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KU Endowment board elects 6 new trustees
LAWRENCE — At the KU Endowment Board of Trustees’ Annual Meeting on Oct. 27, six new trustees were elected: Stephonn Alcorn of New York City; William W. Humphrey III (Trey) of Mission Hills; Schalie A. Johnson of Kansas City, Missouri; Allison Long of Lawrence; Winifred Pinet (Win) of Plymouth, Michigan; and Abbey Rupe of Salina. Each new trustee brings a wealth of experience to the board.
Paper shows story of legal heroes solving crisis of 1929 stock market crash was a myth
LAWRENCE — A University of Kansas School of Law professor has published new work on the “lost history” of mandatory disclosure, contradicting the common origin story of how the U.S. government began regulating business in the years following the stock market crash of 1929. “Early on, I realized there was something essential that was missing from the standard version of the origin story. Everyone has a picture in their mind about how this all started, and the picture just isn’t correct,” said author Alex Platt.
Author details how Czechs overlaid politics onto Mozart
LAWRENCE – Even though Mozart lived mostly in Vienna and only visited Prague four times, German- and Czech-speaking residents of Prague have fought over his legacy ever since, trying to make it support their nationalistic beliefs. A University of Kansas professor of musicology demonstrates how it happened in his new book, “Mozart’s Operas and National Politics: Canon Formation in Prague from 1791 to the Present” (Cambridge University Press).
Full stories below.
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Contact: Michelle Keller, KU Endowment, 785-832-7336, [email protected]; @KUEndowment
KU Endowment board elects 6 new trustees
LAWRENCE — At the KU Endowment Board of Trustees’ Annual Meeting on Oct. 27, six new trustees were elected: Stephonn Alcorn of New York City; William W. Humphrey III (Trey) of Mission Hills; Schalie A. Johnson of Kansas City, Missouri; Allison Long of Lawrence; Winifred Pinet (Win) of Plymouth, Michigan; and Abbey Rupe of Salina. Each brings a wealth of experience to the board. Brief bios of the new trustees follow.
Stephonn Alcorn
Stephonn Alcorn was student body president at KU and graduated in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in finance. While serving as president, he created and launched the Summer Venture in Business program, a pre-college summer academy for underrepresented students in high school and/or potential first-generation college students who are interested in business. Nearly 200 students have participated in the program, with many electing to attend KU.
Alcorn lives in New York, where he is a vice president at the Blackstone Group, managing investments in affordable housing. He is currently studying for his master’s degree in urban planning at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. Most recently, Alcorn served as the associate director for racial justice & equity in the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris White House Domestic Policy Council, where he helped drive the formulation and implementation of the president’s equity agenda. Alcorn began his career at the Blackstone Group in 2017. He serves on the board of directors of Urban Pathways, a leading provider of transitional and permanent supportive housing in New York.
William Humphrey III
William Humphrey III (Trey) received his bachelor’s degree in business administration from KU in 1987 and a Juris Doctor from the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 1990. He and his wife, Bethany, reside in Mission Hills, and their three children all graduated from KU: Billy in 2019, Elena in 2020 and Kate in 2023. Humphrey is chief legal officer at Lockton, where he leads a robust, global legal team. An essential part of Lockton since 2000, he previously served as executive vice president and group general counsel and secretary and has played a crucial role in managing the company’s legal affairs in an increasingly complex business environment. Humphrey serves on the board of directors of several organizations, including the Police Foundation of Kansas City, KC Common Good and the Kansas Alpha of Phi Delta Theta Education Foundation.
Schalie Johnson
Schalie Johnson earned a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies from Connecticut College in 2003 and a Juris Doctor from KU in 2006, where she received honors in trial advocacy. She and her husband reside in Kansas City, Missouri. Johnson is a partner at Wallace Saunders and is a member of the Kansas City Metropolitan Bar Association, the Missouri Bar Association, the Johnson County Bar Association and the Kansas Bar Association. She is a member of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce and the Central Exchange. Johnson serves on the KU School of Law’s board of governors, an alumni group dedicated to advancing the intellectual and material development, growth and continued excellence of KU Law.
Allison Long
Allison Long is a third-generation Jayhawk originally from McPherson. Long, a CPA and 1985 graduate of the KU School of Business, she and her husband, Jeff, returned to Lawrence in 2012 following his Air Force career. She has held positions at KU Endowment in accounting and human resources and currently serves as the senior vice president for administration, chief operating officer and secretary.
