Assistant Professor Katherine Carroll spent a year embedded with the military in Iraq as a social scientist. The flag behind her reads “We all love Iraq.”

ARTSANDSCIENCE© is published by the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University in cooperation with the Office of Development and Alumni Relations Communications. You may contact the editor by email at artsandsciencemagazine@vanderbilt.edu or by U.S. mail at PMB 407703, 2301 Vanderbilt Place, Nashville, TN 37240-7703.

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Nelson Bryan (BA’73), Mardy Fones, Gail McConnell, Jim Patterson, Wes Powell (BA’91), Jan Read, David F. Salisbury, Sandy Smith, Fiona Soltes, Cindy Thomsen, Contributors

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Cover: Assistant Professor Katherine Carroll spent a year embedded with the military in Iraq as a social scientist. The flag behind her reads “We all love Iraq.” Photo by John Russell.

© 2010 Vanderbilt University

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In this issue of Arts and Science, you will read the words of Gail McConnell, a visitor from Queen’s University, Belfast, Ireland. Gail is a Ph.D. candidate in English and a member of this year’s graduate fellows program at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. The Warren fellows are a group of eight Ph.D. students in the humanities, seven from the distinguished programs within Arts and Science and an annual visitor from our valued partner university in Belfast. These gifted young scholars come together for one year of interdisciplinary exchange as they complete their dissertations and prepare to launch careers as junior professors. These students and the others enrolled in the 19 doctoral programs in Arts and Science—spanning the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences—represent nothing less than the future of higher education.

Earlier this year, Chancellor Nicholas Zeppos announced a major new initiative for Vanderbilt: a series of deep and lasting investments in graduate education. As the chancellor wrote in his letter to the faculty: “The Ph.D. is the highest academic degree offered by Vanderbilt and the other great American universities. These are the future professors, scientists, researchers, teachers, and policymakers that will build our nation and heal our globe. As with our undergraduates, we must devote ourselves and our resources to attracting the very best and inviting them to be part of our academic community.”

I stand with Chancellor Zeppos in the firm conviction that top-quality graduate education represents the difference between good and great in a research university. We often speak of the College of Arts and Science as a liberal arts college at the heart of a great research university. Our investment in Ph.D. education gives us legitimate claim to that adjective, “great.” Arts and Science faculty press the horizon of new discovery across the disciplines—and they do so while also teaching first-year writing seminars and the courses that anchor undergraduate majors as well as our AXLE liberal arts curriculum.

We ask a great deal when we ask a professor to fulfill both parts of the Arts and Science mandate: to be an excellent undergraduate teacher and a trailblazer in a highly specialized field of academic endeavor. Attracting top young scholars to our graduate programs makes this magic happen. Our professors need the partnership of the world’s best young talent in their fields. In labs, libraries, classrooms and offices across our campus, Ph.D. students advance the work of discovery at the core of our academic mission. A deep pool of talented Ph.D. students is indispensable to our ability to recruit, retain and develop a world-class faculty in the College of Arts and Science.

Let me speak for a moment as a professor rather than a dean. Two of my own Ph.D. students, Sarah Kersh, MA’06, and Elizabeth Meadows, MA’06, are members of the Warren fellows group alongside Gail. My students’ research is specialized within the area of Victorian literature that has comprised my professional life’s work. Sarah and Elizabeth are producing remarkable new research in their dissertations, and their work challenges, advances and invigorates my own scholarship and thinking on a daily basis.

Great articles and books—great discovery no matter what the discipline—require the stimulating interchange that can only be found in specialized apprenticeships. For this reason, the chancellor’s investment in graduate education is truly visionary. It represents a giant step toward a Vanderbilt that maintains equal commitment to the liberal arts and to the thrill of discovery.

Carolyn Dever
Dean

Lorraine M. López, associate professor of English, was named a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction for her book, Homicide Survivors Picnic and Other Stories. López’s story collection was chosen as one of five honorees from nearly 350 books nominated by their publishers.

“The PEN/Faulkner Prize is one of the most prestigious awards for fiction in America today,” says Jay Clayton, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and chair of the English department. “Recent winners have included such wonderful writers as Philip Roth, E.L. Doctorow, Ha Jin, John Updike, and Nashville’s own Ann Patchett.”

López, the author of three additional works of fiction and winner of the International Latino Book Award, was nominated along with fellow writers Barbara Kingsolver, Lorrie Moore, Colson Whitehead and Sherman Alexie, who received the 2009 award. All five were honored during the 30th Annual PEN/Faulkner Award ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., in May.

Homicide Survivors Picnic is a collection of short stories with deeply complex characters at pivotal points in their lives. In each of the volume’s 10 stories, López has crafted characters who are survivors, people who face overwhelming disappointment yet persevere and even reach out to help others.

López joins a cadre of past PEN/Faulkner honorees that reads like the who’s who of great American literature, including David Guterson, Bernard Malamud, Alice McDermott, Joyce Carol Oates, E. Annie Proulx, Isaac Bashevis Singer and John Kennedy Toole.

The National Academy of Science has announced that Associate Professor of Psychology Frank Tong is one of the winners of this year’s Troland Research Award. Two $50,000 Troland awards are given annually to scientists under the age of 40 for groundbreaking contributions to psychology and/or neuroscience. The NAS singled Tong out for his pioneering use of neural decoding techniques to explore mechanisms in the human brain mediating perception, attention and object recognition. Tong is the third Department of Psychology member to be honored with a Troland award. The highly prestigious award has also been awarded to Isabel Gauthier, professor of psychology, and Jeffrey D. Schall, E. Bronson Ingram Professor of Neuroscience.

Richard A. “Pete” Peterson, professor of sociology, emeritus, died this spring in Nashville. Peterson, 77, was one of the first professors to research country music from a sociological perspective and was also the founding chair of the American Sociological Association’s culture section. His impact on undergraduate and graduate students alike is still felt in the College of Arts and Science and in the field of sociology. Peterson’s recent work with Assistant Professor of Sociology Jennifer Lena (above) on “Classification as Culture: Types and Trajectories of Music Genres,” was featured in the fall 2009 issue of Arts and Science.

The Vanderbilt University Board of Trust honored three longstanding members of the Arts and Science faculty with emeritus status at Commencement in May.

David A. Lowe, associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures, was named professor of Slavic languages and literatures, emeritus. Lowe is an expert on 19th-century Russian literature with a strong interest in contemporary Russian culture and has been a member of the Vanderbilt academic community since 1979.

John Siegfried, professor of economics, is now professor of economics, emeritus. Siegfried joined the economics faculty in the College of Arts and Science in 1972 and also taught at Vanderbilt Law School and in the Executive MBA program of the Owen Graduate School of Management.

