Irish Arch and Old Physics Tower, Queen’s University Belfast

Keivan Stassun sat down with fellow astronomers at Queen’s University Belfast a few years back with no preset notions about how the two research teams might partner. What developed is a collaboration that is, well, out of this world.

The newly introduced researchers, normally separated by an ocean, didn’t begin by asking what they were doing already that could be enhanced by sharing. Instead, they immediately began to talk about projects they couldn’t have envisioned on their own, remembers Stassun, director of the Vanderbilt Initiative in Data-Intensive Astrophysics and professor of physics and astronomy. Stassun and his colleagues at Queen’s were both “dealing with sort of an embarrassment of riches.” Between the two universities, they had access to reams of data from observatories around the world. What they needed were intelligent computer tools to sift and winnow data in an automated way, alerting scientists to critical findings. So the teams developed them together.

College of Arts and Science and Queen’s scholars work together on two different research thrusts: to locate and better understand exoplanets, which exist outside our solar system, and to detect and study supernova explosions. These efforts involve a host of graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and faculty members.

Keivan Stassun

That collaboration is one part of several strong and emerging core partnerships between Vanderbilt and universities overseas, partnerships that are essential to the vitality of the college and to research institutions today.

“Looking forward, universities are going to have to create these kinds of global networks to compete effectively for students, faculty and resources. It’s really turning into a global marketplace,” says Tim McNamara, vice provost for faculty and international affairs.

Building a Pyramid

Timothy McNamara

McNamara likens the school’s international efforts to a pyramid. Institutional agreements with core partners, like the one with Queen’s, form the top of the pyramid. Other core partnerships—a recent but very well-developed association with the University of Melbourne, a longstanding one with the University of São Paulo in Brazil, and the rapidly expanding relationship with Queen’s in Belfast, Nashville’s sister city—have blossomed lately. Other core partners include China’s Fudan University, Chile’s Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and South Africa’s University of Cape Town.

Faculty collaborations and graduate student exchange, such as bringing Queen’s students to the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities as they complete their doctoral dissertations, comprise the pyramid’s next tier.

A post-grad at work at Queen’s University Belfast.

And the all-important base of the pyramid will always be study abroad and student exchange, McNamara says.

The College of Arts and Science’s global connections and international scholarship are natural extensions of a vibrant, meaningful liberal arts education, Dean Carolyn Dever says. “It’s part of the college’s mission to expand students’ interest in other cultures and provide diverse experiences,” she says. “Our increasingly global society makes it both possible and vital for students and faculty to be citizens of the world.”

Strengthened by Institutional Support

Institutional collaborations with core partners require a great deal of commitment from both participants, McNamara notes. Recently, Vanderbilt and Melbourne jointly provided $344,000 to support partnership grants for faculty.

University of Melbourne’s gothic Old Quadrangle.

One of those projects has Terry Lybrand, professor of chemistry, joining forces with colleagues at the University of Melbourne to analyze data from studies of small peptides and proteins that produce anti-microbial effects. Lybrand provides the in-depth computational work to analyze the data. His Melbourne counterparts will provide something Vanderbilt doesn’t have—solid-state NMR spectroscopy.

Lybrand says the association is enhanced by the many common aspirations and features between the two universities and the fact that there is no language barrier. Well, almost no language barrier. Lybrand says Aussie slang takes a little getting used to.

Eva Harth

These types of associations build slowly but yield surprising benefits. Melbourne has poured money into a gorgeous new eye institute, says Associate Professor of Chemistry Eva Harth. The Arts and Science professor develops targeted drug delivery for cancer treatment and researches nanoparticles to treat glaucoma. Melbourne’s eye institute is eager to work with world experts to enhance their productivity and global standing. Already Harth was part of a plenary lecture in nanomedicine at Melbourne and is considering more possible collaborations.

The improved access to talent, resources and funding benefits both institutions, Harth says, adding, “You can accelerate only so much without good collaborators.”

Synergies

The third blossoming core partnership actually began many years ago with Chancellor Harvie Branscomb, who traveled to Brazil’s University of São Paulo following World War II. He wanted Vanderbilt to be more than a Southern university and began by recruiting renowned scholars—Brazilianists—who formed the core of what is now the Center for Latin American Studies.

City of São Paulo, Brazil

Nashville has “a natural synergy with Brazil,” explains Jane Landers, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History and CLAS interim director.

Landers, whose research focuses on Brazilian slavery and related issues, says the Southern United States and Brazil have a common history that included eradicating the indigenous population, seizing their land and bringing African slaves to work on plantations.

A great deal of research and collaboration has come out of this shared history, Landers notes. Brazil is working to elevate the lives of its poor black citizens and is intensely interested in the experiences of the American South, she says.

The South’s difficult history with fair treatment and equal opportunities for minorities is also something that unites Nashville and Queen’s University Belfast. Stassun says Queen’s and Vanderbilt each have an institutional commitment to boosting educational and professional prospects for populations that have been underrepresented or faced prejudice.

Stassun co-directs the Fisk–Vanderbilt Masters-to-Ph.D. Bridge program, the university’s alliance with the historically black university. “It turns out that Vanderbilt and Queen’s both, for very different reasons, are at this very interesting point in history. Vanderbilt, through our partnership with Fisk, is attempting in an aggressive and progressive way to respond to the need for increased diversity in the sciences and to train diverse future leaders for the scientific professions,” Stassun says.

“Northern Ireland is emerging from an era of great challenge and unrest. They are now addressing the challenges of successfully integrating traditionally self-segregated religious groups for full inclusion in the scientific professions,” he says. “We’re approaching those challenges institutionally in a similarly broadminded and positive and inclusive way.”

Bridges and Connections

Arts and Science’s international interests support individual students and scholars, too. Building international connections early in a scholarly career can be a critical early marker of success, says Mona Frederick, executive director of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. That’s a discovery that has characterized the Warren Center’s graduate fellowship program with Queen’s, which provides a fellowship to a Queen’s graduate student to be part of the Warren Center for a year while the scholar works on his or her dissertation.

As dissertation adviser for Queen’s graduate student Clive Hunter, Queen’s University Senior Lecturer Maeve McCusker traveled to Nashville for a public lecture Hunter presented in conjunction with the program. She noted that the Warren Center’s Graduate Student Fellows program projected “the very model of what a postgraduate community should look like.”

“While students came from different disciplines and had an eclectic range of interests, I was genuinely dazzled by the connections and bridges they found between their varied fields,” McCusker says. She was further dazzled when her Irish boyfriend, a Queen’s faculty colleague who accompanied her on the trip, proposed in Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge with a ring purchased at Tiffany in Nashville. Married now, the couple has a painting of Nashville’s “honky-tonk strip” hanging in their dining room.

It’s not just faculty and students learning from each other, either. Dean Carolyn Dever and other leaders have visited Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Melbourne, and key officials from core partner institutions have visited and learned from Vanderbilt. Additionally, Queen’s University has consulted with Vanderbilt as it builds its own humanities center in Belfast.

The Pyramid’s Foundation—Study Abroad

Each year, more than 40 percent of College of Arts and Science juniors study abroad in Vanderbilt-sponsored programs. The most popular one is Vanderbilt in France, which has been in existence for 51 years. The longstanding program has adapted over the years to accommodate changes in French culture and politics, and continues to develop new emphases. As part of the program, some students now choose to do internships with French companies or nonprofits, gaining valuable international work experience.

Vanderbilt in France

In addition to Vanderbilt’s own programs in countries ranging from Argentina to New Zealand, the university works with other institutions to offer an even wider array of study abroad options.

For undergraduates seeking a unique abroad opportunity that combines travel and service overseas with a strong academic and research focus, there is the Vanderbilt Initiative for Scholarship and Global Engagement (VISAGE), begun in 2008.

Students first take a spring class centering on a country and topic of interest with the faculty member who will lead their four-week summer service trip. The course provides students with a foundation that equips them for more thoughtful service work and community engagement during their time abroad, explained Shelley Jewell, assistant director of the Global Education Office.

Participants typically travel to sites with a Vanderbilt presence, frequently involving Vanderbilt’s core partners, making the program more sustainable.

Once the service abroad is complete, students have the option to follow up with a related, intensive research-based course. The experiences are often profound, Jewell says. “When students return to Vanderbilt, many confront their sense of privilege in relation to the communities they served,” she says. “As a result, they often change the focus of their careers and want to return to those communities.”

While the more traditional programs last a semester, increasing numbers of students now are taking advantage of monthlong Maymester experiences between spring semester exams and the start of summer sessions.

“For some students, a semester abroad sets them back,” says Martin Rapisarda, Arts and Science associate dean. “Maymester fills a particular niche. It’s time-intensive, it’s thematically focused, and it’s taught by Vanderbilt faculty who have special expertise on the topic and provide experiences that you couldn’t necessarily have on campus.”

The experience, he says, can be unforgettable and unmatched. “If I’m an English major and I can go to England and study reformation literature with (director of undergraduate writing) Roger Moore, going to pilgrimage sites as well as reading those texts, it brings those texts alive in a way that complements and enhances the experience,” Rapisarda says.

Looking to the Future

Other relationship opportunities are emerging in other areas of the world, such as Germany and China and other parts of Asia, according to McNamara. “We try to find important areas of the world that will yield interesting and productive collaborations not necessarily looked at by others,” he says.

“At a very high level our goal is to increase the impact and visibility of Vanderbilt worldwide in a very strategic, focused way.”

The home where Robert Penn Warren was born in 1905 is now a museum in Guthrie, Ky.

Vanderbilt honors him with its Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities and Fugitive and Agrarian Collection; Guthrie has the Robert Penn Warren Birthplace House…although it nearly lost that.

In spring 1986, Guthrie resident Jeane Moore read a newspaper article reporting that Western Kentucky University wanted to buy the small home where Warren had been born in 1905 and move it to the university’s campus.

From top: Robert Penn Warren’s Vanderbilt yearbook picture; the museum has Warren’s keys to his Vanderbilt room on display; Vanderbilt’s Wesley Hall, one of the places Warren lived.

Moore immediately called the person quoted in the article. “We had quite a conversation,” Moore recalls. “I’ll never forget her last words…she said to me, ‘Well, you know, Mrs. Moore, that Guthrie isn’t a proper place to have the Robert Penn Warren house.’ I said, ‘Well, it was good enough for him to be born here,’ and I hung up the phone.”

The fight was on.

Moore, Guthrie native Melba Smith and a handful of other residents set out to prevent the relocation of the brick bungalow on Third Street.

“Our mayor said, ‘Well, now, you know we can put up a little monument there on the site,’ and I said, ‘No, Mr. Mayor. We’re not going to be putting up any monument.’ I was ready to lie down out there in the street,” Smith says. “It was like, if you’re going to come and take this house away, you’re going to have to do it over my dead body.”

Moore says her opposition was based on historic legacy. “He was one of the most famous writers in the world, and I just didn’t want them to take the house. You can’t change history,” she says. “The man was born here; you can’t move it somewhere else and have it have meaning.”

That Guthrie had meaning for Warren is unmistakable. Although he left in his teens for Vanderbilt and came back only for visits, the people, places, experiences and memories of Guthrie remained with him.

“But as far as writing is concerned, the basic images that every man has, I suppose, go back to those of his childhood. He has to live on that capital all his life,” Warren told an editor of Studies in the Novel at Yale University in 1969.

The acclaimed poet and novelist returned to that theme often in his writing. He wrote the poem “True Love” when he was 83 about a beautiful girl he saw when he was a boy in Guthrie. “It seems to me that all your vital images are ones you get before you’re seven, eight, nine years old,” Warren told The New England Review in 1978. “That’s true for my life anyway.”

The museum includes items related to Warren and his family and friends.

The Battle Won—Now What?

With so much of Guthrie having shaped Warren, it was important for the Kentucky town of approximately 1,500 to keep ties to its most famous citizen. By the mid-1980s, the community was changed from the one Warren knew. His parents, siblings and many friends were gone. The railroad presence was a shadow of what it had been. Places he recalled and the houses his family lived in were in private hands. The town didn’t have anything to honor its native son.

“First we got the townspeople and the county people all riled up,” Smith recalls. Then the small group called politicians. They wrote Warren scholars. They alerted the media. The media turned the tide, the women say. “The Atlanta Constitution came up and did a two-page story on us,” Smith says. Then newspapers all over the country took up the story.

In a few weeks, the battle was over. The sale to the university didn’t go through and the 17 members of the Committee for the Preservation of the Robert Penn Warren Birthplace found themselves called upon to sign a legal agreement making them personally responsible for the house’s mortgage.

Jeane Smith and Melba Moore are two of the local volunteers who saved and renovated the house.

The house had had several owners since the Warrens moved to another Guthrie house during Warren’s boyhood. Most recently, it had been rental property owned by two Air Force colonels at nearby Fort Campbell. It would require renovation, collections and period-appropriate furnishings to make it a proper museum. And funds.

Grassroots and Gumption

The committee registered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and raised the money needed to purchase, repair and run the house. “We actually paid for the house with grassroots fundraising, mostly luncheons that we catered in the house,” Moore says of the group that continues to oversee the birthplace. “That was over a long period of time. We had yard sales, we had auctions, we had walks, everything we could think of.

“At the same time we were doing that, we were making people aware of Warren, going to schools, giving programs, having schoolchildren here—once the house was to a point that we could have people inside,” she says. “We wanted the schoolchildren to know that this man had made it to the top of his profession and he was from Guthrie, Ky.—so they could do it, too.”

Today, the meticulously restored house is furnished with antiques and Warren materials. Visitors can stand in the room where Warren was born and view memorabilia, books and photos, including a portrait created for Life magazine and donated by Annie Leibovitz. They can learn how Guthrie shaped him and his work.

Moore, Smith and others on the committee tell personal stories, tales handed down from people who knew the Warren family. They share wonderful anecdotes, ranging from how childhood bullies tried to hang Warren in a nearby barn to the opinion most locals had of the family (“Everybody in town knew that Thomas was the successful Warren boy. The other one had gone off and he was making a job out of going to school. He was continually going to school,” Moore relates dryly.).

It was that going to school that brought him to Vanderbilt, where Warren found where his true interests lay: in poetry, writing, literature and teaching.

The women say that when they read Warren’s work, they find Guthrie. “Warren drew on everything around us,” Smith says. “The woods, the railroad, the bullbats and the cinders. The people, the characters…Unless you’re from here, and knew of some of those people, you don’t even realize he’s writing about Guthrie. I think his whole life here spoke to him and he just valued it so much. It’s just amazing.”

Top: Data from Large Hadron Collider experiments are monitored 24/7 in Stevenson’s virtual control center. Middle: Victoria Greene. Bottom: Vanderbilt physicists communicate with researchers around the world.

But the room is much more than a quiet computer lab. Instead, it is a window to the very forefront of modern physics, allowing Vanderbilt University researchers to transport half a world away to the border of Switzerland and France, where collisions of protons and heavy ions occur at nearly the speed of light.

The Stevenson facility is one of eight virtual control rooms in the United States that collect data from experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) outside Geneva, Switzerland. For most of the year, physicists study the results of collisions of protons that occur in the vacuum-sealed chambers 50-175 meters underground. One month each year, the focus is on heavy ions.

Each collision generates mountains of data and, as a Tier 1 computing center for the project, Vanderbilt plays a key role in collecting and storing the data and disseminating it to thousands of other researchers around the world. Vanderbilt also took a lead role in creating the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, one of two main particle detectors in the LHC.

“People will say, ‘You’ve got 2,000 people on this experiment; what can one group [Vanderbilt] matter?’” says Victoria Greene, professor of physics and senior associate dean of graduate education, College of Arts and Science. “You’re developing a reputation with these 2,000 people. There are entire research areas where the annual conference is less than half that. This is significant.”

Astonishing Results, Astonishingly Fast

Since the collider beam was first turned on in March 2010, it’s already yielded significant results. None has gained more attention than results indicating that scientists are getting closer to discovery of the Higgs boson, which could help explain why particles have mass. The CMS team and another team, Atlas, completed “astonishingly fast analysis of this data,” Greene says. “Neither result is big enough to reach the level needed for a discovery and it seems clear that we will need at least another year’s worth of data.”

While finding the elusive Higgs boson—sometimes called the “God particle”—may be one of the major goals of the LHC, it is far from the only research that’s being conducted. Greene, Professor of Physics Charles Maguire and Professor of Physics Julia Velkovska received one of Vanderbilt’s own IDEAS grants to study jet shapes in heavy ion collisions. Associate Professor of Physics Will Johns performs research that makes him the “go-to person for the pixel tracking detectors, the fine tracking detectors at the heart of CMS,” Greene says.

Vanderbilt plays a key role in collecting and storing the data and disseminating it to thousands of other researchers around the world.

“All top physics departments have a presence in fundamental physics like this,” Greene says. “Ultimately, you need to be able to understand matter in its essence. It’s also attractive to students. As soon as LHC turned on, we had more students than we knew what to do with. Students want to work at the energy frontier and that’s something we can provide.”

Middle-of-the-Night Meetings

To be sure, there are modern-day challenges, such as the weekly meetings that alternate between convenient times for those in Europe and for researchers in the States. That may mean that a Vanderbilt postdoctoral researcher like Monika Sharma makes a presentation at 2 a.m.—ensuring that her web camera is turned off so no one can see that she’s ready for bed. It also requires physics graduate student Eric Appelt to be available any time the green on the screen turns red, indicating that there’s an issue with the quality of the data that’s being sent. He has five minutes to respond to avert a flurry of panicked calls from researchers from around the world, concerned about data being lost.

“We actually rotate being on call,” Appelt says. “There is actually a human being looking at these all the time. If one of these turns red, there’s someone somewhere in the world with a beeper.”

While the LHC is itself a marvel, the sheer volume of data that it creates brings both challenges and potential. In December 2010, the heavy ion collisions generated 30 million separate events, all of which had to be analyzed. In all, the LHC provides enough data to fill 1.7 million dual-sided DVDs each year; Vanderbilt has devoted more than 1,000 computer cores to store the information.

“It’s a different scale and a different amount of data that is being collected,” Sharma says. “There’s definitely more pressure with it as we’re managing the needs of the Tier 2 centers and doing the physics analysis ourselves. It’s really keeping your feet on two different poles and trying to manage.”

But as the research continues to yield impressive discoveries, the juggling has proven productive.

“In this field it is especially important to choose your experiments wisely, because the experiments take such a long time to plan, build and conduct that you can’t work on very many in your career,” Greene says. “Tantalizing results like these underscore that fact that we physicists chose well when we joined CMS, and Vanderbilt chose well in supporting our efforts.”

While in the College of Arts and Science in the mid-1950s, young Antonio Gotto Jr. caught the attention of his Sigma Nu fraternity brothers, who constantly sought out the clever student for crash courses in their own studies.

The biochemistry major also found himself with no shortage of eager mentors (in particular Dean Madison Sarratt and Dr. F. Tremaine Billings) who encouraged him to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship, modeled discipline and diligence, and taught him how to write—elements that would enrich his career and life in unforeseen ways.

This year, Gotto (BA’57, MD’65)—now a world-renowned expert of atherosclerosis, the primary cause of cardiovascular disease—retired as Cornell University’s provost for medical affairs and the Stephen and Suzanne Weiss Dean at Weill Cornell Medical College in Manhattan.

Dr. Tony Gotto, Stephen and Suzanne Weiss Dean at Weill Cornell Medical College, speaks at commencement in Qatar in 2011.

During his 15-year tenure as dean, Gotto oversaw the raising of $2.6 billion in various campaigns. He established a school branch and biomedical research program in Qatar, joined forces with the Catholic church and Tanzanian government to start a medical school in Tanzania, and formed an affiliation with Methodist Hospital in Houston. He also quadrupled Weill Cornell’s endowment and created 122 new faculty endowments during what benefactor Sanford Weill considered the school’s “golden age.”

Beneath the titles and accolades, those who know Tony Gotto say he is first and foremost a devoted dad, quick wit, voracious reader and the kind of man to put Weill at ease by ordering less-than-heart-healthy eggs Benedict—one of Weill’s favorites—at a breakfast meeting.

No Leisurely Retirement

Anita and Tony Gotto. This is the second time Tony Gotto was photographed in the Memorial Room in Alumni Hall. The first was in 1957 for a Vanderbilt Alumnus story about Vanderbilt’s Rhodes Scholars.

“He’s the most comfortable person you’ll ever meet,” says longtime family friend Barbara Gregg Phillips (BA’58, MA’70), who roomed with Anita, Gotto’s wife of 53 years, while they were students at Peabody College. “He always makes you feel like he’s glad you’re there, a Southern gentleman through and through.”

But make no mistake: There’s no peaceful rocking chair in this Southern gentleman’s immediate future. Gotto is transitioning into a new role of co-chairing the Board of Overseers of Weill Cornell Medical College. His first year of retirement is looking less and less like a sabbatical by the hour, says Anita Safford Gotto, BS’59. Dr. Gotto won’t have the day-to-day running of the medical school under his purview, but there still will be meetings and plenty of travel.

“He’s planning the international section of our trips, and I’m getting together the national section,” she says. “It is still to be determined just how this retirement is going to work out.”

If anyone would know, it would be Anita Gotto. His partner in vocation as well as in life, she has been a constant confidante, encourager and helpmate. They each tell the story of how they met on a bus to summer camp when they were 13 and 15—but only Anita adds the fact that she spent most of her first year of high school in the girl’s bathroom avoiding his pursuit. She eventually gave in when she saw how many others thought highly of him; by the time Gotto left Nashville on the Rhodes Scholarship for the University of Oxford, they were engaged.

Researcher, Scholar, Physician and Dad

Under the leadership of Sir Hans Kornberg and Sir Hans Krebs, Gotto’s time at the British university opened his eyes to the underlying pathophysiology of disease, and a focus on lipidology came next. He enjoyed a season at the National Institutes of Health, then spent 20 years chairing the Department of Internal Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and the Methodist Hospital, all the while researching the link between cholesterol carriers (the good and bad cholesterol) and heart disease, and became a pioneer in educational efforts aimed at cardiovascular risk reduction.

He also kept a steady roster of patients, ranging from international dignitaries to everyday folks. And he became the father of three daughters—two of whom developed diabetes early on, deepening his passion for helping those who are sick become well. One developed further complications that have disabled her; the Gottos travel to Houston to be with her every few weeks.

“It resets your priorities when one of your children has a serious, life-threatening illness,” Gotto says. “It does alter everything.”

Future days, of course, will bring more time with family, more time with friends and more time spent on the visionary, big-picture ideas that are a hallmark of Gotto’s career.

Preparation and Hard Work

Among those visionary concepts was proving a link between cholesterol and hardening of the arteries and thus the connection between lowering cholesterol and lower incidence of heart disease. Another was the transformation of complex medical information into layman’s language in the groundbreaking books by Gotto and longtime friend, heart surgeon Dr. Michael DeBakey. Their The Living Heart, The New Living Heart and The New Living Heart Cookbook championed healthy, good-tasting food. A revised edition, The Living Heart in the 21st Century, was published in April.

Today, Gotto looks back on his time in the College of Arts and Science as a season of great preparation—and a lot of hard work.

“I had grown up knowing about Vanderbilt, and it was the only place I wanted to go,” says Gotto, named the university’s Distinguished Alumnus in 2000. “It had a reputation for having very high academic standards.” It also had a rigorous, disciplined program that set good habits for the more independent, less structured format he found at Oxford.

