U.S. ARMY PHOTO/STAFF SGT. RUSSELL LEE KLIKA

June 28, 2006, Iraq. As the Humvee passed through the streets, Command Sgt. Maj. David Allard spotted the Taliban in their distinctive cloaks. Nothing unusual about that--yet something told Allard to look back. He shifted his weight forward and turned his head just in time to see the Taliban aim
the improvised explosive device. "Punch it!" David urged the driver. Seconds later the IED exploded right behind Allard, narrowly missing his spine.

April 24, 2008, Nashville. Command Sgt. Maj. David Allard rounds his ninth lap on Peabody College's tranquil green campus. Physical therapist Lisa Haack stops him mid-jog to check his vitals. Heart rate 140. Headache and dizziness at level 4. Cause for concern.

Same war, different fight.

An hour's drive northwest of Nashville, the sprawling Fort Campbell U.S. Army installation, which straddles the Tennessee-Kentucky line, is home to the 101st Airborne Division. Most of the division's 26,000 enlisted men and women are infantry. They are front-line soldiers, prime candidates for the signature injury of the U.S. war in Afghanistan and Iraq: traumatic brain injury as a result of improvised explosive devices.

An estimated 11 percent to 20 percent of returning U.S. combat troops suffer from traumatic brain injury (TBI). Soldiers on a tour of duty in Iraq may have experienced dozens of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and although not every blast injury is fatal, the residual damage is real.

It has been just more than one year since the Vanderbilt Bill Wilkerson Center's Pi Beta Phi Rehabilitation Institute saw its first patient with TBI as a result of an improvised explosive device detonated in Iraq. Vanderbilt is one among only a handful of civilian agencies across the country treating soldiers, and Fort Campbell has quickly come to depend on the expertise of Pi Beta Phi, which provides rehabilitation for neurological impairment with a special emphasis on traumatic brain injuries.

Fort Campbell has its own hospital, Blanchfield Army Community Hospital--but the 66-bed facility can offer nothing like the wealth of resources down the road at Vanderbilt. According to Sandra Schneider, director of the Pi Beta Phi Rehabilitation Institute (PBPRI), Fort Campbell initiated the partnership when it asked the Brain Injury Association of Tennessee what programs were available. The PBPRI is known for its strong brain injury program, which works with an array of specialty clinics like the Vanderbilt Sleep Disorders Center and the Vanderbilt Headache Clinic. In addition, PBPRI has on-campus resources in the Vanderbilt departments of neurology, trauma and internal medicine.

Now entering its third decade, the PBPRI has a long history of treating mild to severe brain injuries. But last year, in taking on this new group of patients with injuries unlike anything its therapists had seen before, the PBPRI was navigating uncharted territory.

"In April 2007 we started to receive our first referrals because there was nothing in place to treat them at Fort Campbell," says Schneider, who is also an associate professor of hearing and speech sciences. "Families and friends of the soldiers would say that their soldier just didn't seem the same. The soldiers themselves would complain of sleeplessness, headaches and dizziness. We knew we were seeing a new phenomenon."

What made the brain injuries so distinct from other "traditional" TBIs was the presence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The combination of TBI and PTSD created a treatment conundrum.

"Most all the soldiers sent to us who have been in a combat zone have PTSD," says Schneider. "In treating most patients with mild traumatic brain injuries, we work on memory deficits. Sometimes, however, as the soldiers share their stories with the therapist, their memories are just too painful--and those memories triggered PTSD. These are, after all, individuals who were almost killed by blasts and sometimes watched soldiers in the same vehicle lose their lives."



The uniqueness of these soldier patients--their injuries and their road to recovery--has prompted the Pi Beta Phi Rehabilitation Institute to customize treatment regimens. PBPRI staffers found that even some of the tools often used to treat traumatic brain injuries might dredge up disturbing recollections. Personal digital assistants like PalmPilots help TBI patients compensate for memory loss by using the electronic devices to make lists, record directions and take notes. But for some soldiers, PalmPilots are too much like the devices used to detonate an IED. Even seeing the PalmPilot can send them into combat mode.

"Many aspects of ordinary daily life can be extremely stressful to a returning soldier," says Jenny Owens, PBPRI occupational therapist. "More than one soldier has told us of being somewhere like a mall with his family, hearing a loud noise like a balloon popping, and diving to the floor with his family to take cover. The experiences of war are so fresh that they see potential threats everywhere."

For Kristin Hatcher, speech pathologist, the soldiers' unpredictable behavior makes treatment challenging. "These individuals are hyper-vigilant to everything going on. You never know what's going to disrupt," she says. "We've learned to watch for fire drills, audiovisual speaker noise--anything that's going to send them into combat mode."

"Every single one of these guys wants to go back," says PBPRI Director Sandra Schneider. "They feel an obligation to their units."
Photo by Neil Brake.

Counseling is therapeutic and has become a critical part of the soldiers' treatment, yet PBPRI therapists have learned that the emotions counseling unearths can cause agitation.

"Sometimes, particularly after their vestibular/PT treatment, the soldiers may be dizzy or have headaches, and are unsafe to drive back to Fort Campbell. We have learned to schedule that therapy first or give them breaks to avoid putting them in an unsafe situation," says Dominique Herrington, clinic coordinator. "The traffic and distance they travel to our facility already provide a level of stress that we don't normally see in civilian patients with brain injuries.

"Think of the typical personality of a soldier: aggressive, adventurous. They may be off the battlefield, but they're still engaging in risky behaviors like extreme sports."

Some of the anxiety stems from the soldiers' frustration at being back home, points out Anita Zelek, social worker and case manager with Pi Beta Phi. "Anyone with PTSD experiences anger, but for these soldiers there isn't one specific event that is now emotionally over--like a car wreck, for instance. These soldier patients are still living the war. They know the war is continuing without them and that their buddies are still in Iraq. It's so difficult to move on.

"The soldiers experience great anxiety because they define themselves as soldiers," adds Zelek. "So they think, 'If I'm not a soldier, then what do I do?'"

David Allard works out as part of his therapy with therapist Lisa Haack at Pi Beta Phi Rehabilitation Institute. Therapy can run as high as $50,000 per soldier, and insurance usually pays only part of the cost.
Photo by Neil Brake.

The Soldier Mentality

One would think that a soldier narrowly escaping death would never want to return to war. Ironically, though, the desire to go back to Iraq is a prime motivation. The soldiers feel an obligation to their unit, making them some of the most committed, driven patients Vanderbilt has ever seen.

Case in point: One of Hatcher's patients had witnessed 32 IED blasts and wanted to get better so he could redeploy. "How do you prepare someone to return, with such deficits?" she asks.

This is not a rhetorical question. PBPRI staff must prepare soldier patients not only for ordinary daily activities, but for a return to the frontline. In occupational therapy, for instance, Owens works with patients to maximize independence in daily activities. Previously, she had never rehabilitated anyone to return to a dangerous situation. Now she prepares soldiers to continue being scouts.

"Scouts are the first soldiers to enter a building and clear it, so they must be watchful for any signs of IEDs or other dangers," Hatcher explains. "For these soldiers I tailor occupational therapy to their duties--giving them maps to identify the best routes.

"We go on 'missions' where we follow a route, making sure the soldier is attending to landmarks, signs, etc. Even counting the
number of trash cans can simulate the type of attention to detail that is needed in war."

In the arena of physical therapy, Lisa Haack is not just rehabilitating a patient back to normal conditions. She is rehabilitating soldiers to return to 100-degree heat with 90-pound packs--an enormous hurdle for patients like David Allard with constant headaches.

Warriors in Transition

Although he's working on building endurance, David Allard is not returning to Iraq. Through the course of his therapy at Pi Beta Phi, he not only improved physically, but made an enormous psychological leap. A 24-year veteran of the Army, David realized his injuries could make him a liability for men in his command. Rather than redeploy, David answered the military's call to set up a Warrior Transition Unit (WTU) at Fort Campbell.

Established in August 2007, the WTU is Fort Campbell's response to the TBI phenomenon in soldiers returning from duty. Currently, more than 700 soldiers are in the WTU. The partnership among the Department of Defense, PBPRI and Fort Campbell has grown as the three work together to rehabilitate injured patients.

"We know anecdotally that there are Vietnam vets who are homeless because they are still dealing with PTSD," says Schneider. "Currently, data shows there are 1,600 homeless individuals who served in the Iraq war. The Army has recognized the significance of doing something now to help returning soldiers. No one can wait 15 years to figure out what's needed."

In addition to the jobs for which they're trained, each PBPRI therapist finds herself in the unfamiliar role of advocate. The number of case managers at Fort Campbell has increased from three to 28, but more are needed. At Vanderbilt the therapists must work within the system to get the treatment the soldiers need through Tricare, the insurance plan for the U.S. Department of Defense. Although
Vanderbilt commends both the Department of Defense and Tricare for funding most of the soldiers' needs, there are still gaps.

Take Spc. Juan Zapata, for instance. He was patrolling the streets for insurgent activity when he suffered a blast injury. He served another six months before leaving Iraq in November 2006. He returned home shell-shocked and suffering from multiple vision problems due to his concussion.

Post-trauma vision syndrome caused photophobia, or light sensitivity. Driving at night has been compromised for Zapata, and headaches are relentless. In addition, he has an accommodative dysfunction--meaning it's difficult for his eyes to shift focus. Arguably one of Zapata's greatest challenges, though, is his difficulty in orienting.

"Because of visual-spatial deficits related to post-traumatic vision syndrome, he has navigational problems," says Owens. "This is a tough blow for an individual with such a talent for navigation. He had built a career in the Army around those skills."

Fighting the System

In November 2007--more than a year after sustaining his TBI--Zapata saw a Fort Campbell doctor who referred him to Vanderbilt for speech and occupational therapies. Applying a team approach to patient care, Vanderbilt recognized that Zapata also needed a physical therapy consultation because he suffered from vestibular/balance dysfunction. With his extensive vision issues, Zapata also needed to see a behavioral ophthalmologist. Because he didn't have a case manager, the PBPRI team had to navigate the bureaucracy themselves to get Zapata the treatment he needed.

"The Tricare worker said Juan needed to see someone on base--but those specialized services don't yet exist," explains Anita Zelek. "It took several months of making calls before we got the insurance company to agree to cover the other services for Juan."

Vanderbilt also was able to refer Zapata locally to obtain eyeglasses with special prisms in them.

Although Zelek and others at Vanderbilt often are able to help soldiers like Zapata get the services they need, they sometimes hit roadblocks. BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, for instance, does not recognize cognitive therapy as a service, although the company does in other states. All payers will, however, cover medications. That's why over-medication is a real problem. When Pi Beta Phi therapists told one soldier to bring in his medications, he brought a tackle box--full of his more than 35 pills a day.