Jo Ann Staples, senior lecturer in mathematics, was named senior lecturer in mathematics, emerita. An expert in graph theory, Staples joined Vanderbilt in 1975. In addition to her teaching responsibilities, she oversaw the teaching and training program for mathematics graduate students as director of teaching.

Beth Bachmann, assistant professor of English, is the 2010 winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award given to honor a poet’s first book. Bachmann’s Temper, published last year by the University of Pittsburgh Press, was called “an unforgettable first book” by poet Lynn Emanuel. “This is a great honor for Beth, and yet another sign of a very bright future for her,” says Carolyn Dever, dean of the College of Arts and Science. The Kate Tufts Discovery Award, given by Claremont Graduate University, is presented to a first book by a poet of genuine promise. It provides a cash award for its recipients to further their work in poetry.

Even as a high school student, Molly Boland Thompson, BA’99, knew that Vanderbilt University was the place for her. She found her campus home in the College of Arts and Science, first as an English major during her undergraduate matriculation and now as school registrar. She has worked in Arts and Science since January 2003 and was named registrar last August. Among her other duties, she’s overseeing the College of Arts and Science’s participation in the implementation of a new enrollment management system—no more OASIS (Vanderbilt’s online course registration system). Huzzah!

Okay, first off: what does a registrar do?

Together with my fabulous and capable staff (which includes two former Vanderbilt students), I am responsible for preserving the academic integrity of the College of Arts and Science. Our tasks include facilitating the registration process (including creating the schedule and assigning classrooms); posting majors, minors and transfer credits to students’ records; maintaining the online degree audit; and assisting with various and sundry curriculum-related matters.

The registrar’s office maintains student records so that the dean’s office and the faculty can perform their necessary functions: advising and teaching students.

How long have you worked in the College of Arts and Science?

This is my fifth year at Vanderbilt and in A&S. I started working in Vanderbilt Temporary Service (I think that is how a lot of staff stories begin) in human resources. I alphabetized and filed papers in a windowless closet of an office. My next temporary assignment was in the Arts and Science registrar’s office and I have been here since. I started out as the student records assistant and moved my way steadily up the ladder (academic credentials evaluator, assistant registrar) until I was fortunate enough to get the registrar position in August 2009.

What attracted you to apply to Vanderbilt as a student and pursue a major in English?

I applied to Vanderbilt because of the name. Even at that time, it had a good reputation (though nowhere near as stellar as it has now). It seemed to me at the time, too, to be a perfect midway point between my parents’ houses: a quick 8-hour drive on I-40 to North Carolina and a looong 4-hour drive on the Natchez Trace to see my father in Mississippi! I hadn’t actually visited Vanderbilt before I accepted my admission. Once I finally made it to campus during the summer prior to my freshman year, I felt secure that I had made a good decision. I find it difficult to believe that a person could not fall in love with this place even at first glance.

I always planned to major in English; it just seemed like the right fit for me. It didn’t hurt that I got to spend class time listening to Professor Michael Kreyling [Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English] read from The Sound and the Fury or arguing the virtues of The Moral Animal with Professor Vereen Bell. Perhaps it was the literary history here—from the Agrarians to Tony Earley [Samuel Milton Fleming Professor of English] and beyond—but learning about literature at this school seemed sort of magical.

What do you like to do in your free time?

I try to spend as much time as possible with my husband and kids when I am not at work. In the fall and spring, this usually means that I am at soccer practice or games. In the summer, we like to canoe the Harpeth as often as we can. I am a big fan of live music, too—at the Ryman, at The Basement or on the street.

What do you like to read and do you have any favorite Web surfing destinations?

Faulkner. Always Faulkner. At the moment, I am trying to make my way through Entertainment Weekly’s list of the top 100 books of the last 25 years. When I finish with that, I plan to move to Time’s 100 best English-language novels. (What can I say? I love lists!) I expect there will be another list to tackle when I am finished with those two.

My favorite website is The Onion’s A.V. Club. The site has great features like the Weekly Inventory (personal favorite: “Don’t Blow It: 10 Great Songs Nearly Ruined by Saxophone”); excellent reviews of music, movies and television; and just all-around spectacular writing.

I started reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog for The Atlantic during the election and I continue to enjoy his rather unique takes on everything from modern conservatism to Catholicism to South Park. I am also grateful to Mr. Sullivan for introducing me to another fabulous blog, www.lettersofnote.com. Letters of Note features historical letters, etc., covering just about anything you can think of—three Elvis fans’ request to President Eisenhower that the singer’s hair not be cut upon induction into the Army; Kurt Vonnegut’s letter to his family upon being released from a Dresden work camp; a ninth-century letter template from China used for apologizing to dinner hosts after drinking too much and embarrassing oneself…I highly recommend the site. If you read only one of the letters of note, I suggest “Favourite memo ever,” which features a memo that Matt Stone sent to the MPAA regarding the South Park movie.

What do you like best about being employed by your alma mater?

I like the discounted season tickets to football, basketball and baseball.

Vanderbilt is a great place to work, and I would think that whether or not I had also gone to school here. For a person as inclined toward nostalgia as I am, it really is a pleasure just to walk past Alumni Lawn and remember those heady days as an undergraduate. I only hope that in some small way I can help our students to have as fine an experience as I had.

Within the brick walls of Benson Hall’s top floor lies an incubator for the next generation of writers. Home to Vanderbilt’s master of fine arts program in creative writing, the fourth-floor hallways are lined with books, comfortable reading chairs, and the workplaces of renowned authors mentoring some of the campus’ best student writers.

Creative writing faculty, from left, Nancy Reisman, Mark Jarman, Sandy Solomon, Tony Earley, Kate Daniels and Lorraine López.

The College of Arts and Science launched the M.F.A. in creative writing in fall 2006. Three years later, it debuted at No. 18 in Poets & Writers magazine’s influential annual ranking of creative writing programs. Now 621 writers and poets have applied for the six spots in the fall 2010 class.

What makes Vanderbilt’s M.F.A. in creative writing so popular? It may start with Vanderbilt’s reputation. The university’s association with great writing began nearly a century ago with John Crowe Ransom’s acclaimed class described as “a practical course in writing various types of prose, including the short story.” Among Ransom’s students were Fugitive literary group writers Donald Davidson, Allen Tate and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Penn Warren. Given that legacy, the M.F.A. program seemed both logical and overdue.

Literary life at Vanderbilt includes events such as the Gertrude Vanderbilt and Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writers series. Here poet Cornelius Eady reads from his work.

