A competitive spirit burns in every Vanderbilt student. They wouldn’t be on campus without that drive to succeed at the highest levels of academia. But some students take that spirit even further. They have, in essence, two full-time jobs—student and athlete.

Vanderbilt consistently ranks first in athlete graduation rates in the Southeastern Conference, boasting a 94 percent success rate during the past six years. Last year 112 Commodore student athletes made the dean’s list.

The six you’ll meet here are as different as can be: a towering linebacker and a reed-thin soccer player, a Nashville native and a tennis player from Eastern Europe, a bowler and a batter.

They all cite one trait as key to their success in both academics and sports at Vanderbilt: time management. As first-year students they learned the fine art of scheduling. They study while their peers are at parties. They practice while others are asleep. They snatch 30 minutes here and an hour there to fulfill their obligations to their professors, their coaches and their teammates.

It’s not the average college life—but there are no average student athletes here.

In Tune with Life

Star outfielder by day, tuba-playing musician by night—that’s the life of Alex Hilliard, the first student in the history of the Blair School of Music who is also a varsity athlete. It’s an arrangement that works because of the cooperation of both
Blair and the baseball program, and because of Alex’s dedication to both.

“To succeed in both baseball and music, you have to create a fire within yourself because the coaches and professors won’t do it for you,” Hilliard says. “For me to be a better musician, I have to spend hours in the practice rooms. To be a better baseball player, I have to be willing to be in the batting cages at 6 in the morning.”

The cooperative arrangement between Blair and the baseball program was reached when Vanderbilt was recruiting Hilliard. In fact, the deal was struck while Hilliard was still in high school and has held firm since, earning him SEC academic honors.

“I don’t think there’s another music school that would’ve worked with me on this kind of arrangement, or another baseball team,” Hilliard says. “The coaches definitely understand the academic side of Vanderbilt.”

If early mornings are for batting practice, late nights are for music. Every student at Blair is required to spend many hours outside the classroom rehearsing and learning new pieces.

“They don’t allow you to perform music at a mediocre level,” says Hilliard, who also plays piano, trombone, clarinet, saxophone and string bass. “If I’m unprepared, I don’t play—that’s true in music and in baseball.”

Pro scouts have already shown an interest in Hilliard, and a career in the major leagues would be a dream come true.

As for music, there’s plenty of time.

“You can only be an athlete for so long, but you can play music forever.”

Just Call Her National Champ

When your parents own the only bowling center in town, it’s natural that you take up the sport at an early age. Josie Earnest threw her first bowling ball at age 3 and became serious about the sport when she was 12 after placing fourth in a tournament full of much older bowlers. A few years later, in 2007, Josie found herself on Vanderbilt’s NCAA championship women’s bowling team—quite an accomplishment for a sport that has only been at the university a few years.

“It was pretty surreal at first,” says Earnest, who was named MVP of the NCAA National Tournament. “I got to throw the last shot. It really didn’t hit me until we went to the White House with all the other national championship teams.”

If there’s one thing Earnest wants everyone to know about competitive bowlers, it’s that they are true athletes.

“A lot of people think bowlers are overweight and drink and smoke,” she says, “but that’s people who bowl once a year. We work out. We lift weights and do cardio exercises. You have to be in shape.”

Earnest’s experience in bowling for the U.S. national junior team has given her a taste of international travel and influenced her choice of a major in international leadership. She’s bowled in El Salvador and the Dominican Republic.

“I’ve traveled to some neat places and seen a lot of different things,” she says. “Meeting people from different cultures is interesting and drew me to this major.”

Earnest was named to the SEC Honor Roll during her first two years at Vanderbilt. She admits that being an athlete at Vander-bilt means missing out on some of the activities other students enjoy.

“There’s not a lot of life outside school and bowling,” she says. “But those are the choices you make when you decide to be an athlete. You know going in that you’re going to be dedicated to your sport and dedicated to your academics.”

Necessary Roughness

John Stokes really likes to hit people, and as a linebacker in the SEC, he gets that opportunity most Saturdays in the fall. He also has been conditionally accepted to Vanderbilt School of Medicine. The doctor-to-be fully understands the disconnect between his current passion and future profession.

“The cool thing about football is that it’s a legal, fair, relatively safe way to channel aggression—that feeling that I just want to hit another guy really hard,” Stokes says. “But there’s also this sense in me of compassion. I care about people and how they feel. I want to help them.”

Excelling in the very highest ranks of academia and athletics seems to come easily to John, who was named to the SEC Honor Roll his freshman and sophomore years. He also has made time for service trips to Belize and several U.S. cities.

He likes the structure of a full schedule and keeping busy. “Some people are blessed with more intellectual ability and more athletic ability than others, but you have to be disciplined to do well at both. You have to plan ahead and allot the time you need to get your assignments done.”

Stokes had the opportunity to play at larger schools where winning seasons are a matter of course. He chose Vanderbilt because Coach Bobby Johnson convinced him that times were changing for the Commodore program.

