Bolsheviks, Bombs, Ballet
When a disgruntled dancer threw sulfuric acid in the face of the Bolshoi Ballet’s director in January, Yvonne Howell, professor of Russian and international studies, saw a teachable moment.
Her course on Soviet culture is full of paradoxes and contradictions—the brutality of Bolshevism alongside scientific prowess and exquisite arts, for example—so she wasn’t surprised when the Russian police, who have a reputation for thuggishness, were asking about Bolshoi season tickets as they investigated the attack.
The course, focused on how people living within Soviet culture made sense of their own situation, tells students something about culture more broadly, said Howell.
Post-doctoral fellow Madison Moore, whose students analyze hybridity, performance, and strangeness in modern pop culture
“It makes sense that the systematic study of the construction of culture in any society automatically makes you aware of your own position vis-à-vis your own culture.”
Gaga for Gaga
Beware, students who are registering for the course the catalog calls “Lady Gaga.” Madison Moore, the post-doc from Yale teaching the course, openly admits it’s a bait-and-switch.
“It was an exercise in branding that shows how someone can be so famous that you can just put their name on something and it sells,” he said.
Lady Gaga is the cultural text for his course in critical thinking about pop and media culture through analysis of the complex issues of hybridity, performance, and strangeness. As his syllabus puts it, “If cultural theory took a hammer to pop phenomenon Lady Gaga and shattered her aura, what would the pieces contain?”
As his students are reading everyone from Camile Paglia to Roland Barthes and Mikhail Bakhtin, Moore is already planning another new course next semester with a more straightforward title: Nightlife as Artform.
Yum … love those veggies and they’ll love you
Practical biology and rolled-up sleeves combine in a new organic vegetable gardening certificate offered by the School of Professional and Continuing Studies. The six-course program covers everything from soils and composting to garden planning and plant biology, and adds two field trips and volunteer time in a community garden. For more information, go to spcs.richmond.edu/noncredit-online/sustainability and click “Certificates.”
“Top producer”
The Chronicle of Higher Education identified UR as a “top producer” of U.S. Fulbright Scholars, the nation’s flagship international educational exchange program. Next year, Fulbrights will sponsor faculty members in Brazil, India, and Mongolia. Richmond has produced 17 Fulbright Scholars since 2000, more than half of them since 2010.
“Fulfilling the Promise”
Last year, approximately 24,000 prospective students and their families wound their way through the woods and hills around campus to find the admission office in Brunet Hall.
A handsome new sign now marks UR’s presence steps from the Capitol in central Richmond. UR Downtown is home to law clinics, Bonner Center for Civic Engagement programs, and a café averaging four out of five stars in reviews on Yelp.com at press time.
That journey is set to change. A new front door to campus that combines admission and career services in a single, 56,000-square-foot center is among the four priorities of The Campaign for Richmond: Fulfilling the Promise, a $150 million fundraising campaign that students, faculty, alumni, trustees, donors, staff, and other members of the University community celebrated with a public kickoff in February.
The campaign’s priorities are an outgrowth of The Richmond Promise, building on a record of significant achievement and capitalizing on a trajectory that is bringing the University to a new level of distinction. From 2007 to 2012, undergraduate applications increased 54 percent, average SAT scores were up 22 points, and enrollment by undergraduate students of color and international students each more than doubled. University rankings have risen dramatically amid increasing national competition for students.
The campaign has four priorities:
• Creating UR Summer Fellowships to provide full-time undergraduates with access to a stipend to pursue the very best internship or research experience they can, in any field and in any part of the world.
• Building the Center for Admission and Career Services to strengthen UR’s ability to recruit the very best students and help launch their success after Richmond.
• Bolstering scholarship support to ensure that UR attracts the very best students from all backgrounds who will benefit most from the exceptional educational experience offered here.
• Enhancing the annual fund to increase undergraduate alumni participation to an ambitious 30 percent and to signal externally the high regard in which Richmond is held by those who have been shaped by it.
“The focus is students, with the goal of attracting the best students to Richmond and ensuring they fulfill their own promise,” said honorary campaign chair E. Claiborne Robins Jr., B’68, H’86.