“Creative writing has always been highly regarded at Vanderbilt,” says poet Mark Jarman, Centennial Professor of English and director of the creative writing program. “That’s the legacy we’ve tried to keep going.”

The intimate class size is also important. Just six students are admitted each year into the two-year program, which makes the program highly selective and “extra small,” according to Poets & Writers’ ranking. “We wanted to create an esprit de corps with high morale,” Jarman says. “It was an ethical decision. We want to help our students create a community for a certain amount of time that allows them to be immersed in their writing.”

The English department’s award-winning faculty of 10, evenly split between poetry and prose, is another strong selling point for the program. All members are working writers who continue to teach.

For the program’s faculty, finding the best students is important. “We try to get it down to the best 20 applicants, and then we rank them and go after the top students,” explains novelist Tony Earley, the Samuel Milton Fleming Professor of English. “Last year, we got three of our top five. It really allows us to have a team of all-stars.”

For first-year M.F.A. student Matthew Baker, the faculty’s energy about the students was a drawing card. “The faculty pursued me and seemed genuinely excited about the prospect of me being in the program,” he says. He was also drawn to its small size. “You want to find a program that has a balance between students having a significant amount of time with the professors, but also enough students to make the workshops valuable,” he continues. “Vanderbilt seemed like the right size for me.”

Most of the creative writing students are in their 20s, although some are older. Associate Professor Lorraine López, a PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist, says she appreciates the more seasoned writers. “They bring poise, history, maturity, a longer background in literature,” the novelist and short story author says. “Writing isn’t like a professional sport, where you peak in your early 20s. Your experience and perspective and history continue to shape you. If you keep at it, you just get better as a writer.”

Jarman points out that the program’s goal is not to teach people how to write. “We’re teaching the craft of an art,” he says. “A writer has an innate gift, and we can help them with techniques. But we can’t teach the art.”

Earley wants his students to appreciate the hardness of writing. “Every piece of fiction is the result of thousands of decisions,” he says. “I tell my students to go ahead and get lost, get overwhelmed in the process. It’s the only way to succeed. You must get to that place where you’re overwhelmed and learn to negotiate within those parameters.”

In the M.F.A. program, Earley hopes that his students accelerate their learning curve and discover things they could not gain on their own. “The process is almost alchemy,” he says. “All the pieces, when taken together, become something else.”

As part of the M.F.A., creative writing students study legendary Vanderbilt writers such as Robert Penn Warren, James Dickey and the Agrarians.

For the first three semesters, the M.F.A. students take two seminars and one workshop, where the focus is class discussion of student-produced work. The final semester is devoted to their thesis—a novel, collection of short stories or collection of poems.

In addition, they work as writing consultants in the school’s Writing Studio during the first year and then in their second year, teach an introductory creative writing workshop in their genre.

The teaching helps boost the funding package for the students, which this fall will include a full tuition benefit, $10,650 stipend and $3,350 salary. Jarman says that applications tripled the year they went from partial to full funding for tuition. Now his goal is to double the stipend, bringing it more in the range of a doctoral student’s stipend.

“The stipend, of course, makes a real difference,” Baker says, who hopes to string together a few writing gigs for the summer. For now, much of his attention is directed at the spring launch of the program’s online literary magazine, The Nashville Review. The first issue focuses on areas of literature that are often overlooked.

“You’ll see graphic novels, creative nonfiction, music, and interviews with writers,” he says. “We want to look at writing that isn’t literature with a capital ‘L’.”

I am a final year Ph.D. student from Queen’s University, Belfast, Ireland, and one of eight graduate student fellows at Vanderbilt’s Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. We are a diverse bunch, with varied interests, ideas and opinions, which makes for lively meetings when we gather on Tuesday afternoons in the Vaughn Home, where the Warren Center is located.

Being Warren fellows affords us the opportunity of interdisciplinary exploration. We represent philosophy, English, German, French, Spanish and history as well as four countries: Mexico, Germany, Ireland/U.K. and the U.S. By reading and critiquing one another’s work, we are gradually becoming more fluent in disciplines not our own.

My own thesis examines theological aesthetics in Northern Irish poetry. The violent conflict known as “The Troubles,” which has dominated political, social and cultural life in Northern Ireland since the late 1960s, has had particular—and peculiar—implications for literary production and criticism. By focusing on the poetry of Northern Ireland’s Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon, my thesis seeks to reimagine art’s relationship to religion and theology in this context.

I applied for the Warren Center Graduate Student Fellows program to spend time in dialogue and debate with other doctoral candidates. In the U.K., doctoral work is entirely research-based. I haven’t taken a class in four years. Instead, I’ve been let loose in libraries. Consequently, I’ve been much more isolated than I imagine I would have been in the U.S.

In the second year of my doctoral studies, I spent a few months doing research in Atlanta at a large archive of Irish poets’ papers at Emory University. It was great to spend time in a university on this side of the sea and to travel south and west, but archival work is a lonely process.

While in Atlanta, I visited friends in Nashville for a weekend. That gave me some sense of the city and I found some of its best little nooks for reading with an Americano in hand. I left Nashville with a feeling of curiosity about the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt (as well as a three-legged cat called Mister Joshua Ingalls, but I suspect that’s another story).

The opportunity to spend my final year at the Warren Center seemed too good to be true. I told myself it was unlikely I would be chosen, so the invitation was a very pleasant surprise.

This is the first time someone from Queen’s University has been part of the program, making me the pioneer and guinea pig. The Warren Center hopes to establish a full exchange program with Queen’s University. The connection is actually closer than one might imagine. Nashville and Belfast are sister cities, with Belfast holding a Belfast/Nashville Songwriters Festival every February.

Seen through a wide-angle lens, my semesters of interdisciplinary activity at the Warren Center are part of broader processes of cultural exchange, as Queen’s scholars have visited and lectured over the year.

Mona Frederick directs the Warren Center, and I heard her passion for the vision and values of the center when we first spoke. Despite the poor phone connection, her enthusiasm for the work achieved and the encounters enabled within the Vaughn Home was clear. I felt welcome before I’d even arrived. Mona, together with Polly Case, Katherine Newman and Faculty Director Edward Friedman, Chancellor’s Professor of Spanish and professor of comparative literature, welcomed me warmly and have made my time at the College of Arts and Science an enjoyable experience. The Warren Center also happens to have the best coffee on campus so, in addition to supporting my academic endeavors, the staff has helped keep me in caffeine (do you see a minor theme here?).

From left, Warren fellows Elena Deanda-Camacho (MA’07), Gail McConnell and Matt Whitt (MA’08) spend Tuesday afternoons helping each other fine tune their dissertations.