“I wasn’t going to commit to a school that puts on a token show on Saturdays,” Stokes says. “I really had to believe in my heart that Vanderbilt was going to be competitive. Winning the bowl game last year was a huge step in that direction.”

Unfortunately for Stokes, a shoulder injury meant he couldn’t fully enjoy the Music City Bowl victory.

“Football is painful,” he says. “I was in the training room earlier getting an injured ankle worked on. I looked at the guy next to me, and he had a broken foot. Sometimes I think we’re absolutely crazy to play this game … but we do it because we love it.”

Make Every Second Count

According to Molly Kinsella, the best way to achieve big goals is to take small steps. For this future pharmacist, the
formula works for soccer and for academics.

“You have to set attainable goals,” Kinsella says. “It’s not, ‘We have to make it to the SEC tournament, and I have to get an A in this class,’ but ‘We have to beat South Caro-lina, and I have to do this paper.’”

Evidently her strategy is working. In her sophomore year she was named first-team All SEC and was on the SEC Academic Honor Roll. She is proud of both accomplishments, but says that making the All SEC team is particularly gratifying.

“I know that school is supposed to come first, but right now soccer is fun. I have lots of school ahead of me, but only a couple of years of soccer,” she says.

At the beginning of each semester, Kinsella must discuss her schedule with her professors—and let them know that she’ll be absent at certain times because of soccer.

“You cross your fingers to see how they’re going to react,” she says. “Some teachers think it’s really cool that you’re an athlete, and some have no sympathy whatsoever.”

Like all Vanderbilt student athletes, Kinsella cites effective time management as the key to getting everything on her full schedule accomplished.

“You learn freshman year after staying up too late that the two-hour nap you took in the afternoon probably wasn’t the best idea. Now, even if I only have a 30-minute break, I use my time productively.”

A Winner in Any Language

For most people, just sitting through an engineering class would be hard enough. Now imagine you’re taking the class in a foreign land from a professor speaking a foreign tongue. That’s a daily experience for Alex Zotov.

“The first two years at Vanderbilt were really hard academically,” he says. “It takes me a lot longer to do my homework because sometimes I have to translate words and terms I don’t know. I thought I knew a lot of English—but now I realize that I really don’t.”

Fortunately for Zotov, his racquet does the talking when he’s on the tennis court. He and his doubles partner, Adam Baker, are nationally ranked, and he has already competed in the Davis Cup. He attributes his academic and athletic success to a strong work ethic.

“Sometimes you’re tired and don’t want to do the things you know you have to do,” says Zotov. “But you have to push through, and if you plan ahead and manage your schedule, you might even have time to hang out with your friends.” Last spring his hard work earned him a place on the SEC Academic Honor Roll.

Coming to Nashville was a little easier for Zotov because he had built-in friends—his teammates. “I had 10 people here who helped me adjust,” he says. “The people here are also very kind and know how to make you feel better about yourself. In Eastern Europe people can be harsh.”

Like all international students, Zotov misses his family. His doubles partner, Adam, always invites him to his Nashville home for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

“I only get to go home once a year for about three weeks,” he says. “My parents haven’t been able to come here yet, but I think they’ll be here for my graduation.”

No Dumb Jock Stereotypes Allowed

If there’s one thing Jessica Mooney can’t stand, it’s the stereotype that athletes at Vanderbilt aren’t as intelligent as their non-sporting classmates.

“We all worked hard to get into this school,” Mooney says. “We don’t get any special privileges because we’re student athletes. Our classes aren’t any easier, and nothing is handed to us.”

Mooney’s feisty attitude serves her well on the basketball court.

“You just can’t be intimidated,” she says when asked about playing against much larger women. “You have to have confidence in yourself. Besides, I’ve always played against guys, and most girls don’t compare to their size and strength.”

Mooney comes by her talent naturally: She is a cousin of Vanderbilt basketball great Charles Davis Jr., BS’82, who played for the Washington Bullets, Milwaukee Bucks, San Antonio Spurs and Chicago Bulls.

The growing popularity of women’s collegiate basketball means playing in front of some rowdy fans—most notably the Cameron Crazies at Duke—who serenaded former player Caroline Williams with “Sweet Caroline” every time she touched the ball.

“You can’t let that stuff bother you. You can’t focus on what they’re saying,” says Mooney, who in her first year at Vanderbilt was the only freshman to play in all 34 games and helped her team win the SEC championship that year.

Unlike other sports with shorter schedules, the basketball season spans fall and spring semesters. The addition of summer school means Mooney and her teammates are on campus year-round.

“Sometimes I do feel like we never get a break,” she says, “especially when we see the football team lounging around in the spring.”

As a senior, Mooney tries to help her younger teammates adjust to the rigors of being a Vanderbilt student athlete.

“Time management is the key,” she says. “Once they figure that out, they’ll be great.”

Fortunately for the rest of us, the alumni you’ll meet here aren’t wringing their hands waiting for somebody else to take action—they’ve made sustainability the focus of their life’s work.

