th last year — in a table of the world's top 200 schools.
However, the four other Japanese universities in the top 200 fell from last year.
Kyoto University dropped from 52nd to 54th, the Tokyo Institute of Technology moved from 108th to 128th, Tohoku University went down from 120th to 137th and Osaka University fell from 119th to 147th.
Even so, Japan has more universities in the top 200 than any other Asian nation.
Phil Baty, the report's editor, said the declines are due to several factors, including the rise of other Asian schools, particularly in China and Taiwan, and the failure of Japanese universities to adopt a more international outlook.
"Other nations are rising, and standing still will see you fall in the rankings," Baty said. "There's a sense that Japan is perhaps isolated on the world stage, in terms of international collaboration in research and also in terms of international student recruitment.
"A lot of Asian universities have focused on international collaboration and attracting the finest overseas scholars. Japanese universities are not as widely cited in academic research papers as one would expect," he said.
"But Japan has recognized the problem of international isolation and has taken some moves to address the situation. Japan has also not benefited from the kind of focused public investment as in China, which has aimed to create several high-performing universities."
Meanwhile, the California Institute of Technology held on to the world's No. 1 spot, while Harvard University was pushed into fourth place by the University of Oxford and Stanford University, which shared second place.
But the continued presence of Western universities at the top of the table — the United States took seven of the top 10 places — masks the declines these countries have suffered in the overall league table due to the increasingly strong performance of countries like China, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea.
Caltech named best research university in the world -- again
October 5, 2012 | 7:39 am LATimes
Once again, Caltech is ranked as the best in the world.
The Pasadena institution retained its ranking as the world’s best research university in the 2012-13 World University Rankings released this week by the Times Higher Education magazine in London.
The University of Oxford and Stanford tied for second place. Harvard, last year’s runner-up, placed fourth.
University of California campuses at Berkeley and Los Angeles maintained their top 20 positions despite massive state funding cuts to higher education.
The rest of the top 10 in order were: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago.
The rankings use measures such as research funding, faculty publication, the influence of research as measured by citations, the international makeup of faculty and students and the number of doctorates awarded.
Caltech President Jean-Lou Chameau praised the other universities at the top and said he was pleased his institution, home to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was in such good company. He credited the school’s success to a simple recipe.
“We always try to recruit exceptional faculty and exceptional students,” Chameau said. “We try to support them the best we can and we encourage them them to look at big questions, important scientific issues. It has resulted in game-changing types of discoveries.”
Yamanaka wins Nobel Prize / 19th Japanese laureate honored for developing iPS cells
(Oct. 8, 2012)The Yomiuri Shimbun
Shinya Yamanaka, who developed induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, has won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which he shared with a British scientist, the Swedish Karolinska Institute announced Monday.
Yamanaka, 50, won the prize for developing and establishing reprogramming technology that can revert somatic cells to their undifferentiated, or embryonic, state.
The British scientist, Sir John Gurdon, 79, is known for successfully cloning frogs in 1962.
Yamanaka, the 19th Japanese Nobel laureate, will receive half of the 8 million Swedish kronor (about 95 million yen) prize money during a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10.
Using a method of introducing certain types of genes into mouse skin cells, Yamanaka in 2006 developed iPS cells that rejuvenated to a state close to that of fertilized ova from mature adult cells. He successfully generated human iPS cells in 2007.
His groundbreaking work opens up possibilities in a wide range of fields, such as the development of regenerative medicine and treatments for intractable diseases.
iPS cells are highly versatile, and able to replenish every type of body cell except for those in the placenta.
Their capacity to multiply almost indefinitely has led to expectations they could have a number of practical applications.
It is hoped they will assist the development of regenerative medicine to replace tissue damaged through injury, such as damage to the spinal cord, or through illness, such as diabetes or Parkinson's disease.
They might also help clarify mechanisms that bring about the onset of intractable diseases and assist in the development of treatments for such illnesses.
Yamanaka is the second Japanese recipient of the physiology or medicine prize. The first was Susumu Tonegawa, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1987.
Yamanaka was born in Osaka Prefecture in September 1962.
After graduating from Kobe University School of Medicine, Yamanaka became an assistant at Osaka City University Medical School, then a professor at Nara Institute of Science and Technology.
2 US scientists win Nobel chemistry prize
By KARL RITTER and LOUISE NORDSTROM
Oct 10, 8:49 AM EDT Associated Press
STOCKHOLM (AP) -- Two American researchers won the Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday for studies of protein receptors that let body cells sense and respond to outside signals like danger or the flavor of food. Such studies are key for developing better drugs.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka had made groundbreaking discoveries, mainly in the 1980s, on an important family of receptors, known as G-protein-coupled receptors.
About half of all medications act on these receptors, including beta blockers and antihistamines, so learning about them will help scientists to come up with better drugs.
The human body has about 1,000 kinds of such receptors, structures on the surface of cells, which let the body respond to a wide variety of chemical signals, like adrenaline. Some receptors are in the nose, tongue and eyes, and let us sense smells, tastes and light.
"They work as a gateway to the cell," Lefkowitz told a news conference in Stockholm by phone. "As a result they are crucial ... to regulate almost every known physiological process with humans."
Lefkowitz, 69, is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and professor at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina.
Kobilka, 57, worked for Lefkowitz at Duke before transferring to Stanford University School of Medicine in California, where he is now a professor.
Lefkowitz said he was fast asleep when the Nobel committee called, but he didn't hear it because he was wearing ear plugs. So his wife picked up the phone.
"She said, `There's a call here for you from Stockholm,'" Lefkowitz told The Associated Press. "I knew they ain't calling to find out what the weather is like in Durham today."
He said he didn't have an "inkling" that he was being considered for the Nobel Prize.
"Initially, I expected I'd have this huge burst of excitement. But I didn't. I was comfortably numb," Lefkowitz said.