Being part of the graduate student fellowship program has provided me with the chance to have my work read by scholars from outside Irish studies and, indeed, from outside English literature. This has been of great benefit for my writing, challenging me to pay close attention to my writing style, as well as to my argument, methodology and structure.

I love the variety of the work represented by my fellow graduate fellows and I have learned so much throughout the course of the year. Whether it’s the politics of 15th-century Mexican folksongs, the musical modes of 18th-century German aesthetics, the history of evangelical political activism in the U.S. or the morbidity of Victorian poetry, I have not had a dull week.

Submitting your work to seven keen and intelligent minds is a vulnerable process, but the risk has been worth taking. Each of us fellows has benefited from sharing our writing and learning from other perspectives; we are becoming betters writers and better critics as a result.

What will I take away after I earn my doctorate and leave Nashville? I’ll be a stronger writer, a better critic, a more complete scholar, a more accomplished teacher. I’ll also leave with memories: of the Warren Center people who made me feel so at home, of the warmth of the university and Nashville communities, and of my companion graduate fellows. Most of all, I look forward to seeing my fellow fellows in print in years to come, and to remembering fondly our Tuesday afternoon debates at the Warren Center’s roundtable.

Gail McConnell is a poet and scholar preparing for her doctoral dissertation at Queen’s University Belfast. She is also the first Queen’s University participant in the Robert Penn Warren Graduate Fellows Program at the College of Arts and Science. In addition to finishing their dissertations, Warren fellows also meet with visiting scholars regarding issues related to academic careers and each delivers a capstone public lecture.

Biblical Epic Eight Years In The Making

Daniel M. Patte isn’t directing a remake of The Ten Commandments, but his new book, The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity, is an equally huge undertaking. Patte, professor of religious studies, has spent eight years soliciting and compiling 3,500 entries documenting the beliefs and practices of Christians throughout history. More than 800 scholars from around the world contributed to the book, including 25 from eight departments in the College of Arts and Science. The book is scheduled for publication in August.

The Scarier, The Better

When Claire Sisco King was a little girl, she would sneak out of bed to watch scary movies. Today the assistant professor of communication studies examines the cultural implications of “bad” movies like slasher or disaster films.

“Millions of people love to watch these movies,” King says. “Even films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Night of the Living Dead often get noticed as powerful political allegories.”

Recently, she has studied films such as Poseidon and I Am Legend in relation to rhetoric about the perceived traumas of 9/11. “These films, whether intentionally or not, seem to speak to memories and fantasies and anxieties about a tragedy like September 11,” King notes. Her research will be the focus of an upcoming book tentatively titled Washed in Blood: Sacrifice, Trauma and the Cinema.

If You Must Multitask, Practice, Practice, Practice

René Marois, associate professor of psychology, and Paul E. Dux, former research fellow, discovered that practice makes perfect when it comes to doing two things at once. “We are lousy multitaskers because our brains process each task slowly, creating a bottleneck at the central stage of decision making,” Marois says. When study participants did the same task over time, however, practice enabled their brains to process each task more quickly, the researchers found.

In grade school students are often told that acts could “go on their permanent record”—a mythical file that impacts everything from college admissions to job searches. Today, College of Arts and Science researchers seek to discover if there’s a true kind of permanent record that resides in a person’s white blood cells.

Wikswo

John McLean, assistant professor of chemistry, and John Wikswo, Gordon A. Cain University Professor and director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Integrative Biosystems Research and Education, are researching the possibility that white blood cells retain chemical memories of drug and alcohol use. In other words, even if a person has not used cocaine in years, his body may still retain a record of it. Their research is based on the finding that each instance of drug use causes a reaction in the immune system. That reaction creates special bio-molecules that could serve as identifying markers for each exposure.

“In essence, we are hitting these cells with a hammer to hear how they ring and to determine if those that have been exposed to a drug ring differently,” Wikswo says.

The research could have several applications.

• Cancer patients may benefit from improved analysis of biopsy material that could help determine optimal chemotherapy regimes.
• More effective addiction treatment strategies could be developed on a case-by-case basis, thanks to precise details about an individual’s drug use and new information on the biological pathways that control addictive behavior.
• Better drug testing and detection.
• Development of sensors that identify biological warfare agents.

The Arts and Science pair is collaborating on this project with researchers from Cornell, Duke and the National Institute of Drug Abuse. They also have another key partner in the process—a robot scientist. This new class of instrument will run thousands of virtual experiments—and hundreds of actual ones—every day, without human interaction.

A $2.7 million Recovery Act grant from the National Institute of Drug Abuse and a $1.5 grant from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency fund the research.

Talisse

You’re wrong. You’re stupid. And your mother dresses you funny.

In his new book, Democracy and Moral Conflict, Robert Talisse, associate professor of philosophy and political science, argues that our nation’s current polarized state is actually a threat to democracy. The book examines the political debate in America today and the lack of civility that sides show to one another.

“If there’s a danger to democracy, it’s the attitude that there’s no reasonable opposition to the view that someone happens to favor,” Talisse says. “If that’s true, democracy has got much larger problems than having made the wrong decisions about wars and energy policy and all that.”

Hot topics such as abortion, gay marriage, gun control and health care reform elicit extreme opinions on either side. One trend that Talisse finds disturbing is the media’s increasingly partisan voice when discussing these issues.

On the conservative side of the spectrum, he cites slogans such as “fair and balanced” used by right-leaning media to describe its reporting—despite reporting that may not be either. On the liberal side, he mentions filmmaker Michael Moore and Moore’s penchant for inflammatory theories that skewer the right.

It’s not just the media. Increasingly, political debates don’t serve as an exchange of reasons and arguments, but as an opportunity for trading insults. Talisse says in his book that they are sophistical contests in which each participant tries to prove the most effective at making his opponent look silly.

That should be of deep concern to all, he says. “The philosophical point is worth punctuating from the very start: If we lose our capacity to argue with each other, especially across deep moral divisions, we will lose our democracy,” he says.

The issues that divide our country are complicated, without black and white definition. That’s one reason Talisse believes civil, spirited debate—even when voices are raised—is essential to our coming together.

“A civil argument is not always calm,” he says. “But when an argument is civil, it’s because it’s aimed at assessing and addressing reasons and arguments and evidence, rather than assassinating people’s characters or trying to shout them down or cast them as unintelligent or not properly rational.”