The campaign will conclude in 2014 with the centennial celebration of the University’s move to its current campus and the establishment of Westhampton College.
For more information about the campaign’s goals, progress, and impact, go to promise.richmond.edu.
Leadership
Heroes come in many forms, from transitional teen idols (Justin Bieber) and unsung ancestors (the makers of fire) to some who lead with moral courage (Rosa Parks) and others who rise and fall with tragic self-destructiveness (Lance Armstrong).
In Heroic Leadership: An Influence Taxonomy of 100 Exceptional Individuals, professors Scott Allison and George Goethals profile 100 heroes as a way of offering a new conceptual framework for understanding the nature of heroic leadership.
Politics
A new study of our nation’s political landscape, New Directions in American Politics, could be subtitled, “observations from Richmond’s political science department.” The collection includes essays by Professor Dan Palazzolo and two of his former students: Sean Theriault, ’93, now on faculty at the University of Texas, and Joanne Miller, ’91, now on faculty at the University of Minnesota. In their essays, they analyze congressional policymaking, the limits of presidential power, and bipartisan dealmaking in an era of polarized political parties.
“Way different than physics class”
Ti-Ameny-Net, the mummy about whom we reported in the Fall 2012 issue, is back home in North Court. Her coffin, meanwhile, was on display during the spring semester in the Modlin Center as two students, classical studies major Janelle Sadarananda, ’13, (left) and chemistry major Mimi Hiebert, ’14, worked in public view every Friday to conserve it.
For months, the pair painstakingly swabbed the coffin’s surface with cotton swabs dipped in a cleaning solution, filled in cracks, and sealed exposed wood to ward off insects under the supervision of a private conservator from Colonial Williamsburg.
“My friends are tired of me talking about this, but not many undergraduates get to do something like this,” Hiebert said. “It’s way different than physics class.”
Lessons, plans
In 1973, the Supreme Court put the brakes on a judge’s plan to consolidate school districts in Richmond and its surrounding counties to remedy a history of segregation in public education. Desegregation proceeded within existing districts.
Forty years later, a report by the Civil Rights Project shows that racial segregation remains commonplace in the region’s schools, and economic segregation is increasing.
What’s to be done?
That was the question on the minds of attendees at a two-day conference hosted by the University’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies and Virginia Commonwealth University called “Looking Back, Moving Forward” that drew regional leaders, including several district superintendents.
Social science research makes obvious the links between diversity, equity, and educational opportunity; all students, majority and minority, benefit from a diverse educational environment. Less clear is what to do to achieve it.
“We have to articulate a motivation for change everyone can buy into,” newspaper columnist Michael Paul Williams, a Richmond-area middle schooler 40 years ago, said during one panel. “We’ve got to escape this pattern in Richmond because it has so obviously been to our detriment.”
Tom Shields, director of UR’s Center for Leadership in Education and an organizer of the conference, took heart that what had started “as a small conversation among four friends is now a communitywide discussion.” He promised to keep it going.
Join the conversation at spcs.richmond.edu/moving-forward/dialog.html.
Suite life
New construction fences in March signaled the start of two campus construction projects: a new suite-style residence hall next to South Court and new apartments in South Campus, both scheduled to open in summer 2014. The facilities, which will offer housing for approximately 225 students, are part of the first phase of the University’s 2011 Master Plan.
Deep roots
Lakeview Hall, built in 2007, is perched atop a slope overlooking Westhampton Lake and the woods beyond it. While studying the site for construction, Andrew McBride, UR’s associate vice president for facilities and University architect, kept his eye on an elm whose large limb hanging over a walkway reminded him of a giant bonsai.
“We went to some very special efforts to see that the tree stayed alive,” he said.
What careful planning preserved, nature took away in January when a snowstorm and soft ground toppled the elm and drew students from nearby residence halls into the night snow.
A photo of the fallen tree, taken by Conor Lemmon, ’16, drew more than two dozen comments on facebook.com/universityofrichmond. One from history major Dorothy Monroe Hill, W’44, showed it was no ordinary loss: “That tree must’ve been as old as I.”
Permanence, beauty
President Frederick W. Boatwright’s high expectations were evident as he planned UR’s move to Westhampton Lake nearly a century ago: “We shall need to plan for a great future and should build with due regard to both permanence and beauty.”