“I worked very hard,” he says. “Particularly my first year. It got a little easier, but not much.…I can’t say whether students then were any more or less smart. But I’m glad I don’t have to compete to get into medical school today.”

He’s also glad, he says, that his career ended up taking him to the dean’s office at Cornell, where his everyday presence will be sorely missed.

“To use a football metaphor, Dean Gotto is a ‘triple threat,’” says Cornell University President David Skorton. “If he were playing gridiron football, he would be equally adept at running, passing and kicking, and thus a very valuable player on his team—as he has been on the Cornell team for 15 years.

“He excels in teaching, research and clinical care,” Skorton says. “He combines empathy for his patients, students and colleagues with an incisive intellect and a strong commitment to engagement for using his enormous and varied skills to lift the world’s burdens.”

Bell

“He’s a brilliant and caring teacher, a productive and admired scholar, a supportive if sometimes provocative and crabby colleague, and a witty, refreshingly naughty presence around the department,” says Paul Elledge, professor of English, emeritus.

Mark Schoenfield, professor and chair of English, echoes that sentiment: “He’s a transformative figure in the department. I respect him enormously. He cherishes his Southern tradition but is a relentless critic of what needed and still needs to change.

“Fifty years ago our department was full of white men teaching about dead white men,” Schoenfield says. “Today it’s enormously diverse not only in terms of our faculty, but also in what we are teaching: Caribbean literature, African-American literature, film, women’s literature and gender studies. Vereen was very much a part of that change—a voice for transformation.”

Often, Bell’s was a lone voice. As a young professor during the turbulent 1960s, he was a strong advocate for civil rights and academic freedom and an opponent of the war in Vietnam.

“He marched, protested, joined the Nashville sit-ins and delivered petitions on campus,” Elledge says. “He was forcefully behind hiring African Americans, other ethnicities and women, even when it was not popular.”

Literary Roots

The grandson of a Georgia Supreme Court justice, Bell was born in Cairo, Ga. His father, novelist Vereen McNeill Bell, was killed in action during World War II when the younger Bell was barely 10 years old.

“He was a wonderful father,” Bell remembers. “We’d go fishing and hunting together with his friends, and then he’d take some pictures and write an article about it for Sports Afield or Field and Stream. It gave me a warped idea of what real life was going to be like.

“My stepfather was a very literate person himself, a small town, Faulknerian lawyer who had me reading Hardy and Hemingway and Dostoyevsky before I was out of high school,” Bell says. “I guess all of this steered me to study English literature.”

Bell came to the College of Arts and Science in 1961, after earning degrees from Davidson College and Duke University. Today the professor of English has received just about every teaching honor Vanderbilt offers, including the Madison Sarratt Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award, and the Chancellor’s Cup for contributions to student-faculty relations beyond the classroom. He also received a university award for contributions to diversity and equity.

Bell is a favorite of both students and alumni, Schoenfield says, and his classes are always full.

Former student Nancy Page Lowenfield, BA’10, says, “Professor Bell taught me to think critically and act thoughtfully in a way that no other professor or class has.” First-year Vanderbilt law student Andrew Preston, BA’09, remembers Bell’s lectures as “funny, engaging and incisive.”

“Professor Bell brings a wealth of experience to his lectures,” Preston continues. “Once, upon returning from a summer abroad, I told him that I had gone running with the bulls in Pamplona. Professor Bell responded with a story about how he had met Hemingway during his own trip to Pamplona some 50 years earlier. I didn’t think that anyone would be able to make my running of the bulls experience seem boring by comparison, but, sure enough, he did. And, honestly, I should have seen it coming. Professor Bell is just that legendary.”

Being a legend has hardly slowed him down. He teaches both undergraduate and graduate students and serves as associate chair of the department. His scholarship includes the modern British and American novel, modern British poetry, W.B. Yeats and Irish history, film studies and literary theory.

In addition to books on Robert Lowell, Cormac McCarthy and Yeats, Bell has written about Charles Dickens, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. “I’m interested in a lot of different things that don’t connect with each other,” he says wryly.

He is currently working on a book about British and Irish writers in the 1920s and early ’30s. “I’m looking at the nature of their interest in Italian fascism, what it seemed like from that end of history as opposed to our end.”

Lasting Relationships

Bell and his wife, Jane, have five children and more than half a dozen grandchildren. He nurtures old friendships, annually traveling to Florida for saltwater fishing with humorist Roy Blount Jr., BA’63, and four other friends—a ritual that has lasted for 33 years—and to Montana for fly fishing with two other Vanderbilt alumni, Will Johnston, BA’66, JD’69, and his brother Duck Johnston, BA’71. The families of all these friends get together every fall for a long weekend in the Smokies.

“Vereen came to Vanderbilt as a young professor during my junior year, and we have been friends ever since,” Blount says. “He is the best example of ‘Gladly would he learn and gladly teach’ that I ever came across. And he can fish good.”

A baseball fan, Bell has visited the Yankees spring training camp in Tampa several times with friends Roy Gottfried, professor of English, and August Johnson, a 60-year Vanderbilt employee and former Negro League baseball player.

“We met in the 1970s and from then on our relationship began to grow,” Johnson told the Vanderbilt Register in 2001. “We were all interested in baseball, but mostly we shared some of the same ideas. Over the years, we became close.”

During his half-century in the College of Arts and Science, Bell has witnessed academic, racial and cultural changes on campus. “Vanderbilt has changed over the years just like the rest of the world,” he says, “but usually about five years later than everyone else.”

Called a “catalyst for change” by many, Bell pauses when asked what, if anything, needs to change at Vanderbilt today. “Vanderbilt is racially diverse, but I would like to see it also become more socio-economically diverse,” he finally says, noting that rising tuition seems to make the university less accessible to students of modest means. “The administration seems to be moving us in the right direction on this score,” he says, referencing Vanderbilt’s national leadership in eliminating need-based loans and meeting fully demonstrated financial needs for all undergraduates.

“Most of the good things in my life right now are associated with having been at Vanderbilt—my wife, my children, my friends and students, my colleagues, my intellectual life. It’s an amazing thing to be able to work in a place where everyone working around you is way smarter than you are. I couldn’t be happier doing what I’m doing,” he says. “What other job could someone like me have where every day you get to be around such attractive, articulate and intelligent young people? Going to work every morning is like going to the show.”

Jon Boughtin in the rotunda of the Cannon Office Building. Boughtin serves as senior legislative assistant for New York Congressman Bill Owens.

For some, it was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. Others fell into jobs and found a passion. No matter what drew them, though, College of Arts and Science graduates working as staff on Capitol Hill share one commonality: their Vanderbilt experiences equipped them well for Washington’s political world.

“I don’t know if Vanderbilt creates it, or if the same type of person is drawn to—and successful at—Vanderbilt that is successful here,” says Conrad Schatte, BA’97,  an economics and communication studies graduate who served as legislative assistant for U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, BA’62 (Tenn.). “It’s the same sort of skills: a balance of the analytical and the personal.”

Well-Prepared

Currently, there are a dozen or more Arts and Science graduates working in Congress. Though specifics vary regarding experience, position or political party, most are legislative staffers handling a range of tasks, including monitoring legislation on specific topics (most will specialize in more than one), corresponding with constituents, communicating with the press, and serving as liaison with the elected official’s committee assignments and those who lobby and advocate on connected issues.

Some, like Jon Boughtin, BA’05, majored in political science. Now Boughtin is a senior legislative assistant for Rep. Bill Owens (N.Y.), a role he describes as “entirely policy.” Owens is a member of the Armed Services Committee and Boughtin compiles briefings on bills and assists in writing legislation.

Charlie Keller says the multitasking skills he honed at Vanderbilt prepared him to work as chief of staff for Florida Congresswoman Sandy Adams.

“Your degree matters,” Boughtin says. “But a lot of people tell you that college is as much about learning how to think as what you need to know. At Vanderbilt, there were a host of professors keyed into the local politics. Professors are willing to sit down with you and give you ideas, ‘Try interning here, look there.’”

Even without a field of study that directly correlated to her current role as health policy advisor to Alexander, a liberal arts education helped Mary-Sumpter Lapinski, BA’97. “We do a lot of writing, and I write very well because of my education,” the English and French graduate says. “When I was in college, everyone said, ‘What are you going to do with that major? Teach?’ I said, ‘You need communication skills in every industry.’ I work with language every day, writing briefing documents, legislation, and memos and editing press releases. I had good training.”

But a lot of preparation happened outside of the classroom as well. “The rigorous academic environment teaches you that you’ve got to buckle down and maintain focus,” says Charlie Keller, BA’99. A political science graduate, Keller serves as chief of staff for Rep. Sandy Adams (Fla.). “One of the things I did at Vanderbilt was spread myself thin: club track and field, varsity cross country, alcohol education program and fraternity. I still graduated on time,” Keller says. “Doing all of that you have to truly learn to balance your time, even with all the fun things there are to do in Nashville. Putting all of those into one coherent mix prepares you for the future.”

Political science and public policy major Lindsay Mosshart, BA’05, says it was the mix of people she encountered that has helped most in her Washington work. “I really value the exposure I got to individuals from all parts of the country. I learned to be more patient and understanding of others’ geopolitical views and political rationale by listening to my classmates discuss politics and world events,” says Mosshart, a senior legislative assistant for Rep. Gene Green (Texas). “In my job, I work with different personalities every day, and this background constantly comes in handy by allowing me to better collaborate and coalition build across the aisle and with constituent groups.”

The Vanderbilt Influence

Located in a state capital, Vanderbilt has a natural connection for politics, with students able to engage politically early on. Additionally, while Tennessee is deep red, Nashville is not, offering opportunity for those on both sides of the political spectrum.

That is, perhaps, one reason Washington has such a strong network of Commodores. Reps. Leonard Lance, JD’77, (N.J.) and Ben Quayle, JD’02, (Ariz.) are graduates of Vanderbilt School of Law. Alexander and Rep. Steve Cohen, BA’71, (Tenn.) are Arts and Science alumni. Numerous former senators and representatives also have Vanderbilt ties, including former Vice President and Senator Al Gore and Rep. Jim Cooper (Tenn.), who teaches at Owen.

In an environment that can radically change every two years—with Democratic staffers looking for work one cycle and Republican staffers the next—building strong connections is a valuable currency. Often young staffers land their first job working for their home-state senator or the representative from their district.

Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander’s office has strong Vanderbilt ties—the senator himself is an Arts and Science grad. From left, alumni staffers Mary-Sumpter Lapinski, Allison Martin, former staffer and current Senate Rules Committee staff Lindsey Ward, Nick Magallanes and former staffer Conrad Schatte.

For Lindsey Ward, BA’02, Vanderbilt itself provided the opportunity to secure her first Washington job as a legislative assistant. The history major worked on Alexander’s campaign staff immediately after graduation and when he was re-elected, “Vanderbilt provided my connection to Sen. Alexander. If I didn’t have that, I seriously doubt they would have hired me,” she says. Ward now serves as professional staff for the Senate Rules Committee.

Allison Martin, BA’98, graduated with a degree in political science. She previously worked for Senators Fred Thompson and Bill Frist, both of Tennessee and who employed a large number of Vanderbilt graduates. “We all figured out that we had a shared background and that made me feel a lot more at home,” says Martin, a legislative assistant to Alexander.

Martin, Lapinski and Schatte all were in the College of Arts and Science around the same time, but didn’t know each other. “Conrad and I figured out that we were at some of the same events and had some of the same friends,” Lapinski says. Lapinski and Ward also were in the same sorority, though separated by a few years.

Shared Experiences

Having that connection to the familiar in an unfamiliar town—one known for its sometimes ruthless politics—provided comfort. “It makes it helpful that everyone looks back so fondly,” says economics/history graduate Nick Magallanes, BA’08, and another of Alexander’s legislative aides. “You have good memories and good stories to exchange of those times at Vanderbilt. I didn’t overlap with some of the others in the office, but it does provide a connection to be able to talk about the same places and experiences.”

It also can provide a powerful network of mentors. Drew Brandewie, BA’07, who now works as press secretary for a senator, found that out when searching for a job a few years ago. The communication studies graduate met with an older alumnus who brainstormed job opportunities with him, even though they hadn’t met previously. “He did it solely because I was a fellow VU grad,” Brandewie says. “A skillful networker will go a long way here, and relating to others through VU can be an excellent way to forge relationships no matter what field you’re in.”

Beyond the Hill

Scores of Vanderbilt alumni work throughout Capitol Hill and many, many more in the organizations that work with the government.

“When we need to reach out to a certain office, or an agency, it helps to have someone that you have that shared connection of Vanderbilt with,” Keller says.

It also helps that Arts and Science graduates previously in Congress work throughout Washington. Jennifer Romans, BA’03, first joined then-Senate Majority Leader Frist’s health care team after internships for a pharmaceutical company and in Frist’s office. She is currently senior director of federal affairs for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, where she uses what she learned from stints with Frist and Sen. Jon Kyl (Ariz.) to work with health policy issues and entitlements. She made the switch to the private sector after the grueling health care reform battle.

In her present role, as in her Capitol Hill experience, the English and political science graduate continues to use valuable lessons learned at Vanderbilt. “Every day, my job requires me to think critically and analytically, develop creative solutions, devise political strategies, and effectively communicate ideas,” Romans says. “I am thankful that my A&S degree helped me develop these capabilities and gave me the tools necessary to lead, achieve and succeed.”

James “Jim” Seuss, BA’85, has been surrounded by luxury throughout his career.

Holding positions of leadership with Tiffany and Co., Harry Winston Inc., Cole Haan, Stella McCartney Ltd., and currently, high-end watch retailer Tourneau, Seuss knows about the finer things. But to him, the most luxurious items of all don’t have much to do with expense. Luxury to Seuss is found instead in a home-cooked meal with quality ingredients (including, perhaps, a spice brought back from a trip to Morocco), time spent with Scarlet, his beloved Welsh springer spaniel puppy, or even just sleeping past 6 in the morning.

James "Jim" Seuss, BA'85

“For me,” he says, “it’s about the experience, not the cost.”

Looking back, he’s amassed a wealth of experiences since his days studying history in the College of Arts and Science.

Retail at Tiffany’s

Seuss took a job in a men’s haberdashery while a high school student in Memphis, Tenn. He was drawn to quality and branding even then, he says, and knew that later he would want to go to business school. He came to Vanderbilt with several friends, seeking a good, diverse liberal arts background that would offer a strong base for a future MBA. That came via George Washington University, but it was his time at Vanderbilt, he says, that opened doors to uncharted territory: an educational program that landed him in China.

“One of the professors from Vanderbilt put me in touch with the program since I was interested in international business,” Seuss says. “It was concentrated on Asia Pacific, or Far Eastern history, as it was called at the time. The program was geared toward archaeology and language, and gave me further exposure.”

It also lit a fire about business potential in that part of the globe; when Seuss took his first job in retail in New York City, it was with Tiffany’s international division. He began working on Japanese business for the luxury jeweler known by its iconic blue box, eventually opening some 50 stores for Tiffany throughout Asia.

“I stayed with Tiffany for 13 years and decided that would be what I would do: stay in higher-end retail,” Seuss says. “Then I just stuck with it.”

Appreciating the Timeless

His latest executive position is as CEO of Tourneau in New York, his first stint with a multibrand retailer rather than a monobrand company.

That offered new challenges and opportunities for growth, he says, and under his careful eye, Tourneau has implemented a wide-ranging plan to rebrand the more than 100-year-old retailer as “friendly, reliable and discreet.” The rebranding included the recent opening of a 3,000-square-foot, uniquely designed Madison Avenue location that is intended to eliminate the somewhat intimidating atmosphere of jewelry shops and make watch shopping fun.

Tourneau represents brands like Breitling, Cartier, IWC, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Panerai and Rolex. Typical customers, he says, are in their 30s to 50s, but a growing number of the youngest generation is becoming re-engaged with watches after Gen Y’s reliance on cell phones and other technology to track time instead.

“There’s a sense of nostalgia about it,” he says. “Everything is so modern and automated now, and a watch can represent something else. It’s handmade, handcrafted and took six months to produce. That represents something unique to a generation that’s grown up with everything automated.”

Seuss’ own private watch collection features about 20 pieces, including a Jaeger-LeCoultre that was his grandfather’s. He also treasures a Panerai given him by fashion designer Stella McCartney at the second anniversary of their doing business together. “It’s engraved with the company and date, which makes it even more special to me,” he says. “There are many great pieces that I received at great moments.”

Life of Curiosity

Leading companies known for quality and excellence, Seuss has a passion for doing things to the best of his ability—and pushing others to do the same. Ask him what people would be surprised to know about him, and he responds that he’s not quite the perfectionist that some would believe. Not only that, but even with his haberdashery background, his own closet isn’t as organized as it could be, he admits.

For someone who has held so many high-profile positions—he was president and CEO of Cole Haan, president of Harry Winston and CEO of Stella McCartney—Seuss has kept a rather low-key media profile. It’s not that he seeks privacy, per se, but rather that he has aimed to put his employers first.

“I’ve always wanted the company to speak more than one person,” he says. “Whether that’s Harry Winston or Cole Haan, I’ve wanted to push the company first.”

Those companies have afforded him the chance to visit more than 60 countries—though not yet the Galapagos Islands, he laments—as well as enjoy his personal pursuits of waterskiing, snow skiing, scuba diving and playing the cello. He has studied a half-dozen languages and maintains the love of Chinese culture and archeology that deepened during his time in the College of Arts and Science—including being an avid collector of contemporary Chinese art and 17th century maps.

“I’ve always been very curious about other parts of the world, other cultures, other civilizations,” he says. “I’ve always thought there was so much to be learned from history.”

His own history has been a rewarding one, Seuss says, made all the richer by being curious, asking questions and continuing to dig a little deeper. His years at Vanderbilt encouraged him to care about others, to enjoy himself and to be smart with his time, he says, and it’s that last thing that’s most luxurious of all.

“Some things just have to fall by the wayside,” he says, admitting that his schedule has caused him to lose touch with friends and give up some activities he formerly enjoyed. All the same, he still encourages the pursuit of having as many different experiences as possible, including traveling, reading, learning and listening—not to mention, every so often, marking the time on a meaningful watch.

Jake Ramsey was part coach, part confidant, part disciplinarian…and all teacher to his TFA students. He continues those roles at a Nashville charter school.

The October after his graduation from the College of Arts and Science was arguably one of the darkest months in Jake Ramsey’s life.

Teaching math at Nashville’s Maplewood High School through nonprofit organization Teach For America, Ramsey, BA’09, had reached the phase of working in a high-poverty setting that might be labeled “despair.”

Less than a third of his students could add or subtract negative numbers, though they weren’t far from his own age. Gang members sorted out grievances with a razor fight. One student—who had taken honors geography—called Florida another country.

The economics major was learning, all too well, the unspoken agreement present in many classrooms and one which affected his ability to teach: “It goes like this,” Ramsey says. “ ‘I won’t make you do any real work, or stress you in any way, and you don’t misbehave.’ ”

Sure enough, the Teach For America corps member—one of thousands who make a two-year commitment annually toward closing the achievement gap of low-income students by teaching in high-need areas—had moved beyond his initial phase of excitement. It had been followed by disillusionment. The idea of rejuvenation seemed as far away as the possibility of graduation for a high school class with an average grade of 43 out of 100.

“For the first time, I couldn’t work hard enough to make things happen,” he says. “But the beauty of Teach For America is that you cannot participate in this—you cannot survive those two years—and not be forever changed. You cannot come to know these kids in such a way as I have and not care about education for the rest of your life.”

Highest of Expectations

During his two-year stint, Ramsey discovered what many Teach For America alumni do: that investment and belief in students can make a remarkable difference in grades, attitudes and outcomes. Studies consistently show that Teach For America teachers—most of them prepared only by a six-week intensive summer training program rather than a four-year degree in education—have an impact on student achievement that’s equal or greater to traditional first-year teachers. The large majority of TFA teachers take part in the 20-year-0ld program immediately after graduation, when the idealistic incentive to change the world might peak.

TFA teachers receive one-on-one mentoring in addition to first-year teacher pay and benefits, and two-thirds end up staying in education, “with the largest portion of that group as classroom teachers,” says Taylor Imboden Brown, BA’08. Brown, a communication studies major, was so inspired by her own TFA experience in St. Louis that she became a manager of teacher leadership development for the program, now offering ongoing training and support to 35 corps members.

“My two years in the classroom showed me the importance of always holding myself and my students to the highest of expectations—academic and otherwise,” she says. “Seeing students achieve in individual classrooms over the short term gives me hope and evidence that we can close the achievement gap in the long term.”

Brown is far from alone in her beliefs—and she and Ramsey are far from alone in crediting the College of Arts and Science for aiding in their success.

TFA seeks out participants with demonstrated leadership and achievement among other attributes, and often draws highly motivated and successful students as a result. Add in the fact that, the former students say, Vanderbilt strongly encouraged them to give back through community service, think critically and strategically as part of a larger group, excel in challenging environments, interact with diverse populations, and be involved in numerous areas simultaneously, and it’s no real wonder that the school is among the
top contributors of graduates to the program in the country. In 2011, Vanderbilt placed seventh among medium-sized college and university contributors, with 47 graduates headed for TFA placements last fall.

“It Was Terrifying”

“There’s no doubt that students in these underserved communities lack a lot of skills we take for granted,” says Matthew Specht, BA’09, a political science major who taught math to fourth- through eighth-grade students in Kansas City. “Especially if you’ve gone to Vanderbilt, you’ve probably seen success academically. You’ve probably gone to good schools. For me, seeing seventh and eighth graders struggling to subtract with borrowing was humbling. But it gave me that much more motivation, recognizing that in one year, we needed to make two years’ worth of progress.”

Outside of the classroom, Specht says, “it’s very difficult to have an appreciation for how many moving parts there are in a day of teaching, whether planning lessons or units, or just planning for 150 students who come through 25 at a time. The goal is not to have a relationship with one class, but with each of the 25 students in that class. You don’t give attention to that one entity, but to building relationships with every single one, every single day.”

As such, TFA teachers recount endless hours spent before and after school with students and parents, doing whatever they could to make a difference. Ramsey recalls being shocked early on when a student told him he’d seen more of Ramsey than his father in the previous three years. “I asked the class who else that was true for, and 80 percent of the hands went up,” he says. “It was terrifying. They were seeing me for an hour and a half every day. Even if they had dads at home, they were working hard hours and asleep when the kids were awake.”

Huge Sense of Responsibility

Now in his second year with Teach For America, Miron Klimkowski says he feels a huge sense of responsibility to help his students advance.

Miron Klimkowski, BA’10, just finished his first year as a ninth-grade English teacher in Dallas. The political science major hadn’t really considered a job in education, he says, but an Alternative Spring Break project opened his eyes to the possibility. He spent ASB as a teacher’s assistant in a Rome, Ga., elementary school, and loved the experience. “I saw the impact that I could make in just one week. I had a couple of friends who had done Teach For America, so most of my senior year I knew I was going to do it,” he says. He was fortunate, he says, to have had great teachers growing up in the Memphis public school system, teachers who instilled a pay-it-forward attitude. But nothing could really prepare him for what TFA would be.

“I had to grow up really fast,” he says. “The gravity of the achievement gap becomes real to you, and you start to feel this huge sense of responsibility. Now it’s my job.… But they were all such great kids. There wasn’t one that I didn’t like. And that impassioned me to work all the harder for them.”