"With TBI patients, memory's an issue, so often these patients can't remember which medications they've taken," notes Schneider. "This can lead to accidental overdoses."

When the War Becomes Personal

Soldiers come to Vanderbilt only after they've fought their own private war--a war in which they deny their symptoms, deny anything is wrong.

"In the Army the soldiers have learned that 'pain is weakness leaving the body,'" says Andrea Ondera, PBPRI physical therapist. "It is ingrained in them that 'pain reminds you you're alive,' so it's very hard for them to admit they need help.

"We validate for them that what they feel is real--and that physical reasons are behind those feelings."

As demand for its services has increased, PBPRI is growing accordingly. And staffers have traveled to Alabama, Illinois, Nevada and North Carolina to share what they've learned with medical and rehabilitation professionals elsewhere.

Juan Zapata performs an eye test with therapist Jenny Owens. Post-trauma vision syndrome has caused Zapata to experience light sensitivity and relentless headaches.
Photo by Neil Brake.

"Training others is the best thing we can do," Schneider says. "We owe these soldiers the best of the best. I could spend every waking hour dealing with our military obligations--and I would do anything in the world for them."

For the dedicated professionals at PBPRI, this war has become intensely personal. In the face of each soldier, the therapists see their brothers. Sons. Friends. Soldiers come to depend on the Pi Beta Phi team as therapists, advocates, confidants and friends. The therapists receive e-mails from soldiers who have redeployed. The younger therapists, all contemporaries with soldiers, share a common generational bond. And each of the team members at Vanderbilt feels rewarded beyond measure.

"I feel I'm serving my country," says Haack, age 33. "Some people may build up a tolerance to what's going on over there, but not us. Our soldiers show us the shrapnel that came out of their heads; we hear the stories and relive those experiences with them."

David Allard, conscientiously pursuing his treatment, leads by example. He has even adapted a war tradition for the Warrior Transition Unit and Pi Beta Phi. "In the Army you get a coin for excellence, and you have to carry it on you at all times," he explains. "I've given coins to my therapists. They've earned them. They'd best not forget them."

On the coin is this inscription: I am a warrior in transition. My job is to heal as I transition back to duty or continue serving the nation as a veteran in my community. This is not a status but a mission, because I am a warrior and I am Army strong.

The therapists at Pi Beta Phi Rehabilitation Institute are not likely to forget--or to leave their coins behind. Like the soldiers they treat, their work is a mission.

Photo by Daniel DuBois.

Dunkin' Donuts. Cornell. The American Frozen Food Institute. Georgia Tech. The Snack Food Association. University of Michigan. The Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Institute. The University of Texas and University of California systems. The American Peanut Council. University of North Carolina. These are but a few of the thousands of companies, associations and universities that maintain full-time federal relations offices in Washington, D.C.

While many Americans have come to regard "lobbying" and "special interest" as dirty words, others see personal, professional contact with lawmakers as the best way to ensure that vital concerns are advanced at the federal level. From research grants to student loans, approximately one-third of Vanderbilt's $2.5 billion annual operating budget depends directly on federal monies. And because the federal government foots the bill for much of what happens on certain areas of campus, part of the challenge lies in convincing decision makers that less is more when it comes to oversight and regulations. Vanderbilt and its peer institutions view a physical presence in the nation's capital as crucial.

Vanderbilt Federal Relations staffers work within a stone's throw of the Capitol Building, congressional offices, the Supreme Court, and the Library of Congress.
Photo by Shane Stezelberger.

"The level of interaction and importance and impact of what happens in D.C. on Vanderbilt is tremendous," says Beth Fortune, interim vice chancellor for public affairs. "Virtually everything that happens on campus--except what gets taught in the classroom--is affected by policy made and debated in Washington. Changes in tax law, the debate about Medicare reimbursement, labor issues, environmental issues, immigration--at some point all these things impact Vanderbilt."

Since the early 1990s, Vanderbilt's Office of Federal Relations has existed as an embassy of the university in the nation's capital. The office sits a block away from Union Station and within a stone's throw of the U.S. Capitol. Its staff--all full-time employees of
Vanderbilt's Division of Public Affairs--as well as frequent visitors from campus, wave high the Vanderbilt flag and bring a bit of black and gold to the Beltway.

Their main job is advancing legislative issues of interest to the higher-education community and to Vanderbilt, working alone as well as in conjunction with a number of associations, including the Association of American Universities and American Council on Education. For the higher-education community, the greatest concerns involve individual institutional autonomy and academic freedom on campuses. For Vanderbilt there is a more specific focus on research funding, elements included within the Higher Education Act and, at least for this Congressional session, tax issues.

With research funding awarded to Vanderbilt faculty and staff by countless federal sources, the office must carefully monitor budget hearings and budget proposals at the congressional level as well as at such federal agencies as the National Institutes for Health and the Departments of Education, Defense and Energy. When the time comes to weigh in on funding issues, the appropriate Vanderbilt representative--a dean, a department chair, or a direct recipient of the federal funding in question--can be in Washington and meeting with the Tennessee delegation on very short notice. The goal is always to make certain Tennessee's lawmakers understand the real impact of any funding decisions-- both to Vanderbilt and to the citizens of Tennessee and the country.

Dave Piston, professor of molecular physiology and biophysics, professor of physics, and director of Vanderbilt's W.M. Keck Free-Electron Laser (FEL) Center, is one such Vanderbilt representative. He has made scores of trips to the nation's capital, sometimes to discuss FEL medical research programs that received extensive funding from the Department of Defense for several years, and sometimes to join researchers from other universities in advocating for greater federal funding--across all relevant departments and agencies--for research in the life sciences and physical sciences.

His trips to Washington have involved meetings with program managers and budget executives at the Pentagon; numerous members of the Tennessee congressional delegation and their staffs; and staff members of various congressional committees that oversee federal policy and spending on research.

"There's a need to educate the Department of Defense and Capitol Hill about all the great things we're doing," says Piston, who is also a member of the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development. "Even if people have been constantly informed, they still want to know the latest and greatest in what we are doing. You absolutely don't want to be out of sight, which then means you're out of mind."

But Vanderbilt's interests in Washington extend well beyond research funding. The federal relations staff constantly monitors policy issues encompassed in the Higher Education Act, officially known as the College Opportunity and Affordability Act (H.R. 4137), as well as new tax guidelines targeting endowments of certain colleges and universities. From access and affordability to illegal file-sharing on campus to teacher training standards, these two areas cover an array of issues large and small.

"Capitol Hill is an oral culture, and you talk in broad strokes. You're meeting with people who have 15 to 20 meetings a day--and that's on top of what they're supposed to be doing." --Professor Dave Piston
Photo by John Russell.

And then there are the policies that touch everything else. Immigration laws affecting Vanderbilt's international faculty and students, regulations issued by the Environmental Protection Agency concerning radioactive materials used at the Medical Center, and reimbursement rates for federally subsidized medical care all have been issues tackled by the Office of Federal Relations in the recent past.

While Vanderbilt's Washington staffers keep one eye on legislation that could affect Vanderbilt and the higher-education community, they also work closely with an array of people hundreds of miles away.

"The best representatives of Vanderbilt are the people actually doing work in areas impacted by federal laws and regulations," says Jeff Vincent, who recently retired as assistant vice chancellor for federal relations and executive director of the Washington office. "Whenever possible we prefer having administrators, deans, faculty, even students telling Vanderbilt's story. They have credibility because they are the people impacted by what happens in Washington."

Maybe it's Doug Christiansen, associate provost for enrollment management, explaining how proposed changes to a student loan law will affect Vanderbilt's students. Or perhaps it's Beverly Moran, professor of law and sociology, meeting with members of the Congressional Black Caucus to discuss her research on race and tax policy. Whatever the issue, the federal relations staff believes one of its most important roles is connecting the end user on campus with Washington policymakers.

When these connections aren't made, Vanderbilt risks being left out, says Kenneth Galloway, dean of the School of Engineering. At stake is up to $40 million each year in federal research funding and contracts for engineering education and research. Galloway's trips to Washington are timed to coincide with the annual American Society of Engineering Education colloquium, attended by engineering deans from across the country. When Galloway meets with members of the Tennessee delegation, he makes certain his message about the importance of funding engineering research explicitly emphasizes engineering as a tool of economic development for both the state and the nation.

"At the end of the day in Congress, the words you never want to hear are, 'We never heard from you guys,'" says Jeff Vincent (left), retiring assistant vice chancellor for federal relations.
Photo by Daniel DuBois.

Far from seeing Vanderbilt's federal relations staff as yet another unwelcome intrusion upon a crammed schedule, U.S. Congressman Jim Cooper, in whose district Vanderbilt sits, says that having Vanderbilt's voice among those of his constituents is a big plus.

"They are persistent and sometimes relentless," Cooper says, "but that's good because sometimes Congress is a bunch of slow learners, and we need reminders."

Whether finding an undergraduate student to offer testimony about an issue before Congress or providing requested information about a particular topic, the Office of Federal Relations serves as a resource for Tennessee's congressional delegation as well as for Vanderbilt alumni in other legislative or administrative positions. Whatever the national concern, the assumption is that the topic can be addressed intelligently and thoughtfully by a member of the Vanderbilt community. Vanderbilt, say federal relations staffers, has an obligation to offer itself as a resource, to become a voice in these national conversations.

Camilla Benbow, dean of Peabody College, is one Vanderbilt voice who is often asked her opinion about legislation affecting math and science education and K-12 schools in general. She jokes that Washington is her home away from home because she is either traveling there every two to three weeks or working on an assignment at the request of someone there. Her goal, she says, is to help the senator, representative or committee craft and refine ideas that result in better policy, which in turn will truly benefit schools.

"It is a good gut check for reality," says David Cleary, staff minority director of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Subcommittee on Children and Families led by U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, BA'62. "We have a close relationship with the dean of the No. 2 school of education in the country. I think that's an important relationship to have."

Having practitioners like Benbow join the conversation in Washington is important to the organizations that promote education, agrees Pat White, vice president of the American Association of Universities, which advocates on behalf of major research universities.

"I can see any congressional staffer I want--but they don't want to hear from an association guy," says White. "They want to hear from the chancellor or from the vice president for research or from a faculty member. To the extent that Vanderbilt makes its contacts available to the higher-education community, we are able to succeed. By tradition and history, Vanderbilt has always stepped up to help advance higher education.

Faculty members are viewed as the most credible representatives of the university in Washington. Here, Carol Swain, professor of political science and professor of law, testifies before a Senate committee.
Photo by Daniel DuBois.

"Higher-education research and, indeed, institutions like Vanderbilt University and their missions, remain articles of the American faith," adds White. "Virtually anyone you talk to understands the importance of higher education and research, not just for quality of life and quality of fellow citizens, but because of its connection to civic life, business, engineering and technology--things that contribute to national values and principles."