Winifred Pinet
Winifred Pinet (Win) received a bachelor’s degree in English in 1980 and an MBA in 1982, both from KU. She also has a certified treasury professional (CTP) designation and a certificate in sustainability management from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Pinet resides in Plymouth, Michigan. She is president and CEO of Sycamore Associates and has more than 25 years of experience in capital structure, treasury, risk management and environment, social and governance (ESG) investing. Prior to forming Sycamore in 1999, Pinet enjoyed a career in corporate banking. She is co-chair of KU’s College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Advisory Board and has served on the KU School of Business board and national KU Alumni Association board.
Abbey Rupe
Abbey Rupe earned a bachelor’s degree in microbiology from KU in 2001 and a medical degree from the KU School of Medicine-Wichita in 2005. During her medical education, Rupe was inducted into the prestigious Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Society. She completed her residency in pediatrics at the KU School of Medicine-Wichita and served as chief resident during her third year. Rupe and her husband, Chris Rupe, a fourth-generation KU graduate, reside in Salina with their two teenage children. She is a faculty pediatrician at Salina Family Healthcare Center, where she helps train family medicine residents for future practice in rural Kansas through the Smoky Hill Family Medical Residency Program. She is an active member of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the Kansas chapter of the AAP and the Saline County Medical Society. She also serves on the Sports Medicine Advisory Board for the Kansas State High School Activities Association.
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Contact: Mike Krings, KU News Service, 785-864-8860, [email protected], @MikeKrings
Paper shows story of legal heroes solving crisis of 1929 stock market crash was a myth
LAWRENCE — Origin stories are powerful. From the Book of Genesis to Peter Parker’s fateful encounter with a radioactive spider, people draw a special kind of meaning and identity from these “founding” narratives. In the world of corporate finance, the birth of mandatory disclosure looms especially large: In the years after the stock market crash of 1929, Franklin D. Roosevelt brought a team of Ivy League lawyers down to D.C. to help rein in Wall Street; the mandatory corporate disclosure system they invented has provided the foundation of government regulation of business ever since.
Just one problem: That’s not what happened.
Alex Platt, associate professor of law at KU, has a new paper uncovering what he calls the “lost history” of mandatory disclosure. While conventional accounts focus on the drafting and enactment of securities laws by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s team of legal eagles, Platt’s “revisionist history” looks past the law on the books to the details of how the system was implemented. He found that the real administration of mandatory disclosure in the 1930s departed from and even contradicted the law.
Many know the names Franklin Roosevelt, Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter and James Landis. But Baldwin Bane? Not so much. According to Platt, though, this obscure civil servant played a critical role in the founding of securities regulation and deserves broader recognition.
In July 1933, with the new securities law set to take effect, Bane was in charge of administering it. Companies for the first time had to file a disclosure document with the government 20 days before selling stock to the public. If the disclosure had “material” deficiencies, the government could block the stock sale by filing an administrative enforcement action before the window closed.
When this carefully crafted statutory system was finally set to be implemented, Bane found himself in a quandary. On the very first day, Bane and his small staff received about a hundred separate disclosure filings. And, upon review, all of the filings were materially deficient.
Bane knew that pursuing formal enforcement actions against all 100 companies (as the statute directed) was infeasible, given his small staff. So he came up with a workable alternative: He told his staff to write letters to all of the companies, advising them of the problems the staff identified, inviting amendments and threatening formal action in the event of noncompliance.
This “deficiency letter” system took off; going forward, virtually all companies filing disclosures received one or more of these letters – and virtually none received the formal enforcement actions contemplated by the law. The effect, Platt said, was nothing less than transformative.
For instance, because of delays built into the back-and-forth of the letter-writing process, the majority of stock offerings were delayed far beyond the 20 days contemplated by the statute. And instead of the government conducting only a “preliminary review” of disclosures for obvious problems as Congress had envisioned, the agency conducted what it described as a “careful and critical” analysis of every statement.
Bane invented the system and oversaw its implementation for several decades as a civil servant. To this day, companies looking to go public must go through the same deficiency letter process that Bane invented 90 years ago.
Platt told the story in a newly released paper, also forthcoming in the Journal of Corporation Law. Platt first encountered deficiency letters as a practicing lawyer and started looking into the history of the system while he was teaching at Harvard Law School. Over time, Platt pulled together sources from many archival collections, including those at Harvard University, Columbia University, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Washington & Lee (Bane’s alma matter) and others.
“Early on, I realized there was something essential that was missing from the standard version of the origin story. Everyone has a picture in their mind about how this all started, and the picture just isn’t correct,” Platt said. “Brandeis, Frankfurter, Landis and other elite lawyer intellectuals tend to get all the credit. Bane was a humble civil servant, but he had a tremendous effect.”