Although Klimkowski says it’s too early to tell whether he’ll keep teaching after the program is over, other TFA participants have continued in education. Specht has deferred his enrollment in law school to work at a New York City charter school. Ramsey is a teacher at KIPP Academy, a college preparatory public charter school in Nashville, and is pondering fundraising for education or possibly starting his own school. And English major Neily Todd, BA’09, says her time teaching algebra in Nashville has led to a solid commitment to continue the work she began with TFA. She, too, teaches math at KIPP Academy.

Teach For America inspired Neily Todd to stay in teaching beyond her two-year term. She says she now goes through the day thinking about what’s best for her students.

“When you’re in college, so much of your day-to-day life is about you, your classes, your grades, your studies, what you want to do,” she says. “That’s just that phase of life. But having had this experience, working with these students, I go through my day now thinking about what’s best for them, and how I can teach them things in a way that they’ll understand.

“There’s such a deeper sense of contentment now that my life is more than about just me, and that my actions are impacting others in a positive way,” Todd says. “When I got into Teach For America, I really did believe that all students can learn. And after two years in the classroom, I know that all students can learn. It’s been a cool experience to see that this is true.”

Kelly Oliver, W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy. That's a poster from one of her favorite gender and media movies, Pillow Talk, behind her.

Philosopher—the word evokes images of ancient, dour, self-absorbed thinkers who opine esoterica that has little to do with lives of ordinary people. Contrast that with Kelly Oliver, W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy, author and media critic. The dynamic professor’s classes and research dissect current events and contemporary thinking by piercing the veil of the mundane, revealing the inner workings of modern life.

“Everyone is searching for meaning in his or her life. Philosophy is a reflection on the meaning of experience,” says Oliver, who examines these and other conundrums through the lens of contemporary issues. “We all wonder why are we here, what should we do and what can we hope for. To paraphrase German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, ‘Philosophy rekindles our natural curiosity about life’.”

Forest Roots

Oliver’s childhood laid the foundation for her philosophy career. “My family is primarily loggers and forest people from the Northwest. One of my grandfathers was a forest ranger, the other was a logger. The logger grandfather never went to high school, but he was thoughtful and reflective. He was a homegrown philosopher. He treated me like an adult and talked about the meaning of life and told amazing stories.”

When she was in high school, Oliver’s biology teacher was studying philosophy and would talk to her about philosophy classes where they would ask “is this chair real?” which Oliver found intriguing. “Sometimes I’d intentionally give wrong answers on tests just so I could argue with him for fun,” she remembers. “I was a nascent philosopher even then.”

Although her parents wanted her to study accounting and go to law school, Oliver was drawn to philosophy. After her first semester at Gonzaga University, “I knew what I wanted and I never looked back,” she says. She went on to earn a master’s and doctorate in philosophy at Northwestern University.

Oliver’s research emerges from the study of Hegel, Nietzsche, phenomenology, Derrida, Kristeva and contemporary French philosophy. She delves deeply into the infrastructure and beliefs that drive the thinking, choices and lives of people. Whether people know it or not, Oliver says, philosophy is elemental and fundamental and at the heart of both conflict and its resolution.

“Throughout my work are common threads and questions of ethics, justice, social justice, relationships and how we relate to each other as well as the environment and animals,” she explains. This encompassing perspective makes it natural for Oliver to hold a joint appointment in women’s and gender studies.

Media Philosopher

Oliver has authored numerous books and articles, frequently examining modern media and culture. “Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex and the Media came about as a result of the photos from Abu Ghraib Prison and the uncanniness of the photos that were released. These smiling young people looked like they should be in a high school yearbook, yet were pictured giving a thumbs up over bodies,” Oliver says. “It brought me to the question ‘what would lead young people to do this for fun and then photograph it?’ ”

Media coverage of Abu Ghraib and women on both sides of the Iraq War fascinated her because of the way the women were involved. She was likewise intrigued by women who become suicide bombers and the media attention they attract. “Women usually are portrayed as young and innocent—instead, essentially, with suicide bombing, at least as portrayed by the media, the bombshell has become the bomb.”

“It struck me that women were figured as, and used as, weapons,” Oliver says. “In the Guantanamo prison, there were all-women interrogation units that were used because of the humiliation it would cause the Muslim men to be tortured by women. Women were being used as military strategy.”

The 2007 release netted her a spot on the ABC network’s World View and international exposure. “The book was well received in Britain where Muslim culture is more apparent and politicized than in the U.S. and also well received in Iraq and Egypt,” Oliver says. “It’s being translated into Arabic.”

Oliver is continuing to focus on issues of gender and media in Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down: Images of Pregnancy in Hollywood Film. “Hardly a month goes by without a pregnant belly on the big screen,” Oliver says. “But what does it mean? While it’s true there’s more openness in our culture today, there’s also a sexualization of pregnancy. And yet there’s a conservative undertone in many of these films that suggests that having a baby will solve all of the problems in the lives of women and girls,” Oliver says. The book, due out from Columbia University Press in fall 2012, explores the impact and portrayal of reproductive technology and pregnancy in Hollywood film.

Life Affirming

To illustrate the covers of many of her books, Oliver uses the art of Spanish surrealist Remedios Varo. “Her work is melancholy, yet life affirming and full of a richness of plant, animal and human figures. There is a life force emanating from them,” Oliver says. Oliver’s Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human is dedicated to her beloved cat, Kaos, and features a Varo painting of a cat on the cover, along with a poem Oliver wrote for Kaos.

Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human

“On an existential level, we are relational beings, so trying to understand who we are can only be done by [understanding] how we relate to others,” Oliver says. “And what about our relations with the animals around us, those familiar and those in our environment? Some philosophers argue that we should extend rights to animals most like us. But I ask, what about animals—and people—not like us? Do you have to be like me for you to be my concern? I’d say no.”

While she concedes it’s easier to acknowledge obligations to friends, family and one’s own culture, where to draw the line isn’t that clear. “What about people whose values challenge mine?” she asks.

“Too many people think that they can exploit and kill people who challenge our values, people who are different,” Oliver says. “Fundamentally, that viewpoint is why we wage war. We need to question our own values and investment in them constantly, especially our investment in violence and killing. Doing so could mean less war and more peace.”

Kelly Oliver discusses Women as Weapons of War at a Thinking Out of the Lunch Box presentation in Nashville.

Tracy Miller admires a Ming dynasty (1368-1644) tomb model house that’s part of Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery’s permanent collection.

Buildings represent a three-dimensional record of a people, art and culture. For Tracy Miller, associate professor of history of art, tracking these facets of medieval Chinese life through free-standing timber frame buildings is a passion and an exploration that began early.

“My grandmother painted furniture in the chinoiserie style,” Miller says, explaining her early exposure to China through the decorative painting technique.

Later, as an art history major at Arizona State University, Miller took a Chinese painting survey class. “In Chinese paintings, there is a sense of a landscape through which you can walk, as though it’s a portal, a way to travel through time and space,” Miller says. She stepped through that portal, becoming fluent in Mandarin and spending three years studying language and architectural history at Chinese universities in the 1990s. She later earned a doctorate through the University of Pennsylvania’s Asian and Middle Eastern Studies program.

History and Culture through Architecture

Miller is the artist in a technically minded family. Her mother is a mathematician and software test specialist. Her siblings and father are engineers. “Math is interesting, but it doesn’t thrill me,” she says. (Even so, she does find herself with a math renaissance as she runs multiplication drills with her third-grade daughter while driving. She and her husband, Peter Lorge, a senior lecturer in the history department, have another daughter, age 5.)

Miller’s academic specialty is the art and architecture of East Asia, with an emphasis on ritual sites in China between 618-1644 C.E., and the ways in which regional identity is expressed through construction techniques.

She makes frequent trips to Shanxi Province, where 70 percent of premodern Chinese architecture is located. Key in her research are the timber bracketing systems that support the roofs of ritual structures such as temples and palaces, bracket systems that are also replicated with masonry in tombs.

“These buildings and bracket systems are markers of self-awareness and self-confidence in a specific time and place,” Miller says, explaining that her work documents Chinese regional identity which persisted despite new rulers who sought to import styles from other regions. “The style of the bracketing is helpful in tracking the path of architecture and culture as the southeast increased its influence over north-central China from the 10th through the 13th centuries.”

Studying the construction styles, Miller is able to create an in-depth picture of the geo-political forces that drove design of ritual sites and influenced architecture, culture and history. Her current research is for a second book regarding Chinese medieval architecture; her first, the award-winning The Divine Nature of Power: Chinese Ritual Architecture at the Sacred Site of Jinci, was published by Harvard University Press in 2007.

Adventures in China

China’s increasing receptivity to Westerners has expanded and quickened the pace of her research. “I used to spend a lot of time waiting for people to tell me ‘No, [you] can’t have access,’ ” she says. “Now you talk to locals and let them know you’re not there to steal or take pictures for a glossy magazine, and they say, ‘Talk to Mr. Lin. He has the key.’ Things are more open now, but it is China. They could close at any time.”

Her China trips typically consist of 10 intensely focused days visiting rural locations where she photographs, documents and moves on to the next site. “I’m trying to get a sense of [medieval buildings] while looking at regional and cultural forces through architectural style,” she explains. “Ultimately, that means seeing as many free-standing buildings as possible and searching for patterns to see how things are the same, how they differ. If access gets sticky, sometimes I just have to move on.”

Each trip to China is both a journey into the familiar and an adventure in the unknown. In many rural areas only the local dialect is spoken, sometimes causing difficulty in communication. This is compounded by her “foreign” blonde hair and fair skin. She recalls trying to get directions to a temple site, while overhearing a growing crowd of curious locals saying, “What language is she speaking? Is she speaking German? Is it English? Russian? Oh, wait, she’s speaking Mandarin.”

Other adventures are both humorous and intimate. Miller, at 5 feet, 4 inches, says in China she frequently is the tallest woman in a group. In the ’90s, an older woman was overcome by curiosity and began stroking Miller’s then waist-length blonde hair.

In Taiwan, where Miller and Lorge studied classical Chinese with a local professor, a slip in Chinese etiquette—handing their teacher cash in payment for lessons—once yielded quick correction. “The professor said, ‘Next time, use an envelope. This isn’t a grocery store,’ and handed the cash back,” Miller recalls. “In both China and Taiwan, teachers of all levels garner great respect.”

In the Classroom

While her trips to China, Japan and Korea further her understanding of art, architectural history and tradition in Asia, Miller prizes her time in the classroom. Current courses include the art of Japan and a study of East Asian architecture and gardens. Last semester, she taught a writing seminar for first-year students that was titled House, Temple, City—Sacred Geographies of China.

“I love teaching freshman. They’re so open, so interested,” Miller says. “When you teach freshman, you have the luxury of talking about issues as if you didn’t know anything. Freshmen will challenge you, not just about your thinking but about the information itself. They keep me sharp.”

Miller also serves as acting director of the Asian Studies program in the College of Arts and Science. Her hope is that some of her students will find their life’s work in the study of China and build Vanderbilt’s role as a center for research of all things Asian.

“Vanderbilt is looking toward finding a footprint in Asia,” she says. “As we get to the point in the History of Art program where we’re considering a graduate program, some of these students may be a part of it, and we’ll be able to attract excellent people who will help us build it.”

Some 150 years after the first shots were fired, the Civil War still raises questions and strong emotions. Some of its foundational issues—whether citizenship can be defined by race and whether states can secede from federal jurisdiction—are as current as today’s headlines. Other matters haunt us when we’re forced to face them.

Still, Michael Kreyling, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English, wonders if there will be significant national events to mark the sesquicentennial of the war’s beginning at Fort Sumter in April 1861.

“It’s hard to find in the Civil War a metaphor for what we’re going through now,” says Kreyling, who just finished teaching two courses devoted to the topic, including one that compared the 1961 centennial and 2011 sesquicentennial celebrations. “In the 1960s, at the centennial, it was uncomfortably easy to find a metaphor. We remember things not because of what happened in the past, but because there are things we need to think about in the present. I wonder what the anniversary will help us with.”

Kreyling predicts that the sesquicentennial will be celebrated largely as a tourist event—but not in the College of Arts and Science. Here, students and professors explore various issues and aspects related to the war.

What it Means Today

That, believes Mona Frederick, executive director of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, is vital to Vanderbilt’s mission. “It’s very important that on our campus we have careful scholarly examination of the 150th anniversary and that we do not allow the anniversary to rehash a perhaps mythical North/South divide,” Frederick says. “It’s not only the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, but also of the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, and that comes as we have our first African American president. It’s important that our students get an opportunity to study this more deeply and think about it in deep ways, to reflect what it’s about and what it means to us today.” As part of the dialogue, the center’s annual Harry C. Howard Lecture brought historian David Blight to campus in March to discuss Warren’s look at the centennial, The Legacy of the Civil War.

Watch David Blight's lecture on Robert Penn Warren’s look at the centennial, The Legacy of the Civil War

Campus discussions will not solely look back. Richard Blackett, Andrew Jackson Professor of History, believes that many issues are contemporary. With Kreyling, he team-taught the spring Humanities 161 course, which brought in numerous guest lecturers from around the country.

The Civil War “transformed America from being a series of states—of entities that aspired to achieve the principles that were enumerated in the American Revolution—into a country with a strong central government,” Blackett says. “As a result, what we have had ever since are these attempts to question the legitimacy of a strong federal government by individual states. We see it even today … Periodically in its history, America always finds a way to stretch itself over a barrel on issues that you thought were previously resolved.”

Shifting Images of the War

The war continues as a popular theme of movies and books and a passion for re-enactors. But its image has changed through the past 150 years. Rory Dicker, senior lecturer in English and women’s and gender studies, taught a course that explored the fiction of the war, both that written in the immediate aftermath and that with the perspective of time.

“You can see a change through the shift into realism,” Dicker says. “If you think about Stephen Crane (Red Badge of Courage) or William Faulkner (The Unvanquished), there’s more artistic license. Earlier on, as with Louisa May Alcott (Hospital Sketches), writers are trying to get at the point of view of someone who has been there. There is more literary distance in things that were written in the 20th century.”

Visual images of the war and of African Americans also have changed in perspective, says Vivien Green Fryd, chair of the Department of History of Art. Her advanced seminar explored how artists dealt with this scar on American history in work ranging from Thomas Ball’s depiction of a paternalistic Lincoln hovering above a subservient freed slave in his Emancipation Group, to work by Edmonia Lewis—herself part black—that showed slaves celebrating their newfound freedom.

“Slavery is such a fraught issue in the U.S.,” Fryd says. “We’re supposedly a country founded on the concept of freedom. Yet our founding fathers had slaves, so they themselves made distinctions between white people and African American slaves. Some images in the nineteenth century denigrate African Americans, while others, especially after the Civil War, show genre scenes of everyday life among African American families that depart from mainstream racist caricatures.”

Vanessa Beasley, associate professor of communication studies, also myth-busted in her course on the rhetoric of the American experience, tackling the most celebrated figure from the war years. “We have this idea of Lincoln as the reluctant hero,” she says. “Lincoln clearly wanted to be president, and he has more ambition than is represented. He’s also not as consistently anti-slavery throughout his career as popular culture represents him. He’s not always convinced that it’s a good idea to abolish slavery in slave states, for example. Often, he’s depicted as this isolated man in the White House who knows the right thing to do. There seems to be an ongoing need to depict the presidency in particular ways of this notion of a strong individual who doesn’t want to have the power.”

Founded Out of the Conflict

Because of the campus’ proximity to war sites, Teresa Goddu, director of the American Studies program and associate professor of English, offered a traveling course to area Civil War monuments, memorials and battlefields.

Students in Brandi Brimmer’s first-year seminar on black women’s activism in post-Civil War America also visited local sites. Assistant Professor of History Brimmer and her students explored locations connected with the life of Callie House, a Tennessee woman born into slavery who later led the fight to secure pensions for slaves.

Vanderbilt University’s ties to the Civil War are indelible, and not just because the Battle of Nashville was fought a few miles from where the campus stands. Shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt supported the Union Army and loaned numerous ships to the Northern war effort. Nearly a decade later, he made his first—and only known—significant charitable endeavor: $1 million to found a university in the South to help the region heal from the ravages of war.

It is partially for that reason and partially because it is located in the South that Vanderbilt must lead in discussions of the Civil War, Beasley believes.

“We need to have these conversations for a lot of reasons,” she says. “What does it mean to be a leading intellectual center in the South? Do we have a special obligation to the rest of the nation because we’re in the South?”

Like the Civil War itself, sometimes the questions have no easy answers.

Associate Professor of Anthropology Tiffiny Tung perches on the edge of her office chair, mulling how to explain the importance of successfully melding research, teaching and service into her life’s work at the College of Arts and Science. Each inform and elevate the other, she begins.

She needn’t answer the question, although she has many fine thoughts on the subject. The conversation is punctuated by visits from students turning in research papers or coming to work in the osteology lab. A book Tung is consulting for a research project lies open on her desk. Emails and research permits come in as she plans a summer field project in Peru that will include undergraduate research participants. A grant application for plastic skeletons has just gone into the mail. The skeletons would aid in Tung’s public outreach through Vanderbilt’s Virtual School, where during the week before, she had reached nearly 500 primary school students in two teaching sessions.

Tiffiny Tung (center, with students Matt Migneron, Kirsten Delay, Penny Dolan and Cristina Francois) says her goal—and that of research institutions—is to inspire new generations to become active producers of knowledge.

Tung, like much of the faculty in the College of Arts and Science, is a researcher defined more by her desire to serve the advancement of knowledge than by just the body of her work. Vanderbilt is defined as a research institution but its core mission, like Tung’s, is much more expansive. What does it mean to be a research institution? What does it mean to be a faculty member in the liberal arts college of such an institution? How do teaching and service fit in?

Teaching + Research + Service

At the very basic level, the purpose of the university is to ask questions and solve problems, a description that can be found on the website of the 63-member Association of American Universities, to which Vanderbilt belongs. Research universities train the leaders of the future by combining access to research and education, and they apply expert knowledge to real-world problems every day, according to the AAU.

At the heart of Vanderbilt is the College of Arts and Science. While its mission statement clearly includes the directive to foster well-taught programs and service to society, good teaching and a commitment to service are more than a common goal. They are a distinct part of the Vanderbilt culture, says John Sloop, senior associate dean of the College of Arts and Science and professor of communication studies.

“People sometimes think that at a research university, the commitment and dedication to teaching is a façade. But that’s not true here and I can’t stress that enough,” he says. “The teaching culture here is rich, robust and vibrant in a way that you might not expect.”

Sloop and all administrators serving in the Arts and Science dean’s office—including Dean Carolyn Dever—teach every year. For that matter, so does Chancellor Nicholas Zeppos. “We make better decisions because we’re in the classroom and it better informs our research,” Sloop says.

Tripartite Mission

At an institution such as Vanderbilt, the expectation is clear that faculty must be leaders and experts in their fields. But top researchers don’t leave their classroom duties to a colleague down the hall. “What I would continue to stress is that every one of them is a really good teacher, too, and I find this unusual when compared with other university environments,” Sloop says.

Marilyn Murphy presenting at Inside Out of the Lunchbox, a series of talks sponsored by Vanderbilt for the Nashville community.

Associate Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences Steve Goodbred was part of a team that interviewed potential new faculty as his department expanded. Candidates who demonstrate a record of integrating their research into the excellent teaching of undergraduates and service to the community have a leg up on others, he says. Stellar research alone won’t make the cut.

“When we hire new faculty, we talk a lot about the university culture … There is not a bar to get over or a secret handshake,” says Goodbred, whose research interests focus on river deltas and coastal environments. Instead, at Vanderbilt, faculty search committees routinely search for potential colleagues who are fully engaged in the complete, collaborative academic experience because that engagement meshes more fully with the institution’s environment, he says. He came to the College of Arts and Science from a state university where he felt good teaching wasn’t valued.

“One reason the tripartite mission works at Vanderbilt is because it’s articulated to people when they come in,” Goodbred says. “Research, teaching and service together are truly valued. It goes beyond rhetoric. People are willing to put in the effort it takes when they know it is not just disappearing as a checked box on their resume.”

All of the professors interviewed for this article teach introductory courses and invite undergraduate participation in their research. In fact, they love teaching introductory classes and watching how students often change their worldviews as the semester progresses. These professors routinely share research findings and articles in class—their own and those of others who challenge or complement their ideas.

Inextricably Altered

Professor of Art Marilyn Murphy has been a member of the faculty for more than 30 years and still relishes teaching introductory art courses, “wrestling” the students into better drawing and less conventional thinking.

“These students are very used to exceeding expectations, but I’m asking them to throw expectations out the window,” Murphy says. Ultimately the goal is to, literally, “heighten their awareness of the world around them.”

Murphy described the reaction of one student, who said that after a class unit on creating the illusion of depth with shadows, “I could hardly walk over here.” The student’s way of looking at the interplay of light and dark in the world had been inextricably altered. She wondered if her path to class would ever be the same again.

Murphy’s “The Getaway” depicts her feelings toward the challenging, yet satisfying tasks of academic administration.

Murphy says her teaching and service to the university have dramatically influenced her work as an artist. She has poured many hours into administrative duties, such as revamping catalog information for studio art, which had course entries jumbled like spaghetti with art history. She was heavily involved in all phases of construction of what is now the E. Bronson Ingram Studio Arts Center. For many years, she was a department chair.

Her dramatic artwork often presents a surprising twist on everyday life. “I started a whole series of falling paper,” she remembers. Murphy realized the tumbling sheets represented the overwhelming but ultimately satisfying completion of administrative tasks that furthered and improved the mission of the university. In her piece, “The Getaway,” a woman in high heels looking over a fence is caught up in barbed wire. “After I relinquished the world of chair, I began to do (art that included) a lot of balloons,” she says with a smile.

For artists such as Murphy, publication and productivity are associated with staging exhibits and shows, which she has done all over the world. In 2004, the Frist Center for the Visual Arts presented a retrospective of the last 25 years of her work, Suspended Animation.

For basic scientists such as Patrick Abbot, associate professor of biological sciences, research life revolves around writing grants, conducting and guiding research, and encouraging ideas and inquiry that lead to more research. In all arenas, the mandate is to communicate information clearly.

“It’s very common for me to be working on a paper, and to get up and grab my lectures. My brain is very much into how to best describe a point,” he says. He strides into the classroom ready to share and expand on ideas.

Abbot’s research focuses on insects, typically those that feed on plants and mammals. The ultimate goal is a more comprehensive understanding of the interaction between species. “It’s very hard to find an insect that doesn’t have an important function. Sometimes it’s just not visible,” he says.

“We Do it … Because We Love It”

Good teaching and basic science breakthroughs would not be possible without institutions such as Vanderbilt, Abbot says. Professors, in turn, understand the critical need to “participate in the maintenance and improvement of these institutions.” That’s where service, such as editing journals, jurying research or serving on faculty committees, naturally comes in.

Patrick Abbot combines teaching with research in his biological sciences lab.

“The most obvious reason we do it is because we love it,” Abbot says. There’s also a strong commitment to paying it forward and paying homage to previous mentors. “I don’t know a single colleague who can’t point to somebody in their life who was a member of an institution like Vanderbilt who was critical in facilitating their development and getting them to where they are. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t keep that in the back of their mind when they engage with students.”

He relishes the opportunity to follow the careers of students who have matriculated through his lab and gone on to graduate school and careers in the sciences. Many publish papers before they graduate from Vanderbilt, he says.