In addition to advocating policy and monitoring legislation, Vanderbilt's Office of Federal Relations also works with campus visitors who come to Washington, helping them adjust to the peculiar warp and woof of the nation's capital and its politics.

"Capitol Hill is a different culture from anything I've ever experienced," says Dave Piston. "It's an oral culture, and you talk in broad strokes. You're meeting with people who have 15 to 20 meetings a day, and that's on top of what they're supposed to be doing. Academics really, really like what they do. They are passionate, they love it--and while that works well if you're teaching 18-year-olds, it does not work well in D.C."

Wyatt Smith, a Peabody sophomore from Reform, Ala., spent last summer in the city with the Vanderbilt Internship Experience in Washington (VIEW), which pairs a public service internship with academic work. For these eight weeks each summer, the Office of Federal Relations converts its conference room into a classroom for the VIEW students, their professors and guest lecturers.

"D.C. is such a place of activity, and when you're in the area where the office is located, tons of people are coming in and out from the subway, from the Capitol, from Union Station," says Smith. "When you walk into the office, though, it's like walking onto campus. There are pictures of folks giving testimony before Congress, but also lots of campus photos. It was neat to walk in and always see the Vanderbilt 'V' with the acorn at the same time you're in an office that is definitely high performing and geared toward the pace of Washington."

Christina West discusses proposed legislation during a forum on federal student aid. West assumed the role of director of federal relations in June.
Photo by Daniel DuBois.

Not infrequently, the Office of Federal Relations transforms itself into a little piece of Vanderbilt for visitors. Whether serving as a classroom, a reception venue for newly admitted students, or audition space for high school seniors competing for acceptance into the Blair School of Music, the office and its staff stand ready to do almost anything when company from Nashville is in town.

Christina West, director of federal relations, has been in Washington for nearly 10 years. Having worked in nearly every Washington capacity possible--from congressional staffer to private-sector lobbyist to current director of Vanderbilt's Office of Federal Relations--she still considers Washington an amazing city full of incredible opportunities.

"When I get tired of seeing the U.S. Capitol, that's when it is time to leave Washington--and I've never gotten tired of seeing it," West says. "Some people are infected by Potomac Fever, and I've got it."

That's a good thing, since the coming months and years will be anything but dull for higher education. Complex issues like affordability, access, competitiveness and academic freedom loom large on the legislative horizon. Vanderbilt's Office of Federal Relations, the university's embassy 600 miles to the northeast, stands at the ready to weigh in whenever necessary.

Shattered Diplomac Think your job is tough? Try working with an angry mob of thousands right outside your office. While James Sasser, BA'58, JD'61, was U.S. ambassador to China, American-led NATO forces bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia). Chinese citizens reacted by violently protesting outside the U.S. embassy in Beijing. Sasser was trapped in the embassy for four days while his wife, Mary Gorman Sasser, BA'59, and son, Gray Sasser, JD'98, took refuge beneath a table in a nearby house. 
Photo by Mike Stewart/© CORBIS SYGMA.

At least 12 Vanderbilt alumni have served as United States ambassadors. As the top American in a foreign country for a period of three to four years, it was their job to explain, promote and defend U.S. foreign policy and American values.

In practice that meant mounting a Southern charm offensive on unfriendly Chinese leaders, speaking truth to power to the embarrassment of a corrupt Panamanian government, and personally whisking a Haitian president to safety after a military coup. It meant engineering a mega-sale of American-made Apache helicopters, educating local people on how to run their new democracies, and weathering a four-day siege as thousands violently protested an American bombing.

It meant not only witnessing but having an impact on the end of the Cold War, the end of South African apartheid, the Bosnian War and the Iraq War. For one of our ambassadors, it even meant leading the Foreign Service itself into a very changed post-Cold War world and the next era of diplomacy.

Of the ambassadors profiled here, five were career diplomats and two were political appointees from outside the State Department--similar to the overall proportions of roughly two-thirds career ambassadors (for which politics traditionally plays no role in appointment or confirmation) to one-third political ambassadors (who generally get the glitzier assignments).

Only one is a woman, which also reflects the makeup of the Foreign Service prior to the 1990s.

Several were part of a "tandem couple," meaning both spouses were in the Foreign Service and coordinated their assignments. All of them, however, credit their spouses, who accompanied them to all their posts, with sharing the job. "It's not a job, it's a lifestyle," said one. The whole family must be onboard, which requires a lot of sacrifice.

They all loved serving their country, and grew to love the countries they served in. Among them they speak 16 languages and have served in every corner of the world.

Adams answers questions during a street press conference in Haiti.
Photo courtesy of Alvin Adams.

Alvin Adams, llb'67 Ambassador to Djibouti, 1983-85 Ambassador to Haiti, 1989-92 Ambassador to Peru, 1993-96

"You sometimes have to do difficult things publicly. The [Peruvian] president was embarrassed by comments I made about human rights and democracy. But by the time I left, things were a lot better."

Grandson of a New York governor, son of a flamboyant Pan Am executive, and U.S. ambassador to three far-flung countries before the age f 50, Alvin Adams is the kind of old-school oreign service officer you might see in the movies.

The opening scene would find him personally escorting a deposed president out of an inflamed country in the dead of night, sitting with him on a runway, waiting hour after hour for a U.S. rescue plane, and hoping he could keep trigger-happy soldiers at bay.

Our leading man would soon receive a U.S. State Department Citation with Award for Valor "for acts of heroism, taken at great personal risk, to protect the safety and well-being of President Aristide during the September 1991 coup in Haiti."

Adams never sought the limelight, instead making a career going places no one else wanted to go. He was U.S. ambassador to Djibouti, a "hot as hell" Islamic country on the edge of Africa; Haiti, the least developed and most volatile country in the Western Hemisphere; and Peru, where fierce homegrown terrorist organizations with a special hate for Americans meant he never made a move without 15 bodyguards.

Why did he accept these assignments? "It was fun," he says. "And I was asked to."

Foreign service officers take an oath to go where they are needed. And where Adams was needed most was where democracy and free elections were under threat.

Now a Honolulu resident, Adams hosts a weekly program on Hawaii Public Radio called Business Beyond the Reef and serves as counselor to the president for international affairs at the Bishop Museum. 
Photo courtesy of Alvin Adams.

When he arrived for duty at Haiti's Port-au-Prince airport, he made his intentions clear by speaking directly to the people in Creole (unheard of for a foreign ambassador) and putting the military government on notice that it was time for Haiti to have democratic elections for the first time in its history. Even though the president refused at first to accept his credentials and Adams couldn't shake anyone's hand for fear of deadly voodoo powder, he ultimately succeeded in helping bring elections to Haiti, leading to Aristide's first presidential election in 1990.

In Peru, where the president had thrown out the legislature, "we were quite determined that the country would remain democratic," Adams says. "The U.S. had been very critical of President Fujimori, which did not help me in developing personal relations up-close and friendly.

"But you're not his representative to Washington," he continues. "You are Washington's representative to him. You sometimes have to do difficult things, say difficult things publicly. The president was very embarrassed sometimes by the comments I felt I had to make about human rights and democracy. But I'll give him credit: By the time I left, things were a lot better."

Some people would give Adams a lot of credit, too. Former Secretary of State George Shultz called him "one of a special cadre of Foreign Service professionals--the shock troops of our diplomacy--with the grit, savvy, imagination and hard-headedness needed by this department."

McCallie digs a hole in dry Namibian soil, with President Sam Nujoma at center. "President Nujoma was keen on planting trees in areas decimated by overgrazing," says McCallie.
Photo courtesy of Marshall McCallie.

Marshall McCallie, BA'67 Ambassador to Namibia, 1993-96

"In the long term, our world would be more secure if we had secure states through- out Africa. As we've seen, states with ineffective government and constant turmoil are hotbeds for incubation of terrorism."

From the segregated American South, Marshall McCallie ventured out into the world to spend almost his entire career in sub-Saharan Africa, serving in Zambia and South Africa before becoming U.S. ambassador to Namibia.

His first stop after a global-minded upbringing in Chattanooga, Tenn., was Vanderbilt, where he participated in the Vanderbilt-in-France semester abroad and credits Alexander Marchant's Western Civilization course and Henry Swint's Historiography course ("a marvelous lesson in skepticism" of written history) with greatly broadening his world.

During his Vanderbilt years the university began to integrate black students. A quarter-century later, says McCallie, "when I got to South Africa as deputy chief of mission, which is essentially deputy ambassador, they were going through much of what we had gone through in the '60s in the United States--opening up to people of every ethnic background, finding the richness of ethnic diversity--and going through the difficult negotiating process that I had seen in the American South."

McCallie was in South Africa for the beginning of the end of apartheid, when President Frederik de Klerk released African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela from prison and began negotiating with black political parties. Economic and moral pressure from the U.S. played a part, McCallie says, and the American taxpayer played a critical role by helping fund college educations for South African people of color so the possibility of success when the government became more democratic would be more likely.

Now an active conservationist, McCallie and his wife, Amye, BA'66, enjoy hiking and studying the trees and wildflowers near their home in Brevard, N.C.
Photo by Michael Aaron Hogsed.

Because of his long relationship with the new Namibian leaders, including President Sam Nujoma, McCallie was sent to Namibia as ambassador not long after it gained independence from South Africa. As one of his first acts, he lined up training when the leader of the Upper House asked him for help in educating parliamentarians, who'd never had a chance to participate in the democratic process.

Africa has never been a top priority of the U.S. government, says McCallie--a challenge for any ambassador there. "I wanted to get more aid and assistance," he says. "I thought that if we were to be as good as our word about what we believe in, about the values of our country, then we would invest in economic and political development in these countries. I argued that in the long term, our world would be more secure if we had secure states throughout Africa. As we've seen later, states with ineffective government and constant turmoil are hotbeds for incubation of terrorism."

Despite witnessing firsthand a lot of that turmoil, McCallie has never given up hope for Africa.

"I saw some leaders who clearly were capable," he says. "Mr. Mandela in any group of world leaders would be stellar, an enormous moral figure. I saw a level of caring and compassion in Africa that we don't see in the news--wonderful family relationships and community relationships from which I felt good things could grow."

Sasser needed all his Southern charm and diplomatic skills during his stint as ambassador to China. In 1999, after American-led NATO forces inadvertently bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, the people of Beijing erupted in violence outside the U.S. embassy.
Photo by Greg Baker (ap/wide world photos)

James Sasser, BA'58, JD'61 Ambassador to China, 1995-99

"In times past, if you bombed somebody's embassy and killed their diplomats, it was an act of war. But we had built a relationship of mutual trust."