Kobilka said he found out around 2:30 a.m., after the Nobel committee called his home twice. He said he didn't get to the phone the first time, but that when he picked up the second time, he spoke to five members of the committee.
"They passed the phone around and congratulated me," Kobilka told AP. I guess they do that so you actually believe them. When one person calls you, it can be a joke, but when five people with convincing Swedish accents call you, then it isn't a joke."
He said he would put his half of the 8 million kronor ($1.2 million) award toward retirement or "pass it on to my kids."
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The academy said it was long a mystery how cells interact with their environment and adapt to new situations, such as when they react to adrenaline by increasing blood pressure and making the heart beat faster.
Scientists suspected that cell surfaces had some type of receptor for hormones.
Using radioactivity, Lefkowitz managed to unveil receptors including the receptor for adrenaline, and started to understand how it works.
Kobilka and his team realized that there is a whole family of receptors that look alike - a family that is now called G-protein-coupled receptors.
In 2011, Kobilka achieved another breakthrough when his team captured an image of the receptor for adrenaline at the moment when it is activated by a hormone and sends a signal into the cell. The academy called the image "a molecular masterpiece."
The award is "fantastic recognition for helping us further understand the intricate details of biochemical systems in our bodies," said Bassam Z. Shakhashiri, president of the American Chemical Society.
"They both have made great contributions to our understanding of health and disease," Shakhashiri said. "This is going to help us a great deal to develop new pharmaceuticals, new medicines for combating disease."
Mark Downs, chief executive of Britain's Society of Biology, said the critical role receptors play is now taking for granted.
"This groundbreaking work spanning genetics and biochemistry has laid the basis for much of our understanding of modern pharmacology as well as how cells in different parts of living organisms can react differently to external stimulation, such as light and smell, or the internal systems which control our bodies such as hormones," Downs said in a statement.
The U.S. has dominated the Nobel chemistry prize in recent years, with American scientists being included among the winners of 17 of the past 20 awards.
This year's Nobel announcements started Monday with the medicine prize going to stem cell pioneers John Gurdon of Britain and Japan's Shinya Yamanaka. Frenchman Serge Haroche and American David Wineland won the physics prize Tuesday for work on quantum particles.
The Nobel Prizes were established in the will of 19th-century Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. The awards are always handed out on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.
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AP Science Writer Malcolm Ritter in New York and AP writers Amanda Kwan in Phoenix, Jack Jones in Columbia, South Carolina, and Danica Kirka in London contributed to this report.
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Mo Yan Wins Nobel Literature Prize
By ALAN COWELL
Published: October 11, 2012 20 Comments
PARIS — The Swedish Academy announced on Thursday that it had awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature to Mo Yan, a Chinese author who was said to be “overjoyed and scared” when the Nobel organizers contacted him to say he had won the coveted award.
“Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition,” the citation for the award declared, striking what seemed a careful balance after campaigns of vilification against other Chinese Nobel laureates.
While his American audience has been limited, a film based on his novel “Red Sorghum” and directed by Zhang Yimou, was one of the most internationally acclaimed Chinese films, seen by millions.
In addition to novels, Mo Yan has published short stories, essays on various topics, and “despite his social criticism is seen in his homeland as one of the foremost contemporary authors,” the citation said.
When the organizers contacted him, said Peter Englund, the secretary of the Swedish Academy, “he said he was overjoyed and scared,” The Associated Press reported, adding that China’s tightly controlled national television took the highly unusual step of breaking into a newscast to announce the award.
Mr. Mo was born in 1955 in Gaomi, China. The citation described him as a writer “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.”
The name Mo Yan is a pseudonym for Guan Moye. He is the son of farmers who left school during the Cultural Revolution to work, first in agriculture and later in a factory, according to his Nobel biography.
In 1976 he joined the People’s Liberation Army and began to study literature and write. His first short story was published in a literary journal in 1981, the biography on the Nobel Web site said.
“In his writing Mo Yan draws on his youthful experiences and on settings in the province of his birth,” the biography said, referring to his 1987 novel published in English as “Red Sorghum” in 1993.
His novel “The Garlic Ballads,” as it was called on its publication in English in 1995, and other works “have been judged subversive because of their sharp criticism of contemporary Chinese society.”
Other works include “Big Breasts and Wide Hips” (1996), “Life and Death are Wearing Me Out” (2006) and “Sandalwood Death,” to be published in English in 2013. His most recent published work, called “Wa” in Chinese (2009) “illuminates the consequences of China’s imposition of a single-child policy.”
Mr. Mo was one of three writers tipped by bookmakers to break what critics had seen as a preponderance of European winners over the past decade.
The prize is worth 8 million Swedish kronor, about $1.2 million.
Since 1901, 104 Nobel literature prizes have been awarded, the most recent to Tomas Transtromer, a Swedish poet, whose more than 15 collections of poetry, the academy said last year, offered “condensed, translucent images” through which “he gives us fresh access to reality.”
The Japanese author Haruki Murakami had been tipped by bookmakers as the most likely winner, but the panel selecting the winner prides itself on its inscrutability, keeping its deliberations secret for 50 years.
The last American writer to win a Nobel in literature was Toni Morrison in 1993. Philip Roth has been a perennial favorite but has not been selected.
Nobel committees have announced prizes so far this week in physics, chemistry and medicine. The 2012 Nobel Peace laureate is to be named on Friday by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, and the prize in economics is to be announced on Monday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
2 Americans win Nobel econ prize for match-making
Oct 15, 12:15 PM EDT
By KARL RITTER and LOUISE NORDSTROM Associated Press
STOCKHOLM (AP) -- Two American scholars were awarded the Nobel economics prize on Monday for studies on the match-making that takes place when doctors are coupled up with hospitals, students with schools and human organs with transplant recipients.