“They really have a home and the opportunity to be part of something,” he says. Students have full access to laboratories like Abbot’s and the opportunity for an intensely hands-on experience. “By the time they’re done with their research projects, walking into a crowd and doing a PowerPoint presentation is nothing. When they go on interviews and they’re asked about what they did, they can be very specific.”
His pride is almost parental. “It becomes effortless. I’ve seen them give better talks than I can give. The educational value is just immense.”

Inspiring New Generations

That is part of the ultimate goal of a research institution–to inspire new generations to become active producers of knowledge, according to Tung, who has made a strong commitment to public science education and encourages her students to continue that tradition as well.

“This is a place where new ideas are being implemented and they have the opportunity to tap into that,” Tung says.

Sparking students’ interest helps keep Steven Goodbred recharged and ready for each semester to begin.

A bio-archaeologist, Tung takes undergraduates and graduate students to central Peru to study the Wari culture, a pre-Incan civilization that lived in the Andes 1,400 years ago. Undergrads who have completed Tung’s osteology course have the opportunity to participate in research and become involved in teaching a similar course on skeletal analysis to high school students in the U.S. and Peru. In the laboratory portion of the class, the undergraduates work hands-on to manage different stations. “When I see my undergrads teach the high school students, I know that they really comprehend the material,” Tung says. “I sit and watch it unfold.”

While Tung emphasizes that research and teaching can be creatively blended into service, she acknowledges there are many unglamorous challenges to daily work and to keeping a balance. Goodbred agrees.

“I’m not a great multitasker, so at the end of the semester, I’m ready for the semester to end,” Goodbred admits. But then, he says, there’s a kind of rebirth and a longing to begin again. Often that’s fueled by knowing he’s created a spark in a student, like the one who sent him a lengthy email thanking him for the way he so effectively taught a course. The email is taped to his wall. “That made my year,” he says.

Nancy Farese was once again on foreign soil, reflecting on differences.

This time it was a Ugandan village on the banks of the Nile, watching a woman in a “teeny, tiny hut” without electricity use a new solar-powered flashlight. Candles mean danger when flammable malaria nets are nearby, and Farese, camera in hand, was struck by the nuance. It was not the poverty that caught her artful eye, however. It was the sparkling white apron the woman wore, a sign of dignity in a village with no running water.

“It was such a combination of being impressed by the way she presented herself and daunted by the environment she was in,” says Farese, BA’83. “I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know if I could do this.’ She was so strong, so much stronger than I am. I love being put in situations that cause you to reflect on your own strength, resilience and morals. It feels healthy to me to do that.”

Farese was in Uganda documenting the works of a nonprofit called Living Goods (www.livinggoods.org). It’s a network of salespeople who offer products for personal hygiene and prevention and treatment of disease, and it’s just one in a long list of agencies Farese has touched.

Matching Photographers with Need

A photographer who first picked up her camera to take snapshots of her five growing kids, she went on to found PhotoPhilanthropy (www.photophilanthropy.org), an organization that helps match nonprofit organizations needing fresh images with photographers willing to take them. PhotoPhilanthropy’s mission is to change the world—one photo at a time.

Traveling for the Carter Center, Farese captured dignity and beauty in Ghana.

“The genesis of PhotoPhilanthropy was to put an award out there—to see if other people were doing this kind of work—and reward that kind of behavior,” Farese says. Launched in 2009, the Activist Award, which highlights photo essays of nonprofit work in various categories, drew 209 submissions from 63 countries in that first year. In 2010, there were 256 entries from 83 countries.

The initial interest and success helped Farese see she was on to something; in addition to the matching assistance, PhotoPhilanthropy also helps the photographers get their photo essays seen. The group encourages photographers to donate their efforts whenever possible; as for Farese, she splits her work between professional paid gigs and nonpaid adventures.

“We actually have a very specific protocol we suggest to all of our photo-philanthropists,” she says. “We work with students, adult amateurs and professionals, all levels of sophistication, and when you’re interacting with a nonprofit, you want them to realize that something very credible and positive can come out of this.”

Storytelling with a Purpose

Cate Biggs, a freelance writer and global issues consultant, met Farese in 2007 through a mutual acquaintance. As both were interested in using storytelling as a way to support groups doing important work in Africa, Biggs says, the two became fast friends.

“From the beginning, I think we recognized in each other a sense of humility about our roles as storytellers and a desire to always be reconsidering what we think we know—about others and the world,” Biggs says. The pair traveled in Liberia with Mercy Corps in 2009, documenting programs aimed at empowering women in a country now led by the continent’s first female head of state, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. They tacked on work for several other organizations while there, and in November 2010, went to Ghana and Liberia with The Carter Center, founded by former President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn. They’re now working on a book to help educate the public about The Carter Center’s efforts in peace, governance and mental health. The book’s second purpose, Biggs says, is “to inspire PhotoPhilanthropy’s base to hit the road.”

“Nancy is truly one of my favorite people in the world: a friend, mentor and model,” Biggs says. “I don’t know that I have ever met anyone like her, a blend of warm and gracious Southern manners, genuine compassion, professional rigor, sense of humor and deep intellectual curiosity. She is tremendously accomplished: fabulous kids, a community leader, a no-nonsense business woman, a superlatively talented photographer, a great sense of style, and all the while, really down to earth, open and downright fun.”

Amazing Stories Beautifully Told

Farese, who grew up in Georgia, now lives in San Francisco with her husband, fellow Vanderbilt grad Dr. Robert Farese Jr., MD’85, and family. The kids who first inspired her photography are now ages 16 to 24. When she’s not snapping photographs, involved in community activities or on the road, she enjoys reading, trail running and sharing stories with other Vanderbilt friends who live in the area. A French and economics major, Farese says her Arts and Science experience fostered numerous long-term relationships, similar to those relationships she builds now. She also credits her study abroad through Vanderbilt in France as helping her develop interest and comfort in being in different cultures and around different languages and people.

Farese photographed this woman and child at Phebe Hospital in Liberia.

She says she’s frequently surrounded by different cultures, languages and people today. “That’s now what I do a lot,” she says. Her list of travels, in addition to Uganda, Liberia and Ghana, includes Kenya, Tanzania, Haiti, and in 2011, Vietnam, with friend and fellow Vanderbilt alumna Liz Schwartz Hale, BSN’82, also a photographer.

“One thing I always encounter is this feeling of disbelief that I’m right here and experiencing this thing,” she says. “The camera, in some way, has become a tool that leads me to—or creates access to—really interesting cultural experiences.”

And she’s anxious for others to do the same. Recently, she returned to campus to share her work and experiences with undergraduate photography students.

“It’s eye-opening as Americans to see what people all over the world are doing to make people’s lives better and to address critical need in their communities,” she says. “There are amazing stories out there that can be beautifully told.”

The battle erupts every time the economy nosedives: skills training versus education. With unemployment high and the future uncertain, should students focus on a trade or a broad-based education?

Employers, corporate recruiters and education experts say short-term thinking will cost you in job growth and lifetime income potential.

Their preference? The liberal arts education.

Long on critical thinking, writing, communication, problem solving, and development of analysis and synthesis of data, a liberal arts education fosters a capacity for lifelong professional success.

“Especially in bad economic times, the argument about skills training versus a liberal arts education emerges,” says Sarah Igo, associate professor of history and co-director of the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education. “But technology and skills become outmoded quickly. What doesn’t is the ability to think on your feet, assess problems critically and develop innovative solutions. These are the foundations of a liberal arts education.”

Kenan Arkan, BA’04, MBA’06, and a member of Goldman Sachs Private Wealth Management service, agrees. “Anyone can be taught to run numbers,” Arkan says. “But what you can’t do on the job is teach someone how to think about the world, to have intellectual curiosity.”

Arkan says while his MBA might boost his credibility in the business world, it is his undergraduate degree in political science that fuels his professional growth. “I was working with a client starting a bank focusing on southern European customers. From my classes at Vanderbilt, we were able to talk about the historical ties people in that region have and what their motivations to patronize a bank would be,” he says. “To be successful, you have to understand people’s motivations, not just their financial needs. Fundamentally, my job is about asking the right questions and then using that information to help a client find a solution.”

Arkan, who also serves as a member of Goldman Sachs’ recruitment team, says the company recruits liberal arts graduates like him. “We want people who have a global perspective, who have an interest in the world around them, people who have depth and breadth and aren’t constrained by their education…people who speak and think intelligently,” Arkan says.

Communicate and Think

John Kuhnle, PhD’71, is a recruiter specializing in educational placements for the executive placement firm, Korn Ferry. He says skills are great, but people who lack the ability to communicate intelligently lose out.

“You can’t distinguish between clear writing and clear thinking,” says Kuhnle, who earned his doctorate in English. “Oral and written skills are the passports to success. Absent those, people are permanently hampered and their careers thwarted.”

A recent study for the Association of American Colleges and Universities affirms Kuhnle and Arkan’s experiences. Surveying more than 300 companies about the qualities they seek in employees, researchers reported:

• 90 percent are asking employees to take on more responsibilities and to use a broader set of skills.
• 81 percent believe students who are able to research and conduct evidence-based analysis pay off.
• 84 percent endorse requiring senior projects as a way to prepare new graduates for work success.

The survey found employers want people who have a wide range of skills and higher levels of learning to meet the increasingly complex demands of the workplace. A majority of those surveyed encourage colleges to emphasize written and oral communication; critical thinking and analytic reasoning; the application of knowledge and skills in real-world settings; problem solving; ethical decision making; and teamwork skills.

What Matters

“A liberal arts education teaches you how to think and work outside settled patterns. It produces doubt, examination and skepticism,” Igo says. “That’s the way we reform our world and develop new ideas.”

As co-director of National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education, Igo leads research and discussions about the liberal arts. Forum membership consists of more than 70 rising academic stars selected in a nationwide search of the sciences, social sciences and humanities at top American research universities. The prestigious three-year program seeks to identify and prepare a core national group of emerging academic leaders to guide the future of the liberal arts.

“The real contributions to our society come from understanding the ways in which social and political systems interact, of critical thinking and skeptical questioning,” Igo says. “These qualities produce new knowledge, the ability to adapt and improve, to communicate, to analyze and to make ethical judgments that impact society.”

Proven Leaders

To power up their success, liberal arts majors should enhance their potential with practical internships and leadership experience, the experts say.

As a student, Arkan interned with companies ranging from Smith Barney and USAirways to Goldman Sachs. He’s adamant that the workplace experience and leadership opportunities he had set the stage for his current job.

“Candidates with more experience in an actual corporate role have the upper hand,” Arkan says. “Even if the experience is in an unrelated sector, candidates can have success (in job interviews) by contrasting their previous role with what they are applying for to show a depth of understanding.”

Companies that look to the College of Arts and Science for new employees say leadership experience is key. “We look for people who have taken the lead, whether it’s in an internship or a community activity,” says Keturah Akida Henderson, a recruiter with Deloitte. “We like people who are versatile, who can use technology, yes, but who perform well in front of the client.”

Deloitte’s preference for liberal arts graduates emerges from their ability to analyze, to be proactive, and above all, to learn. “We train new graduates. We don’t expect them to come in knowing advanced software,” Henderson says. “What we want is people with a hunger for learning—people who can understand client problems and come up with ways to solve them that are creative, focused and goal-driven.”

Disciplined Problem Solvers

Personal and professional discipline is another employment-tipping factor. A high GPA is expected, but advantage goes to candidates with broad and fulfilling interests. If job candidates are also marathon runners or have long volunteer records in community service, that makes them stand out.

“We’re always looking for evidence of discipline,” says Stevie Toepke, director of recruiting for Harris Williams, one of the nation’s largest mergers and acquisitions advisers.

“A good GPA plus a full resume tells us you can balance a lot and set priorities. We’re looking for well-rounded candidates.”

During job interviews with both Harris Williams and Deloitte, candidates are presented with case studies and asked to talk about how they’d handle particular business situations. This assesses the candidates’ ability to think on their feet and problem solve creatively, Toepke says.

Harris Williams’ hires face a steep learning curve on the business side, but Toepke says liberal arts graduates are positioned to take the new material and make it their own.

“An ideal candidate for us is one who has a strong educational foundation plus the great classes that come with a liberal arts degree,” Toepke says.

Corriher demonstrates how to fry just about anything on Jimmy Kimmel Live. From left, Adam Carolla, Snoop Dogg, Corriher and Kimmel.

Having a conversation with Shirley Ogletree Corriher, BA’56, is like taking a ride on a verbal roller coaster. Her voice swoops and swirls, plunges downward and then rises to a crescendo. Her words roll clicketyclack down the track and her stories, often as not, end with a belly laugh.

Corriher has a lot to be happy about these days. The one-time single mother of three who supported herself with a paper route is an international culinary phenomenon with two best-selling books (CookWise and BakeWise) to her name and a dance card filled with cooking demonstrations, television appearances and speaking engagements. If that’s not enough, her face will soon grace the packaging of a new flour from Tenda-Bake.

Corriher grew up in Atlanta and spent a lot of time in her grandmother’s kitchen. Milking cows and going into the yard to wring a chicken’s neck were normal activities. She graduated from high school in just three years and came to Vanderbilt where she majored in chemistry at the College of Arts and Science. After graduating cum laude, she worked at Vanderbilt as a research chemist and supported her first husband as he completed graduate school.

Her next move was back to Atlanta where she and her husband opened a boarding school for boys, with Corriher in charge of the kitchen. Cooking didn’t come naturally.

“I went crazy at first scrambling eggs in the school. I had this big old skillet and I would stand there and crack a dozen eggs in the pan and then I would sigh and put it on the heat and stand there and scrape like crazy,” she says. “Because I was using a cold skillet, those eggs—liquid protein—went into every nook and cranny of the pan. When I heated it, I literally cooked the eggs into the pan and ended up with this knotty pile of mess.”

Chemistry for Cooks

Fortunately for Corriher—and the schoolboys—her mother-in-law visited and taught her to heat the pan first so that the eggs cook on the surface of the skillet. Corriher took that lesson to heart and explains how it can help inexperienced cooks.

“Heating the pan first is the key to cooking meat. Say you have two chicken breasts—you put them in the hot pan and they’re literally stuck to the pan. But this is the Zen moment—you have to think happy thoughts and be at peace with the universe. Have a sip of zinfandel, BUT DON’T TOUCH THE CHICKEN BREASTS!” she says.

“As soon as they realize their food is stuck, new cooks will start scraping frantically. Get over it!” she commands. “It takes a full 90 seconds, which is an eternity, but eventually the proteins will coagulate—they hook together and form a light tan surface—and the chicken releases all by itself.”

The story is Corriher in a nutshell—present her with a cooking or baking problem and she’ll tell you why it happened and how you can fix it. She credits the College of Arts and Science with giving her both the science and communications skills that fuel her success today.

“Most people would not associate cooking with Vanderbilt, but my chemistry and English backgrounds both serve me well,” she says. “I probably took as many hours in English as I did in chemistry and I was the editor of the literary magazine, The Phoenix. I use not only my major, but everything I learned at Vanderbilt.”

The Mad Scientist of the Kitchen

Corriher’s marriage ended and so did her job at the boys’ school. The mother of three found herself struggling to make ends meet, even working a paper route for money. Then she won cooking lessons at Rich’s Cooking School in Atlanta and came to the attention of the school’s founder, legendary Southern cook and award-winning cookbook author Nathalie Dupree. If a cake failed to rise or a vegetable turned mushy, Corriher used her chemistry background to explain why. It didn’t take long for Dupree to turn to Corriher with food science questions. Dupree soon hired the newly divorced Corriher to help at the school and eventually, to teach a food science class.

Shirley Corriher

Corriher’s reputation as a food scientist grew and she soon found herself in demand as a teacher. Over the years, Julia Child, Pillsbury and magazine test kitchens tapped into her expertise. In an era of celebrity chefs, Corriher, who still lives in Atlanta, stands out because of her chemistry background. You won’t hear Bobby Flay or Mario Batali tossing around terms like chlorophyll, hydrogen sulfide or peptic substance, but they’re Corriher’s stock in trade and the reason she’s called the “mad scientist of the kitchen.”

Keeping green beans green is a favorite topic where Corriher uses chemistry to demonstrate a point—and to explain how to keep vegetables like fresh asparagus from turning “yucky army drab.”

“When you’re cooking green vegetables, there are three things that happen almost all at once. First—there are fine air bubbles on the vegetable’s surface. When you heat them, they pop and you see the beautiful green that’s underneath,” she explains. “The second thing that happens is that the cell walls shrink and the little cells start leaking out their insides, and the third thing is the glue between the cells—the peptic substance—changes to water soluble pectin and dissolves so the cells are leaking and falling apart—it’s just mass death and destruction.” (See her solution in a simple recipe for asparagus.)

Teaching and Television

If some of these expressions and explanations sound familiar, it may be you’ve seen Corriher on television. One of her most memorable television appearances was on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live, where she was given the task of deep frying a variety of objects including a ping-pong ball, chocolate bunnies and a wrist watch. She has also made several appearances on the Food Network’s Good Eats with Alton Brown.

“The early shows were filmed in his mother-in-law’s kitchen and we didn’t even have scripts,” Corriher says. “We just talked. Thank goodness they rerun those over and over—it keeps me out there so people in airports recognize me.”

Corriher laughs at herself a lot, but behind this self-deprecating persona is a bona fide superstar in the culinary galaxy. She has twice been honored by the James Beard Foundation, she was named a grande dame of Les Dames d’Escoffier International and has served on the board of directors of the International Association of Culinary Professionals. She crisscrosses the country regularly demonstrating her unique brand of kitchen chemistry, and not long ago, co-hosted a chemistry of barbecue event during the national meeting of the American Chemical Society.

However, even someone as seasoned as Corriher gets thrown for a loop occasionally—it happened recently at the Oregon Culinary Institute when she realized that she was expected to teach a participation class instead of her usual demonstration class.

“I’m a big ham up there with my molecules moving around, but I’ve never taught a participation class in my life,” she says, relating her dismay when she discovered what she was being asked to do. “Our names and everything were already printed in the brochure.”

Corriher then saw that the topic of her class had already been chosen—Northwest regional ingredients.

“I called my co-teacher and said ‘I know nothing about this.’ He said, ‘Well, Shirley, let’s just cook what’s in season.’ I said, ‘Fine, what would it be?’ And do you know what he said? Asparagus!

“Hallelujah, hallelujah!”

Tony Brown at dinner with first-year students.

Tony N. Brown’s office is in Garland Hall, exactly where one might expect to find a scholar in the College of Arts and Science. But the associate professor of sociology might not be in, as his teaching, research projects and secondary appointments take him all over campus.

It’s a good thing he has no real commute. All of campus is accessible by foot or bike from his apartment on the second floor of a first-year residence hall.

In fall 2008, Brown and his partner, Chase Lesane-Brown, research assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and Human Development, moved into Hank Ingram House with 290 Vanderbilt first-year students and 10 resident advisers. “Hank’s House,” as it is known, is one of 10 residences on The Commons, Vanderbilt’s first-year student living-learning community.

In addition to residential amenities, students experience unique programs designed by their faculty head of house in collaboration with resident advisers. During the 2009-2010 year, Hank’s House hosted more than 40 such programs, some academic, some social, but most a blend of the two. That’s in addition to the Browns’ apartment hours (known as First Fridays), when their apartment door opens to residents seeking a home-cooked meal or impromptu conversations about politics, sports, career paths or whatever.

“When I leave Garland Hall, I often tell people ‘Now I’ve got to go to work,’ ” Brown says. He likens the house programs to a smorgasbord for residents. “The faculty heads have provided this educational and social buffet and you can eat as much as you want, or as little as you want.”

Brown realizes that not all residents will pick up a plate at that buffet. He believes only a third will take advantage of “having a faculty member who lives in the building and has vast knowledge about university life, faculty life, and how to find a path in life.”

The rest are focused on studying or partying. “But I realize that we’ve been spectacularly successful (in integrating with students on The Commons),” he says. “Getting one-third to embrace the life of the mind is amazing.”

Frequent Knocks on the Door

The faculty head of Hank’s House has developed a greater appreciation of students and their life stories, even if it takes a vast amount of commitment. In addition to interacting through programs and dinner in the communal dining room, there are frequent knocks on the apartment door. The Browns live in a spacious apartment with a large TV that often becomes the spot for watching sporting events. The couple’s two pet bunnies—Memphis and Sakkara—are also popular draws. “Having the bunnies is a really good way to get some of the students to come over to the apartment,” Lesane-Brown says. “They’ll come and say, ‘I just want to hang out with the bunnies.’ Sometimes it’s an excuse for them to come over and talk about a real issue.”

Above: At home in the Browns’ Hank Ingram House apartment. Right: The house’s 2009 Race for the Cure team.

Having the Browns at hand eased the transition to university life, says Lauren Koenig, a member of the Class of ’12, which was the first to experience The Commons. “Whenever I stop by, they always want to know what’s going on both inside and outside of my classes,” the junior says. “They’ve also provided some really helpful advice that I’ve taken to heart over the past two years.”

Katharine Donato, chair of the Department of Sociology, believes that The Commons is a powerful classroom. “Tony has an opportunity to have an informal classroom setting, one on one, five on one, at all times of the day and night. It’s enormously helpful to him as a scholar and a teacher and a person,” she says. “There’s only so much learning that happens in the classroom. Outside of the classroom is where Tony and Chase have been able to insert themselves in important ways.”

Their open door also has demystified professors, says Mengting Ren, also a member of the inaugural Commons Class of ’12. “My friends and I were hesitant to go in at first, scared that there would be nothing to talk about in a professor’s apartment. Instead we found ourselves rocking out to Rock Band or Guitar Hero, and staying up until 2 a.m. watching Blu-ray movies back to back,” Ren says.

Balancing the Workload

Brown and Lesane-Brown, who officially became associate faculty head of house in the second year of their Commons immersion, balance the workload by splitting tasks and delegation. There must still be time for research and teaching. Brown conducts research into mental health and racial and ethnic relations, and he is known for excelling with quantitative methods and survey design. His expertise has made him a popular collaborator for any number of research projects, including a major survey study of black-white health disparities in Nashville.

In addition, he’s one of four sociology professors who edit sociology’s most prestigious journal, the American Sociological Review, now located at Vanderbilt. That means reading hundreds of manuscripts and shepherding diverse research through the publication channel. Though it ranks as a third full-time job, it is an honor.

“I’m too young to be doing it,” says Brown, who came to Vanderbilt in 2001. “This is something that’s reserved for the big names and eminent scholars in the field. Yet I’m now in a position to observe the production of science from the inside. I’m reading about topics way outside my specialty area. It’s so rich, so exciting, so stimulating to see your discipline from this vantage point and it’s empowering to shape the future research agenda of sociology.”

The journal is yet another avenue in which Brown finds himself learning. “Constant learning: It’s like Popeye and spinach. The more I get, the more connected I feel, the more alive I feel,” he says.

Imagine learning history, politics and international law from the very people who made it.

That’s what students enrolled in Humanities 161–The Iraq War experienced in a very tangible way.

Over the course of the 2009 fall semester, class speakers ranged from former National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley to the retired Army officer and West Point professor who literally wrote the book on the counterinsurgency strategy. Students were captivated by details of efforts to keep detention facilities from becoming breeding grounds for insurgency and of a soldier’s fight to stay alive. They heard of new military strategies and major mistakes that provided future lessons.

But not all of the firsthand experience came via guest speakers.

The course was taught by Katherine Carroll, assistant professor of political science, and Michael Newton, professor of the practice of law at Vanderbilt University Law School, both of whom served in Iraq in two very different functions.