Coming from outside the diplomatic service, political ambassadors typically have to learn on the job, establishing their foreign-policy credentials with the world watching. It was no different for Jim Sasser in China, despite the fact that he'd been a three-term U.S. senator from Tennessee, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, and seemingly next in line to be majority leader before his upset loss to Bill Frist in 1994.

There were some who doubted Sasser had the expertise to be ambassador to China at a time when relations between the two countries were all but hostile, reported The New York Times in 1998. But "the new warmth in Chinese-American relations," the paper continued, "is in part a personal victory for Mr. Sasser. ... By all accounts Mr. Sasser personified the American effort to create friendlier ties despite the deep differences over issues like human rights. His Southern style--polite, charming and attentive--was an evident hit with President Jiang Zemin, who also valued his closeness to his old Tennessee colleague, Al Gore, in the White House."

Nowadays Sasser is a consultant who divides his time between Tennessee and Washington, D.C.
Photo by Pamela Lepold

When President Clinton first called to ask if he would be interested in being an ambassador, recalls Sasser, "I told him, no, I would not--unless I can be ambassador to China."

China, Sasser realized, was becoming one of the most important countries in the world, and it was dangerous not to establish a working relationship. Before long he had escorted President Jiang Zemin on a momentous 1997 visit to the U.S., and convinced President Clinton that it was smart to make his well-received reciprocal trip to China sooner rather than later.

The new and improved relations between the two countries were tested soon enough when, in May 1999, American-led NATO forces inadvertently bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo War, killing four embassy staff. The Chinese people reacted violently.

"Thousands and thousands of them descended on the embassy and the ambassador's residence," says Sasser. "I was unable to get out of the embassy for four days and four nights. All our cars were destroyed, fires were set, and all the windows broken out.

"My wife [Mary Gorman Sasser, BA'59] and son [Gray Sasser, JD'98] were at the residence," he continues. "They took refuge in another little house in the compound, which had bars on the windows, and they got under tables and spent the night there while the crowds continued to assault the building."

Eventually it quieted. "In times past," he says, "if you bombed somebody's embassy and killed their diplomats, it was an act of war. But we had so strengthened the relationship between the two presidents, President Jiang knew in his heart that President Clinton would not do that on purpose. We had built a relationship of mutual trust."

Still with the State Department, Carlson now serves as senior liaison for strategic communication for the undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs.
Photo by Pamela Lepold.

Brian Carlson, BA'69 Ambassador to Latvia, 2001-05

"If we don't invest today in public diplomacy, I'm worried about what we'll get 25 years from now. You can't walk up to somebody and say, 'Let me tell you about the war on terror.'"

Brian Carlson reached the top ranks of the Foreign Service through an expertise in public diplomacy--the art of winning hearts and minds through strategic communication and cultural and educational exchange. At the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), Carlson started the organization's public diplomacy programs in the newly liberated states of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. By the time he became ambassador to the former Soviet republic of Latvia, he'd seen firsthand what could be considered public diplomacy's greatest success: the end of the Cold War.

"The old regime of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact fell down because we undermined it from beneath and within," says Carlson. "In our cultural and educational exchange activities, we brought people from these countries to the United States, expanding contacts with artists and writers, and sent performers and exhibits of art abroad. All that human contact we insisted upon and pushed for--we started to see things come around."

During Carlson's time in Latvia, the country was invited to join the European Union and NATO, and he worked constantly to help get it ready for NATO membership. He likened Latvia to a greenhouse, recovering from the Soviet years and growing its economy at 8 to 12 percent a year. "Add free-market economics and incentives, and it's amazing how an economy will just start up by itself."

Carlson and his wife, Marcia Nightingale Carlson, BSN'69, with Latvian Bishop Anton Justs at the dedication of a partnership between Latvian and American churches. The rural parish in Eglaine has emerged from the Soviet repression of religion with assistance from an American church in Texas.
Photo courtsey of Brian Carlson.

But cultural diplomacy remained a priority for Carlson, who once there learned that famed American artist Mark Rothko was born in Latvia and that the 100th anniversary of his birth was approaching. He went to the National Gallery of Art in Washington and, with the help of the State Department and a year's worth of lobbying, finally got an exhibition of 21 Rothko works sent to Riga, Latvia, and exhibited at the state art museum. (Latvia owned no Rothko paintings, which have repeatedly set records at auction.)

"It told them America cared enough to send the very best," he says. "It played very well."
Unfortunately, in times of budget cuts like those the Foreign Service weathered in the 1990s and again today, cultural and educational programs are among the first to go. In 1999 the USIA was abolished.

That may prove to be a mistake, Carlson warns, in times of trouble. "If we don't invest today in public diplomacy, I'm worried about what we'll get 25 years from now. You can't walk up to somebody and say, 'Here, let me tell you about the war on terror.' You have to come at it through relationships. It's all about relationships."

Carlson is now involved in a movement in Washington that is calling for a semi-independent, public/private institution that would bring in people from academia to provide a reserve of ideas and innovations to help bolster America's relations and reputation abroad.

"To see," he says, "if we can't get back a little bit of what we seem to have lost."

Now chief operating officer of the Episcopal Church, Watt was a foreign service officer for 30 years, working in Russia, Nicaragua, the United Kingdom, Costa Rica and Ecuador as well as the Dominican Republic and Panama. She lives in New York City.
Photo by David Coulter.

Linda Ellen Watt, BA'73 Acting Ambassador to the Dominican Republic, 1997-99 Ambassador to Panama, 2002-05

"It's our job to carry out the government's foreign policy. If you don't agree with our policy on Cuba or Darfur or Iraq, your choice is to hit your pillow, kick your cat, or find another line of work."

"When I came into the Foreign Service in the mid-'70s, there was a lot of stereotyping of women," says Linda Ellen Watt. "There weren't women ambassadors. And more important, you never saw a woman deputy chief of mission, who is really the manager and leader and often the most senior career person. Never."

Not until the late '80s and '90s were women represented in significant numbers. Though she had few role models herself, Watt was one of the trailblazers, serving first as acting
ambassador to the Dominican Republic and then as ambassador to Panama.

Watt, who studied Spanish and history and participated in the Vanderbilt-in-Spain program, got to Panama not long after the U.S. had turned over control of the Panama Canal to the Panamanians. There was quite a sense of excitement as the country looked forward to a more equal relationship with the United States rather than one of big brother/little brother, she remembers.

But at times the Panamanian government still needed big brotherly--or sisterly--advice. In a speech to Panama's Chamber of Commerce that prompted a crisis for Panamanian politicians, according to the local English-language newspaper, Watt "blasted the pervasive culture of corruption in Panamanian politics and warned that it's hurting our international reputation and driving foreign investors away."

Watt's main goals in Panama were building trade relations, maintaining canal security and combating drug trafficking, but she also supported women's efforts in business and community development and spent a lot of time with the poor and the voiceless.

Watt visits with schoolchildren at the Galeta station of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute near Colón, Panama.
Photo courtsey of Linda Ellen Watt.

"Americans have had an image in Latin America, and Panama specifically, as being elitist or arrogant and only interested in business and politics and strategy," says Watt. "It was my absolute mission to disabuse Panamanians of that stereotype."

Certain U.S. government policies will always be unpopular abroad, and it's an ambassador's job to support those policies publicly irrespective of her personal views or political beliefs.

"That's a point of professional pride among members of the Foreign Service," Watt says. "We realize that no one elected us, and it's our job to carry out the government's foreign policy. If you don't agree with our policy on Cuba or Darfur or Iraq, your choice is to hit your pillow, kick your cat, or find another line of work."

Watt herself says she couldn't have found a better line of work. The hardest part for her, as for most diplomats, was the impact the job had on family. "If it's a strong marriage and strong family, it will be strengthened, but if it isn't, it's not going to work."

Dornbush divides his time between his homes in Amsterdam and Atlanta with his wife, psychologist Marilyn Pierce Dornbush, BA'55.
Photo courtsey of Sebastiaan Westerweel.

Terry Dornbush, BA'55 Ambassador to the Netherlands, 1994-98

"The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was sitting there stillborn. We kept knocking on doors until we found somebody with enough power to get something to happen."

Appointed by President Clinton to be U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands, Terry Dornbush was not so much a "Friend of Bill" as a "Friend of Al," having served as vice chairman of the Georgia campaign when Gore ran for the presidency in 1987 and, at Gore's request, working for the Clinton/Gore ticket in 1992.

But afterward, says the Vanderbilt economics major, investment banker, global real-estate developer and cancer activist, "it turned out I was not the only one who worked on the campaign who wanted a government job." Of the 3,300 jobs that were presidential appointees, he learned, only about 160 were ambassadorships. He lobbied for the Netherlands post because of strong ties between that country and his home city of Atlanta, where there are more Dutch businesses than in New York or Chicago.

If Ambassador Dornbush thought he was going to have a trouble-free post focused on growing business between the two countries, he was soon to learn that every position representing the U.S. in a foreign country can suddenly involve matters of life and death.

During the Bosnian War and Srebrenica Genocide, when 400 Dutch U.N. peacekeeping troops were the only force that stood between 10,000 Serb troops and their Muslim targets,

Dornbush was drawn into controversial decisions and responses made by both the American and Dutch governments. No one knew at that time that the largest mass murder in Europe since World War II was taking place, with the killing of more than 8,300 Bosnian Muslims. But it was clear that the Clinton administration was trying to avoid committing ground troops to that war, even though Dornbush was present when the secretary of defense assured the Dutch, "If you get in trouble, we'll get your people out."

Dornbush (center), who once served as regimental commander of the Vanderbilt Reserve Officer Training Corps, prepares to fly on a Dutch F-16 fighter jet.
Photo courtesy of Terry Dornbush.

It's anyone's guess what may have happened if they had, "but they never asked to get out," says Dornbush.

A war effort he had more control over proved to be the one thing of which he is most proud during his service. "The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia had been authorized by the U.N. in May 1993, and when I arrived in March 1994, it was just sitting there stillborn. It was our embassy that energized Washington. We kept knocking on doors until we finally found somebody with enough power to get something to happen ... and we got 21 temporary staff members who came in to give this thing life."

Dornbush also engineered a business deal, bringing together President Clinton and the Dutch prime minister, in which the Dutch and, consequently, the British purchased a combined $900 million of American-made Apache attack helicopters over a competing French-German helicopter--despite European Union loyalties.

"It was an economic competition," says Dornbush, "and that's my cup of tea."

Having retired in 2006 from 30 years as a career diplomat, Pearson now heads the international business division of a large Washington, D.C.-area consulting group.
Photo by Pamela Lepold.

W. Robert Pearson, BA'65 Ambassador to Turkey, 2000-03 Director General of the U.S. Foreign Service, 2003-06

"We are living in a world completely different from the world we lived in during the Cold War. Since we're the strongest single country in the world, we have a responsibility diplomatically."