Joya Hampton, (pictured) a junior psychology major, focuses on course-related reading:

• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave by Frederick Douglass
• African American Family Life by Vonnie C. McLoyd (for Psychology 2100)
• Perception by Randolph Blake (for Psychology 214)
• Excerpts from The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros (for Spanish 243)

• The Associate by John Grisham
• The Shack by William P. Young

—Barbara R. Kaeser, administrative assistant, women’s and gender studies

• Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI
• The Thrill of the Chaste by Dawn Eden
• The Drudge Report, Post Politics and Vandyright.com
• The National Review
• The Wall Street Journal

—Frannie Boyle, junior, history and Earth and environmental science

• The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
• You Better Not Cry by Augusten Burroughs

—Clint Hendrix, senior lecturer, coordinator of Spanish 104

• What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell
• Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer

—Clay Skipper, sophomore, English

I’m pretty sure I had never uttered the word “Guantanamo” before the summer of 2004. I had never even seen A Few Good Men, the movie famously set on the U.S. Navy’s base there. Guantanamo Bay Naval Base first crossed my mind in early 2002, when the U.S. began transferring suspected al-Qaida and Taliban members captured in the war in Afghanistan to the prison located there. I saw photographs of shackled men in orange jumpsuits being corralled into a makeshift prison. News reports said human rights organizations were concerned about how these men were being treated and whether the U.S. was holding them illegally. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the men were responsible for September 11 and Guantanamo was the best place to hold and question them.

I didn’t give it much thought and wasn’t terribly concerned about these men. The country was at war, and capturing and holding prisoners of war has always been part of battle. And I happened to live in lower Manhattan, not far from the World Trade Center. September 11 had taken an emotional toll on me and my neighbors. To say the least, the well-being of men allegedly responsible for that tragedy was not front of mind.

Plus I was busy and not exactly a human rights lawyer. At that time—and for the last 15 years—I’ve been a corporate litigator in New York, defending payment card networks, investment advisors, private equity firms and other companies in large antitrust and securities lawsuits. I really enjoy what I do. I am lucky to have great clients. I get to work with smart people on complicated cases involving cutting-edge legal and economic issues. I love to read, write and speak in front of people, and one of my favorite challenges is to explain complicated issues in simple terms. In other words, I put the skills I developed as an English and history major in the College of Arts and Science to work every single day. The hours can be long and the work stressful, but I definitely found the right job for me.

I’ve also combined my paid legal work with pro bono service, which is hugely important to me. Since earning my law degree, I’ve never been without a pro bono case and have handled matters ranging from criminal appeals to First Amendment cases. I guess that is why, in July 2004, I got what I now refer to as the Guantanamo call. Life hasn’t been the same since.

On June 28, 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Rasul v. Bush, holding that men imprisoned at the U.S. Naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had a right under U.S. law to challenge their detention through a habeas corpus action in federal court. Habeas corpus—Latin for “you shall have the body”—is a legal tool dating back to at least the 12th century and enables a prisoner to petition for a writ commanding his jailer to deliver him to court and defend the legal and factual basis for his detention. If the jailer’s explanation is inadequate, the court must order the prisoner released. Habeas has always been part of U.S. law and is protected by the Constitution.

After the Rasul decision, my firm, along with many other large law firms in New York, D.C. and elsewhere, agreed to represent Guantanamo prisoners in their habeas challenges. The partner in charge of pro bono work at my firm called to ask if I would lend a hand. After some hesitation, I said yes. A few hours later, a file landed on my desk and I was anointed lead counsel to three French citizens who had been held in Guantanamo since early 2002.

All three are now home in France. I have since represented four more men—three Yemenis and one Libyan—with two cases still active today. After five and a half years, thousands of work hours, dozens of court filings, 15-plus visits to Guantanamo, a trip to Yemen, and upwards of 50 trips to D.C., I think “lending a hand” may have understated my assignment. But I don’t regret a minute of it. No other professional experience has been as challenging, and I’ve grown enormously as a person and lawyer because of it.

I’m often asked by friends and colleagues of all political stripes why I said yes when I got the Guantanamo call. Some assume that, as a confirmed Democrat, it must have been a shot at the Bush administration. But in all honesty, I wasn’t motivated by politics. In fact, I supported the decisions to enter both Afghanistan and Iraq. For me, it boiled down to first principles. In my view, this nation’s greatest gift to the world is its founding commitment to due process and the rule of law. Day to day, most of us take those principles for granted. We never doubt if we are arrested and put in prison, we can challenge that imprisonment before an impartial judge and jury. We will have our day in court.

But as I learned from studying the U.S. civil rights movement at Vanderbilt, due process, the rule of law and other constitutional principles are always at risk of erosion at the margin—when they are invoked by the poor, the disenfranchised or the despised. If those principles are compromised in the most controversial of cases, they are at risk of dilution for all of us.

For many reasons, the rule of law has been in serious jeopardy in Guantanamo. It’s now well known that not everyone detained at the base was a member of al-Qaida or the Taliban. The U.S. government has now admitted that errors were made, safeguards against mistaken detention were not implemented, and men who played no role in hostilities toward the U.S. ended up in Guantanamo. On the other hand, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others who have claimed credit for September 11 are also there. This is why we need a fair process—due process—to determine who has or has not been lawfully detained. This is when we most need lawyers—particularly at large, well-funded law firms—to step in to defend the rule of law in the most controversial of cases.

And this is why I said yes to Guantanamo.

From left, Brian, Arlene, Jonathan, Steven and Lisa Grushkin at Commencement 2009.

Last spring, when the youngest of Steven and Arlene Grushkin’s three children graduated from the College of Arts and Science, the final family trip to Vanderbilt University was bittersweet. There was the sweetness of accomplishment as Jonathan, BA’09, walked the stage like his brother Brian, BA’05, had done four years prior.

“But I remember Arlene being saddened, concerned that we wouldn’t be visiting there as often,” says Steven Grushkin, Arlene’s husband of 34 years.

It was truer than any could have imagined. Within a month of the ceremony, Arlene Grushkin was calling her children with the news that she had been diagnosed with cervical cancer. By mid-July, at age 59, she was gone.

Such was her love of the school, however—not to mention her passion for seeing children in general succeed—that the Grushkin family has continued to “paint the house” they helped build through financial contributions and scholarships. Arlene’s self-described second home will now offer the Arlene H. Grushkin Memorial–Gibor Foundation Scholarship in her honor.

“You can have a beautiful home, and when you move in, everything is fine,” says Steven, a partner at Wofsey, Rosen, Kweskin & Kuriansky, a Connecticut-based law firm. “But you don’t want it to deteriorate. You’ve got to nurture it and paint it, to keep it up so it doesn’t collapse. I believe it’s the same with a university like Vanderbilt. If you want it to continue to expand, to hold its reputation, you’ve got to work at it even after you graduate.”