Newton, former military attorney and noted expert on international war crimes, helped establish the Iraqi High Tribunal, which was responsible for the trial of Saddam Hussein. He trained Iraqi jurists and assisted them during the trial. Enemy of the State, co-written with fellow expert Michael Scharf, is considered the definitive account of the events leading up to Hussein’s execution.

Carroll served in Iraq from 2008-2009 as an embedded civilian political scientist and part of the military’s Human Terrain System team.

Michael Newton (blue shirt)

Personal Accounts in Real-time

“In my opinion, this course is education in its highest form precisely because it allows students to bring their assumptions and their inferences and challenge them in light of experiential and empirical data that we have exposed them to,” Newton says. “This course tremendously broadens their understanding and experience.”

Katherine Carroll

It also offered students the opportunity to apply their understanding to media reports and stories as they appeared. “They’re hearing about Afghanistan in the news, but they’re thinking about the lessons of Iraq, which is exactly what the policymakers are doing, too,” Carroll says.

Carroll began formulating the class while still in Iraq. She proposed it as a Humanities 161 offering, which covers current events in a team-taught, interdisciplinary manner and presents guest lecturers. An endowment from an anonymous donor funds a budget each year to bring in speakers from around the world for the course. Previous topics have included the 2008 presidential election, Hurricane Katrina and Sept. 11.

The Iraq topic benefited, Newton believes, by being able to hear directly from key decision makers so soon after events happened.

“You have to study it close enough in time that you can do what we did, which is give students the actual participants,” Newton says. “If you teach it in three or four years, it’s much more difficult to get the firsthand sense of what really did happen.”

Munqith al-Faroun, the Iraqi deputy prosecutor at Saddam Hussein’s trial, with Newton.

Also adding to the value of the course is that Newton and Carroll were able to rely on personal connections to land the speakers.

“One of the most moving days for me was when we had some noncommissioned officers talk about staying alive and about changing how they operated over time to be more sensitive to the Iraqis,” Carroll says.

Change in Strategy

Six years into the war—and with a plethora of lessons learned—students also heard how tactics have changed since the early days.

“Rick Skidis had been in the Army for 22 years and speaking to the students at Vanderbilt was the last thing he did in his career in the Army. I hadn’t anticipated how great that day would be,” Carroll says.

General David H. Petraeus speaking to Vanderbilt students and visitors.

The veteran solider told students, “We used to raid houses this way: kick the door down, tear everything apart, then leave.” Then, Carroll relates, he talked about a change. “‘As we learned about the counterinsurgency, we folded the clothes up that we tore out of the cupboard and made the bed again.’ If you really want to know what the counterinsurgency meant on the ground, here was a guy telling you exactly how he worked to implement it.”

That direct knowledge made the course special, says Medora Brown, a senior French major. “I think it is easy for so-called armchair academics to investigate issues within a bubble,” Brown says. “And the most important thing we’ve learned in this class is that nothing can be understood without knowledge of the context—an observer can’t comprehend the workings of the current Iraqi government without understanding the Iraqi Constitution; the constitution can’t be fully understood without knowing the societal divides, which, in turn, require at least a cursory knowledge of the history of Islam.”

Former National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley (center) with Vanderbilt Law School professors Ingrid Brunk Wuerth and Newton.

War’s End

Getting that broader view also has shifted opinions. From the outset, Carroll and Newton intended the class to focus on the military and legal perspective—not devolve into a political discussion of right and left.

“Before this class, I had literally no insight on the military’s experience in Iraq,” says Wyatt Sassman, a senior political science major. “All I had was the hearsay of friends and stories from the media, which can be rather misleading. While my political stance on the war has not changed, this newer, concrete source of information helped clarify any preconceptions I previously had and challenge any misplaced opinions.”

Carroll says that the course was designed not only to follow a natural progression of the war, but also to answer lingering questions that she had after she returned from her year there. “My main regret for this class is that we have not heard from any Iraqis,” Carroll says. “The speakers that we had planned fell through. It was hard to get them here from Baghdad and that’s too bad.”

Despite that shortcoming, having two professors with their own knowledge of the topic provided a rare credibility. “While it is good to study about a particular situation or event, it is somewhat rare to find people who have helped shape the outcome,” says Matthew Fillmore, a senior political science major.

Carroll and troops in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib region in 2009.

Main photo (top): Major Larry E. Porter Jr., public affairs officer, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), during a visit to The Iraq War class at Vanderbilt.

Cohen’s grand staircase and tesserae floors.

From the Peabody esplanade, Cohen Memorial Hall looks as it has for more than 80 years: a beautiful, classic structure in keeping with the Jeffersonian-inspired mall design. From the 21st Avenue side, the building now exhibits a new design more in keeping with modern museums and contemporary classrooms. It is homage to the old with a nod to the new.

Cohen was recently renovated and now has new life as home to the Department of History of Art, the Department of Classical Studies and the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery. The building renovation was designed to make the facility viable, useful, safe and accessible while preserving one of the more important architectural buildings on the Peabody campus.

Built for Art

The Cohen story began in 1926 with a gift to Peabody College from George Etta Brinkley Cohen, who believed that future art teachers should have first-hand access to art. The graceful three-story building, designed by the New York firm McKim, Mead & White, was completed in 1928. The architects gave the building a decorative Flemish bond brick exterior and limestone trim and ornament. The interior boasted a two-story atrium with grand staircase, tesserae and marble floors, marble columns, balustrade and arched ceiling with skylight—features which remain key to the building today.

The rest of the building included study, lecture, exhibition and reference rooms and studios. Additional art storage racks, still in use, were added in 1937 to accommodate the school’s growing art collection.

Peabody College’s art department and its museum called Cohen home until 1979. After Peabody merged with Vanderbilt, the Arts and Science studio art program occupied the building until moving to the E. Bronson Ingram Studio Arts Center in 2005. For the next four years, the Fine Arts Gallery maintained an art vault and other facilities in Cohen. The Peabody Professional Institute also used the building, as did Dining Services during the construction of The Commons.

The renovation took approximately 12 months, with the departments and Fine Arts Gallery moving in at the start of the 2009 fall semester. Allard Ward Architects, Knestrick Contractor Inc. and Vanderbilt’s campus planning unit handled the renovation, which totaled about $7 million in construction and project-related costs, including architectural fees, furnishings and equipment.

New entrance on 21st Avenue.

Art and Classics

The Department of Classical Studies nestled into its new home after spending some 30 years on the third floor of Furman Hall. Barbara Tsakirgis, department chair and associate professor of classics, already knew the Cohen Building through her appointment as associate professor of art history. “For my first 22 years or so here, the studio artists were resident in this building, so I’ve been here before,” she says. The years and studio work had taken its toll on the building, she says.

Now, however, Tsakirgis notes that the restored flooring in the mall-side entry of the building is in keeping with that of McKim, Mead & White’s newly restored wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “So we could call us, I suppose, the little cousin of the wing of the Metropolitan in that respect,” she says, pointing out that the restoration kept the cracks in the flooring. “And yes, the cracks go along with the age of the building—in a way, with the mosaics as well. With its black and white colors, it’s very reminiscent of ancient Greek mosaics.”

Vivien Green Fryd, chair of the history of art department, professor of art history and professor of American studies, says she’s glad to be settled in. “The move consisted not only of moving faculty and their holdings, but also the gallery and the Visual Resource Center,” Fryd says. One major undertaking involved preparing the department’s nearly 190,000-piece slide collection for storage because all of its images are now digitized.

Dean Dever speaks at the building’s reopening celebration.

New Location, New Mission

The relocation of the Fine Arts Gallery from its longtime home in the Old Gym was a challenge that required closing the gallery for several months and storing its collection at other arts organizations.

“Many thanks to the Frist Center for the Visual Arts and the Tennessee State Museum [which stored the pieces],” says Joseph Mella, museum director of the Fine Arts Gallery.

The next big feat was transferring the 6,000-item collection to its new home from that temporary storage. “Using the new gallery as a staging area, we then had to uncrate these objects and integrate collections previously stored in separate locations into one facility.”

Along with the gallery’s relocation and contemporary exhibit space, the College of Arts and Science also refined the mission of the art gallery and its collection. A key goal is to have the gallery serve as an interdisciplinary resource for all school departments. To that end, a newly created faculty committee helps set policy for the gallery’s collection and exhibitions.

Associate Dean Martin Rapisarda has charged the staff with building a database and compiling digital images of the major works in the Vanderbilt collection. “A professor can scan through, call up the database and see if those images would be helpful in his or her course. That’s one way of enhancing the utility of the collection,” Rapisarda says.

The renovated Fine Arts Gallery.

Another extension of the academic mission includes training students as docents. The gallery also will host faculty exhibits and be open nontraditional hours such as late-night Thursdays and weekend hours.

“In addition to sculpture and painting, there will even be some performance art and video art,” Rapisarda says. “Some neat things that are happening in the art department will have a chance to enliven the art gallery in tangible ways.”

Dillehay atop an early pyramid in the desert of Peru.

The seeds of his career started when Tom Dillehay was a child living on the same street as a professor of archeology at Southern Methodist University.

“I’d be walking by and see him in his garage where he had some doors set up on sawhorses and things laying on them,” says Dillehay, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology in the College of Arts and Science. “One day, he called me over and asked me if I wanted to see what he was doing. The next year, he took me on my first dig.”

That experience started Dillehay on a career that has changed the way the world thinks about settlement of the Americas and has earned him innumerable National Science Foundation grants, Fulbright lectureships and teaching stints at 19 universities around the world. He has published 16 books, including three award-winning volumes, and more than 125 journal articles. In 2007, Dillehay was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. With academic interests that include human migration, archaeology, and the transformative processes leading to state-level political and economic change, Dillehay is essentially a seeker of the small truths that alter understanding of people and their relationship to their world.

That’s an intriguing raison d’être for the man whose undergraduate degree in international relations led to a brief stint in law school before he succumbed to the siren song of digs, dust and discovery. “Even while I was in law school, I was still involved in archeology. Finally, I decided to go into anthropology. My dad, a petroleum engineer said, ‘What the hell are you doing that for?’” Dillehay says, adding with a smile. “He got over it.”

Anthropology Under Dictatorship

Armed with a Spanish fluency from growing up in Texas and taking trips to Mexico, Dillehay set his sights on South America. “Too many gringos in Mexico,” he quips. “I wanted to be more embedded in the local culture, which meant living with the local people and learning Quechua.” Through a graduate school mentor, he first went to the Peruvian highlands where he combined archeology, ethnology and ethnohistory in his doctoral study of Inca and early colonial sites.

In 1976, at the behest of the InterAmerican Development Bank, he went to Chile to build anthropology departments at the Pontificia Universidad de Chile and the Universidad Austral de Chile.

Two years earlier, Chilean President Augusto Pinochet had taken power. His dictatorship killed or drove many Chilean intellectuals out of the country, including anthropologists. Dillehay was charged with recruiting faculty to fill and rebuild the gutted programs.

“My work in Chile is one of the prouder parts of my career,” Dillehay says. They were difficult years as Dillehay worked on his thesis, advocated for indigenous people and often lived in fear. “Every time we went into the field, we had to leave our ID cards with the military police and tell them where we were going and what we were doing,” he says. “Then they’d come and hassle us.”

In Pinochet’s efforts to suppress leftists, thousands of people were reportedly killed, tortured or exiled. “There were killings in the indigenous populations and I reported them to international organizations,” Dillehay says grimly. “Because I was an American, the military thought I was working for the U.S. government and everyone else thought I was a leftist because I had long hair and a beard and I worked with the indigenous people.”

Excavation crews at Huaca Prieta, a temple pyramid on Peru’s north coast dating between 4,000 and 7,000 years ago.

Evidence of Earlier Habitation

While in Chile, Dillehay and others worked at Monte Verde, an archeological site in south-central Chile. There they made a discovery that challenged established archeological beliefs by uncovering evidence of human habitation predating the Clovis culture. The accepted benchmark for settlement of the Americas, Clovis culture is believed to have begun approximately 13,200 years ago. At Monte Verde, evidence of human habitation dates earlier, from around 14,500 years ago. This finding changed long-accepted understanding of human migration in the Western Hemisphere.

A deep trench excavation at Paredones, a site dating back about 6,500 years.

In 1981, Dillehay returned to the U.S. to a position at the University of Kentucky. The job provided the flexibility to travel, consult and research.

“Chile taught me the value of taking risks,” says Dillehay, who still holds a Chilean residency visa. He returns yearly to continue his work and to other locations in South America to do research, teach and consult. The two Chilean anthropology departments he fostered in the late 1970s are thriving, he reports with satisfaction. “South America is ethnically and culturally a tremendously diverse place to work and live,” he says of his passion for the region. “It’s a vast, constantly changing frontier.”

Writing the Unwritten Record

Change is a theme in Dillehay’s life. In 2004, Dillehay’s wife, Dana D. Nelson, came to Vanderbilt as Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English. Dillehay also made the move, joining the College of Arts and Science as Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and professor of anthropology.

“Vanderbilt has been a good match for me,” says Dillehay, who spent his first three years at Vanderbilt chairing the Department of Anthropology. “I have very good colleagues, the academics are strong, and university-wide, there’s a strong focus on Latin America.”

Dillehay has been on research leave for the past 18 months, teaching in Argentina and Peru plus doing fieldwork in Peru and Chile. He returns to the classroom in fall 2010. “Teaching undergraduates and graduates is equally stimulating,” he says. “It challenges me to stay up on the reading and thinking. I can bring to them research and information that is more current than what’s in textbooks.

“It’s exciting to talk to students who have never heard this information,” he says. “At Vanderbilt, the undergrads come to class prepared and enthusiastic. That environment can lead to new ideas and critical thinking.”

Whether he’s traveling in India for pleasure or sitting on a White House panel on human responsibility and climate change, Dillehay finds links to anthropology everywhere. “Humans and pre-humans have been on this planet for 4 million years,” Dillehay says. “Only anthropologists will write the unwritten record of 99.9 percent of humanity on this planet. No other discipline can do that.”

Some locations just seem to nurture and foster artists of all types. The heat and history of Mississippi gave us William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. The majestic Hudson River influenced an entire school of painting and storytellers like Washington Irving. On California’s Pacific coast, the iconic scenery of Big Sur has inspired many notable American artists including John Steinbeck, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson.

Protecting that uniquely American stretch of land is the goal of the Big Sur Land Trust in Carmel, Calif., and its executive director, Bill Leahy, BA’83.

Leahy’s career began on the other side of the country. After graduating from the College of Arts and Science with an economics degree, he returned home to the Washington, D.C., area and worked in commercial real estate. While he enjoyed it, the work didn’t fulfill a deeper yearning. “As a young kid I had a lot of opportunities to be outdoors, including some trips to the Smokies while I was at the College of Arts and Science,” Leahy says. His love of nature led him to volunteer with the Maryland chapter of The Nature Conservancy.

“Then I had a kind of epiphany. I realized my real estate skill set could be applied to resource protection through land conservation,” he says. “I really wanted to find a way to be in service to the native landscape.”

Leahy went to work for the Nature Conservancy, first in Missouri and then in Southern California. In 2001 he moved north to Monterey County, rich with a diversity of natural resources including the Big Sur Coast and the fertile Salinas Valley. As part of his Nature Conservancy position, he worked with the Big Sur Land Trust, a local nonprofit dedicated to preserving the area’s natural resources. Leahy joined the land trust in 2003.

Conservation Developers

The Big Sur Land Trust was formed in 1978 by a small group of area citizens worried about the threat of development to the region’s natural, recreational and scenic resources. Its goal was to proactively protect the landscape by acquisition of properties or establishment of conservation easements. (One of today’s most effective conservation tools for land trusts nationwide, conservation easements are agreements with landowners to maintain their property for conservation in perpetuity.) Since its founding, the Big Sur Land Trust has successfully conserved more than 30,000 acres of shoreline, wildlife habitat, streams, forests, grasslands and rangelands.

As the trust’s executive director, Leahy applies the economics background he acquired at Vanderbilt and the business skills he honed while in commercial real estate.

“An effective land trust often needs to look to the success of forprofit business models,” he says. “We are very strategic. Sometimes we think of ourselves as conservation developers. When you’re developing an office building you have to have a pretty rigorous planning process and timeline and financing capabilities. We do the same thing, only from the standpoint of acquiring, conserving, restoring and stewarding the land for natural resources.”

Leahy says that the trust faces additional challenges today, including large-scale ecological, economic and cultural threats to native landscapes. The trust deals with them through broader collaborations with communities and private landowners.

Connecting People to the Land

One of the greatest challenges facing land conservation groups today, Leahy believes, is the inexorable loss of connection to the land that happens at all levels of society.

He sees families who can no longer afford to keep their lands in ranching, farmworkers who don’t have opportunities to enjoy the outdoors, and young people from all areas of society who don’t experience outdoor activity.

“Kids used to learn a lot of problem-solving skills building forts and treehouses out in the woods. Kids today are really disassociated from the land,” Leahy says, noting he isn’t just referring to those in metropolitan areas. “It’s just as problematic in communities where the children are overscheduled or have other distractions like TiVo and Wii. On the other hand, we have kids in Salinas who’ve never seen the ocean, and it’s only six miles away.”

To address this problem, the Big Sur Land Trust is looking at how it can collaborate with local communities to develop a network of parks and outdoor spaces. The goal is to reconnect people—young and old—with the outdoors and build the next generation of land conservationists. In one such project, the land trust is working with the Boys and Girls Clubs of Monterey County to develop a campus for outdoor environmental education. It has acquired an 800-acre ranch, rich in wildlife and local history, for this use.

Inspiration that Supports the Landscape

Another project on Leahy’s agenda honors Big Sur’s past as an area that inspired countless artists while providing income to protect its future.

“We are working to develop a retreat center on some land that was donated about a decade ago,” he says. “We want to provide an inspiring place for artists—and even scientists—to come and create music or write and to interact with one another. Big Sur is such a remarkable place, and we want to nurture that connection between arts and the landscape and between the arts and science, which both get their inspiration from the natural world.”

Leahy says his employment of economics and business planning skills in land conservation is a natural progression for a liberal arts major.

“A liberal arts education has nothing to do with land conservation, and yet it has everything to do with land conservation,” he says. “When we talk about the story of humanity and a sustainable community, it’s about honoring and cherishing and recognizing and supporting all that we are as human beings. That’s the evolution of land conservation from a very nuts and bolts idea to one that’s, in fact, restoring our relationship to our history or our relationship to the land.”

Current students learn a lot when alumni share about the paths they took from their degrees to their careers, Vanderbilt Career Center Director Cindy Funk believes. Consequently she’s redesigned the Career Center to better leverage the network between alumni and current students.

The center has created the Vanderbilt Intern and Professional (VIP) Network, which Funk envisions eventually will be a board for jobs that alumni hear about—whether they are the person hiring or not—for which a Vanderbilt student might be qualified.

The Career Center, which has reorganized operations to focus on coaching students by career clusters regardless of their majors, also recently began video conferences between alumni and a small group of students. “This is where they create that network,” Funk says. “We try to piggyback where the faculty will refer them here, and we’ll put students in a room where there’s an intimate connection that can happen.” Funk also hopes to make better use of those networking opportunities when alumni come on campus to speak to classes.

A more aggressive program internship, Vandy on Madison Avenue, was the brainchild of Dan Lovinger, a 1987 economics graduate and senior vice president of advertising sales for MTV Networks. Lovinger worked with Funk to develop the new program, which placed a dozen Vanderbilt students in internships in the media, advertising and marketing industries
in New York in the summer of 2009.

In NYC, those industries had gotten “homogenous in terms of how we recruit and where we recruit from,” Lovinger says. “Knowing what I know about the caliber of the Vanderbilt student, the way I feel they can handle themselves in business and social situations, I thought we needed to establish a better pipeline to Vanderbilt. The only way I knew how to do it was in a hands-on way.”

Ingram

Orrin Ingram and Rodes Hart believe in Vanderbilt and the College of Arts and Science. As alumni, trustees, philanthropists and visionaries, they reflect on the opportunities—and challenges—of eliminating need-based loans and increasing scholarship endowment.

Rodes Hart, who graduated from the College of Arts and Science in 1954 and now serves as chair of Vanderbilt’s $1.75 billion Shape the Future campaign, joined the Vanderbilt Board of Trust in 1979, becoming trustee, emeritus, in 2007.

Orrin Ingram received his bachelor’s degree from the College of Arts and Science in 1982. A member of the Board of Trust since 2002, he chairs its Medical Center Affairs Committee and serves as vice chair of the Shape the Future campaign. He also chairs the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center Board of Overseers and the Vanderbilt University Medical Center Board.

These leaders answered questions about Vanderbilt’s commitment to replace need-based undergraduate loans with scholarships and grants—and the $100 million philanthropic effort, Opportunity Vanderbilt, that will sustain this historic expansion of financial aid.

Why is Vanderbilt’s expanded financial aid initiative, with its emphasis on scholarships rather than loans, so important?

HART: It’s the right thing to do. Scholarships replace the burden of student loans, and those loan obligations can adversely impact students’ career choices or their plans for advanced or professional education. We want to ensure that financial need is not a deterrent for highly qualified students who want to attend Vanderbilt.

INGRAM: When a class is made up of individuals of all economic, geographic and cultural backgrounds and experiences, that blend enriches the learning environment for the whole class—and every student.

Opportunity Vanderbilt is seeking $100 million in new gifts to support this financial aid initiative. Why not postpone this, given the current economy?

INGRAM: By waiting we could be denying someone who is qualified a chance to attend our university. Though we are certainly mindful of the current economic climate, Vanderbilt’s strategic decisions and philanthropic priorities focus on what’s important to sustain the university’s mission over the long term. And increasing Vanderbilt’s scholarship endowment is crucial to that mission.

What has been the College of Arts and Science’s progress toward its Opportunity Vanderbilt goal?

HART: As the largest school within the university, Arts and Science has set a goal of $32.5 million for new gifts to scholarship endowment for its undergraduates. To date, close to $16 million in gifts and pledges have been made by alumni, parents and friends.

Hart

Why not incur student loans in order to receive an education of the caliber Vanderbilt offers?

HART: The young people Vanderbilt educates will be the leaders who will guide our country and positively influence societies throughout the world. But debt will influence their choices.

Vanderbilt has been addressing the challenge of student debt for many years, and since 2000, students’ loan burdens have been reduced by 17 percent. Scholarship giving to our Shape the Future campaign has had a vital role in those debt-reduction efforts, and Vanderbilt’s expanded financial aid announcement builds directly on the university’s long-term focus on this issue of student debt.

Approximately 61 percent of students in the College of Arts and Science receive some sort of financial aid. And it’s important to keep in mind that even as we eliminate loans in our financial aid packages, all families still have an expected financial contribution, and some families will meet that contribution through loans—so this expanded financial aid initiative does not make Vanderbilt cost-free.

How do you think the educational needs of your children and grandchildren are/will be different from those of your generation?

INGRAM: Thank goodness I’m not in college right now. When I was in school, I was being prepared to compete with other companies inside the United States. My children are going to have to compete with businesses both within the U.S. and globally.

HART: When I was in school, we used a slide rule. The tools of today are completely different. To maximize education today and tomorrow, students need a broad educational experience to cope with the fast pace of change and expansion of knowledge.

What makes Vanderbilt an important institution in today’s world?

