Year in review 1998 / OCTOBER

Film mogul Robert Redford traveled to campus at the beginning of the month to announce that in partnership with General Cinemas, he will open one of the first Sundance Cinemas in the Hamilton Village shopping center at 40th and Walnut streets. The six-to-eight screen, 40,000-square-foot complex will likely include a public meeting area, a "video library," child-care center, restaurant, bar, art gallery, jazz club and room for filmmakers to edit their footage. Across the street will be a multi-story parking garage with a specialty food market on the ground floor. A few days after Redford announced his arrival, Wharton School Dean Thomas Gerrity and and Law School Dean Colin Diver both announced independently that they would leave their current positions on June 30, 1999. Gerrity, who will have led Wharton for nine years when he steps down, plans to take a full-time professorship in Wharton's Management Department. Diver will continue to teach and research at the Law School after a decade as dean. Dining was also hard hit, although not by resignations. About 50 students broke into Stouffer Dining Commons and stole food, used its kitchen supplies and went into the building's administration and storage areas. But it was not just a month of loss. The University City District broke ground on its new headquarters at 3940-42 Chestnut Street. The $1.7 million project is scheduled to open next spring. The School of Arts and Sciences received a $10 million bequest from the late John Merriam, a 1931 Wharton School graduate. Merriam did not specify how his donation should be used, leaving it to the discretion of University administrators. In the latest turn in the tragic killing of first-year Wharton doctoral student Shannon Schieber in May, her family sued the City of Philadelphia and two police officers, claiming they failed to properly handle a 911 call that could have saved their daughter's life. Eugene Harrison and Yvette Stewart, two of the three people convicted in connection with the 1996 Vladimir Sled murder, were sentenced by a Philadelphia homicide judge. Harrison, who was convicted of robbery but not murder, received a seven-to-14 year sentence while Stewart got 15 to 30. Also, a jury convicted Larry Ray of the January attack of a Health System secretary in the Penn Tower Hotel. -- Seth Grossman