Robert Pearson grew up on a farm near the tiny town of Bells, Tenn., to become deputy chief of mission in Paris, deputy chief of mission to NATO, ambassador to Turkey and, finally, director general of the Foreign Service, responsible for the careers of 50,000 fellow diplomats and for setting the path the Foreign Service would follow in the new millennium.

That path, he explains, is out of the developed world and--in greater and greater numbers--into the developing world. In other words, emphasis is moving away from those coveted jobs in European capitals toward hardship posts and hardscrabble places where representatives of American policy and values can make a real difference.

"By the middle of this century, the combined population of all of North America, including Mexico, and all of Europe, including Turkey, will be 10 percent of the world's population. Take a look at the 'second-tier' countries," Pearson says. "China, the Philippines, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, South Africa, Nigeria, Mexico, Brazil, Chile ... If we don't succeed in convincing those people that an open economic system and democratic values are the better choice, then American national security will be severely damaged.

"My point," he continues, "is that we are living in a world that is completely different from the world we lived in during the Cold War. Since we're the strongest single country in the world, we have a responsibility diplomatically to place ourselves where things that happen in the world are going to have the gravest consequences, either for good or for bad."

Pearson got a taste of this new world order serving as ambassador to Turkey as the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. He had arrived in Turkey in September 2000, feeling the country was stable and on the right track and looking forward to all the positive things he thought they could accomplish. "I wasn't expecting any kind of meltdown," he says.

Within a few months a political in-fight caused the Turkish lira to lose half its value, sending Pearson to bat for Turkey at the International Monetary Fund to negotiate a loan rescue package. Then came the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, after which Turkey went to bat for the U.S., joining the war effort in Afghanistan.

On their first trip to Ephesus, Pearson and his wife, Margaret, visit the site of the ancient library.
Photo courtesy of Robert Pearson.

It wasn't until the Iraq War that the two countries found they could no longer play ball. It was up to Pearson to ask the Turkish government to allow U.S. ground troops to enter Iraq through Turkey. "My principal reasoning was that--not trying to be ideological about the war so much as the relationship--I thought that whatever happened, it would be far better for the United States and Turkey to be working together than to find themselves on different tracks."

Turkey put the decision to a democratic vote and decided not to allow access to American ground troops, straining U.S.-Turkey relations. As the Iraq War progressed, the gap between the two countries widened and anti-American sentiment in a once-strong ally escalated dramatically.

By that time Pearson was back in Washington, leading the Foreign Service into a future in which diplomacy seems more important and imperative than ever.

But Wait--There's More

These alumni have also served as ambassadors:

William Cabaniss, BA'60
Ambassador to the Czech Republic, 2003-06

William Prentice Cooper Jr., '15
Ambassador to Peru, 1946-1948
(Died in 1969)

Marion Creekmore, BA'61
Ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Sri Lanka and to the Republic of Maldives, 1989­-92

Guilford Dudley, BA'29
Ambassador to Denmark, 1969-71
(Died in 2002)

Thomas Ferguson, BA'55, JD'59
Ambassador to Brunei, 1987-89

John Geer

Christian Grose

Bruce Oppenheimer

Mitchell Seligson

Neal Tate

Photos by John Russell and Steve Green

The economy is floundering. The housing industry is in crisis. Gas and energy prices are skyrocketing. The country is faced with immigration issues, burgeoning debt, an unpopular war, and an unprecedented election year in which an African American, a woman, and a former P.O.W. emerged as the top competitors for the presidency. It's both an unsettling and an inspiring time to be an American.

It's also a terrific time to be an American political scientist. More and more often, faculty members in Vanderbilt's political science department are contributing to the public debate, adding an academic's perspective about political events, both here and abroad. From The Washington Post to The Los Angeles Times, it's a rare day in this election year when at least one Vanderbilt political science faculty member isn't called upon for insight and analysis.

And given the current backdrop of change, tension and expectation, Vanderbilt political science students are more engaged in politics than they have been in decades. Professors are using the current election as a teaching tool to examine fundamental political science theory in real time.

Christian Grose has taught at Vanderbilt since 2005, and every year he delivers lectures about conventions and delegates. Often students find the subject matter dry. "But now it's very exciting," says the assistant professor of political science. "They're asking probing and detailed questions about past Democratic and Republican conventions."

Political science scholars offer perspectives that students don't get by watching network news programs or reading popular blogs.

Bruce Oppenheimer, professor of political science, follows political races all across the country and, using empirical models, makes predictions about election outcomes. "Conventional wisdom isn't always right," he says, citing the 2006 congressional elections as an example. Election watchers claimed that Democrats had a chance to win control of the House of Representatives because of the declining popularity of the Bush administration--but they wouldn't win control of the Senate.

"I said that the Democrats had a good chance of winning both the House and the Senate," Oppenheimer recalls. "That was based on an analysis of the totality of all the things that were going on. And I was right."

While the media tend to look at the larger numbers in opinion polls, Oppenheimer and his colleagues often focus on the smaller numbers. Suppose, for example, that 80 percent of polled voters say they don't have a problem voting for an African American or a woman. News outlets will overwhelmingly tout the majority opinion. Oppenheimer, however, is more curious about the minority of voters who say they won't support those candidates.

"In a landslide election it's not a big deal," he says, "but in a close election, you'd better find out who that 20 percent is."

Academicians are particularly adept at teasing out the subtle factors that influence people's behavior. Oppenheimer and Christian Grose published research in the Legislative Studies Quarterly (November 2007) correlating how the number of casualties among hometown soldiers worked against Republicans running in congressional districts--including formerly popular incumbents running in Republican strongholds.

"We examined the impact of Iraq war deaths on the congressional vote in the November 2006 elections," Grose explains. "We found that the majority of the American public had moved against the war in Iraq, and thus this issue helped the Democrats. ... Specifically, for every two local soldier deaths in a congressional district, the Republican candidate did about 1 percent worse in the 2006 election compared to the 2004 election in the same district."

The 24-hour news cycle has altered the blueprint for political races, which means that students are actually helping professors form a clearer vision of the modern political process. Vanderbilt undergraduates provide a window into the attitudes of their generation, particularly when it comes to accessing communication channels like television, alternative radio and the Internet.

Vanderbilt is increasingly bringing in outside experts like Roy Neel, BA'72, former chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore, to teach classes in political science.
Photo by Joh nRussell

"They're much more savvy than I am at using those resources," Grose says. "Which is good for me, because they clue me in on things that are appearing on YouTube and Web blogs. Then I'll hear about it in the mainstream news a month later."

Political science has been one of the most popular majors on the Vanderbilt campus for decades, and for many years it has been the second most popular major (after economics) in the College of Arts and Science. Currently, between 275 and 300 undergraduates are majoring in political science. Many will use the experience as a foundation for law school or careers in the public arena.

Since as early as the 1920s, Vanderbilt political science professors have been weighing in on the most important issues of the day: the League of Nations, World War II, the Cold War, the Middle East. Vanderbilt's fifth chancellor, Alexander Heard, was considered a brilliant political scientist who was named by President John F. Kennedy to serve on the Commission on Campaign Costs.

In 1940 political science, which previously had been part of the same department as history at Vanderbilt, became a department in its own right. In the 1950s and '60s, under the leadership of renowned political theorist Avery Leiserson, the political science department at Vanderbilt was considered among the top 20 in the nation, going head-to-head in prestige against much bigger programs at Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Michigan.

Troubled Waters

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the department became increasingly embroiled in an internal battle on a variety of issues, including the merits of applying quantitative and mathematical methods to an essentially soft science. Personalities clashed, feelings were hurt, egos were bruised.

Administrators eventually took the dramatic step of placing the department in receivership, meaning that an outside chairman ran the department and faculty members were not allowed to make hiring or firing decisions. Amid the turmoil, several respected faculty members departed for calmer waters. Some believed university administrators had overreacted to the kinds of problems political science departments were experiencing nationwide.

In 2003, Neal Tate, who had been dean of the graduate school at the University of North Texas in Denton, accepted the challenge to take the helm of the unruly political science program at Vanderbilt. "The faculty members who remained, both tenured and tenure-track, were very supportive of me," Tate says. "So we started out trying to recruit new and excellent faculty as our first priority," not only to fill in the existing gaps, but also to expand.

Illustration by Kevin Rechi

By the end of that academic year, they had signed three new faculty members. Three years later they had increased that number to eight. By the fall of 2008, an additional seven new faculty members will be on board, arriving from Duke, Princeton, Stanford, and the Universities of California at Berkeley and Davis. Their research interests span the spectrum from minority politics to international relations to the presidency and executive policy.

"We could hire seven people in a year. That's not hard," says John Geer, Distinguished Professor of Political Science. "But hiring seven people of this caliber is unprecedented."

Brokering peace agreements and growing the political science department by more than 50 percent in such a short period of time has been both exhilarating and exhausting. Tate will take a sabbatical year beginning in the fall to focus on his comparative research interests, examining the judicial processes in foreign countries. Geer will serve as acting chair in Tate's absence.

Even during its most obstreperous days, the political science faculty continued to maintain a high standard of excellence. Geer, for example, became editor of the Journal of Politics, one of the most respected publications in the discipline, and he continues in that role today.

Faculty members also have become open to creative teaching strategies. Over the last few years, the department has enlisted any number of outside experts to serve as adjunct professors. Roy Neel, BA'72, former chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore; Harold Ford Jr., former U.S. representative and current chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council; and Republican party strategist Vin Weber, who spearheaded policy for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, have taught (or team-taught with Geer) political science courses and special seminars. During the spring 2008 semester, for example, Roy Neel taught a course on presidential transitions.

"Mr. Neel should know that subject matter better than anybody," Tate says. "He had the chance to plan a transition in great detail and begin executing it, before Al Gore was ultimately declared to have lost the 2000 election."

Unconventional Wisdom

Scholars are playing an important role in proffering nonpartisan evidence, theories and conversations about the issues central to our country, particularly as the United States grows increasingly polarized between red and blue voters and between the haves and have-nots.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, center, speaks to an American political leadership class taught by former U.S. Rep. Harold Ford, right, who now chairs the Democratic Leadership Council. At left is John Geer, professor of political science.
Photo by Niel Brake.

"Because tempers are running so high, evidence that political scientists gather, analyze and discuss becomes even more important, because oftentimes conventional wisdom is off," says Geer. "For example, people are claiming that the Democrats are going to tear themselves apart and McCain is holding a slight lead in the polls. As political scientists, we know this isn't true. This is not a partisan statement, but the state of the economy structures the campaign at the presidential level. The economy is struggling, and that means John McCain faces more of an uphill battle than any poll is suggesting."