Bane’s decision to abandon the statutory system also changed the essential character of the regime. The statute had been drafted by acolytes of Brandeis and reflected his regulatory philosophy: The government would maintain an adversarial relationship with business, making rules and suing those who violated them, with an emphasis on transparency. Bane’s system, by contrast, created a cozier interdependent relationship between government and business, effectively inviting elite securities professionals into the regulatory process.
“By drawing these accountants, lawyers and bankers into the regulation structure, Bane moved this system away from the pure Brandeisian model and closer to the rival corporatist model,” Platt said. “Under Bane’s system, it’s really government and industry working together to produce these disclosures.”
The paper, which was recently featured on the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, calls on readers to reconsider and think critically about history. Platt said that policymakers like current SEC Chair Gary Gensler frequently call back to the origins of the regime in the 1930s to explain or justify current actions.
“If people are using the origin story to try to legitimize something they are doing today, what does it mean if we find out the origin story they are pointing us to is really more of an origin myth?” Platt said.
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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman
Author details how Czechs overlaid politics onto Mozart
LAWRENCE – Even though Mozart lived mostly in Vienna and only visited Prague four times, German- and Czech-speaking residents of Prague have fought over his legacy ever since, trying to make it support their nationalistic beliefs.
Martin Nedbal demonstrates how it happened in his new book, “Mozart’s Operas and National Politics: Canon Formation in Prague from 1791 to the Present” (Cambridge University Press).
“The main point of the book is that art is always political,” said the University of Kansas associate professor of musicology. “A lot of the concepts that we believe are based on artistic merit, such as the idea that there is a group of masterpieces by master composers that are a part of the canon of Western art music, are actually grounded in political as opposed to aesthetic considerations.”
Mozart premiered his operas “Don Giovanni” in 1787 and “La clemenza di Tito” in 1791 in Prague’s Estates Theatre, and he stayed in the city for a few weeks during each of his visits.
Nedbal, a native of the Czech Republic, said Praguers have never forgotten.
“If you go to Prague and take any tour of the major sites, you will hear about Mozart frequently,” Nedbal said. “All the guides will tell you, ‘This is the house where Mozart lived. And this is the theatre where “Don Giovanni,” his most famous opera, was performed.’ And all of this is because Prague loved Mozart and Mozart loved Prague, and Prague is the most important Mozart city in the world.”
Nedbal wrote that Prague’s citizens issued varying claims to be the deepest and most authentic lovers of the great musical genius to assert one of three main identities:
· Bohemian, seeing themselves as belonging to the historical territory that forms the western part of today’s Czech Republic
· Czech
· German
“It’s a form of cultural appropriation,” Nedbal said.
He wrote that it was part of a campaign by these factions to distinguish themselves as the preeminent national group at a time of shifting political power. For instance, two separate, monumental theatres — one dedicated to Czech repertoire (the National) and the other to German (New German) — were established in Prague in the 1880s, each using performances of Mozart’s operas to emphasize their group’s enlightenment and cultural superiority.
Both the National Theatre and the former New German theatre, now the State Opera, remain standing, as does the Estates Theatre. But all the originally German theatre institutions have long since been in Czech hands.
“I am constantly reminded of the history of 19th century Central Europe by what is now happening in Ukraine,” Nedbal said. “You have this mixture between Ukrainians and Russians, and for a long time many people residing in Ukraine were not really sure which nation they belonged to.
“That is very similar to how it was in Bohemia in the 18th and early 19th centuries, where you had people who spoke Czech and German, but it didn’t really matter because most people viewed themselves as Bohemians. And all that changed in the 19th century, when it suddenly became important to decide whether someone is a Czech or a German. And then culture played a significant role in this identification.”
Nedbal said these tensions reached a peak in the aftermath of World War II, when hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans were expelled from what eventually became the Czech Republic.
And all the while, the forces behind this process of ethnic stratification used their love of Mozart to advance their causes, Nedbal wrote. The scholar said he used the COVID-19 lockdown to pore over the now digitized critical responses to Mozart’s premieres and productions in historical newspapers online. Nedbal compared production notes from different eras to see what sections of the operas were cut, how they were translated and how different generations of Czech and German critics explained the value of these works to their readers.
Not that Mozart intended any of this. But Nedbal said it’s less important, in many respects, what the composer intended than how his works were received.
“My claim,” Nedbal said, “is that this ‘monumental-ization’ and creating of the musical canon was related to nationalism, because in Central Europe these artworks of the past were important not just for their artistic merits but also because they somehow could be seen as connected to a national past and the cultural traditions of these ethnic groups that were being created in that time.”
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