The work of Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley has sparked a "flourishing field of research" and helped improve the performance of many markets, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
Roth, 60, is a professor at Harvard Business School, but currently is a visiting professor at Stanford University. Shapley, 89, is a professor emeritus at University of California Los Angeles.
Shapley learned that he and Roth had won the $1.2 million award from an Associated Press photographer and another journalist who went to his home in Los Angeles early Monday.
"I consider myself a mathematician and the award is for economics," Shapley told AP by telephone. "I never, never in my life took a course in economics."
Citing "the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design," the award focused on the problem of matching different agents in a market in situations where prices aren't the deciding factor.
Shapley made early theoretical inroads into the subject, using game theory to analyze different matching methods in the 1950s and `60s. Together with U.S. economist David Gale, he developed a mathematical formula for how 10 men and 10 women could be coupled in a way so that no two people would prefer each other over their current partners.
While that may have had little impact on marriages and divorces, the algorithm they developed has been used to better understand many different markets.
In the 1990s, Roth applied it to the market for allocating U.S. student doctors to hospitals. He developed a new algorithm that was adopted by the National Resident Matching Program, which helps match resident doctors with the right hospitals.
He also helped redesign the application process of New York City public high schools, ensuring that fewer students ended up in schools that were not among their top choices.
Similar formulas have been applied to efforts to match kidneys and other human organs to patients needing a transplant, the academy said.
Roth was in California with his wife when he got the call from the prize committee at 3:30 a.m.
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"We missed the first call because we were asleep, but we had time to wake up and think that might be what it was," he told The Associated Press. "My wife is going to go out and get us some coffee, and maybe we'll absorb it."
He said he didn't expect things to change too much, and that he would teach a class at Stanford on Monday.
"But I imagine that they'll be listening with renewed interest," he said. "I think this will make market design more visible to economists and people who can benefit from market design."
Shapley is the son of renowned astronomer Harlow Shapley, whose work early in the 20th century included helping estimate the true size of the Milky Way galaxy.
"Now, I'm ahead of my father," Shapley said. "He got other prizes ... But he did not get a Nobel prize."
David Warsh, who follows academic economists on his Economic Principals blog, says Roth's work has revolutionized the way organs are matched to patients. Before Roth, he says, "there were no economists in that business at all. He's really changed it, and saved a lot of lives."
Prize committee member Peter Gardenfors said the winners' work could also be applied to other areas, such as allocating housing to students or refugees.
"There are economic problems that can't be solved with normal market mechanisms," Gardenfors said. "With these matchings there is no money involved so the main thing is to follow what kind of preferences people have - who wants to be matched with whom - and find a good solution to that."
The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was the last of the 2012 Nobel awards to be announced.
It's not technically a Nobel Prize, because unlike the five other awards it wasn't established in the will of Alfred Nobel, a Swedish industrialist also known for inventing dynamite.
The economics prize was created by the Swedish central bank in Nobel's memory in 1968, and has been handed out with the other prizes ever since.
Last year's economics prize went to U.S. economists Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims for describing the cause-and-effect relationship between the economy and government policy.
The 2012 Nobel Prizes in medicine, physics chemistry and literature and the Nobel Peace Prize were announced last week. All awards will be handed out on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.
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AP Economics Writer Paul Wiseman in Washington D.C., AP writers Jay Lindsay in Boston and Robert Jablon in Los Angeles, and AP photographer Reed Saxon in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
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Saint Lucia (French: Sainte-Lucie) is a sovereign island country
Two Nobel laureates, Arthur Lewis, an economist, and Derek Walcott, a poet and playwright, have come from the island. It is the nation with the second most such honorees per capita after the Faroe Islands.
Ｉｔ is in the eastern Caribbean Sea on the boundary with the Atlantic Ocean. Part of the Lesser Antilles, it is located north/northeast of the island of Saint Vincent, northwest of Barbados and south of Martinique. It covers a land area of 617 km2 (238.23 sq mi) and has a population of 174,000 (2010). Its capital is Castries.
Three U.S. Economists Win Nobel Prize
by Associated Press
October 14, 2013 7:29 AM
Americans Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert Shiller won the Nobel prize for economics on Monday for developing new methods to study trends in asset markets.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the three had laid the foundation of the current understanding of asset prices.
While it's hard to predict whether stock or bond prices will go up or down in the short term, it's possible to foresee movements over periods of three years or longer, the academy said.
"These findings, which might seem surprising and contradictory, were made and analyzed by this year's laureates," the academy said.
Fama, 74, and Hansen, 60, are associated with the University of Chicago. Shiller, 67, is a professor at Yale University.
American researchers have dominated the economics awards in recent years; the last time there was no American among the winners was in 1999.
The Nobel committees have now announced all six of the annual $1.2 million awards for 2013.
The economics award is not a Nobel Prize in the same sense as the medicine, chemistry, physics, literature and peace prizes, which were created by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel in 1895. Sweden's central bank added the economics prize in 1968 as a memorial to Nobel.
2 Japanese, 1 American win Nobel Prize in physics
Japan's Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura of the U.S. won the 2014 Nobel Prize for physics for inventing a new energy efficient and environmentally friendly light source, the LED, the award-giving body said on Tuesday.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS / Published: Tuesday, October 7, 2014, 6:37 AM / Updated: Tuesday, October 7, 2014, 6:38 AMA.
Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano of Japan and U.S. scientist Shuji Nakamura won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for the invention of blue light-emitting diodes — a new energy efficient and environment-friendly light source.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the invention is just 20 years old, "but it has already contributed to create white light in an entirely new manner to the benefit of us all."
Akasaki, 85, is a professor at Meijo University and distinguished professor at Nagoya University. Amano, 54, is also a professor at Nagoya University, while the 60-year-old Nakamura is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
The laureates triggered a transformation of lighting technology when they produced bright blue light from semiconductors in the 1990s, something scientist had struggled with for decades, the Nobel committee said.
