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.”

Brendan Synnott recently spent two days on campus, inspiring students and telling the Bear Naked success story.

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.