Passion for Learning

It was an easy sell, then, for the Grushkin children to be on board with a gift in their mother’s honor—even for Lisa, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001.

“My mom really took pride when we did well in school,” says Lisa Grushkin. “But she loved Vanderbilt, everything from the campus to the social aspects of it. She and my dad made a lot of friends there, and she’d talk about Vanderbilt all the time. It seemed like a great idea to me.”

The Grushkins’ involvement has gone beyond that of many. The couple served six years on the Parents Leadership Committee and another five on the Parents and Family Association Advisory Board. While their sons were still at the College of Arts and Science, a Grushkin-Smith-Gibor Foundation Scholarship for $100,000 was established. An additional scholarship was in the works when Arlene unexpectedly passed away; the decision was easily made for it to bear her name. Her children say Arlene was the kind of mother who would read current events magazines, keep up with the latest sports scores, and listen to contemporary music to connect with them in many different ways beyond normal conversations. She strived to remain involved in her children’s lives through various means, they say, and the scholarship will continue her legacy of involvement for another deserving young adult.

Back at home in New Canaan, Conn., Arlene was an active volunteer in various programs with schoolchildren, including a reading program in the nearby town where she grew up. Reading and learning were her passions, the family members say, in addition to treating all people equally without regard to position or status.

Making It Worthwhile

That’s yet another reason Arlene’s family members believe she would have been excited about the new scholarship. Because of the university’s recent move to replace all need-based undergraduate student loans with scholarships and grant assistance through the expanded financial aid program, the Grushkins can help students and the school as a whole in that area.

Mihir Gandhi, a first-year economics student from New Jersey, is a recipient of the established Grushkin-Smith-Gibor scholarship. “It would probably not be possible for me to attend Vanderbilt without the generosity of such donors,” he says. “A grant like this makes you feel like you have an obligation to do well. I’ve made the dean’s list and am trying to work hard, to make this money I’ve been given worthwhile.”

In the meantime, the Grushkin children have been making their own degrees worthwhile by all working in financial services. Brian lives in Charlotte, N.C., and Jonathan and Lisa in New York. Both brothers graduated from the College of Arts and Science with degrees in economics. Lisa’s degree was in communications; she now works for an investment bank.

Though Arlene was tremendously pleased by her gifted children, Steven says, the reserved mother was not one to boast of them to other parents.

“The children meant everything to her,” Steven says. “But when people asked her about them, she would just say, ‘Everything is fine; they’re doing great.’ We knew that we were so lucky, but she never wanted to come across as comparing our children to others. She didn’t want a ‘my-child-is-better-than-your-child’ type of thing. She respected people, and they admired her.”

Good Soil

Brian Grushkin believes that his mother would have been absolutely thrilled to be able to help someone else’s child go to the College of Arts and Science, “especially someone deserving,” he says. “She loved Vanderbilt, and she knew we did, too. She knew that, without Vanderbilt, we wouldn’t have gotten where we are today. So this is a chance to kind of give back.”

Likewise, younger brother Jonathan, who has been greatly touched by an outpouring of cards, sympathy and support from the school even though he’s no longer there, sees the investment as planting in good soil.

“When there’s an opportunity to give back, you want to give to something that you’re going to get a good return on,” he says. “Not for our sake, but for someone else’s. And with Vanderbilt, the money we’re putting into this scholarship, we know it will be put to good use. After Brian and I had such a good experience there, what better way to give back than to help ensure someone else could do the same?”

As 2009 drew to a close, the Grushkin family put extra effort into being together. It was a time of endings, but also one of beginning a new family dynamic. Steven has taken over the phone check-ins with the children, for example, and has been trying his hand at cooking more.

As with any family loss, the meanings of home are being redefined. But at the Grushkins’ home away from home in Nashville, the other house still stands—and it’s ready to receive that next coat of paint.

They checked his transcripts and the registrar’s records to make sure he had completed all the requirements, and in late 2009, Dr. Ullin W. Leavell received his College of Arts and Science diploma from Dean Carolyn Dever—66 years after leaving Vanderbilt during World War II. Leavell, BA’43, entered medical school a year early to help with the war effort. The 86-year-old says it always bothered him that his Arts and Science diploma wasn’t hanging on the wall with his other degrees. In the years since he left Vanderbilt, the physician marked a successful career as a dermatologist and taught at the University of Kentucky.

Helping students where they live. That’s the goal of the College of Arts and Science’s Pre-major Academic Advising Resource Center (CASPAR). The innovative advising program has set up shop in room 225 of The Commons Center, heart of the university’s first-year living and learning center. That makes it easy for first-year students and those who have not yet selected a major to meet with academic (and overall college life) advisers.

Click wherever you see a to find out more about this photo!

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CASPAR Director Patricia Armstrong oversees a staff of six recent or soon-to-be Ph.D.s who work closely with undergraduates to help them thrive at Vanderbilt. A specialist in 17th-century French literature, she took on her CASPAR role in addition to serving as senior lecturer in the Department of French and Italian. Armstrong says one of the joys of her CASPAR work is advising students as they take on intellectual challenges at Vanderbilt.

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In the past, pre-major advising was assigned to faculty members located in separate academic offices all over campus. The CASPAR program was launched in fall 2009 to help students interact with their advisers more organically and to provide a uniform advising experience for new students.

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One of the advantages to offices in The Commons is that students feel free to stop by and talk with their advisers both formally and informally. Doctoral student and adviser Laura Taylor (left) and Josh Epstein, MA’04, PhD’08, (right) chat with student Eric Fram.

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Andrea Hearn, PhD’05, has been a pre-major adviser since 2007. She’s also a senior lecturer in the English department and was honored with the college’s Harriet S. Gilliam Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Lecturer or Senior Lecturer in 2009.

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First-year student Stephen Siao talks to his adviser, Charles Bowie, MTS’00, MA’06, PhD’08. Advisers are available to help students select classes and develop course schedules, but also help with the transition from high school to a major research university.

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Student Michael McGee is one of many who pass by on the way to other activities in The Commons Center. The CASPAR offices are open during the day when students gather to eat, pick up an espresso, work out, hang out, study or play. The center also has evening office hours by appointment.

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CASPAR advisers also help students understand AXLE requirements, the core curriculum that College of Arts and Science students must fulfill. Student Malika Watson credits her CASPAR adviser, Scott Zeman, PhD’09, for helping her select courses and navigate AXLE.