Using the blue light, LED lamps emitting white light could be created in a new way.
"As about one fourth of world electricity consumption is used for lighting purposes, the LEDs contribute to saving the Earth's resources," the committee said.
Nakamura, who spoke to reporters in Stockholm over a crackling telephone line after being woken up by the phone call from the prize jury, said it was an amazing, and unbelievable feeling.
On Monday, U.S.-British scientist John O'Keefe split the Nobel Prize in medicine with Norwegian couple May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser for breakthroughs in brain cell research that could pave the way for a better understanding of diseases like Alzheimer's.
The Nobel award in chemistry will be announced Wednesday, followed by the literature award on Thursday and the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. The economics prize will be announced next Monday, completing the 2014 Nobel Prize announcements.
Worth 8 million kronor ($1.1 million) each, the Nobel Prizes are always handed out on Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel's death in 1896. Besides the prize money, each laureate receives a diploma and a gold medal.
Nobel, a wealthy Swedish industrialist who invented dynamite, provided few directions for how to select winners, except that the prize committees should reward those who "have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind."
Last year's physics award went to Britain's Peter Higgs and Belgian colleague Francois Englert for helping to explain how matter formed after the Big Bang.
Grade Point
Yale keeps the Calhoun name despite racial concerns, but ditches the ‘master’ title
By Isaac Stanley-Becker April 27, 2016 at 11:49 PM The Washington Post
Pic=Students walk on the campus of Yale University in New Haven, Conn. (Reuters/Shannon Stapleton)
NEW HAVEN, Conn. ― Elisia Ceballo-Countryman, a Yale sophomore, predicted that falling asleep in her dormitory Wednesday night would feel “violent.”
That is because the residential college in which she lives will continue to bear the name of John C. Calhoun, an 1804 graduate of Yale College and an intellectual forefather of the Confederacy who famously defended slavery as a “positive good.”
The university has decided not to strip Calhoun’s name from the college, so named in the 1930s, though it will drop the title “master” used for the faculty members who head Yale’s residential communities, following similar moves at Princeton and Harvard. Yale will also name its two new residential colleges, set to open in the fall of 2017, after Benjamin Franklin, the inventor and founding father, and Anna Pauline Murray, a lawyer and civil rights activist and the first black woman ordained as a priest in the Episcopalian church.
The decisions, announced in a Wednesday email from University President Peter Salovey, mark the latest chapter in a searing campus debate over names and symbols that appear to some as relics of white supremacy. The debate reached a fever pitch last fall, when incidents unrelated to the names ― involving a fraternity party and Halloween attire ― touched off protest among minority students who charged their university with treating them as second-class citizens.
As Salovey told aggrieved students in November that the university had “failed” them, the Ivy League school became one of a number of colleges and universities swept up in a national reckoning with racial inequities that have persisted in spite of formal equality. Where the fallout elsewhere unseated high-level university administrators, with the president and chancellor of the University of Missouri stepping down, Salovey responded quickly with a set of promises, including a renewed focus on faculty diversity and the creation of an academic center focusing on race and ethnic studies.
Pic=Yale University students and faculty rallied in November to demand that the New Haven, Conn., school become more inclusive to all students in New Haven, Conn. (Arnold Gold/New Haven Register via AP)
For months, however, the issue of the names, and the title “master,” remained unresolved, decisions belonging to the Yale Corporation, the university’s governing body. Salovey reported the decisions of that body, of which he is a member, in his university-wide announcement on Wednesday.
He said banishing Calhoun’s name would have been a disservice to Yale’s teaching mission, a move, he said, “that might allow us to feel complacent or, even, self-congratulatory” while hindering an honest reckoning with the past.
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“Retaining the name forces us to learn anew and confront one of the most disturbing aspects of Yale’s and our nation’s past,” Salovey wrote. “I believe this is our obligation as an educational institution.”
Calhoun College, long a subject of disagreement owing to the legacy of its namesake, came under renewed scrutiny last summer, following the murder in Charleston, S.C., of nine black churchgoers by a man who exalted Confederate symbols. While the Confederate battle flag came down from capitol grounds in South Carolina, a petition at Yale calling for the renaming of Calhoun College has drawn more than 15,000 signatures. A raft of alternatives were offered ― names as disparate as Frederick Douglass, the self-taught abolitionist, and Roosevelt Thompson, a model student who died in the spring of his senior year at Yale.
Meanwhile, the title of “master” came to the fore last summer when Stephen Davis, a scholar of religious studies who heads Yale’s Pierson College, wrote in an email to the Pierson community that he wished not to be addressed as “master.”
“I think there should be no context in our society or in our university in which an African-American student, professor, or staff member ― or any person, for that matter ― should be asked to call anyone ‘master,’” Davis wrote in August 2015, drawing praise from those who said the title unnerved them and disparagement from some who said the title was simply borrowed from Oxford and Cambridge, where it bore no relationship to the system of chattel slavery that now colors American perception of the word.
Yale’s peer institutions moved more quickly to banish “master,” with Princeton changing the title to “head of college” in November 2015 and Harvard opting for “faculty dean” in February of this year. Yale will change the title to “head of college,” Salovey wrote. While the honorific derives from the Latin word magister, the title, Salovey acknowledged, “carries a painful and unwelcome connotation.” He said on a call with reporters Wednesday evening that the title serves no educational purpose, and was therefore worth eliminating.
But keeping the name of Calhoun College, Salovey wrote in his email, represents a “vital educational imperative” ― the pursuit of a more thorough engagement with the past. He said the university would be looking for new means of highlighting Yale’s history, describing an “interactive history project” involving an examination of Calhoun’s legacy as well as “the lesser-known people, events, and narratives behind the familiar facades we see as we walk through the campus.”