Geer is in familiar territory when making claims that contradict conventional wisdom. Author of In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns (University of Chicago Press, 2006), he sees attack ads as usually doing more good than harm by stirring up fresh ideas and generating essential debates. Sometimes, he says, the most qualified candidate will only get traction if he or she raises doubts about the other side. "Rather than hand-wringing about the ill effects, this strikes me as a good thing," he insists.

The men and women of Vanderbilt's department are jumping feet-forward into the fray, trying to weigh in objectively on many of the flashpoint issues that affect us all. Whether they are studying American elections, foreign judiciaries, immigration issues or floor-fights at nominating conventions, political scientists essentially illuminate the "science" part of political science, providing data and nonpartisan analysis that may make us all better citizens. And that, perhaps, is the most valuable contribution an academic political science department can make.

"We think this is one of the best places in the country to work if you're a political scientist," says Neal Tate. "Which means it's one of the best places to study if you're a political science major or a political science graduate student. And we're very proud of that."

Elyn Saks feels right at home on the University of Southern California campus. There is something about the leafy-green trees and ivy-covered walls, the slate-roofed buildings, and the perpetual warmth of the California climate that has put her at ease almost from the start. But even here in this academic cloister, where her office is cluttered with her legal research, where she holds an endowed professorship of law, and where she has earned the admiration of her peers, the same old voices keep drifting in. She hears them two or three times a day, bearing messages that she would rather keep at bay.

You are bad. You are evil. You have killed thousands of people with your thoughts.

She has been receiving these messages for much of her life, certainly since her days at Vanderbilt, where she graduated first in her class but sometimes alarmed her friends and fellow students with behavior that seemed far more than peculiar. She didn’t yet know, when she was still an undergraduate, that she was falling into the grip of schizophrenia, and that her “journey through madness,” as she would later put it, would be unbearably painful and long.

There was the night at Vanderbilt, for example, a frigid winter evening when the ground outside was covered with snow. Saks was talking with a visitor in her dorm, when suddenly and without any warning, she grabbed a blanket and rushed outside. She ran manically across the lawn, spreading her arms and pretending to fly.

“No one can get me!” she shouted in a frenzy. “I’m flying! I’ve escaped!”

Later she said it was all just a joke, just a moment of silliness that had swept her away. But the episodes grew worse over time, particularly after she left Vanderbilt in 1977 and entered the master’s program at Oxford University. She had won a Marshall Scholarship to study in England, but something was unsettling about the move, and soon she found that she was losing her grip. She began handing in papers that were masses of gibberish, and muttering to herself as she walked through the town: I am a bad person; I deserve to suffer. People are talking about me. Look at them; they’re staring at me.

She soon wound up in a mental hospital, and many years later she wrote down her memories of those times: “In my fog of isolation and silence, I began to feel I was receiving commands to do things—such as walk all by myself through the old abandoned tunnels that lay underneath the hospital. The origin of the commands was unclear. In my mind, they were issued by some sort of beings. Not real people with names or faces, but shapeless, powerful beings that controlled me with thoughts. … Walk through the tunnels and repent. Now lie down and don’t move. You must be still. You are evil.”

All of that was nearly 30 years ago, and in the time since then Saks has pulled herself from the cold and terrifying depths of her illness to build a distinguished career as a scholar. She is happily married and surrounded by friends, and a visitor to her office at the University of Southern California will encounter little evidence of the agony she’s endured. But she recently decided to write it all down, to create a memoir of her own psychosis, believing that it might give hope to other people. Her powerful book The Center Cannot Hold was published by Hyperion in the summer of 2007, and within a few weeks the praise was pouring in.

Publisher’s Weekly called the book “engrossing.” The Washington Post praised Saks’ “lucidity and intelligence.” Time magazine selected her story as one of the 10 best books of 2007. But at least as important in Saks’ own mind was the warm response of her colleagues and friends. She had felt she was skating where the ice was thin, where the people she knew might easily be repelled, and where the university that had nurtured her career might find her revelations embarrassing. But none of that happened. Instead, people praised her honesty and courage, and marveled at the simple power of her story. And her memoir does have a strength all its own—a journey of suffering and a road to recovery that will probably never quite come to an end; a passage through a schizophrenic nightmare that is far more common than many people know.

But hers, in the end, is a story of hope—of “a brilliant mind,” as Time magazine put it, that with love and therapy and the right kind of medicine finally, painfully learned to heal itself. There was a time, however, when it was hard to believe that such a triumph could occur.

The worst of it came when she entered law school.

After four years of study, she had received her master’s degree from Oxford and decided to take on the challenges of Yale. Her illness, at best, was still unresolved. She had already spent months in a mental hospital, and then in intensive psychoanalysis. But in between her bouts of psychosis, she managed to do well enough in her studies to be accepted at the law school of her choice, which turned out to be Yale. She arrived in New Haven accustomed to academic success, but knowing also that changes in her life often triggered major problems—a powerful feeling of dislocation that would degenerate into a break with reality.

Sure enough, within two weeks of her arrival at Yale, as she walked among the great gothic buildings with their stained-glass windows and drafty hallways, she began having thoughts that were not her own, and began seeing people who were not really there. One of them was a bearded man with a knife who was ready to kill her. On an autumn weekend in 1982, with her symptoms getting worse, she made her way to the student health center, babbling wildly to anyone who would listen. There’s the killing fields. Heads exploding. I didn’t do anything wrong. They just said ‘quake, fake, lake.’ I used to ski. Are you trying to kill me? The doctors tried to reassure her, but she pulled away and crawled under a desk, moaning softly as she rocked back and forth. They’re killing me. They’re killing me. I’ve got to try. Die. Lie. Cry.

They sent her off to another mental hospital, where she lay for 30 hours on one of the beds, her arms and legs bound by restraints and a net tied over the rest of her body. She found that she couldn’t move at all, and no matter how desperately she begged for relief— “Please,” she cried, “it’s not necessary”—the doctors assured her that this was really best.

A quarter century later she remembers that medieval moment as clearly as if it had just happened to her, and her anger still ripples through the pages of her memoir: “As frightened as I was, I was equally angry, and frantic to find a way to show defiance—not an easy task when you’re in four-point restraints and pinned under a tuna net. I was bound … but not gagged! So I inhaled as deeply as I could, and started belting out some beloved Beethoven. Not, for obvious reasons, Ode to Joy, but Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. BA-BA-BA BA! BA-BA-BA BA! Look, there, see how he created such power out of those four simple notes! It echoed nicely down the halls, so I did it again.”

Her brother, Warren Saks, came to visit her a few days later, and he was stunned to see how awful she looked—gaunt and wild-eyed with her hair all askew, and so thin it was startling. She had always been tall, nearly 5-foot-10, and sometimes under-weight, but nothing pre-pared him for the pain in her face. “It was frightening,” he remembered. “It was really clear how sick she was.”

For a younger brother who had always loved and admired his sister, who was astonished by her brilliance and moved by the warmth she showed to other people, it was nearly too painful to see her this way. And yet even then, he couldn’t really grasp the depths of her agony or the fundamental gloom of her official prognosis: “Grave,” one doctor wrote at the time. “Chronic paranoid schizophrenia with acute exacerbation.”

For much of the medical community in the 1980s, such a diagnosis was more like a death sentence or, more precisely, the prediction of a life without any hope. Her condition was one that didn’t have a cure, a chemical malfunction afflicting her brain that would sever her ties to the rational world, in a sense to the world of physical reality, where most of the human population lived. She might well spend her life under lock and key, and whenever her symptoms spiraled out of control—when she began to talk about killing or tried to run away—there would be no choice but to tie her down, fill her full of drugs, and wait for the terrible moment to pass.

Such was the view of her doctors at Yale.

The fact that Saks has defied those predictions is a testament in part to her stubbornness and will. But it was a facet of her character often played out in double-edged ways—in a refusal at first to believe she was sick, which sometimes made her resistant to treatment, even as it kept her from ever giving up. She was determined, for example, during her slides into madness, not to let go of her academic work, her studies of philosophy and the law, and later her teaching, writing and research. She had grown up in Miami in a strong Jewish family, among people who managed to build meaningful lives, and it seldom occurred to her not to do the same.

It was true periodically that the agony of her illness would sweep her away, that the voices and thoughts taking hold of her mind would become so powerful and so terrifying that she was reduced to desperation and despair. But when the antipsychotic drugs did their job, turning down the volume to give her some relief, she would find a part of herself still intact—still determined to find fulfillment in her work, and still tied to her family and her circle of friends.

And yet, for Saks, the issue of her medication was a problem. It was clear to her doctors that she simply had to have it, for that was the nature of schizophrenia itself: a chemical imbalance affecting her brain. But Saks saw pharmacology as a crutch—a view that may have been a throwback to the anti-drug messages she had listened to in high school. In those days of chemical experimentation, when she and her peers were getting into trouble, Elyn accepted the mantra of drug counselors that a person had to have the strength to stay clean. It was a matter of will more than anything else. And later in her life, when schizophrenic notions invaded her brain, her greatest fear was not that she was ill, but that she didn’t have the strength to repel them.

“I truly believed,” she would write in her memoir, “that everyone had the same scrambled thoughts that I did, as well as the occasional breaks from reality and the sense that some unseen force was compelling them to destructive behavior. The difference was, others were simply more adept than I at masking the craziness and presenting a healthy, competent front to the world.”

And others, of course, managed to do it without the help of medication.

Eventually, however, after years of suffering, her resistance wore down. Again and again, whatever her doctors’ choice of drugs, she would try to wean herself from their prescriptions. And again and again she would fall apart. But finally in California, she was introduced to clozapine, a drug developed in part through the studies of Dr. Herbert Meltzer of Vanderbilt, and it has worked well for her—for the most part, keeping her psychotic symptoms at bay.

Through it all, she also has relied on psychoanalysis, which she says is not typical of schizophrenic patients. Many psychiatrists, Saks explains, believe her particular form of mental illness is basically “a random firing of neurons,” producing jumbled thoughts that are beyond the reach of any kind of rationality. And indeed, when Saks began seeing an analyst in Oxford, the first few sessions were downright scary. As she remembered it later, despite the fact that she had never been violent, she carried a box cutter inside her purse, as well as a kitchen knife with a serrated blade, and warned the analyst that she had better watch her step.

“You are an evil monster,” Saks hissed, “perhaps the devil. I won’t let you kill me. You are evil, a witch. I’ll fight.”

But the analyst was calm, and session after session, day after day, she pushed Saks to confront her most frightening thoughts. For Saks the effect was strangely reassuring, a gradual discovery that she had found a safe place to deal with her illness. Thoughts that she had simply tried to repress were now being dissected and robbed of their power—and her analyst, always firm and professional, never seemed to be repelled.

Even today, with her life going well, she sees an analyst five mornings a week, sometimes sorting through psychotic thoughts, other times talking about ordinary things, the routine ups and downs of her life.