HART: There’s no doubt that Vanderbilt is equipping its students for leadership roles in an increasingly complex world. And within Vanderbilt, the College of Arts and Science, with its diversity of disciplines, faculty and opportunities, clearly prepares students for an integrated global society.

INGRAM: Vanderbilt recognizes that big, important, game-changing breakthroughs and discoveries typically come at the interdisciplinary crossroads. Arts and Science students can combine their passions for history and economics, study medicine, health and society or work at the interface of the physical/biological sciences. This interdisciplinary approach makes the world a better place by having bright students learn and collaborate with great faculty, across all the arts and sciences.

Some might wonder if Vanderbilt and the College of Arts and Science really need their support or whether a small gift can make any kind of difference at a big university with a sizable endowment. What do you tell alumni and others when you encounter that?

INGRAM: You’d be surprised at what a difference a little can make in somebody’s life. A lot of “littles” can add up to be a lot. Our endowment per student isn’t as large as many other schools’—so every penny counts. Vanderbilt receives more than 85,000 gifts each year from alumni, parents and friends who give in amounts from $10 to $10,000.

HART: Every gift is important and every gift makes a difference. Of course we need large contributions to reach the Opportunity Vanderbilt goal of $100 million and our overall Shape the Future goal of $1.75 billion—but we need gifts at every level. When Arts and Science alumni support the school, they’re supporting young men and women who will be tomorrow’s leaders in a broad spectrum of industries and arenas. These students deserve the best we, as alumni, can offer, and they will take their liberal arts education, and apply it to the enormous challenges of the future.

Hopping a plane to the world’s largest country is hardly unusual for the English major whose business savvy and drive have propelled her to president of global marketing partnerships and international business operations for the NBA.

China is both her top market and top success story. “The first statistic is there are 300 million people who play basketball in China. When you think of that number, and that it’s larger than the entire U.S. population, you understand,” she says.

Ueberroth herself is a top success story. A native Californian, she earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the College of Arts and Science. She says she chose Vanderbilt, in part, because her parents encouraged their kids to be “outside the laundry drop.”

In other words, they teased that they didn’t want her close enough to bring her laundry home each week to Encino, Calif.

“They feel that living away from home can be part of the benefit of a college education. It’s a view I share,” Ueberroth says. In addition to attending a university the caliber of Vanderbilt as far as education, it was important for her to experience another part of the country. “I had never been to Nashville or visited much of the South. I really enjoyed living there,” she says. “I am also incredibly proud of my nephew, Nick Booth, a junior in the College of Arts and Science, who also grew up in California and saw the university as his top pick.”

International Impact

That excitement at being in new places continues to fuel her. Living in New York—as well as in airplanes and hotels circling the globe—she remains far removed from the family laundry drop.

At the NBA, Ueberroth has worked to develop a worldwide network that explores NBA growth and marketing opportunities.

“We have 13 offices outside the U.S.,” she says. That includes four offices in China, where 150 employees help in the mission of spreading the gospel of the game. Her job also involves developing relationships with global business partners like Coca-Cola and Adidas to grow the game’s international popularity.

Ueberroth and her staff now are fashioning a campaign to tap into India’s mammoth population.

The game’s portability and simplicity are big selling points. “A hoop and a ball and you can play on your own,” Ueberroth says. “You can play with two people. It’s also played by boys and girls, which is something unique to different countries. And it helps to emphasize fitness and teamwork.”

While Ueberroth works hand in hand with local federations, national teams and youth programs worldwide, China will always be special.

“China is the No. 1 market outside the United States. It is a good place to look at all the basketball events and business opportunities,” the NBA executive says.

Ueberroth’s six trips to China each year will likely diminish to three or four since some responsibilities now fall on the organization’s new entity, NBA China. That doesn’t mean she’ll stay home. It just means more time to explore NBA opportunities in Europe, Africa, India, Mexico, Japan and the rest of the world.

Passion for Sports, Travel and Business

This lifestyle was nurtured in Encino, where her dad, Peter Ueberroth—1984 Olympic executive, baseball commissioner and operator of a worldwide travel firm—helped her learn about sports, travel and business.

“I was very fortunate that I was able to travel a lot when I was young,” she says. “I always knew I was just fascinated by and loved learning about other cultures. I thought that for me, travel would be a perfect part of my career.”

After graduation in 1987, she went to Paris to work for Ohlmeyer Communications, which led her to ESPN and other sports entertainment work. While at ESPN, she heard the NBA was looking for someone to sell international TV rights.

It intrigued her. “I knew that basketball was played in a lot of countries,” she says. “I thought about all of the possibilities and could see the growth on television and sports channels.”

After getting that job in 1994, she quickly realized the NBA had the right programming for international consumption. “Basketball is a global game. It’s also been an Olympic sport since 1936,” she notes. “There’s a long history of international competitions.”

It was simply a matter of the media catching up to the popularity, she says, and marketing the NBA as the ultimate league, drawing the best players from around the world.

And it does. Ueberroth says that 76 international players from 32 different countries played in the league in the 2008–09 season. Eight international players were in the finals pitting the Los Angeles Lakers against the Orlando Magic—a series shown in 215 countries and in 42 different languages.

Thinking back to her college days, Ueberroth says choosing liberal arts over business worked out well. “It deepened the curiosity for different cultures. A liberal arts education can emphasize that,” she reflects. “Being an English major is very helpful in business in that it provides a strong foundation in communications and writing skills.”

Ueberroth recently cemented her ties to the College of Arts and Science by joining the school’s advisory board of visitors. She’s also funding a need-based scholarship for Arts and Science students. “I learned a lot during my time at Vanderbilt that I have found helpful in the professional world,” she says.

Basketball and Beijing

Still, when she walked in her cap-and-gown ceremony on Curry Field, she probably never dreamed that in 2008 she would be a torchbearer on the opening day of the Beijing Olympic Games.

Serving as a torchbearer was a tribute to her popularity and that of her sport in China. “I joined the NBA in September of 1994. Within a year or so, I made my first trip to China. I was amazed then just how widely spread the game is. And the growth since then has been just phenomenal.

“The game has been played in China for over 100 years. Apparently the missionaries brought the game there,” she explains. “It is played in very rural locations and works well in dense, urban cities.”

While excited that a new partnership is constructing a string of NBA-style arenas throughout the land, she’s equally pleased that the Chinese government is seeding the game’s future by building half-courts in 800,000 villages.

“It always starts with the game,” she says. “Grow the game. Increase participation. Partner with the right organizations and countries. It’s a great game, and the players are so dynamic.”

Her voice is warm as she says, “I do love where this career has taken me.” Soon, it’s taking her, not surprisingly, again to China.

Passion has launched thousands of books, paintings, movies and songs. But a number of College of Arts and Science alumni are proof that passion ignites successful careers as well.

“Passion brings laser focus to things,” says Cindy Funk, director of Vanderbilt’s Career Center. “When you’re at a university like Vanderbilt with a strong College of Arts and Science, it provides the opportunity to explore things you’re passionate about. Those things can very well lead nicely to a career, though most people don’t think of it that way.”

Some people know from day one what they love and how that will parlay into a career. Others find the way by realizing an interest in a topic and thirsting to learn more. Regardless of how they arrived, though, the path to career fulfillment comes by following their passions.

Beasley in class, with her students

Interests Point The Way

For Vanderbilt Associate Professor Vanessa Beasley, BA’88, the pursuit of what she loved eventually forced her into the right profession, a career she only found through coursework. “I really wanted to be somewhere where there was an excellent liberal arts education. That’s what I was encouraged to do by my mentors in high school. I wanted to read the classics and be exposed to many different ways of thinking,” she says of her choice to enroll in the College of Arts and Science.

So she read the classics and also took an introductory course in communication studies. Influenced by the times—Ronald Reagan was president and there was much discussion about his use of visual imagery to accentuate his speeches—Beasley combined her interest in politics and communication with the school’s interdisciplinary studies major in communication studies. As she neared graduation, she realized she didn’t want to put her passions aside for a job. “I could not imagine getting to that point and never thinking about those things again,” Beasley says. She pursued a master’s degree and then a doctorate, though her career path was not clear.

“When I was writing my dissertation, I wasn’t completely sure I would go into academia. I wrote a sentence and thought, ‘Nobody else knows this,’” she says. “That was when I realized, ‘I do have to be a professor.’”

After teaching in other universities and publishing two books on presidential rhetoric, Beasley returned to her alma mater in 2007 as an associate professor in communication studies. The teacher-scholar reminds students of the serendipity of success that came by studying what she loved. “That’s part of my goal, to encourage them to take this opportunity that they may not have again in their lives, to just think about something for the sake of thinking of it,” she says.

Olney

Intense Focus, Broad Background

Unlike Beasley, Buster Olney, BA’88, came to Vanderbilt knowing exactly what he wanted to be: a sports writer. Rather than attending a journalism school, he selected the College of Arts and Science. “I thought the broader education was more valuable. What you might have gotten at J-school, you’ll learn through experience anyway,” he says.

Olney majored in history because of its intense focus on writing as part of the coursework and because he had always loved the topic. What he found after graduation, though, was that his knowledge of history enhanced his sports-writing career. He wrote for a variety of newspapers before joining The New York Times, where he was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize award for writing. He moved to ESPN: The Magazine as senior writer in 2003 and is also an analyst for ESPN’s Baseball Tonight.

“Just think about not being limited to knowledge about sports,” Olney says of his liberal arts education. He says that his understanding of U.S./Cuban relations and the law around defection was invaluable when the Yankees signed Orlando Hernandez—a Cuban defector—in 1998. “The classes I took helped me more broadly than it would have been if I’d been completely focused on sports writing,” he says.

Scully-Lerner

Literature to Politics to Finance

Jennifer Scully-Lerner, BA’92, majored in English in the College of Arts and Science because literature interested her and would provide a good foundation for politics and law school. “I didn’t know if I was going to practice law, but I knew that I was going to go to law school and somehow intertwine that with my passion for politics,” says Scully-Lerner, today a vice president in private wealth management at Goldman Sachs, the global investment banking and securities firm. Law school never happened. Upon graduating from the College of Arts and Science, she worked on the 1992 presidential campaign and then took a job in the Clinton-Gore administration. “One of the first things I did was work with the White House Office of Business Liaison. That was the first touch point with the business world,” she says. That draw to business expanded when she was mentored by people with finance backgrounds, including Robert Rubin, secretary of the Treasury 1995–1999, and Jim Harmon, former president of the Export-Import Bank.

“These mentors really encouraged me to pursue a career in business. They basically said ‘you don’t need to have a business background,’” Scully-Lerner says. “They thought a business degree was more flexible for me than a law degree.”

“I truly had never taken econ or statistics or accounting, nothing, but I was well-read, and I knew how to write, so those skills worked to impress people,” she says. “So I took the GMATs and started business school cold. I didn’t know the vocabulary, I did not know the difference between a stock and a bond, I knew nothing about any of it.” After receiving her MBA from Columbia Business School, she joined Goldman Sachs, where she runs a team that manages over a billion and a half dollars in assets for families and foundations. She also reports to the firm’s management team in her role as co-head of Goldman Sachs’ Women’s Network, which deals with issues and programs for women at the firm.

“It was my undergraduate degree that opened up all these doors for me, and then mentors that said ‘work at this, pursue this,’” Scully-Lerner says. “I always am communicating and writing for people, and doing reports. In my case, knowing how to communicate and express myself was the key to it all.”

Sikes

Liberal Arts Prepared for Business

Stuart Sikes, BA’86, says he spent nearly 20 years of his career attempting to satisfy a longing to be more creative. After graduating with a degree in economics, Sikes worked with technology companies in designing technical service, software and hardware solutions. Today Sikes heads up the Dallas-based market research firm Parks Associates. “The primary way that I like to create is through writing. By accident, I’ve landed in a position that requires me to write,” the company president says.

In college, love of writing was enhanced by courses in English and history that came naturally, while math and science were a struggle. If he had it to do over again, Sikes says he might pursue a degree in philosophy, believing that also would have prepared him well for a business career.

“The skills learned at Vanderbilt that served me best are critical thinking and communicating,” Sikes says. “I will advise my children to find something they’re passionate about and pursue that with great fervor.”

Creativity and Risk-taking Win Every Time

Marcia Kemp Sterling’s bachelor’s degree in French was the epitome of pursuing what one loves, as she did not intend to parlay it into any form of career. She intended to make her profession that of a wife and mother. When life did not work out as expected, Sterling, BA’65, earned a law degree at Stanford University. Her undergraduate study of a topic she loved, she believes, helped open the doors to a top law school and offered her valuable insight when she became a partner in Silicon Valley’s largest law firm.

“There are many law students that we hired at the firm with good grades from good schools, who, for the first two years as associates, did great jobs and were tremendously dutiful,” she says. “By the time they started to get towards partnership, though, many didn’t have the qualities of creativity or willingness to take risks or the strength to succeed.”

Dan Lovinger, BA’87, certainly took risks, beginning with abandoning his planned major of English for economics. It was during a semester abroad program in London that the pieces of the puzzle began to fit together. “It exposed me to the world of international business,” he says. “To me, there was something there I knew I wanted to pursue.”

He later returned to England to attend the London School of Economics and realized that one of the United States’ biggest exports was entertainment. Lovinger thought he might become an analyst specializing in entertainment, but found a job at Turner Networks in sales. That was the right fit. As the cable industry grew, so did Lovinger’s responsibilities and achievements. He currently is senior vice president of advertising sales for MTV Networks, one of the largest divisions of the multimedia conglomerate.

MTV’s Lovinger (in leather coat) and industry representatives with the rock group Fall Out Boy.

“When I’m in a situation that seems new, whether it’s through my liberal arts education, or my diverse business background, I feel like I’ve seen it before,” Lovinger says. “When people ask for career advice—and academic advice translates—I say, ‘You may not know specifically why you’re going from point A to point B, why you’re taking psychology with economics and speech and debate. When you start connecting the dots, you form a cool picture. If you try and take it too literally, you’ll miss a lot of opportunity.’”

Finding a Niche Within Diversity

Like Lovinger, Mary Costa, BA’05, found her niche within the diversity of the College of Arts and Science. She thought she’d be premed, but it was a poor fit and her grades reflected it. She declared a major in economics, but enjoyed theater history classes. A summer internship at a boutique arts and culture advertising firm helped her develop an interdisciplinary studies major, combining economics and theater history in preparation for a career in arts administration.

“After developing my interdisciplinary major, I continued to become more involved in what I loved both in and out of the classroom. I saw the practical side of being able to use professionally what I was learning, and my GPA continued to climb,” Costa says. “I also had the wonderful opportunity of holding leadership roles within Vanderbilt’s Great Performances series, which allowed me to immediately apply my studies for tangible results.”

Finding an area of study that she loved—creating her own path by combining the two—led quickly to a climb up the career ladder. She is currently assistant director of marketing at New York’s prestigious Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

“What’s made me successful is I love what I do,” Costa says. “I don’t come to work looking for the next vacation or the next day off. Find something that you love. It will make your life better.”

Leor Halevi is writing. The associate professor of history is tucked away in his office, once a hallway on the first floor of Benson Hall. The tidy, narrow space is lined floor to ceiling with books in Arabic, Hebrew, Latin and other languages. Neat piles of notes and tagged volumes surround the computer illuminated by a tall window that draws in the late afternoon sun.

As a scholar and teacher, Halevi focuses on the history of Islam. He has published on the role of medieval Islamic death rituals and is at work on his second book, which focuses on Muslim trade with the West in the modern period.

“You could say I cast my net broadly,” he says with a slow smile. His background is also broad, an intense and diverse blend of cultural and linguistic elements. Born in Montreal to Israeli parents of Moroccan and Hungarian descent, Halevi grew up in Puebla, Mexico, where his father was a college professor and his mother taught Hebrew part time.

“When I was in 10th grade, I spent time on a kibbutz in Israel,” he says. “The American kids there were already motivated about college. That’s when I realized I wanted to go to an American university, too.”

Make that three American universities: Princeton, Yale and Harvard. As an undergraduate, he envisioned himself following in the footsteps of his father, a physicist. While taking a history class, he found a calling—Middle Eastern history—and stumbled onto a unique opportunity to study it. “At that time, no one wanted to major in Islamic studies; it was one of the smallest departments at Princeton,” he says. “I did the math and saw I could get a student-to-faculty ratio of one to seven.”

That pragmatic decision, strengthened by the fluency in Hebrew he brought from home and a family keen on Middle Eastern politics, led to his life’s work. Halevi found rich, uncharted ground to work in medieval Islam, which led to penning the acclaimed Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society, published by Columbia University Press in 2007.

Imagination and History

“Part of what I try to do as a historian is bring texts to life. For me personally, it’s fulfilling to approach history imaginatively, to picture another world,” Halevi says. “History allows us to envision people and times that are different from our own. I like the discipline it gives me in exercising my imagination. That disciplined approach is the difference between a work of history and historical fiction.”

Halevi’s work stretches beyond uncovering the details of the past to writing that humanizes the actions, people and forces that forge historical events. “I’m not a Muslim and I haven’t died yet,” Halevi jokes, “but I spent several years thinking about how Muslims experienced death a millennium ago. My work forced me to step outside myself and exercise my historical imagination, to bring the practices, and debates, and sentiments that I researched to life.”

Muhammad’s Grave has garnered considerable attention. The book won the 2008 Ralph Waldo Emerson award given by the Phi Beta Kappa academic society to nonfiction books that have made the most significant contributions to the humanities. The American Academy of Religion honored it with the 2008 Award of Excellence in the Study of Religion, and in 2007, it received the top book prize in Middle Eastern studies, the Albert Hourani Prize awarded by the Middle Eastern Studies Association of North America.

While adamantly insisting that his work does not serve as a broad survey or general guidebook into the intricacies of Middle Eastern culture and politics, Halevi admits he sometimes acts as a reference librarian for those wanting to know more about Islam. Always willing to guide others in pursuit of knowledge, he’s happy to suggest titles to read about the Middle East.

An Easy Place to Live

Halevi started his academic teaching career at Texas A&M in 2002, so he’s comfortable in the South, describing Middle Tennessee as gracious and welcoming to him and his family. “We like the weather and the people. They’re friendly here and they make eye contact when they say hello,” he says. “This is an easy place to live.”

The family lives near the university, and Halevi and his wife, Lauren Clay, assistant professor of history, ride their bicycles to campus. Walks to a nearby coffeehouse or Mexican popsicle shop are frequent family sojourns. Their elder son attends a public Spanish immersion grade school; the younger is in preschool. “At home, I talk to the boys in Hebrew and they answer in English,” he laughs. Halevi is fluent in Hebrew, Spanish and English, and proficient in Arabic, Latin and French. Clay is fluent in French and English, and proficient in Spanish. The couple are raising their boys to be multilingual, too.

When not hiking on nearby trails with his kids or partaking of Nashville’s cultural offerings, Halevi writes, does research and perfects his squash game. “I consider my work great fun. I enjoy reading and learning new things,” he says. He has a taste for modernist fiction and he confesses to enjoying detective novels, too. His reading list is eclectic. He just read—for fun—John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1958 treatise on modern consumption, The Affluent Society.

Halevi spent 2008–2009, his first year at the College of Arts and Science, on sabbatical to work on a new book about Muslim fatwas (legal opinions based in part on the teachings of the Quran). Entitled Forbidden Goods: The Consumption of Western Things and the Search for Modern Islam, it explores fatwas on new technology and objects that have to do with religious imagination, modernity and materialism, he says. Halevi received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to research and write this second book.

Quirky Introduction

In August, he returned to the classroom to teach undergraduate classes, including the History of Islam. Forgoing the traditional survey course approach, the class delves deeply into four significant points in the evolution of Islam, such as the formation of the Quran and early-20th century Muslim modernism.

“Cramming the political history of a major dynasty into one semester is boring and useless, so I’ve divided the course into chronological snapshots,” Halevi says. “My objective is to give students a quirky introduction to Islam that will serve to stimulate more study and open doors that will allow them to take more classes on the topic.”

Using his in-progress book as a springboard, his second class, Religion, Culture and Commerce, takes an economic and anthropological view across cultures and countries. “The focus here is not to be exclusively Islam. Far from it. In class, we’ll explore the ways that various religions responded to capitalism,” he says. “It’s a look across disciplines at what consumer goods mean through the lens of religion and what economic exchange means through the lens of culture.”

Dean Carolyn Dever says that when she talks to alumni of the College of Arts and Science, she’s always inspired by how many have found success by being open to opportunities and the unexpected.

The new dean has done that herself. 

Dever planned her career as an educator, author and scholar of Victorian literature. But her passion, abilities, vision and talent for building relationships put her into leadership positions, first as associate dean, then executive dean, and now as dean of the College of Arts and Science, the largest school within Vanderbilt University.

When former dean Richard McCarty became provost and vice chancellor of academic affairs, a committee of faculty and Board of Trust members conducted a national search for a new dean. The committee decided that Dever, professor of English and then interim dean, was the best person for the job. 

“The search committee interviewed eight finalists from a strong pool of applicants. Carolyn Dever stood out from this impressive group based upon her record of scholarly accomplishments and her leadership skills, breadth of experience and vision for Arts and Science,” says Stevenson Professor of Chemistry Ned Porter, who chaired the search committee. “Her deep concern for student welfare and her passion for learning were clearly evident.”

Dever’s concern and passion are also for the school and its people. “I care about the institution, and I love to work with other people to put ideas and opportunities in place,” Dever says. “Our faculty and staff are working to invest our very best in the institution on a day-to-day basis, and my job is a variation on a theme. I have a different set of responsibilities and a different point of view now, but nonetheless the same basic toolbox is in front of me.”

Power Tools

The tools in that toolbox are impressive. Dever is a leading scholar in the field of 19th century Victorian literature and gender studies. The Boston native earned her undergraduate degree at Boston College and her master’s and doctorate at Harvard. She began teaching at New York University, where she earned tenure and directed graduate placement and graduate studies. She joined Vanderbilt in 2000.

“I loved my previous job at NYU, but I was ready for a move,” she says. She soon found that Vanderbilt was, in her words, a remarkable place, warm and collegial. “The quality of scholarly discourse and human interaction is first-rate.” She values that the institution can be cutting-edge and yet prize its heritage of process, civility and good living.

“Vanderbilt is the place where I have very much decided to stay, root and invest. It has to do with the fact the university has historically valued the humanities and the social sciences and the natural sciences,” she continues. “I have the chance now to take leadership of the College of Arts and Science in a very high point in the institution’s history.”

Diversity in Disciplines

The diversity of the college’s academics fascinates Dever. As associate dean, she was charged with improving graduate education. To do so, she observed the workings of each department and forged relationships with colleagues from disciplines she might not have otherwise known. 

“Those relationships are vital,” she says. “I had to get to know a lot of people, had to learn the different business models, the different approaches. How scientists fund their graduate students is different from how humanists fund their graduate students. But within that diversity, there’s a common thread.” That common thread is a deep commitment to quality and to doing their best, she says. 

Interaction with other faculty expanded with her work as executive dean. “That was a great opportunity for me to understand the inner workings of this process by which we advance faculty careers,” she says. “The associate dean position is very programmatically oriented, while the executive dean position is very focused on faculty, their appointments, their research and their work.”

Dana Nelson, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English and founding director of the school’s mentoring program in career development, says that Dever has rock-solid support for faculty. “Carolyn really appreciates her colleagues in all their unique capacities—she has a capacious enthusiasm for the many different ways people develop their professional careers and how their own personality flavors that pursuit,” Nelson says. “That receptivity and attunement to faculty across the divisions, as both professionals and as people, is a wonderful foundation for her leadership of the college. She also brings that same quality of attention and care to each individual student and project.”