Princeton’s Board of Trustees made a similar decision in voting to retain the name of Woodrow Wilson on campus buildings, after the former president’s legacy came under sharp attack.
At Princeton Wednesday, officials announced a change made in response to protests over race this fall: They will remove a wall-sized photograph of Woodrow Wilson from a dining hall, because of concerns some students raised that his legacy as a university and national leader was tarnished by his segregationist views.
Salovey said he sympathized with students who were troubled by the decision to keep Calhoun but suggested that “the more we confront and discuss issues that are deeply troubling to us, for example the issue of slavery, John C. Calhoun’s role in it, the more we can understand them, the more we can fight for a different kind of future than perhaps the one we’re experiencing now.”
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But Ceballo-Countryman, who is black and Latina, said the announcement reveals that the university’s attempts to engage with students following last semester’s protests were hollow.
“What I’m feeling right now is a deep state of mourning,” she said. “After they made students of color sit through a year of discussions, opening up about deep racial pain, they say we can’t change it. There’s no other way for me to interact with this university any more other than to be apathetic.”
The experience of living in Calhoun, she said, “has becoming increasingly violent.” She said she hopes to find a way to transfer to another residential college.
Others said Salovey’s reasoning resonated with them. Hasan Hanif, also a sophomore in Calhoun, said he saw little reason to erase names.
“Changing the name doesn’t make a difference,” Hanif said. “What matters is what you think about the larger issue.”
Dianne Lake, a senior who is black, said she noticed a “paradox” in the university’s decisions, which “moved one step forward” in honoring Murray but “one step, if not two steps, back” by naming the other new college after Franklin, who owned slaves, though he ultimately freed them.
Salovey said the suggestion of Franklin College came from a member of the Corporation, Charles B. Johnson, who considers the founding father a role model, according to Salovey. Johnson, former chairman of the investment firm Franklin Resources, made the new colleges possible in 2013 with a $250 million gift, the largest in Yale’s history.
“Charlie Johnson did not require that we name that college for anyone as a condition of his gift,” Salovey said Wednesday night. “He asked us when he made his gift ― and I really want you to remember that this is the largest single gift ever given to Yale ― he asked us to consider Benjamin Franklin as the namesake of a college.”
Lake said that naming the college for Franklin represents “another step into the past,” rather than moving into the future. Most vexing, she said, is the university’s strategic use of the past in defending Calhoun College. She said little has been done to educate students about Calhoun’s legacy ― and it is not clear to her how the new initiative will change that.
She said students troubled by the decisions were meeting to figure out a course of action, noting that the announcement came at “a strategically difficult time for students” ― right at the end of the semester. She said she still expected mobilization at some point.
A Yale Police officer was stationed outside of Calhoun Wednesday night, and said it was his understanding that an officer would be there through the night.
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世界のトップランクグループにいつも顔を出すハーバード大学。そのグループには日本の東大は入っていない。卒業生が世界を動かす大学だからこそ、その責任感や義務感も存在する。共和国アメリカを象徴する民主主義の理想を説き、広めたり、守ったり、その理想の実現のために、アメリカの大学の役割は大きい。大学の長い歴史や伝統を変える勇気と、そして現代にマッチした新たな伝統を築き上げようとする英知。凡人はそうした行為を高く評価する。
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Harvard Restrictions Could Reshape Exclusive Student Clubs, U.S.A
By STEPHANIE SAULMAY 6, 2016 The New York Times
Photo=Harvard University is imposing new restrictions on single-gender clubs, including all-male final clubs. Credit Charlie Mahoney for The New York Times
The all-male final clubs at Harvard University have long been bastions of money, power and privilege. But on Friday, 225 years after the oldest club was founded, the university announced restrictions on the organizations that could ultimately be their undoing, or at least drastically change their character by forcing them to become coed.
Starting with the class that enters Harvard in fall 2017, members of single-gender clubs will be prohibited from holding leadership positions on campus, according to a statement released by the university’s president, Drew G. Faust. Members will also be barred from receiving the official recommendations required for prestigious postgraduate fellowships and scholarships, such as the Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships, the statement said.
The new rules will apply not only to the six male final clubs, but also to other single-gender organizations, including five women’s final clubs and nine sororities and fraternities. An estimated 30 percent of undergraduates at Harvard belong to such clubs. Two other formerly male final clubs have already voted to admit women.
Two months ago, a sexual assault task force said the final clubs raised “serious concerns” that required attention from Harvard. Surveys conducted for the university, as well as interviews with undergraduate women, had found that some final clubs fostered an atmosphere of misogyny, sexual misconduct and entitlement.
Harvard is not the first university to take action against single-gender clubs. Fraternities and sororities were banned at Amherst College in 2014, and Wesleyan University announced that same year that it would require fraternities to be coed. Middlebury College is among several other small northeastern institutions that banned such clubs years ago.
Even so, with fraternities at a number of universities under fire as the focus of sexual misconduct complaints, the decision by Harvard could spur other colleges to restrict single-gender clubs.
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In announcing the decision, Dr. Faust described it as another step in Harvard’s efforts to become a “truly inclusive” community.
“Over time,” she said, “Harvard has transformed its undergraduate student body as it welcomed women, minorities, international students and students of limited financial means as an increasing proportion of its population. But the campus culture has not changed as rapidly as the student demography.”
The final clubs have a storied history at Harvard. Theodore Roosevelt was a member of the oldest, the Porcellian Club. Franklin D. Roosevelt was admitted to the Fly Club, also the choice of at least two Massachusetts governors. The Kennedy brothers ― John, Robert and Edward ― were final club members.
Tensions with Harvard dated back more than 30 years, when the male final clubs relinquished college benefits rather than admit women. Last year, aware of mounting pressure from the university, two of the clubs ― Fox and Spee ― voted to admit women.