“I’m a lifer,” she says of her therapy. “I’m just too scared to get out of it.”

And so it appears that after a long and difficult journey—from Vanderbilt to Oxford and then to Yale, from a teaching job at a Connecticut law school, and finally to the University of Southern California—Saks has found the tools she needs to survive: a blend of medication and psychoanalysis. But there have been other ingredients in her healing also, things as ordinary as they are indispensable. One of those is a strong circle of friends, people like Scott Altman, a law school colleague, who works in an office just down the hall.

-Saks, now married and a cancer survivor, with a Time magazine Top-10 nonfiction book to her credit and an associate deanship at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law

Altman met Saks in 1989, just after her arrival at USC, and he found her fascinating from the start. She was tall and very bright, with a long, angular face that seemed to break easily into a smile. He says he had no inkling of her mental illness, though in retrospect there were a few things that might have made him wonder. Saks seemed extraordinarily shy and delivered her lectures in class sitting down, as if she didn’t want to call attention to herself. But she was brilliant in her course on mental health and the law, and in all her discussions with her students and peers, Altman was struck by what he later called “her careful, thoughtful intellectual contributions.”

He knew that she worked exceptionally hard. Between 1989 and 2002, before she started writing her personal memoir, she published three scholarly books and contributed chapters to at least three more, all the while writing more than 30 different articles for legal, psychiatric and medical journals. For all of that she was rewarded by the University of Southern California with a special appointment as Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law and Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences. But to her friends in California, the most impressive thing about Saks is something from a more everyday realm: her simple ability to be a friend.

“Elyn makes many friends,” explains Altman, “and usually keeps track of them forever. She is very funny and laughs easily at other people’s jokes. But in difficult times, when people around us go through deaths, divorce or cancer, Elyn is almost always the most aggressive about reaching out. She visits people in the hospital or whatever, and never shies away from those circumstances.”

For all of those reasons, Altman and others took it in stride when they encountered one of Elyn’s psychotic breaks. They were becoming less frequent by the time she arrived in Southern California, but then one day in 1999 she learned in the course of a routine physical that she had breast cancer. The irony of it was, the diagnosis came as she was getting engaged. She had met Will Vinet, a law librarian at the university and a man of optimism and talent, who wore his hair in a ponytail and loved to play music, cook gourmet dinners, and build fine furniture with his own hands. Elyn had made many friends through the years, but after meeting Will she realized she had never been in love. And now at the pinnacle of her own good fortune, she was suddenly confronted with the possibility of death. When she heard the diagnosis, something snapped inside her, and she began to babble once again in a free association of schizophrenic thoughts.

Fleeces and geeses and astronomical proportions with people growing tumors. It’s a growth industry.

As it happened, a friend was in the doctor’s waiting room, a Los Angeles psychiatrist named Esther Fine. She took Elyn into her arms and told her gently, “Oh, honey, it’s going to be all right. You’re in good hands.”

The psychosis passed more quickly this time, and after surgery and radiation, the cancer also has remained in remission. Elyn married Will, who remains a stabilizing force in her life, which is, she says, richer and better than it has ever been. But she also knows, probably better than most, that things can always blow at any seam.

It is a December morning in Southern California, and Saks is working alone in her office. As always, there are the stray and random schizophrenic thoughts—You are evil. You have killed many people. But she has learned over time to take them in stride, to treat them merely as the symptoms of an illness, no longer as crippling as they were in the past. She is focused instead on her legal and psychiatric scholarship, surrounded everywhere by mountains of paper. She has embarked on a study of high-functioning people with schizophrenia, searching empirically for the keys to their success, and she wants to study ways to help mentally ill people seek treatment.

There are also issues of mental health and the law—the use of physical restraints in hospitals, the right of patients to refuse medication—and all of these studies add a feeling of structure and purpose to her life. Most weeks, in fact, she works every day, chipping away at her projects, but taking frequent breaks to call her friends on the phone. She talks every day to Stephen Behnke, with whom she wrote her first book, and to her LA friends like Janet Smith and Esther Fine. And of course there is Will.

“My true love,” she calls him. “He gives my life a meaning that I never thought possible.”

But there is also the haunting reality of her illness, a reality, she knows, that will never go away. “I feel sad,” she admits. “So many years of so much pain.” And yet she believes her story offers hope, and she is now happy to have shared it with other people. There is a sturdy consolation in that—for her, another source of meaning and strength, still another reason to keep pushing on.

Elyn Saks at Vanderbilt

Elyn Saks delivered a talk as part of the Chancellor’s Lecture Series at Vanderbilt on March 20. See a podcast of her lecture at www.vanderbilt.edu/news/lectures.

Few people have a greater impact on Vanderbilt than the person who manages the university's $3.5 billion endowment. Last summer Philadelphia native Matthew Wright, then just 39, left his position as director of investments at Emory University to become vice chancellor for investments at Vanderbilt, succeeding Bill Spitz, who retired after 20 years at the university. Recently, Wright talked with Vanderbilt Magazine Editor GayNelle Doll about his work.

You made the decision to come to Vanderbilt at a point in time that turned out to be eventful for the university and for the financial markets. What have your first few months been like?

Everything changed shortly after I accepted Vanderbilt's offer. While I was still at Emory, Gordon Gee decided to return to Ohio State University. The same day Chancellor Gee's decision was announced, I received calls from several people who had been involved in recruiting me to Vanderbilt. They said, "We still want you to come. We think it's a wonderful opportunity for Vanderbilt and for you." Any anxiety we may have had related to Gordon's announcement was quickly quelled by a tremendous outpouring of support.

In hindsight that experience served to confirm our decision. My wife and I had visited Nashville, walked around campus, and taken in some community events, and we knew this was a wonderful opportunity to raise our two daughters in a positive environment. I thought I owed it to myself, my family and to all those who aided me over the years to step up to the challenge of being Vanderbilt's chief investment officer.

Then, just after I arrived at Vanderbilt, the market went into turmoil after having an incredible run. It's this type of environment--when the market is moving up and down and there's panic in the streets and in the papers--that presents opportunities for long-term investors.

Although it sounds perverse, I welcome the uncertainty. It gives us the opportunity to evaluate wonderful situations that we hope will pay off within the next three to five years.

How do you approach investing?

We look for opportunities that are under-valued or unrecognized. We have the luxury of being able to step back and take a very long-term view.

How many people are involved in investing for Vanderbilt?

We have 15 individuals--nine or 10 are investment professionals, and the others provide support. We outsource probably 90 to 95 percent of our investments, so our primary job is hiring experts. Instead of buying individual stocks and bonds, we hire firms that uncover opportunities within a specific area. Our job is to monitor them and understand what they're doing. If we hire them, we need to have a relationship with them. People halfway around the world want to hear the same voices, see the same faces, and we want to follow up and have continuity.

So it's important that we build a team that will have a long tenure at Vanderbilt. That means compensating competitively, providing the tools to make good decisions and, most important, fostering an environment that is creative and dynamic. We reinforce the notion that they are partners with the university whose decisions will impact the institution for generations to come.

In the years you've been managing uni­versities' assets, the importance of global investments has increased considerably. How has that changed your job?

It has made a tremendous difference. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, if you made an investment in Europe or Japan you were thought of as being on the frontier. Now there are not only more strategies--stock and bond strategies, hedge fund strategies, venture capital strategies, energy, technology, real estate--there's also global expansion. That pushes the edge of the envelope. It forces us to be diligent in our processes and hire people with cultural fluency--not only language skills but openness to new ways of doing things and new dynamics.

We have to travel more, follow more strategies and spread out more. We are segmenting ourselves into developed markets, including the U.S., Europe, and developed markets in Asia; and emerging markets such as China and India and Russia and Brazil. We're also looking at markets such as the Persian Gulf countries and sub-Saharan Africa.

Right now roughly 25 to 30 percent of our portfolio is invested overseas. We will probably get to the point where that's about 50 percent, across the entire portfolio.

How much of the move to greater global investment is due to optimism about the world economy, and how much of it is owing to pessimism about the domestic outlook?

I would phrase that differently. There are things in this country we need to correct, but we're in good shape. We're the wealthiest nation in the world, and it's going to take a long time for that to change. There is huge growth in markets overseas. Many of them have adopted models of democracy or migrated toward capital-driven markets, and there's growth associated with that. We view foreign markets as a very wide pool of opportunities, and our migration to overseas markets is a function of that.

How closely does the size of a university's endowment correlate with its academic ranking?

There is correlation between endowment size and the success and caliber of the institution, but it's not always a direct correlation. With a larger endowment, you can seize the opportunity to recruit academic talent and students. You attract high-caliber people, and as they become successful out in the workforce, they'll be in a stronger position to give back to their institutions and allow the endowment to grow.

If you look at an institution such as Harvard, one of the oldest universities in the country, it has an incredibly successful alumni base, and that alumni base gives back. It's a circular arrangement that keeps the endowment growing.

A number of universities have been under pressure recently to spend a greater proportion of endowment money on tuition. Is that a reasonable expectation?

Vanderbilt's entire endowment portfolio has 2,300 individual endowments, and each has the same spending rate of 4.5 percent. That rate was established in the late 1990s and is periodically reevaluated.

We don't have full discretion to say, "Let's spend more." We have to distinguish between unrestricted endowments and restricted endowments designated by the donor. Those dollars have been allocated to specific scholarships, professorships, chairs or programs. The individuals who made the gifts stated how they are to be used. They rightly expect stewardship and governance, and we abide by that.

We do have an academic venture capital fund that allows spending on specific program initiatives, which effectively increases our total spending to slightly above 4.5 percent, however.

What do you consider the best investment you've ever made?

At both Emory and Vanderbilt, I've invested in a Latin American trade finance fund. The fund makes short-term loans to provide working capital to small farmers who grow beans, fish meal, cattle, or a variety of other commodities for export. It has a very attractive return, and the risks are mitigated by a number of factors including different types of crops, different harvesting cycles, the size of the loan--all denominated in U.S. dollars--and the insurance behind the shipment. It's diversified in a number of ways.

Do you invest your own personal assets, or does someone do it for you?

I'm just an index guy for a couple of reasons. I don't have much time to go around picking stocks on my own. I make a few asset allocation decisions from time to time, but basically I have a long-term, low-cost strategy approach and I monitor my statements periodically just like everybody else.

Illustrations by Hal Mayforth

In 1959 renowned Caltech physicist Richard Feynman pondered the possibilities of just how small technology could get in his seminal lecture, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." He foresaw a world of extremely small machines manufactured at the atomic scale--from the bottom up--by direct manipulation of atoms.

While devices like semiconductors have shrunk exponentially in the nearly 50 years since Feynman challenged the next generation of scientists and engineers to dream small, thus far the reality has fallen far short of what Feynman described.