They built well. Three of UR’s oldest buildings—North Court, Ryland Hall, and Cannon Memorial Chapel—were added to the Virginia Landmarks Register in December.
From left: North Court, Cannon Memorial Chapel, and Ryland Hall
An innocent man
In 1977, a court convicted a Woodbridge, Va., man of abducting a woman and her two young sons at a rest stop in Prince William County. After some prison time, he left the state to start a new life.
They got the wrong guy.
That’s the conclusion Virginia’s Supreme Court made when it issued a writ of actual innocence in the case in March, an outcome supported by Virginia’s attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli.
The case succeeded, in part, because of the involvement of Richmond School of Law’s Institute for Actual Innocence, through which law students and institute director Mary Kelly Tate review cases for indications of factual innocence, often through new DNA testing, which is what conclusively cleared the Woodbridge man.
Actual innocence cases—as distinct from cases in which constitutional safeguards are at issue—are, politically speaking, “convergence issues,” said Tate. Unearthing wrongful convictions reveals both a public safety issue—a real perpetrator may still be out there—and a civil liberties issue as systemic failures contributing to the wrongful conviction come to light.
“This is an area where people of different ideological dispositions can meet, cooperate, and join forces,” Tate said.
Sticks: The drums of Westhampton woods
How many drummers does it take to celebrate Earth Day? This year, on this campus, the answer turned out to be nearly 100.
On April 21, a 99-person ensemble of musicians fanned out across the Greek Theatre and the wooded areas and paths along Westhampton Lake for a 90-minute production by Alaskan composer John Luther Adams called “Inuksuit.”
From tragedy, a legacy
Of the 15 bills Del. Jennifer McClellan, ’94, sponsored in the Virginia General Assembly this year, none hit closer to home for UR than HB 2211, which increased Virginia’s penalties for stalking.
The genesis of the bill was the murder of UR senior De’Nora Hill, whose ex-boyfriend stalked and killed her outside of her off-campus apartment in 2005. Campus advocacy followed, particularly by students in Women Involved in Living and Learning, that remained persistent through two failed attempts to pass the tougher penalties. A third attempt passed the General Assembly unanimously in February.
“These are people’s lives we’re talking about, people we love,” Hill’s mother, Becky Bieschke, told The Collegian. “Something needs to change.”
Quotable
“It’s much easier to have tacit collusion with just three airlines.”
— Robins School of Business instructor George Hoffer in a Feb. 14 story about the merger of American Airlines and US Airways in The New York Times
• • •
“My love story, loss of love, and love still there”—these
biographical threads wind their way through the eight-minute animated short L. City by visiting professor Sandro Del Rosario. An elegant homage to photography, the film received first place in the 2012 James River Shorts film festival.
See an excerpt of L. City and more of his work at
sandrodelrosario.com.
“Uncertainty is the reality for all of us, me included, at various times in our lives. Sometimes you feel like it’s the only reality in your life. But it is what makes us human; it’s what makes us honest and, hopefully, helpful to others.”
—Political science professor Rick Mayes speaking as part of Richmond’s Last lecture Series
• • •
“Before video games, society blamed rock ‘n’ roll for violence and bad behavior among young people. Before rock ‘n’ roll, we blamed television. Before television, movies. Before movies, mystery novels, which were once known as ‘penny dreadfuls.’ Before mystery novels, Shakespeare.”
—Kristin Bezio, an assistant professor in the Jepson School of Leadership Studies, in Christian Science Monitor
• • •
“This school invests a tremendous amount of time and money in making it possible for lower- and middle-income students to come here.”
—The Princeton Review, which again included UR on its annual list of “best value” institutions. Announcing the list on NBC’s Today show, publisher Robert Franek called the academic experiences offered by the schools on the list “amazing.”
• • •
“It’s not just my clips or résumé or anything physical I’ll take away from this school. It’s that mindset—the ‘of course I’m going to succeed, I just have to figure out how.’”
—Collegian opinion editor Abby Kloppenburg, ’13, in her final column Feb. 28. This summer, she will intern with Harper’s Bazaar.