Dr. Faust said last fall that she and Harvard College’s dean, Rakesh Khurana, were weighing various options to address exclusivity, sexual assault and alcohol abuse in the clubs. And in March, the administration delivered an ultimatum that the clubs should become coed by April 15.
In April, representatives of 13 groups, including the six all-male final clubs, met with Harvard administrators, who had also considered banning the clubs altogether.
That same day, the president of the Porcellian Club’s alumni group, Charles M. Storey, wrote in a letter to The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, “Forcing single-gender organizations to accept members of the opposite sex could potentially increase, not decrease, the potential for sexual misconduct.”
In addition to criticizing many of them as centers of sexual misconduct, the March 8 report issued by the Task Force on the Prevention of Sexual Assault said the male final clubs perpetuated a class divide on campus.
The clubs are “imbued with a certain historical tradition that elevates members’ social status on campus,” creating an aura of sexual entitlement, the report said. “A woman’s physical appearance is often seen as the basis for entry to these spaces, and female students described a general expectation that entering final club spaces could be read as implicit agreement to have sexual encounters with members,” it said.
Male students who are not members are excluded from parties at many of the clubs, according to the report, enabling “a gender ratio that makes it easier for members to have a sexual encounter.”
Party themes and invitations have reflected misogynistic views and reinforced a sense of sexual entitlement, according to the report, which also pointed to “competitive games between members where a man will ‘win’ a particular woman or compete for the most sexual triumphs.”
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2017 Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded to LIGO Black Hole Researchers
By DENNIS OVERBYEOCT. 3, 2017 The New York Times
Science Out There By DENNIS OVERBYE, JONATHAN CORUM and JASON DRAKEFORD 4:36
LIGO Hears Gravitational Waves Einstein Predicted
About a hundred years ago, Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves, but until now, they were undetectable.
Rainer Weiss, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, both of the California Institute of Technology, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for the discovery of ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves, which were predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago but had never been directly seen.
In announcing the award, the Royal Swedish Academy called it “a discovery that shook the world.”
That shaking happened in February 2016, when an international collaboration of physicists and astronomers announced that they had recorded gravitational waves emanating from the collision of a pair of massive black holes a billion light years away, it mesmerized the world. The work validated Einstein’s longstanding prediction that space-time can shake like a bowlful of jelly when massive objects swing their weight around, and it has put astronomers on intimate terms with the deepest levels of physical reality, of a void booming and rocking with invisible cataclysms.
Why Did They Win?
Dr. Weiss, 85, Dr. Thorne, 77, and Dr. Barish, 81, were the architects and leaders of LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, the instrument that detected the gravitational waves, and of a sister organization, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, of more than a thousand scientists who analyzed the data.
Dr. Weiss will receive half of the prize of 9 million Swedish Krona, or more than $1.1 million, and Dr. Thorne and Dr. Barish will split the other half.
Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, pronounced in 1916, suggested that matter and energy would warp the geometry of space-time the way a heavy sleeper sags a mattress, producing the effect we call gravity. His equations described a universe in which space and time were dynamic. Space-time could stretch and expand, tear and collapse into black holes ― objects so dense that not even light could escape them. The equations predicted, somewhat to his displeasure, that the universe was expanding from what we now call the Big Bang, and it also predicted that the motions of massive objects like black holes or other dense remnants of dead stars would ripple space-time with gravitational waves.
These waves would stretch and compress space in orthogonal directions as they went by, the same way that sound waves compress air. They had never been directly seen when Dr. Weiss and, independently, Ron Drever, then at the University of Glasgow, following work by others, suggested detecting the waves by using lasers to monitor the distance between a pair of mirrors. In 1975, Dr. Weiss and Dr. Thorne, then a well-known gravitational theorist, stayed up all night in a hotel room brainstorming gravitational wave experiments during a meeting in Washington.
Dr. Thorne went home and hired Dr. Drever to help develop and build a laser-based gravitational-wave detector at Caltech. Meanwhile, Dr. Weiss was doing the same thing at M.I.T.
The technological odds were against both of them. The researchers calculated that a typical gravitational wave from out in space would change the distance between the mirrors by an almost imperceptible amount: one part in a billion trillion, less than the diameter of a proton. Dr. Weiss recalled that when he explained the experiment to his potential funders at the National Science Foundation, “everybody thought we were out of our minds.”
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The foundation, which would wind up spending $1 billion over the next 40 years on the project, ordered the two groups to merge, with a troika of two experimentalists, Drs. Weiss and Drever, and one theorist Dr. Thorne, running things. The plan that emerged was to build a pair of L-shaped antennas, one in Hanford, Wash., and the other in Livingston, La., with laser light bouncing along 2.5-mile-long arms in the world’s biggest vacuum tunnels to monitor the shape of space.
In 1987, the original three-headed leadership of Drs. Weiss, Drever and Thorne was abandoned for a single director, Rochus Vogt of Caltech. Dr. Drever was subsequently forced out of the detector project. But LIGO still foundered until Dr. Barish, a Caltech professor with a superb pedigree in managing Big Science projects, joined in 1994 and then became director. He reorganized the project so that it would be built in successively more sensitive phases, and he created a worldwide LIGO Scientific Collaboration of astronomers and physicists to study and analyze the data. “The trickiest part is that we had no idea how to do what we do today,” he commented in an interview, giving special credit to the development of an active system to isolate the laser beams and mirrors from seismic and other outside disturbances.
“Without him there would have been no discovery,” said Sheldon Glashow, a Nobel Prize-winning theorist now at Boston University.
The most advanced version of LIGO had just started up in September 2015 when the vibrations from a pair of colliding black holes slammed the detectors in Louisiana and Washington with a rising tone, or “chirp,” for a fifth of a second.
Welcome to the place of no return ― a region in space where the gravitational pull is so strong that not even light can escape it. This is a black hole.