Collegiality and quality scholarly discourse are traits Dever values about Vanderbilt.

New Relationships, New Goals

Along with the administrative and leadership tasks she handles as dean, Dever now has new relationships to explore. 

“The part of the job that I thought that I would like, but in fact I love, is the part that’s pretty much new to me, and that’s development and alumni relations,” the dean says. “We have approximately 45,000 alumni in the world out there, and I’m beginning to get to know a number of them. I’m beginning to form relationships with these people who know this place, who care about it, who are insightful, interesting, engaged people who care about education in the world—which is incredibly interesting to me—and I love doing that work.” 

 In addition to meeting with alumni on campus, Dever travels across the country to meet them. A Red Sox fan, she’s looking forward to a trip that might coincide with a certain baseball series, she says. A recent visit to Dallas introduced her to area alumni and allowed her to explain Vanderbilt’s new no-need-based undergraduate loan initiative to them. “I want educational opportunity for every student,” she says. “Hence the commitment to the university’s expanded aid program, which will mean that when students graduate from Vanderbilt, they won’t have the [need-based] personal student loan debt that might limit them to particular career choices.” 

The new dean has additional goals. “I want us to continue to improve in the education that we offer our students. I want us to create circumstances that allow each student to get educated and go out in the world with a full array of options,” she says. “I want to do everything that I can to put opportunities in the way of our faculty to ensure that they can continue to progress in their research. I think that Vanderbilt faculty have opportunities to contribute to this world, to make it a better place. I feel humbled and honored that I have a chance to help in that effort. 

“I’ve found that if you know this place, and when you have that committed community of alumni out there who really can work with our students and contribute in thousands of different ways, that is what makes us unique as a university,” she says.

Research camp in the Allan Hills, Antarctica.

A sweet aroma fills the hall outside the Earth and environmental science (EES) lab. The formation of magma and igneous rocks is being demonstrated—Molly Miller, professor and acting chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science, is making peanut brittle in the classroom.

“Rocks melt more readily if heated in the presence of water,” Miller says. “So you could add heat to three minerals—represented by the sugar, peanuts and salt in this experiment—and they’d never melt. But add water and the sugar and salt melt at low temperature. The liquid magma—caramelized sugar—is less dense than the crystals—peanuts; if it were within the earth it would move upward.” Miller explains that this represents the basic process by which the Earth became density-stratified, with the less-dense continental crust on top of the more dense material.

Known for bringing Earth science alive, Miller was the 2007 recipient of Vanderbilt’s Chancellor’s Cup. The annual award recognizes a faculty member noted for involvement with students outside the classroom; it honored Miller’s contagious enthusiasm and passion for engaging students in Earth science and in life.

 “We all have two questions to answer about our lives: ‘What do I think is most important and worthwhile to do? And in what style am I going to live as I pursue my goal?’ ” Miller says. “The job of a college student is to learn and use that learning to answer these questions and connect to a broader world.” 

Miller’s camp quarters.

Rocks and Roots

Although Miller picked up her first fossil as a child and used a book to identify it, she didn’t feel drawn to science. “In fact, I detested it,” she reminisces. “I did a science fair project in middle school about dog intelligence. People who came to the fair one day used the questions I designed to test their dogs’ intelligence, then brought them back to me to grade the next day. It was sort of an anti-science project that confirmed my dog was really smart.

“My teachers were not thrilled,” she deadpans. 

At the College of Wooster, she took a geology class and the foundation of her career was laid. “I like the idea that the Earth is understandable in terms of a manageable number of processes, that there are commonalities and an order as to why things are the way they are,” she explains. Miller was drawn to the millennia-long scale of geological forces and their interactions. “They’re big. They’re visible. Just thinking about things being incredibly old extends your perspective.” 

Geoscientists and 255-million-year sandstones with coal.

After completing doctorates, Miller and her husband, Calvin, joined the College of Arts and Science in 1977. Originally, the two job shared a teaching position so they could contribute equally in raising their children. “When we were in grad school, we had a vision of how we wanted to live our lives,” Miller says. “With our teaching arrangement, Calvin could spend weeks in the desert, I could do my research and one of us was always at home with the children.” Now both professors of Earth and environmental science, the Millers came on board as full-time faculty once their daughter and son were older.

Polar Exploration

Although Miller is renowned for taking students to explore caves, quarries and fossil sites, her current research finds her in a very forbidding environment: the continent of Antarctica. “I’d done work in Tennessee and other places, but by 1985, I was eager to work where there was more rock and less vegetation, so I turned to Antarctica. There are massive exposures of sedimentary rocks in mountains that stand above the ice,” she says. 

Initially she focused on evidence of ancient life, studying the burrows and tracks left in the rock of the Transantarctic Mountains. In 2003, Miller and her team found the fossilized stumps of an ancient forest that flourished more than 200 million years ago, even though it was near the South Pole. “It’s eye-opening to find such obvious evidence of life in a place that is so lifeless,” she says. She has made eight Antarctic trips and recently led an alumni travel group there.

Miller’s Antarctic research has moved to investigating the life and sediment on the ocean floor just off the coast. Despite the cold water and ice cover, the Antarctic Ocean floor teems with organisms. She and fellow researchers are conducting experiments to determine how the sediment is transported from the continent to the ocean floor in the absence of rivers and deltas, and how animals become fossilized. The results will be used to interpret ancient environmental and climate change recorded in long sediment cores being retrieved from the Antarctic continental shelf. 

Miller thrives in the cold and snow and in the isolated simplicity of fieldwork. Even so, some field experiences still surprise her. 

To gain access to the ocean, a hole is cut through 14 feet of ice. Underwater divers in special gear descend through the hole to reach coring sites and bring back samples. “In November, I was working alone in a tent set up over the hole and I heard this deep, heavy breathing,” Miller says. When she turned around, she discovered that a nosy, 800-pound-plus Weddell seal had appropriated the ice opening as a breathing hole, coming eyeball to eyeball with her. The seal was curious but docile and visited Miller several times before eventually swimming away under the thick ice.

Miller’s collaborator, John Isbell of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, recording observations at Wahl Glacier.

In the Classroom

Miller’s research focuses on reconstructing Antarctica’s past environments and climates to illuminate the Earth’s history. While her work has implications for global warming, Miller thrives on being a teacher.

“I love teaching,” says Miller, who believes her thirst for education was inspired by her mother. “My mother got her doctorate in experimental pathology at the end of my freshman year in college. She taught me to make observations. I learned about surface tension from watching her make apple pies.”

Miller is intrepid in finding new ways to engage students, once enrolling in a stand-up comedy class to bring a new dimension to teaching. “If you’re going to teach for a long time, you have to have some fun the entire time,” says Miller, who has also employed jump ropes, Silly Putty and Play-Doh to get lessons across. “It’s a challenge to think of new ways to present the material. For every important concept, there’s an undiscovered way to make it crystal clear.” 

Some thought Jessica Miles was making a mistake. Why would the Louisville, Ky., student who excelled in the sciences attend the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt rather than a science or technology institute? 

But it made perfect sense to Miles and to Vanderbilt: Learning how to communicate scientific ideas meant she needed to study both science and the humanities. Even so, the graduate of a science and technology magnet school and daughter of a scientific researcher had to defend her choice. 

Now a sophomore with a double major in biology and communication of science and technology, Miles finds herself in a creative haven with students, faculty and staff who share her Chaucer-to-Copernicus interests.

“There is definitely strong support for both here,” Miles says. “And seeing other students with equally diverse interests, that’s really encouraging, too.”

As the liberal arts center within a major research university, the College of Arts and Science serves as the junction of arts and science, promoting their inseparability, and celebrating that understanding of the one illuminates the understanding of the other. In such an environment, minds are open to creative bridges of ideas and thoughts thrive and truly anything can happen. 

Connections Between Art and Life

Senior Maggie Morrow came to the College of Arts and Science to study English. She signed up for calculus to round out her core curriculum. She enjoyed the mathematical way of thinking, she says, and one math class led to another, and then to another. Eventually Morrow became a double major in English and math. 

“When you’re writing a paper in English class, you want it to be logical and well thought-out,” Morrow says. “I never really understood how to do that until I began taking proof-based math classes. You have to think of different cases, different examples. I’ve always felt that, in higher mathematics, it wasn’t so much of a ‘this is a right or wrong answer.’ It’s more about how you’re making the argument. And that’s what writing a paper in English is all about.”

Morrow grew up in a liberal arts-based home with a father who studied history and a mother who taught drama. While that background provided her with an early understanding about the connections between art and life, others in the College of Arts and Science once struggled with the tension of seemingly competitive interests and disciplines.

Dahlia Porter features botanical and natural history prints in her honors seminar.

Crossing Boundaries

Dahlia Porter, assistant professor of English, started her undergraduate career in chemistry.

 “I went to a high school where science and math were given a lot more emphasis, and I thought that’s what you were supposed to do if you were a smart person,” says Porter, whose academic interests include British romanticism and transatlantic 18th-century literature and culture. “I always enjoyed science, and loved how it relates to the world, but I also loved to write, and the science track in college did not encourage this type of expression.”

Pursuing her love of literature, she obtained her master’s degree and doctorate in English. Today she shares both her interests in courses such as the honors seminar, Literature and Science: Revolution to Evolution. “The outlets for expression when starting in science were not as great as they are now. The new emphasis on crossing boundaries between disciplines has changed this,” she says. 

Robert J. Scherrer, chair of physics and astronomy and professor of physics, too experienced a tug to express himself in different ways. Though he says he has always been a scientist first—and a teacher for two decades—he writes science fiction, publishing his first story eight years ago at age 42.

“When I do science, I can’t speculate as freely,” he says. “But writing science fiction gives me the ability to go off on tangents. It hasn’t really affected the way I do science. It has just given me an outlet for more crazy ideas, things I could never put in a scientific paper. It gives me a different sense of accomplishment when I write a story than when I do scientific work.”

Scherrer’s short stories have been published in the revered science fiction magazine, Analog. He says that using his science background in his writing comes naturally, but that his writing technique is more challenging. “I had to unlearn how to write, since I had been writing science papers for about 10 years, and that writing style is turgid. It’s passive voice, very dry,” he says. “The first thing I have to do is whack myself over the head and really concentrate on getting into the fiction-writing mode. When I write a first draft, it’s usually terrible. Even if the content is there, the style is terrible.”

Scherrer is much more likely to write about sciences other than his own, he says, to keep from speculating on things he would otherwise know to be incorrect. It’s a different story, however, when he reads someone else’s science fiction concerning physics or cosmology. “I tend to be very critical of the science,” he admits. “I get all persnickety about it, and it hinders my enjoyment of the reading.”

Jay Dickerson, assistant professor of physics and life-long lover of art.

Faces Agape 

Though the exploration of different interests can certainly have its challenges, it also may have unexpected benefits. Some say stretching the brain to look at certain topics from different angles allows a person to find connections elsewhere in life. 

Physics major Calen Henderson has spent his four years at Vanderbilt moving between the College of Arts and Science and the Blair School of Music. The talented astronomer and pianist doesn’t see conflict in his diverse passions. “As fundamentally different as things may seem, the reality is, if you put your mind to it and have enough passion and drive—especially if you’re helped along by excellent mentors—anything is possible,” Henderson says.

Assistant Professor of Physics James H. Dickerson says he’s accustomed to seeing “lots of faces agape” at the beginning of his honors seminar course, The Physics of Art and the Art of Physics. A first lecture, for example, might focus on the concept of color from both a physicist’s and an artist’s point of view. “That essentially sets the stage. You look at subjects from a variety of points of view, some of which are familiar and some of which are not, then you go into points where they conflict,” says the professor, who developed his own interests in physics and art history in parallel. “These questions create this space where students discover that they are welcome to probe and explore. In a very dramatic way, this gives students a sense that they should not be either frightened or discouraged by challenging topics.”

Fruitful Collaborations

Dinner discussions at the home shared by Jay and Ellen Wright Clayton often cover challenging topics. Jay Clayton is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and chair of the English department. Dr. Ellen Wright Clayton is the Rosalind E. Franklin Professor of Genetics and Health Policy, professor of pediatrics, and director of the Vanderbilt Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society. The English professor credits conversations about scientific policy and ethics for increasing his interest in computer technology, genetics and biotechnology. 

A noted scholar of Victorian literature, Jay Clayton researches the ethical and social issues raised by genetics as they appear in literature and films. He became the first literature professor to receive a grant from the National Institutes of Health. 

Introducing science students to English or English students to science, Jay Clayton says, is not about “one learning to be a scientist, or the other a skilled literary critic. It’s about each person bringing their best to the experience,” he says. “Really fruitful collaborations are starting to take place.” 

That collaborative nature and its productivity shouldn’t surprise anyone, physics professor Scherrer says. They all stem from one commonality.

“Certainly everything we do in Arts and Science has creativity at its core,” Scherrer says. “When I come up with a new idea for my research—or someone else does, even when they’re working in a different field—it’s the fact of trying to create something new and original. That’s common across the college, the thread that ties everybody together.”

Dinner conversation between Jay and Ellen Wright Clayton, a physician and authority in medical ethics, sparked Jay Clayton's interest in how genetics and biotechnology are depicted in literature.

Ken Catania is a funny guy.

The associate professor of biological sciences is also soft-spoken, modest, articulate, creative and quick to laugh. In life, teaching and research, he always looks for the opportunity to do the fun thing—appropriate, since he’s a world-class practical joker. Some of his gems are the stuff of neuroscience legend.

Take the one with the Maryland State trooper, for example.

In the early 1990s, Catania and a carload of fellow neuroscience students were en route to a seminar when the car was pulled over by a huge, surly Maryland trooper. The trooper started asking the students hard questions. Neuroscience questions. It wasn’t until they got into an argument amongst themselves over the number of mammalian cranial nerves that Catania’s friends realized they had been set up—the trooper was a college friend of Catania’s. It took a year to plan, but being meticulous helps make Catania a great scientist. 

He is also a genius; so says the MacArthur Foundation, which in 2006 rewarded Catania’s ground-breaking work on the sensory systems, brain evolution, and behavior of unusual mammals like star-nosed moles, naked mole rats and water shrews with a $500,000 grant. Often referred to as ‘genius grants,’ the MacArthur awards are given annually to a select few to spend as the recipients see fit—no strings attached.

Life in the Woods

Catania’s interest in animals and behavior traces back to countless hours spent in the woods and fields of Columbia, Maryland. “I grew up in a sort of interesting planned community,” the neuroscientist says. “The main feature was that there were a lot of open spaces—lakes, streams and forested land—interspersed with the houses and schools. It had a big impact on me.” 

Catania’s parents also had an impact on his life’s work. “My dad is a psychologist,” Catania says. “He was actually a student of [famed American psychologist] B.F. Skinner, which is a pretty big calling card. He helped me to learn to think carefully about the world and behavior.” His mother’s influence was equally important. She often took the youngster for long walks to look at the plants and trees. “It wasn’t long before I was dragging home everything,” Catania says. “My mother would put up with turtles, snakes, salamanders, toads and frogs, and every creature I could get hold of. She was very understanding.” 

Catania developed insights and intuition about wildlife that served him well. As an undergraduate at the University of Maryland, he volunteered at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. “I fit in really well there, and they started to ask me to help with the research and even to collect some of the animals,” he says. “I had a knack for being able to find animals and that’s where I first got involved with star-nosed moles.” 

Investigating the Odd and Unknown

Star-nosed moles are some of the oddest-looking creatures on earth and Catania is one of only a handful of people who know how and where to catch them in the wild. At least once a year, he travels to a certain spot in northern Pennsylvania to collect specimens of the amazing little mammal. 

Catania’s research into the neurobiology and behavior of the star-nosed mole began as a graduate student at the University of California San Diego. He has found that an abnormally large part of the mole’s brain and nervous system are devoted to its fleshy, pink, 22-tentacled nose, which gives the animal an amazing sense of touch which, in some ways, parallels human vision. The mole detects food underground by constantly sweeping its nose back and forth. If the tips of the appendages make contact with a potential food item such as a worm, the mole will bring the even more sensitive central portion of its nose to bear on the object. If it is food, the mole then gulps it down. The entire process from detection to dinner takes a mere 200 milliseconds. 

Since coming to Vanderbilt in early 1995, Catania’s name and reputation seem inextricably linked to the moles, although his lab features several species of scurrying little creatures equally as unusual. “Water shrews are smaller than mice and can swim like fish,” Catania says. “We discovered that they can actually smell underwater by blowing bubbles out of their noses and re-inhaling the bubbles.” He also studies naked mole rats: hairless, burrowing little rodents that are the only known non-insect to live in colonies organized like beehives. “One queen bears all of the young while the rest are workers,” Catania says. “They also have life spans far beyond other rodents—twenty years or more. I’d like to find out why.”

Catania likes studying the star-nosed moles, water shrews and naked mole rats, among other things. “I’m very interested in animals with small brains and how fast they are,” Catania says. “I think there’s going to be some advantages to small brains as far as speed goes.” And although many recipients spend their MacArthur grants on personal needs, Catania is trying to purchase, preserve and protect the land in Pennsylvania where he finds the star-nosed moles.

Creative Touches

Catania and his wife, Liz, are both Vanderbilt researchers and avid rock climbers. Catania proposed to her on a flower-decorated ledge located halfway up a cliff face. The elaborate event took months of planning and the help of friends, but he says the surprise was worth it. The couple celebrated their first wedding anniversary on Halloween. 

Between research, collecting trips, and settling into newly-married life, Catania also supervises a research lab, takes stunning nature photography (of his research subjects, but also of animals in the wild), and serves as one of the world’s leading experts on his uncommon mammals.

Catania’s creativity helps his students understand complex concepts. In his Neurology of Behavior class, he uses made-to-order replicas to demonstrate the classic case of railroad worker Phineas Gage, who suffered behavioral changes after surviving an accident which sent a railroad tamping iron through his skull. 

Hefting the nearly 14 pound iron, Catania explains that the demonstration helps students learn and remember. “It’s always good to try to do the fun thing, to help make others’ lives more fun and interesting.”

Robert Penn Warren circa 1964, about the time he was working on Who Speaks for the Negro? © Bettmann/CORBIS—Sylvia Salmi

A photograph taken of Robert Penn Warren in the early 1960s shows not the young Kentucky boy whose life changed at Vanderbilt, but a mature Warren—wiser, with life’s experiences written on his face. This is the Warren who sought out men and women in the Civil Rights Movement, interviewing them, sometimes under the cover of darkness for their protection. The Warren who preserved those interviews so they could be heard, in their own voices, once again, thanks to an inter-institutional initiative spearheaded by the center that bears his name, the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities in the College of Arts and Science.

Southern Stance

Now revered as America’s first poet laureate and the only writer to win Pulitzer Prizes in both fiction and poetry, Warren, BA’25, enrolled at Vanderbilt as an engineering student. In the English class he took to meet basic education requirements, Warren found where his passion lay: writing. He joined a group of fellow poets and intellectuals known as the Fugitives. The Fugitives morphed into the Agrarians, a conservative collection of 12 Southern writers and poets. Again, Warren was among them. In 1930 the Agrarians published a manifesto called I’ll Take My Stand, which included a Warren essay on race titled “The Briar Patch.” In it he argued for separate but equal education for blacks and whites.

The Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964. © Flip Schulke/CORBIS

“Hollow though that sounds to us now, that was a radical position,” says Mona Frederick, executive director of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. “His colleagues and constituents would not have believed African Americans needed to be educated beyond elementary school.”

Despite the then-progressive thinking, Warren regretted the essay. “I never read the essay after it was published,” he later wrote, “and the reason was, I presume, that reading it would, I dimly sensed, make me uncomfortable. In fact, while writing it, I had experienced some vague discomfort, like the discomfort you feel when a poem doesn’t quite come off, when you’ve had to fake or twist or pad it, when you haven’t really explored the impulse.”

The Rev. James Lawson and Rev. Walker at the 2008 “We Speak for Ourselves” panel discussion. photo credit: Rosevelt Noble

Warren later determined to set things right. At the height of the Civil Rights Movement, some 35 years after his essay was written, he lugged a giant reel-to-reel tape recorder to interviews with people involved in the movement, including participants like Malcolm X, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Ellison, and the Rev. James Lawson, ’71. The result was Warren’s 1965 book, Who Speaks for the Negro?, hailed by New York Times reviewer Charles Poore as “one of the year’s outstanding books.” The tapes, though disclosed in Warren’s foreword, were largely forgotten. 

An Audible Discovery

Then, in 2006, Frederick read a brief article that mentioned Warren’s book and related audiotapes. Although the Warren Center is dedicated to interdisciplinary research and study in the humanities, rather than to Warren and his work, Frederick was intrigued. “I thought, ‘Wow, I’ll have to look for those tapes,’” she recalls. 

Frederick obtained a copy of the out-of-print book and discovered that Warren had interviewed almost 50 legendary figures at the height of the Civil Rights Era. Realizing his work represented a major contribution to the historical record of the movement, she and staff associate Sarah Nobles began tracking the whereabouts of Warren’s original reel-to-reel tapes. 

Vanderbilt University Special Collections and Archives and Ratnesh Bhatt.

Nobles traveled to Yale where Warren had been a professor while writing the book and uncovered tapes and related materials in Yale’s library. “No one had catalogued them or listened to them in a while,” Frederick says. “To hear them for the first time was chilling. It’s like getting into a time machine and going back in time. Just hearing the voices is pretty remarkable.”

The humanities center discovered that the University of Kentucky also had some audio interviews by Warren that were part of an oral history project. Initially believing that Kentucky had duplicates, Frederick quickly realized the collection had been split. “Kentucky didn’t know Yale had any, and Yale didn’t know Kentucky had some,” she says. 

Warren’s interviews were significant, particularly because they took place during one of the most critical times in U.S history. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law, giving the federal government power to enforce desegregation. Three men in Mississippi registering black voters were found burned to death. The month Warren penned his foreword, Malcolm X was assassinated, and immediately after the book was released, the march on Selma began.

“It was a terribly chaotic time. Why did Martin Luther King and so many others take a couple of hours to sit down and talk to Warren, a white English professor from Yale?” Frederick wonders. 

That makes the tapes, and what will eventually be a broad-based historical repository related to the book, all the more important. 

Mona Frederick, executive director of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. photo credit: John Russell

Preserved and Accessible

Working with Paul Gherman, who recently retired as Vanderbilt’s university librarian, and Jody Combs, assistant to the university librarian for information technology, the next step was to bring the tapes into the 21st century. Using digital versions created from the originals at the University of Kentucky and Yale, the librarians created a searchable database and cataloged the tapes, making it easy for anyone to listen by topic or interviewee. The tapes are accessible for free online at http://whospeaks.library.vanderbilt.edu. Transcripts of the interviews are currently being created and digitized, as are related materials that Warren kept. 

One item is a response to a letter Warren wrote, Frederick says. “He wrote to Stokely Carmichael, and Carmichael responded, ‘Oh, I just read your book in jail. We’d tear five pages out at a time and pass them around. When you’re in jail, characters from books become your cell mates.’”

Combs says that the project has been, in some ways, a humbling experience. “You’re going through material, much of it ephemeral and not of huge historical value, but then you run into these amazing pieces of information—beautifully written, beautifully articulated ideas of the time,” he says. “It can be a little daunting to think what we’re doing is putting a historical record together that will outlive us both.” 