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Located on the second floor of The Commons Center, CASPAR offices are between The Commons’ post office and conference room 205, next to the building’s workout facilities. Meeting in the conference room are first-year student Trevor Anderson (pictured) and just out of view, advisers Christine Valiquette, MA’04, PhD’08, and Scott Zeman.

The campus welcomes notable speakers each spring, but none generated more excitement than President John F. Kennedy did on May 18, 1963. Dudley Field was packed as the president commemorated the university’s 90th anniversary. College of Arts and Science seniors Linda Armstrong (now Causey), BA’63, and Thomas Abernathy, BA’63, JD’67, represented the student body on the platform during the ceremonies and spoke with JFK.

The president later autographed a copy of his remarks as printed in the Vanderbilt Gazette and thanked Chancellor Heard by telegram for the welcome he had received.

The joy of the successful celebration was made poignant when Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas just six months later.

(1) John F. Kennedy reading the event’s official program;

(2) The Vanderbilt Hustler, Vol. 74, No. 23;

(3) Invitation sent to guests;

(4) Kennedy with students Armstrong and Abernathy;

(5) The Vanderbilt Hustler, Vol. 74, No. 29;

(6) JFK autographed copy of The Vanderbilt Gazette, May 22, 1963;

(7) Vanderbilt Alumnus, Vol. 48, No. 6;

(8) Telegram from JFK to Chancellor Heard;

(9) Vanderbilt band on Dudley Field;

(10) The Vanderbilt Hustler, Vol. 74, No. 30;

(11) Event parking pass

All images and historic items are reproduced courtesy ofVanderbilt University Special Collections and Archives.

Katherine Carroll in Iraq as a civilian member of the military’s Human Terrain System team.

Katherine Carroll’s year in Iraq is bookended by distinctly different memories. In the first, she had been in Iraq for just weeks when an Apache helicopter killed two insurgents planting explosive devices (IEDs) outside the walls of the U.S. military base where she was quartered.

“The IED blew up and their van blew up too. It was just guns and missiles and explosives going off everywhere,” Carroll recalls. “I was standing in my Eileen West nightgown in a cement bunker, crying.”

The other event happened near the end of her year. Carroll was in the community of Abu Ghraib, attending a meeting with several sheiks. A suicide bomber dropped by but was too nervous to detonate. Instead he went to a nearby market and killed around a dozen people. After the explosion, Iraqi soldiers began shooting. The American soldiers were new to Iraq and jittery, too. “We didn’t yet know the full story, but we knew there was a big explosion and gunfire all around us, and my interpreter and I were sitting in the Stryker [armored vehicle] gossiping and talking about what we were going to have for dinner,” says the assistant professor of political science. “It’s amazing what you can get used to.”

Carroll with Iraqi children.

To say that a year deployed in Bagdad as part of the Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS) team was life-changing is selling it short. Not only did Carroll learn to confront fears head-on, she also began to understand the U.S. military, a topic she hopes to continue to study. While she has spent much of her career studying Middle East politics, the military was a foreign concept. That is, until a recruiter knocked on her Vanderbilt office door in June 2007 looking for professors to embed with a unit.

The program’s goal is to help the military understand the social and cultural environment of the community in which they work. Participants had to have the credentials—a doctorate in anthropology or related field—and the physical abilities, such as carrying 50 pounds of gear and enduring long work hours on very little sleep.

Carroll was intrigued, but at the time the surge had just begun and both Iraqis and the military had endured months of heavy casualties. By July, though, Iraq began to stabilize. “It wasn’t clear whether this was a real decline or just a blip,” Carroll says. “I wasn’t in a position to make a decision, but it stuck in my head that I wanted to do this. There was nothing standing in my way except being afraid.”

In her work as a social scientist, Carroll met with sheiks to learn about the political and cultural environment.

After several months of watching the attack figures decline, she felt Iraq had become safe enough, and by January 2008, she was training in Fort Leavenworth, Kan. There, with military reservists and other social scientists and researchers, she learned how to conduct social science in a war zone.

Carroll eventually separated from that team and deployed to Baghdad where she investigated various elements of Iraqi culture, society and politics at the direction of the brigade commander. “My typical day was to go outside the wire (the military base) to someone’s home and meet with political actors or leaders. Or I’d go to the Rasheed Hotel on the edge of the Green Zone and talk to Iraqis about who was who in their neighborhood, what they needed or how they viewed the political environment,” the social scientist says. “I spent a lot of time talking to sheiks and figuring out who did what and who was influential in what area, so that the soldiers would know who to work with to solve problems of security, service provision and reconciliation. Then I’d write and work on briefings until 11 or 12 at night.”

Carroll found the Iraqis understandably suspicious, but she eventually won them over, always offering a business card and sending them drafts of reports for input. After she returned to Vanderbilt, she stayed in touch by phone and email with many of the Iraqis she had met, updating them on what was occurring in her classes. “Maybe some of them initially thought I was in the CIA, I don’t know, but they came around to the view that I was who I said I was—an embedded professor—and that I really was there to help Americans understand them better as people,” she notes. “Then they’d say, ‘What a great idea.’”

Still it was a dangerous situation. Three HTS professors have been killed—two in Afghanistan, one in Iraq. Nicole Suveges, the social scientist killed in Iraq, trained at Fort Leavenworth with Carroll, and the two had become instant friends. “We were two peas in the pod. Same age, same interests. We talked on the phone every day,” Carroll says. Suveges had just been in Sadr City a month when a bomb exploded in the room where she was attending a meeting, killing 12.

The professor with her interpreter, Maha El Sadder, at a political rally.

“I fell apart,” Carroll says. “It was hard to stay after that.

My mother, who had been very nervous about the whole thing, pointed out, ‘If you leave now, the whole experience will be about Nicole dying. You will have lost your whole investment.

If you stay, it could be about something else.’”

She stayed, comforted by soldiers who knew what it was like to lose a friend instantly. “They were so supportive of me in this perfect, quiet, gentle way when Nicole died. That was a moment when I felt the military would accept me,” Carroll says.

Now she returns the favor, hoping that the Humanities 161 course opened the eyes of students. “I’m trying to help students understand how the military learns and operates so they can be more informed as citizens, patriots and/or critics,” she says. “That’s to get them more intellectually engaged with a major U.S. institution, but it’s also to say, ‘You need to learn about other cultures, too.’”

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.

No one person knows everything…not even the head of a college. That’s why Dean Carolyn Dever turns to the College of Arts and Science’s Board of Visitors for insight, expertise and wisdom.

Some two dozen graduates of the college, from venture capitalists to med school students, sit on the board as advisers to the dean and the school. Dever looks to the alumni for their unique skills and knowledge, their strategic planning assistance and input, and especially their unbiased outside perspective.