It was also the opening bell for a whole new brand of astronomy. Since then LIGO (recently in conjunction with a new European detector, Virgo) has detected at least four more black hole collisions, opening a window on a new, unsuspected class of black holes, and rumors persist of even more exciting events in the sky.
“Many of us really expect to learn about things we didn’t know about,” Dr. Weiss said this morning.
Who Are the Winners?
Dr. Weiss was born in Berlin in 1932 and came to New York by way of Czechoslovakia in 1939. As a high school student, he became an expert in building high-quality sound systems and entered M.I.T. intending to major in electrical engineering. He inadvertently dropped out when he went to Illinois to pursue a failing romance. After coming back, he went to work in a physics lab and wound up with a Ph.D. from M.I.T.
Dr. Thorne was born and raised in Logan, Utah, receiving a bachelor’s degree from Caltech and then a Ph.D. from Princeton under the tutelage of John Archibald Wheeler, an evangelist for Einstein’s theory who popularized the term black holes, and who initiated Dr. Thorne into their mysteries. “He blew my mind,” Dr. Thorne later said. Dr. Thorne’s enthusiasm for black holes is not confined to the scientific journals. Now an emeritus professor at Caltech, he was one of the creators and executive producers of the 2014 movie “Interstellar,” about astronauts who go through a wormhole and encounter a giant black hole in a search for a new home for humanity.
Dr. Barish was born in Omaha, Neb., was raised in Los Angeles and studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley, getting a doctorate there before joining Caltech. One of the mandarins of Big Science, he had led a team that designed a $1 billion detector for the giant Superconducting Supercollider, which would have been the world’s biggest particle machine had it not been canceled by Congress in 1993, before being asked to take over LIGO.
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Subsequently, Dr. Barish led the international effort to design the International Linear Collider, which could be the next big particle accelerator in the world, if it ever gets built.
Reached by telephone by the Nobel committee, Dr. Weiss said that he considered the award as recognition for the work of about a thousand people over “I hate to say it ― 40 years.”
He added that when the first chirp came on Sept. 14, 2015, “many of us didn’t believe it,” thinking it might be a test signal that had been inserted into the data. It took them two months to convince themselves it was real.
In an interview from his home, Dr. Thorne said that as the resident theorist and evangelist on the project he felt a little embarrassed to get the prize. “It should go to all the people who built the detector or to the members of the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration who pulled off the end game,” he said.
“An enormous amount of rich science is coming out of this,” he added. “For me, an amazing thing is that this has worked out just as I expected when we were starting out back in the 80s. It blows me away that it all come out as I expected.”
Dr. Barish said he had awoken at 2:41 am in California and when the phone didn’t ring he figured he hadn’t won. Then it rang. “It’s a combination of being thrilled and humbled at the same time, mixed emotions,” he said. “This is a team sport, it gets kind of subjective when you have to pick out individuals.” LIGO, he said, is very deserving. “We happen to be the individuals chosen by whatever mechanism.”
For the National Science Foundation, the Nobel was a welcome victory lap for an investment of 40 years and about $1 billion. In a news release, France Córdova, the foundation’s director, said: “Gravitational waves contain information about their explosive origins and the nature of gravity that cannot be obtained from other astronomical signals. These observations have created the new field of gravitational wave astronomy.”
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Kazuo Ishiguro Is Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature
By ALEXANDRA ALTER and DAN BILEFSKYOCT. 5, 2017 The New York Times
As a young man, Kazuo Ishiguro wanted to be a singer and songwriter. He played at folk clubs and went through several stylistic evolutions ― including a purple, poetic phase ― before settling into spare, confessional lyrics.
He never succeeded in the music business, but writing songs helped shape the idiosyncratic, elliptical prose style that made him one of the most acclaimed and influential British writers of his generation. “That was all very good preparation for the kind of fiction I went on to write,” Mr. Ishiguro said in a 2015 interview with The New York Times. “You have to leave a lot of meaning underneath the surface.”
Mr. Ishiguro went on to publish seven acclaimed novels, and on Thursday, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the literary world’s highest honor.
Mr. Ishiguro, 62, is best known for his novels “The Remains of the Day,” about a butler serving an English lord in the years leading up to World War II, and “Never Let Me Go,” a melancholy dystopian love story set in a British boarding school. He has obsessively returned to the same themes in his work, including the fallibility of memory, mortality and the porous nature of time. His body of work stands out for his inventive subversion of literary genres, his acute sense of place and his masterly parsing of the British class system.
“If you mix Jane Austen and Franz Kafka then you have Kazuo Ishiguro in a nutshell, but you have to add a little bit of Marcel Proust into the mix,” said Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy.
Ms. Danius described Mr. Ishiguro as “a writer of great integrity.”
“He doesn’t look to the side,” she said. “He has developed an aesthetic universe all his own.”
At a news conference at his London publisher’s office on Thursday, Mr. Ishiguro was characteristically self-effacing, saying that the award was a genuine shock. “If I had even a suspicion, I would have washed my hair this morning,” he said.
He added that when he thinks of “all the great writers living at this time who haven’t won this prize, I feel slightly like an impostor.”
In a career that spans some 35 years, Mr. Ishiguro has gained wide recognition for his stark, emotionally restrained prose. His novels are often written in the first person, with unreliable narrators who are in denial about truths that are gradually revealed to the reader. The resonance in his plots often comes from the rich subtext ― the things left unsaid, and gaps between the narrator’s perception and reality.
The Canadian novelist Michael Ondaatje, the author of “The English Patient,” said he was “thrilled” by the academy’s choice. “He is such a rare and mysterious writer, always surprising to me, with every book,” he wrote in an email.
Born in 1954 in Nagasaki, Japan, the son of an oceanographer, Mr. Ishiguro moved to Surrey, England, when he was 5 years old, and attended Woking County Grammar School, a school that he told The Guardian was “probably the last chance to get a flavor of a bygone English society that was already rapidly fading.”