But now the burgeoning field of nanotechnology is offering a tantalizing universe of possibilities. Imagine concrete that is virtually indestructible, lighting that requires one-tenth the energy of conventional sources, cancer detection when only a few cells are present.

Nanotechnology promises all this and more. Vanderbilt is one of the nation's leading institutions in nanotechnology research, having received 10 percent of all National Institutes of Health funding for nanotechnology in biology and medicine.

At the heart of the effort is the Vanderbilt Institute for Nanoscale Engineering (VINSE): a community of chemists, biologists, physicists, physicians and engineers that fosters interdisciplinary collaboration and creativity. Since its inception in 2001, VINSE has garnered more than $47 million in federal funding to explore the structure, novel properties and applications of nanomaterials.

What Is Nanotechnology, Anyway?

"Nano" (from the Greek nanos for "dwarf") means one-billionth. Measurements at this scale are made in nanometers (nm), or one-billionth of a meter. To put this in perspective, a human hair is some 90,000 nm wide, and 1 nm is the width of just 10 hydrogen atoms. We're talking small.

We're also talking weird. Materials this small just don't behave like they do in the macro world. At these scales the familiar laws of physics are left behind, and you enter the realm where quantum mechanics holds sway. Materials take on new and often strange properties. These novel properties have convinced researchers that small is the next big thing.

"That's the great thing about nano and why it's so fascinating," says Sandra Rosenthal, associate professor of chemistry, physics and pharmacology and director of VINSE. "You get down to the nanometer-size regime, and you don't know what you're going to get. If you make a new nanomaterial, it's going to have properties that you may not have predicted, and it's those properties that lead to fantastic applications."

Solid-State Lighting

Right now 30 percent of the electricity generated in the United States goes to lighting, the bulk of which is incandescent and only 5 percent efficient. One area of Rosenthal's research involves the chemical synthesis of semiconducting nanocrystals--also called quantum dots--in sizes less than 6 nm. Because they are semiconductors, they behave like solid-state light-emitting diodes, or LEDs. Her lab has been making smaller and smaller nanocrystals and studying their light-emitting properties.

"As you make the nanocrystals smaller," Rosenthal says, "they go through the colors of the spectrum: The big ones are red, and it goes just like a rainbow through orange, yellow, green, to blue. We made them so small that we thought they were going to be blue, but when we put them in front of a laser, the room lit up in this beautiful white light." It turns out that at the magic size of 1.5 nm, the nanocrystals, which normally emit only a narrow wavelength of light, emit the entire spectrum, producing almost perfectly white light.

"My graduate student, Mike Bowers, demonstrated that by coating the surface of a cheap blue LED with a urethane mixture containing these nanocrystals, you can convert the blue light into white light," says Rosenthal.

The impact of a solid-state white-light emitter could be huge. LEDs consume only one-tenth of the electricity for the same amount of light as an incandescent bulb, and they last much longer.

The Department of Energy would like to see the United States transition to solid-state lighting by the year 2025. The problem is that current white-light LEDs are expensive to make, and their light is actually bluish--not an attractive option for home or office lighting.

"So what's great about the nanocrystals is that--for not a lot of money--we already exceed the Department of Energy's 2025 standard for color quality because the white light they emit is so beautiful," says Rosenthal. "The Department of Energy estimates that solid-state lighting could save U.S. consumers more than $10 billion per year in energy costs, as well as a big reduction in CO2 emissions produced by generating the electricity. So you win both ways."

Early Virus Detection

A few doors down from Rosenthal's office, David Wright is interested in the application of quantum dots to help solve a common medical dilemma.

"Everyone who has a child is familiar with late nights, high fevers, and not knowing why their child is sick," says Wright, who is assistant professor of chemistry and associate professor of pediatrics. "Parents wonder if they should call the doctor at 2 a.m. or go to the emergency room."

Unfortunately, many times after children are admitted to the hospital, their fever can break. They're well on the way to getting better before any diagnosis can be made, and even then it can be inconclusive.

"The question we were interested in was how to figure out what your little one was sick with," says Wright. "Nanotechnology offers not just one way, but several ways to do it."

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is the leading cause of lower respiratory tract infections in babies and children. Its symptoms make it difficult to distinguish from the common cold, yet RSV can lead to pneumonia, bronchiolitis and other serious illnesses.

Wright and his collaborators use quantum dots of different sizes and bind them to the two proteins that respiratory syncytial virus uses to attach and fuse to the host cell. One size quantum dot binds to the attachment protein and emits red light, the other to the fusion protein and emits green. When the sample is viewed under the clinical lab's plate reader or optical fluorescent microscope, the colors are easily identifiable. Where the colors overlap appears yellow and indicates a colocalization of the proteins, confirming that the cell has been infected.

"In typical clinical culture assays, it can take three days before you have a high enough concentration of protein to detect with an organic dye and allow a diagnosis," Wright says. "With quantum dots we can get positive results within one hour of infection. We can use more dots and test for several viruses simultaneously with one tiny sample. Whether the test is positive or negative, the child spends a fraction of the time in the hospital bed waiting for results."

Wright is adamant that this technology could be implemented very quickly. "This is about as close to off-the-shelf nanotechnology as a scientist can get," Wright says. "These quantum dots are commercially available, the antibodies are available, and the clinics have the equipment.

"We're not talking about something that can be done five years or 10 years down the road. We're talking today."

Early Cancer Detection

Over in biomedical engineering, Todd Giorgio is part of a team that has received international recognition for its work using nanomaterials to detect cancers at the earliest stage, when only a few cells are present.

"We use quantum dots that we engineer to bind to proteins that are exclusively associated with cancer," says Giorgio, who is chair and professor of biomedical engineering and professor of chemical engineering. "We start with a suspension of quantum dots that are much too small to see individually. Then we add the cancer protein, and the particles bind to it, forming a clump or aggregate. We can see these aggregates with a flow cytometer, which is standard equipment in every clinical lab."

Because quantum dots are available in many different colors, each color could be used as a marker for a different protein. "So you could take one sample of blood, add the quantum dots, use a flow cytometer to look for the different proteins associated with a cancer, and get a yes or no answer."

Another strategy Giorgio is exploring involves the use of iron-oxide nanoparticles engineered to bind to cancer cells. "The survival rates of primary cancers are quite good if the patient comes in with only a primary tumor," Giorgio says. "If the cancer has metastasized, the survival rate drops dramatically."

These metastases are extremely hard to spot by MRI. But the iron-oxide nanoparticles bind to the metastases, increasing their contrast and making them much more visible.

"Physicians could better identify patients with metastases and change their treatment from Day One," Giorgio says.

Stronger, Lighter Concrete

The tragedy of the Minneapolis bridge collapse on Aug. 1, 2007, brought the nation's aging infrastructure into sharp focus. According to the National Highway Administration, 81,000 bridges in the United States are deemed structurally deficient, and another 81,000 are functionally obsolete. Nanofiber research could have a major impact on the next generation of repair and replacement of these aging structures.

"Cement is one of the oldest and most common building materials in the world. It's everywhere," says Florence Sanchez. "The problem is that the cement we use nowadays degrades. We're trying to understand and modify this material at the nanoscale level to see if we can make a new material that is stronger and lasts longer."

Sanchez, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, is investigating the use of nanofibers in concrete to improve its strength and durability. "I'm very interested in the way the material degrades or weathers over time," she says. "If we can make the concrete strong enough, then we might be able to do away with steel reinforcing rods--rebar--which are major sources of degradation."

Modification of concrete also could expand its abilities. "Concrete itself doesn't conduct electricity," says Sanchez. "But if you add carbon nano- or microfibers that do conduct electricity, then you have a material that is going to conduct electricity, which opens up new applications--like roads that warm themselves up in the winter."

What's Next?

Other applications of nanotechnology being researched and developed at VINSE range from ultra-thin coatings for hypersonic (think super-supersonic) vehicles to the generation of electricity from the proteins in spinach cells. While it is unclear just how nanotechnology will impact your life and standard of living in the very near future, it is a certainty that it will. New materials lead to new properties and new applications, which in turn lead to more questions. And so it goes.

There's still plenty of room at the bottom.

Call them "the disappeared."

Last year 1.2 million American students dropped out of high school without receiving their diplomas.

Only they didn't really disappear. According to "The Silent Epidemic," a recent study by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, many of them joined the ranks of the unemployed and impoverished. They became single parents, swallowed up state and federal dollars for welfare and food stamps, and, in too many cases, committed crimes and went to prison.

The U.S. system of public education, it seems, is failing its children. But not all of them. Hundreds of high schools are graduating nearly 100 percent of their students and sending them out to universities far and wide, fully prepared to take on the rigors of higher education. Those left behind on the bottom rung of the achievement gap tend to be minority boys and girls from low-income neighborhoods, often in urban areas, and often attending massive comprehensive high schools of several thousand students.

Today nearly one in three high school students will leave school without a diploma. For white and Asian American students, the graduation rate is estimated at between 70 and 80 percent. For blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans, the rate plummets to around 50 percent. The situation is even direr in certain school districts. The graduation rate in the Detroit city schools, for example, was only 21.7 percent in 2006.

Some media sources have tagged the problem with catchy labels, calling the United States "Dropout Nation," and failing schools "dropout factories." Yet those terms may actually mask the real issue--that millions of teenagers and young adults feel so alienated in an academic setting that they ultimately pack it in and give up.

Although many of the contributing factors seem insurmountable--lack of resources and parental involvement, poor housing and high mobility, state and federal mandates on testing, teacher inexperience and burnout--researchers, including those at Vanderbilt, are doggedly chipping away at the problem, trying to come up with solutions that address the issues on at least a neighborhood and local level.

Here's why: The education dilemma is a ticking time bomb. According to some experts, our economy is losing hundreds of billions of dollars in wages alone over the lifetimes of these dropouts. America, which only 20 years ago had the most educated populace on the planet, now ranks anywhere from seventh to 18th in comparison to other nations in terms of relative effectiveness of its educational system. Performance in math and science among U.S. students in fourth through 12th grades is steadily declining; one study has American eighth graders tied with students in third-world Zimbabwe in mathematics. As America moves from a manufacturing-based economy to a globalized service- and technology-based economy, it is not producing a workforce educated enough to handle jobs that will keep the country clicking.

Despite decades of education reform, educators and legislators now face the hard reality that the system itself is a vinyl LP in the iPod era. The post-World War II concept of teaching children in monolithic neighborhood high schools that steer youngsters into either academic or vocational classes may need a wholesale do-over. In a high-tech, information-laden society such as ours, everybody from professors to mechanics needs a fairly advanced academic skill set.

Early Action Is Crucial

Carolyn Hughes, professor of special education and human and organizational development in Peabody College, believes that creation of inner-school "small learning communities" is one place to start. Studies by the Gates Foundation and other organizations reveal that, in most cases,