A Worthy Commemoration

As the tapes were being digitized and made available online through the three cooperating libraries, the Robert Penn Warren Center was also planning events in honor of its 20th anniversary. The two projects were joined as part of a year-long celebration. 

More than 40 years after Warren asked the question, Who Speaks for the Negro?, the center organized a two-day response. “We Speak for Ourselves,” as the event was titled, brought together leading scholars and activists with as many of the original interviewees as possible, including the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, Ruth Turner Perot, Lois Elie, the Rev. Will Campbell and Lawson. Decades had passed since many of these civil rights leaders had gathered. “One said to another, ‘The last time I saw you, we were talking to Bobby Kennedy,’” Frederick recalls.

The 1963 March on Washington. © The National Archives and Records Administration

The event was videotaped and is available in an online collection, displaying the 21st century response side by side with interviews from 1964.

Warren’s children, Rosanna and Gabriel, generously provided permission to digitize the extra material related to the book. For the conference and collection, Rosanna Warren, the Emma Ann MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities and professor of English and modern foreign languages and literatures at Boston University, wrote her recollections of life in the Warren household while her “Pa” was writing Who Speaks for the Negro? She remembered her father’s return after being gone for weeks at a time:

 Stories emerged: how he and his hosts often had to travel on back country roads long distances at night in cars without headlights for fear of being shot. … He attended meetings in remote farmhouses where all the blinds were down, and where at night almost no lights were lit.

While her parents tried to shield their children from the danger, it hit home, Rosanna Warren said, when she opened their Connecticut mailbox and found a KKK pamphlet with a threat scrawled across it: 

“We know where you live and we will get you.” … I remember running into the house, to find my parents, and show them and ask them what was happening. There followed anxious, whispered conversations between the grownups, where there was question of contacting the FBI and eventually a sense that that would be useless.

© The National Archives and Records Administration

Rosanna Warren’s recollections put in context some of what her father experienced as he wrote Who Speaks for the Negro? and the risks he took in giving black Americans a voice during the early Civil Rights Era. Thanks to scholarship and technology, their voices—and his—are still being heard. They’re speaking for themselves after all these years, and anyone can listen and learn.

The Who Speaks for the Negro? digital project was made possible with support from the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities and the Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Vanderbilt University. Original materials (recordings) were provided through the generous support of the University of Kentucky and Yale University. Some abstracts are available courtesy of the University of Kentucky. The “We Speak for Ourselves” conference was generously co-sponsored by Vanderbilt’s Program in African American and Diaspora Studies, Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center, Center for Ethics, Center for Nashville Studies, Department of English, Law School, the Office of the Provost and the Race Relations Institute at Fisk University. Additional support was provided by various programs and departments at Vanderbilt; a full listing can be found on the Who Speaks Web site.

“That tells you what I think is important,” Worley, BA’72, says. Even though he’s run multimillion-dollar companies, discovered some of country music’s hottest stars, and produced million-selling albums, the former philosophy major thinks of himself as a guitar player.

The Nashville native started playing music in third grade, moving on to guitar at 13. While in the College of Arts and Science in the late ’60s and early ’70s, he played fraternity parties and clubs. After graduating in 1972, he and his bandmates tried to keep the music alive. But the military draft pulled several away, and others went on to regular jobs. 

Worley tried that, too, applying for a job selling business machines. The interviewer told him not to waste either of their time and to go back to music. 

So he did. He became a session guitarist, playing on albums produced in Nashville. He helped build a studio run by fellow alumnus Richard “Pat” Patrick, BA’69, and continued making music with Marshall Morgan, BA’73, who would go on to become a sound engineer for the Eagles. It took eight years for Worley to get his first job as a producer, for a then-unknown Gary Morris. 

During the nearly 30 years since, he’s produced for Reba McEntire, Marie Osmond, Martina McBride, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and more. Producing the Wide Open Spaces and Fly albums for the Dixie Chicks earned him Grammys for best country album. As an executive he worked in the upper echelons of two major record labels, Sony BMG and Warner Bros. At Warner Bros. he signed Big & Rich to their record deal. Most recently, he produced the debut album for Lady Antebellum, a group whose first album hit No. 1 on the Billboard country chart.

Not bad for a guitar player, albeit one who parlayed philosophy and economics into a highly successful career. 

Focus on Learning, Not a Career

“For those of us of our generation, getting an education and finding a career were two separate things,” Worley says. “I know that’s changed now, and for the worse. I went to school to get as broad an education as I could. I majored in philosophy to check out as many different ways of thinking about the world as I could.”

His liberal arts background has served him well in business. Philosophy, sociology and psychology have helped him in working with creative artists, and economics has helped with business. “I minored in economics. I’m glad I did,” he says. “Later in my life as a businessman, it’s been good to innately understand macro- and microeconomics and how they work.”

Understanding economics and a world economy is something Worley learned at home as well. His father, James Worley, was an economics professor and director of Vanderbilt’s influential Graduate Program in Economic Development. The program brings officials and educators from developing nations to Nashville to study economic development. During his tenure the senior Worley worked with more than 900 government officials and academics from 92 countries. Former students include a Lebanese ambassador to the United States, a vice president of Micronesia, a vice president of Ecuador, and a governor of the Central Bank in Turkey. Many of these ended up in the Worley home, providing an international perspective that the lifelong Tennessean says enriched his understanding of the world, education and business. 

Not Ready to Be Irrelevant

In 2004, world and business changes helped Worley decide to reshape his future—and perhaps that of the music business. The music industry now has seen sales drop by half in four years. “Imagine any business that’s now 50 percent of what it was and what that does to the structure of the business, especially if it’s one that has a long history and a certain way of doing things,” Worley says, explaining that Internet downloads are up but CD sales are down. “People are more interested in buying one song at a time than they are albums. We’ve gone from an 18-dollar model to a 99-cent model.”

The changes in the business brought Worley to a point of questioning his own future. He walked away from his job as chief creative officer at Warner Bros. to launch his own business, Skyline Publishing, which specializes in developing artists. 

“I had a good job with a big, fat salary, and all I saw around me was this crumbling of the business. I had three more years available on my contract, but to do what I was doing was a path to irrelevance,” he says. “Am I ready to be irrelevant? The answer was loud and clear: No. I don’t want to live that life. I’ve still got music to make and things to do.”

The music-business model may have crumbled, but consumers clearly still want the content. Worley’s new business develops artists, and then brings the performer, Skyline and the record label into a collaborative profit-sharing arrangement. In the past, record labels made money solely off an artist’s album sales. “Now CD sales are a wallpaper backdrop to the music,” he says. “It’s being able to go in as a business, intersect with other businesses and say, ‘Let’s all win.’ Nobody has to lose. That’s our way of the future.”

The transition from high school to college is a big one. The transition from high school to world-renowned private research university is gargantuan. With an ultimate goal of ensuring that all of its undergraduates make that transition smoothly and excel during their time at Vanderbilt, the College of Arts and Science pays particular attention to the acclimation of its first-year students. 

“Students graduate from high school and wrestle with issues they haven’t previously confronted—time management, personal autonomy, personal responsibility, new academic challenges, new forms of academic and cognitive learning, and new social networks,” says Frank Wcislo, dean of The Commons and associate professor of history. 

An academic institution has the responsibility to help students as they encounter new experiences and expectations, Wcislo explains. Vanderbilt and the College of Arts and Science have a long history of helping with transitions both academic and social. Traditionally, such programs and initiatives include pre-major advising in the college, a quality residential life program, senior faculty teaching introductory courses, activities fairs, and college and university sponsored social activities. 

In the last five years, the College of Arts and Science has grown its efforts even more. New initiatives place an increased emphasis on the value of a liberal arts education, on what it means to study at a major research university, and on improving the quality of students’ writing. Additionally, the institution recognizes students’ needs to develop significant relationships with faculty and with each other early in their academic careers. These initiatives for first-year students overlap in several areas, starting with a new curriculum for all College of Arts and Science students. 

Exposure to Ideas and Inquiry: The AXLE Curriculum

Implemented in fall 2005, Achieving eXcellence in Liberal Education (AXLE) replaced the previous Arts and Science curriculum. More streamlined and with less narrowly defined categories of requirements than its predecessor, the curriculum provides for approximately 13 courses within six categories to fulfill a student’s AXLE obligations. The categories—Humanities and the Creative Arts, International Cultures, History and Culture of the United States, Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Perspectives—ensure students receive broad exposure to ideas and inquiry, hallmarks of a liberal arts education.  

“One thing we hope a Vanderbilt education can do, and why I so firmly believe in the liberal arts, is that it provides students with the tools to problem solve in different ways,” says Fräncille Bergquist, associate dean of the College of Arts and Science and associate professor of Spanish. “It liberates them to be open to new ways of viewing the world and themselves, and I think that is just extraordinarily valuable.” 

Rather than prescribing a specific course of study for students, explains John Sloop, associate dean of academic affairs and professor of communications studies, AXLE helps students avoid creating a narrow educational experience for themselves. 

“We don’t want to overprogram what the students are doing. We are trying to set up the conditions where they can best take control of their own education, where they can best be empowered to grab hold of their education in a way that they haven’t before. This is not a way of sheltering students, but of forcing them to do more,” he says. 

Under the umbrella of AXLE are the college’s first-year writing seminars. As a result of feedback from professors of upper-level courses as well as from graduate schools and employers, the school pays deliberate attention to helping its newest students become stronger, more persuasive writers. 

All students must take a one-semester seminar in their first year. Each department offers a minimum of two writing seminars, which typically gives freshmen 80 seminars on different, intellectual topics from which to choose. Whether taking Science, Voodoo Science, and Democracy; Worlds of Wordcraft: Digital Narrative and Virtual Reality; or Gangs and Gang Behavior, each seminar strengthens students’ ability to communicate their ideas in writing. The seminars also serve as an introduction to research and academic life, emphasizing critical thinking and deliberate inquiry, and make the teaching of writing the responsibility of all departments, not just those traditionally associated with composition.

Each writing seminar requires that students write 15 to 20 pages per course, giving students plenty of opportunity to improve both the quality of their writing and their ability to defend strong, logical arguments. 

An integral part of the first-year experience in the College of Arts and Science, the seminars also encourage students to engage in independent learning and inquiry in an environment in which they can express knowledge and defend opinions through class discussion, oral presentations and writing. The small-group nature of these seminars promotes direct student-faculty interaction and student-to-student communication.

Building a Social Network: Vanderbilt Visions

Engaging all undergraduates in every school, Vanderbilt Visions represents one of the newest components of the first-year experience. Designed as an introduction “to the goals and values of a research university through discussion and collaborative experiences,” Vanderbilt Visions is a hybrid of academic seminar and mentor-supported social network. The concept and original curriculum were designed by a committee of faculty, staff, students and administrators to improve upon the social, academic, cognitive and cultural experiences of first-year students. Currently in its second year, Visions has shifted from an academic seminar format to a more informal, organic way to cement the lessons and information garnered during orientation. It also invites students to critically examine their first year at the university. More than 90 Vanderbilt Visions groups meet weekly, each co-led by a faculty mentor and an upperclass student mentor. 

 “We are addressing the transition [from high school to college], not in top-down, supervisory structures or lectures, but by providing an environment in which the first-year students themselves can actually articulate what they are going through, and in essence, study it,” says Wcislo, who is also a member of the Vanderbilt Visions executive committee. 

Deliberately created groups bring together students with different interests and backgrounds from Vanderbilt’s four undergraduate colleges and schools. The first-year students reap a shared understanding of experience because they are all new to Vanderbilt. Equally important, each Vanderbilt Visions group forms an instant association of friends and acquaintances. 

Nervous at the prospect of coming to Vanderbilt without knowing anyone else, Madison Akerblom of Los Angeles
liked meeting 15 other freshmen, a professor and an upperclass student before classes started. Her comfort level increased as she then saw familiar faces all across campus. “And I met people I would have never met otherwise, one of whom is my best friend today,” she says.  

Based on feedback from prior participants, starting in fall 2008 Vanderbilt Visions will meet formally for the first semester only, rather than all year long. Sessions will take place at The Commons, which will house the entire class of incoming first-year students this year. 

The Commons Experience

In fact, many changes will occur in the first-year experience at both Vanderbilt and the College of Arts and Science when The Commons’ 10 houses welcome their first residents in August 2008. The Commons will bring together all first-year students, currently housed in three different residence settings across campus. Characterized by student-led programming, faculty heads of houses, and the already popular Commons Center, The Commons will provide a physical landscape and communal living that will complement the programs already benefitting first-year students.  In addition to Wcislo’s role as dean of The Commons, several Arts and Science faculty will serve as heads of houses, each living in residence with the first-year students.  

 Helping new students acclimate to university life is a core objective of the College of Arts and Science. The fruit is an all-time high retention rate, a greater number of quality applicants than ever before, and a student body that is engaged, involved and proud to be part of a vibrant, academic community. 

“I feel very, very good about where the university is with the [first-year] students. There are a lot of people working very hard on these issues,” Sloop says. “I genuinely think we have a level of commitment and excitement that is not commonly matched at other universities. I really think we’re doing something right now that’s good.”

Photos by Neil Brake, Steve Green, Mason Hensley, Jenny Mandeville, John Russell.

The future academic dean was living in Barcelona, away from family, friends and American culture. Usually an excellent scholar, she struggled with the college-level literature, language, geography and other classes in which she was enrolled.

“Because I only had one semester of Spanish—not a good idea!—and all the courses were in Spanish, I couldn’t do the work,” she says.

At Christmas break, she explained to her family that, while the academics weren’t going well, she was learning an incredible amount living in the colegio mayor, the dormitory, where all of the residents spoke Spanish. With the support and encouragement of her parents, she returned to Barcelona. She spent the remainder of that first year improving her Spanish, and then repeated the courses for academic credit the next year. 

“It took me two years [to complete a one-year program], but it was full immersion, and it was the best thing I ever did,” she says. 

That personal experience may contribute to the great rapport she has with the students she sees as associate dean of academic affairs for the College of Arts and Science. 

Officially, Bergquist’s charge is helping students resolve issues related to academics, including pre-major advising, transfer of credits from other institutions, and the creation and approval of courses for independently designed interdisciplinary majors. Unofficially, she is the Arts and Science guru, always ensuring that students get the most from their Vanderbilt experience.

“I’ve stayed in this job so long because it allows me to help students realize their dreams, their potential. I help them learn how to approach their studies and their unique situations,” says Bergquist, who is also an associate professor of Spanish. 

La aficionada de la palabra

She came to Vanderbilt by way of the Department of Spanish as a freshly minted Ph.D. Six years later, she was denied tenure by that department, during a time she describes as “different from today” for female faculty. (In 1983, Vanderbilt had only a handful of tenured female faculty across all of its colleges and schools.) 

“I remember talking to Mother when I found out,” Bergquist says. “She said, ‘Honey, it’s not you, it’s them. You know what you’ve done, you know what you’re worthy of.’ And it’s true. I knew what I was capable of, and here I am, more than 30 years later.”

What she was capable of was obvious to others at the College of Arts and Science. The summer after being denied tenure, she was asked to interview for, and was ultimately offered, the position of associate dean. She accepted because of her deep affinity for Vanderbilt and the opportunity to work closely with students. 

“What I do now in the dean’s office is teach,” she says. “When I’m in a classroom, I have 20 or 30 students, and when I’m in the dean’s office, I teach one-on-one.”

In addition to her responsibilities as dean, she has taught an upper-level Spanish language or linguistics course throughout her three decades at Vanderbilt. Bergquist says she loves watching students take on different personas as they learn to speak a new language. With the turns of phrases and various hand and facial gestures required by each language, she explains, a person can truly become and behave like someone else by speaking another language. 

She says her fascination with Spanish comes from being a self-described “word nerd,” someone who is intrigued by form and function within a language. “Se me perdieron las llaves. The keys lost themselves to me,” she says with delight. “This is so unlike that sentence in English, when we’d say, ‘I lost my keys.’ In Spanish, it’s not my fault the keys are lost—the keys did it!” 

Whether teaching rules of possession in Spanish or advising someone on academic requirements, Bergquist is recognized and renowned for her dedication. She has won both the Madison Sarratt Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and the Chancellor’s Cup, given in recognition of student-faculty relationships outside the classroom. Rare is the Arts and Science graduate without a personal experience with Bergquist.

“Dean Bergquist was my introduction to Vanderbilt, and she made me want to go there,” remembers Anastasia Higginbotham, BA’93, who met with Bergquist her first day on campus after transferring to Vanderbilt as a junior. “I walked out of her office and thought that if even one other member of the faculty took as much time with me and cared as much about my situation as she just had, then Vanderbilt was where I wanted to be.”

International Ties

One of two children born 13 months apart into a close-knit family, Bergquist completed her freshman year of college at Louisiana State University. Initially, she was going to take premed in order to be a pediatrician, but as she readily admits, she did not do particularly well in the sciences.  However, she thoroughly enjoyed her one semester of Spanish. So when her father, who was employed by an international oil company, and her mother, a classically trained pianist, were transferred to Italy, she was given an option.  

“When my parents went to Europe, I had the choice to stay in the States or to go with them. ‘Oh! I think I’ll go to Europe,’” she says with a laugh.

In the late 1960s, study abroad programs like those today didn’t exist, hence Bergquist’s enrollment in the Courses for Foreign Students program in Barcelona. When her parents returned to the U.S., she enrolled at Texas Tech and ultimately earned both her undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees in Spanish and linguistics. 

Later at Vanderbilt, Bergquist would help create McTyeire International House, a living/learning center that promotes the use of foreign languages and awareness of different cultures. Students live immersed in a foreign language, becoming more fluent and natural speakers. As a result, McTyeire residents who later study abroad do not have the struggles with language that Bergquist had as a student. 

Not surprisingly, Bergquist relishes traveling internationally and Spain is her favorite destination. Having mastered French, Portuguese and Catalan—though she flatly denies fluency in any of the three—as well as Spanish, she also denies having a favorite part of the country.

 “I like the north as well as the south as well as the middle because there is always something new and interesting to see,” she says. “And while I love the cities—Barcelona and Madrid are fabulous—the smaller cities like Salamanca and Santiago de Compostela are jewels. Just walking the streets and meeting new people is wonderful.” 

Closer to home, Bergquist can be found patronizing Nashville’s Sunset Grill restaurant (despite the conspicuous absence of Spanish food), cheering on Vanderbilt’s athletics teams, and attending as many student concerts and performances as possible. Her affection for students and the institution are evident even when the associate dean has to tell students what they do not want to hear. 

“She has a real gift with students,” says Vickie Latham, Bergquist’s assistant for the past 13 years. “They come in fussing or crying, and they walk out laughing because she has such a wonderful way with people.”

Photo by Steve Green.

Sure, Bear Naked all-natural granola was a great concept—as long as it fit in a standard box.

Product co-founder Brendan Synnott, BA’00, disagreed and had a different idea. With passion, determination and “a whole lot of stars coming into alignment,” the then-23-year-old entrepreneur helped create a new brand that has personally netted him tens of millions of dollars. And as for the granola packaging? In a very literal sense, the confining box suggested by industry traditionalists was scrapped for a bag with a see-through window that clearly showed the natural purity of what was inside.

“From the very beginning, we had a passion for the brand, and we wanted to do the right thing by it,” Synnott says. “And when you have those two things, people want to help you succeed.”

A living case study

Synnott’s story is of youthful exuberance; of putting heart, soul and life savings into something you believe in; and of taking a hearty stab at the status quo. Like many just-out-of-college young adults, Synnott and his business partner, Kelly Flatley, unabashedly moved back into their parents’ homes while they worked on a plan and their product. The difference here, however, is that eventually, the plan paid off. In late 2007, the Kellogg Company bought Bear Naked Granola for an undisclosed amount estimated at approximately $60 million.

Not yet 30, Synnott recently returned to his alma mater to share with students and professors what the last handful of years had brought.

“He will be a living case study,” says Cherrie C. Clark, associate professor of the practice of managerial studies. “His visit was a great way to bring some reality into the classroom, and to remove a level of excuses. It’s the difference between, ‘Yeah, when I’m 50 I’ll do that, too,’ versus ‘When I’m 29…’ It gives the students the ability to see that it’s possible to get from where they are now to where he is. He’s such a role model that they’re still talking about it.”

Senior Kristen Hendricks from Conway, Ark., bears that out. “He put the concept of entrepreneurship a little more within my grasp,” she says. “All you really need is energy, a goal and something you really care about.”

Defining a Lifestyle

Synnott did more than care about Bear Naked, started in 2002 with personal savings and Flatley’s recipe for homemade granola. He believed in it and in creating a lifestyle brand–not simply a product–that would embody the values and aspirations of active, healthy consumers. That, he says, is exactly what made Bear Naked work. As successful models, he points to companies like Virgin Records, which gave up-and-coming artists an opportunity to define his generation’s music; Burton, which not only created snowboards but also the culture that went along with them; and Napster, which totally transformed the music industry by putting power into the hands of consumers.

“To me, Bear Naked was the perfect platform for selling a natural, organic product to the mainstream consumer,” he says. “I saw everybody wanting to live healthier lives, and that was the consumer trend we built the product around. My perspective on business is that when the only thing a company cares about is making the customer happy, then the focus is entirely different. It’s a different structure all together.”

That, in turn, begets a different corporate culture.

“I wanted a culture where people could say it was the best job of their lives,” Synnott says. “That meant hiring the right people and treating them right, and holding on to the idea that Bear Naked was about eating well so you could live your life to the fullest.”

At first, Synnott and Flatley, who grew up together in Darien, Conn., filled their staff with peers from high school and college–including Synnott’s Vanderbilt roommate, Thomas Spier, BA’00, who later became the company’s chief operating officer. It was a lot like “a bunch of friends just hanging out, a big road trip,” Synnott says. At that point, Synnott and Flatley were making Flatley’s recipe all night and trying to sell it all day. Before long, they realized there really could be too many cooks in the kitchen; roles had to be more clearly defined. So the partners decided Flatley would focus on the product, and Synnott would pursue his passion, marketing and sales. By the time the company was sold, there were 55 people making the expanded product line and 40 in the corporate environment.

“The culture was still to give a lot of young people a lot of responsibility in the organization,” Synnott, a former economics major, says. “We had a natural enthusiasm, and that’s infectious in business. When we had meetings, they were always vivacious. We were alive. And because of that, whenever we ran into problems, we would solve them creatively. In addition, every three months, we would do this planning, and start from scratch if we needed to. You always have to be willing to blow yourself up every few months, and shed your skin to find new ways of doing things.”

Go Big or Go Home

Synnott admits he’s on the hunt for his new thing, the next big venture, but not without hesitation. After finishing a commitment to Kellogg to help with the transition, he spent his winter in Colorado, taking a break and hitting the slopes.

“The field is different now,” he says. “There are different expectations. But I don’t want to do the next thing unless it’s going to be bigger than Bear Naked. You know, go big or go home. I want to build something else that makes people go, ‘Bear Naked? Oh, that was so a couple of years ago.’”

Until he finds it, Synnott will be looking for opportunities to give back through philanthropic efforts, as well as sharing his story with impressionable minds like those he found at Vanderbilt on recent days.

“I love to talk to students about business, because I was in that chair not too long ago,” he says. “I want to infect them, and make them understand that you can’t ever be passive about your work. This is not just about learning a special skill set. This is about making your own. And we’ve all been given great tools to do just that.”

Photos by Daniel Dubois and Steve Green.