Mr. Ishiguro discovered literature as a young boy when he came upon Sherlock Holmes stories in the local library. “I was around 9 or 10, and I not only read obsessively about Holmes and Watson, I started to behave like them. I’d go to school and say things like: ‘Pray, be seated’ or ‘That is most singular,’ he said in an interview with The Times Book Review. “People at the time just put this down to my being Japanese.”
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After studying English and philosophy at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, he spent a year writing fiction, eventually gaining a Master of Arts in creative writing, and studied with writers like Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter.
Mr. Ishiguro stood out early among the literary crowd. In 1983, he was included in Granta magazine’s best of young British writers list, joining luminaries such as Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie.
He published his first novel, “A Pale View of Hills,” about a middle-aged Japanese woman living in England, in 1982, and followed with “An Artist of the Floating World,” narrated by an elderly Japanese painter, set in post-World War II Japan.
His deep understanding of the social conventions and affectations of his adopted homeland shaped his third novel, “The Remains of the Day,” which won the Booker Prize and featured a buttoned-up butler, who was later immortalized in a film starring Anthony Hopkins. Mr. Ishiguro, who writes his first drafts by hand, later said he had written the book in four weeks in a feverish rush.
When he published “The Remains of the Day,” Mr. Ishiguro worried that he was repeating himself by writing another first-person novel with an unreliable narrator, but critics saw the book as an extreme departure.
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“I was afraid that people would say, ‘Oh, it’s the same book again, about an old guy looking back over his life with regret when it’s too late to change things,’” he told The Times. “Instead, they were saying, ‘Your books are always set in Japan; this is a giant leap for you.’ I get this with almost every book.”
A literary iconoclast, Mr. Ishiguro has played with genres like detective fiction, westerns, science fiction and fantasy in his novels. Critics viewed “The Unconsoled,” a surreal, dreamlike novel about a pianist in an unnamed European city, as magical realism when it came out in 1995. “When We Were Orphans” was viewed as a detective novel. His 2005 novel, “Never Let Me Go,” was regarded as yet another stylistic leap into futuristic science fiction, although it was set in the 1990s.
His most recent novel, “The Buried Giant,” defied expectations once again. A fantasy story set in Arthurian Britain, the novel centers on an older couple, Axl and Beatrice, who leave their village in search of their missing son, and encounter an old knight. Though the story was a full-blown fantasy, with ogres and a dragon, it was also a parable that explored many of the themes that have preoccupied Mr. Ishiguro throughout his career, including the fragile nature of individual and collective memory.
In selecting Mr. Ishiguro, the Swedish Academy, which has been criticized in the past for using the prize to make a political statement, seemed to focus on pure literary merit.
The Nobel Prize in Literature is given in recognition of a writer’s entire body of work rather than a single title. Winners have included international literary giants like Saul Bellow, Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel García Márquez and Toni Morrison. In other years, the academy has selected obscure European writers whose work was not widely read in English, including the French novelist J. M. G. Le Clézio (2008), the Romanian-German writer Herta Müller (2009), the Swedish poet and translator Tomas Transtromer (2011) and the French novelist Patrick Modiano (2014).
Of the 114 winners who have received the prize since it was first awarded in 1901, 14 have been women.
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Recently, the academy has often overlooked novelists and poets in favor of writers working in unconventional forms. Last year, the prize went to the singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition,” a choice that infuriated some traditionalists. In 2015, the Nobel went to the Belarusian journalist and prose writer Svetlana Alexievich, who is known for her expansive oral histories, and in 2013, the Canadian short story writer Alice Munro won.
Mr. Ishiguro, the 29th English-language novelist to win the prize, stands out from some previous choices for his accessible prose style. In a rarity for writers, Mr. Ishiguro is beloved by critics and scholars and is commercially successful; his work is widely known and read, and has been adapted into feature films, and a television series in Japan. His novels have collectively sold more than 2.5 million copies in the United States.
“He’s got such an extraordinary range, and he writes with such restraint and control about some very big themes, about memory and the loss thereof, about war and love” said Sonny Mehta, the chairman and editor in chief of Alfred A. Knopf, who has worked with Mr. Ishiguro since his 1989 novel “The Remains of the Day.”
In an telephone interview on Thursday, Mr. Ishiguro, sounding flustered and stunned, said he was sitting at his kitchen table writing an email in his London home, where he lives with his wife Lorna, when the phone rang. It was his agent, who told him that the Nobel committee had announced his name. Then the BBC called, and a gaggle of journalists and photographers gathered in front of his door. “It was very embarrassing,” he said. “My neighbors probably thought I was a serial killer or something.”
Mr. Ishiguro seems to be in a prolific phase: He said he’s working on a new novel, and has several film adaptations of his books in the works, as well as a couple of theater projects.
“I’ve got a novel to finish, and it’s not an easy novel,” he said. “It’s going to be just as difficult to get on with it when the dust settles as it was before.”
Who else has won a Nobel this year?
■ Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for discoveries about the molecular mechanisms controlling the body’s circadian rhythm.
■ Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish received the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for the discovery of ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves.
■ Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for developing a new way to construct precise three-dimensional images of biological molecules.
Who won the 2016 Literature Nobel?
Bob Dylan, the poet laureate of the rock era who has sold millions of records with dense, enigmatic songwriting, was recognized with the award, an honor that elevated him into the company of T. S. Eliot, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison and Samuel Beckett.
When will the other Nobels be announced?
Two more will be awarded in the days to come:
■ The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday in Norway. Read about last year’s winner, President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia.
■ The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science will be announced on Monday, in Sweden. Read about last year’s winners, Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmstrom.
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Liam Stack, Iliana Magra and Des Shoe contributed reporting from London. Motoko Rich contributed reporting from Tokyo.
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