“My goal is to benefit from their experience as successful individuals and as people invested in the College of Arts and Science,” Dever says. “Bringing those minds and their experiences together provides Arts and Science with an amazing resource. I see them as partners in helping the College of Arts and Science grow and thrive.”

Open-minded and Open to Change

Advisory board members appreciate the opportunity. Board of Visitors Chair Paul Jacobson, BA’76, likes the changes he sees in the college. “When the administration began reaching out for new ideas, the university really began to change for the good,” he says. “They are open-minded, open to change, and I think that’s what makes Vanderbilt a national leader.”

Serving on the board also allows its 26 members to observe how the school has changed since they graduated. “Vanderbilt still has all the charm that it had when I was a student, but it’s so much more now,” says board member Brian Grove, BA’82, MBA’83. “Not just in academics, but in the character and diversity of the student body and the rich campus life. It’s more of a world-class university now.”

Lillian “Tooty” Robertson Bradford, BA’63, sees the changes in the school and relishes being part of what she sees as a dynamic institution. “The campus is such an exciting place with so much energy,” she says. “As members of the Board of Visitors, we’re engaged and informed. It allows us to spread the word about what’s happening at the college and the university.”

Mary Beth White Kirsch, BA’84, has served on the board since it was established. “At my first board meeting, I was impressed at the degree to which Vanderbilt has strategically moved toward being a national university and not just a regional one,” she says. “Having lived in Boston more than 20 years, I’m familiar with the schools in that area and the change in demographics that has forced our students to look outside the Northeast to new target schools. And Vanderbilt is among the top of those new schools.”

From Different Perspectives

With graduation dates that range from 1951 to 2009, board members represent a wide range of perspectives.

Board member Klint Peebles, BA’09, is now a student at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. “As a recent grad, I am vividly aware of what could be done differently and how the mission of the college could be more fully integrated into students’ lives,” Peebles says. He believes the college benefits students not only intellectually but also in building communication skills and cultural competency.

For Grove, who manages investments for a private partnership in Houston, his advisory role strengthens his attachment to the university. “It brings me closer to Vanderbilt,” he says. “It gives me a way to give back.”

New York-based Jacobson is especially energized by the expanded financial aid initiative, which eliminates need-based loans for undergraduates. “Vanderbilt is a lot more diverse now,” he says. “It’s very important to reach out. If you give kids a chance, you’ll be amazed at what they can do.”

From left: Mary Beth Kirsch, Klint Peebles, Brian Grove, Tooty Bradford, Paul Jacobson

Taking a Liberal Arts Education to Heart

Board members come to campus once a year for a formal meeting. The fall 2009 meeting included Dever’s State of the College address, a report on endowment performance, and a discussion of the role of a liberal arts education during times of economic turmoil. That discussion had special significance for the board—as liberal arts graduates, they see the character and breadth of a liberal arts education as something vitally important.

After earning bachelor’s degrees in English and economics, Jacobson went on to be a successful CEO and now leads a green biotech company. He remembers learning how to think at Vanderbilt. “A liberal arts education trains your mind,” he says. “You learn to think, learn to write. You don’t just learn how to do one thing. What you learn is applicable wherever your career takes you.”

Peebles recalls how his coursework as a neuroscience major prompted him to examine his core beliefs. “I learned more about who I am as a person,” he says. “The college allowed me to reach outside of my comfort zone and take advantage of experiences I never thought possible.” That included, he says, joining a prestigious research lab and participating in social justice activism.

Bradford relates a similar epiphany. She remembers that as a female student in the early ’60s, excelling in economics and business courses proved to her that she could be successful. “I learned that I could make my way in a larger community,” the Nashville resident recalls. “I found that I measured up—it was such a positive experience.”

Grove says the takeaway from his undergraduate studies is that resilience pays off. “I learned that if it doesn’t work the first time, stay in the game,” he says. “I also had a professor that taught me that there’s always more than one way to skin a cat.”

Quality Kept

Those lessons and the ones the alumni have learned since leaving the College of Arts and Science make them valuable as advisers to the college and its dean as the institution advances. Still, there are some things that board members would not want to see change.

“Vanderbilt was really important to me as a young adult,” Kirsch says. “There are values at Vanderbilt that make it unique. It’s exciting to see the college making significant changes, while at the same time maintaining those values.

“Vanderbilt has very high academic standards but there is also a quality of life at the university that allows young people to grow in a balanced way.”

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.”

Dan Cornfield, professor of sociology and political science, was awarded the 2010 Susan C. Eaton Scholar-Practitioner Grant by the Labor and Employment Relations Association for his book project on Nashville music careers supported by Vanderbilt’s Curb Center.

Professor of Psychology Steven Hollon received the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Clinical Psychology from the Society of Clinical Psychology (APA Division 12) in recognition for his body of work on cognitive therapy for depression.

Sarah Igo, associate professor of history and political science, has been awarded a Teagle Foundation Grant of $392,000 to co-direct a three-year project, the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education.

Li

Tong Li, professor of economics and chair of the department, has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to support his work on analyzing auction data, studying bidders’ strategic behavior, and addressing policy-related questions using game-theoretic models and state-of-art econometric methods.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry John McLean has been awarded a $2.7 million Grand Opportunity grant from the National Institutes of Health as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Olatunji

Bunmi Olatunji, assistant professor of psychology, won the David Shakow Early Career Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Clinical Psychology from the clinical psychology division of the American Psychological Association. Olatunji was also awarded the President’s New Researcher Award from the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies.

Sokrates Pantelides, William A. and Nancy F. McMinn Professor of Physics, received a $1,556,399 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Grant Opportunity for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) program. Additionally, he and Kálmán Varga, assistant professor of physics, are co-primary investigators on a new grant from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

Daniel Usner, Jr., Holland M. McTyeire Professor of History, has been elected president of the American Society for Ethnohistory for 2010-11.

The College of Arts and Science honored several faculty with 2009 teaching awards. Associate Professor of French Virginia Scott received the Jeffrey Nordhaus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the Humanities; Professor of Chemistry Sandra Rosenthal received the Jeffrey Nordhaus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the Natural Sciences; and Assistant Professor of Psychology Adriane Seiffert received the Jeffrey Nordhaus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the Social Sciences. The Harriet S. Gilliam Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Lecturer or Senior Lecturer was awarded to Andrea Hearn, lecturer in the Department of English. Associate Professor of Communication Studies Bonnie Dow was honored with the Ernest A. Jones Faculty Advisor Award, and the Alumni Outstanding Freshman Advisor Award was presented to Daniel Solomon, senior lecturer of classical studies.

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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.”