Pericles Lewis

From Leader of Prestigious Yale Program Resigns, Citing Donor Pressure by Jennifer Schuessler.  A lot of column inches for a pretty standard story.  The rub seems to be that Yale established a prestigious and widely admired program twenty years ago with a fairly clear remit about training leaders in real world international relations (business and political) grounded in experience and in the classics.  The program was funded to the tune of a quarter of a billion dollars by the donors.

The most recent program leader apparently has started to take the program in a social justice direction (or social movement in the article's terminology) contrary to the original vision of the program and the wishes of the donors.  

She has resigned her position in protest of the University sticking with the original remit of the program.  Her complaint, in my interpretation, is that her desire to make the University more ideologically homogeneous outweighs the University's desire to maintain some diversity of thinking.  

All of which is ordinary University inside ball save for the wonderful name of the university’s vice president for global strategy and vice provost for academic initiatives who administers the program.  He is Dr. Pericles Lewis.  

I have the feeling that the habit of naming for classical figures has declined but I cannot document that that is the case.  I remember perhaps the my first encounter with such naming practices when I read about Confederate General Leonidas Polk when I was perhaps twelve years old.  What a magnificent moniker.  Almost as good as Pericles Lewis.