At some point, each had an unexpected epiphany—one at a lecture, another during a conversation, one while looking for new product markets, another while teaching young children, and one upon realizing the chronic unnecessary waste of resources inside the university. They found the courage to shift from being advocates of environmental causes to being activists—from a stance of participation to one of leadership.

People across the globe feel a visceral connection to their land. It anchors families, unites communities, and lends flavor and character to an area. Tennessee has some of the most magnificent natural and historic landscapes in the country, says Jeanie Clinton Nelson—and they are worth every effort to preserve them.

In 1999, Nelson and then-Nashville Mayor (now Governor) Phil Bredesen co-founded The Land Trust for Tennessee. Nelson had spent years involved in what she calls the “dirty side of the environmental movement,” volunteer lobbying for legislation that would force companies to clean up spoiled areas, campaigning to fix environmental problems, and feeling as though she were constantly in pitched battle with both industries and environmentalists. During the Clinton–Gore administration, she served as general counsel for the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C. By the late ’90s she’d returned home to Nashville, bone-weary and ready to tackle the lovelier and permanent side of conservation.

One day Bredesen pulled her aside for a chat. He and Nelson had worked earlier to set aside tracts that could be banked as parks for the next 100 years, leading to the development of Shelby Bottoms and Beaman Parks in Davidson County. When his term as mayor ended, he said, he wanted to start a statewide land trust for Tennessee.

“But you know,” he mused to Nelson, “if you’ll do it with me, we could just go ahead and do it now.”

Ten years later The Land Trust for Tennessee has helped conserve more than 42,500 acres across the state—some of it for parks, but much of it to protect privately held acreage for perpetuity.

Landowners donate their development rights in order to keep their property unblemished. Descendents can sell the property or give it away, but it will always have restrictions that prevent it from being sold for, say, a strip mall or parking lot.

The Land Trust has preserved tracts as small as a half-acre near Vanderbilt, up to a 4,500-acre park in Shelby County. It has protected 14,000 breathtaking acres to safeguard parts of the South Cumberland Plateau, including 3,000 acres that connect the 10,000-acre main campus of Sewanee: The University of the South to an 8,000-acre state forest. Those new 3,000 acres will be used as an outdoor learning laboratory.

“Buffering our streams with protected lands is the best way to keep our water pure,” Nelson says. “Saving our forests is one of the best ways to protect against atmospheric and climate-change issues. Our forests allow birds and our souls to keep singing. Plus, they give us areas to hunt and fish and they keep tourists coming. So all of this is good for our economy, too.”

Private conservation easements form a symbiosis with public lands. While park systems must deal constantly with visitors, pollution, litter and upkeep, private lands can serve as a protective shield to preserve the beauty of the surrounding area for people visiting the park, for property owners near the park, and for wildlife that traverses both boundaries. The Land Trust also has protected prime agricultural soils so that working family farms can remain intact for future generations.

Find out more about The Land Trust for Tennessee »

Imagine this: Thousands of fans attend a Vanderbilt football game. The lights come up, the vendors sell their wares, Vanderbilt wins, the fans go home happy—and the game has left no (as in zero) carbon footprint.

“We can do this,” says Brandon Daniell, a co-founder of the sustainability strategy and marketing firm Abeo Partners LLC. “If Vanderbilt were to take the lead in offsetting carbon footprints, the amount of PR they’d get would be phenomenal. They’d start a movement. Every college football game in America could have a positive environmental impact. Rock concerts are now going sustainable. Vanderbilt football could, too.”

Although 94 percent of Americans intend to promote environmental causes, says Daniell, only 11 percent actually take any steps to do so. The goal of Abeo Partners, which includes co-founders Steve Cook, Bob Isherwood and David Cross, is to close the “environmental action gap” by helping institutions and businesses incorporate sustainability and health-and-wellness practices into the workplace. In other words, Abeo initiates organizational changes from within by mentoring employees who want to set up a platform of action—whether it’s establishing an internal recycling program, hosting a community clean-up day, or installing water conservation systems.

For Daniell, the ride into environmentalism began in the lands Down Under. After Vanderbilt and then culinary school in France, he moved to New Zealand for eight and a half years where he started that country’s first organic coffee company. Organic foods were taking off in the United States and Europe, but there was a big “white space” in the markets of Australia and New Zealand. Simply being organic wasn’t enough to attract customers; what appealed to shoppers, he realized, was the idea of fair trade. Fair-trade products offer a fair price, a better work environment, and a good return on investment for the grower. Consumers liked the idea of enabling farmers around the world to make a good living on their own terms.

From this idea grew the marketing strategy firm Lighthouse Ventures, which sells the Scarborough Fair brand of coffee, tea and chocolate. That brand is now sold in five countries and is the largest fair-trade organic food brand in the Southern Hemisphere.

Last year Daniell moved back to Nashville and branched out to cast an even wider environmental net with Abeo Partners. In April 2008, Abeo invited two Vanderbilt undergraduate marketing classes to come up with ideas that promote sustainability in the business world. The company pronounced the students’ video presentations as brilliant. Said one of the judges, “The students succeeded in making sustainability irresistible.”

Abeo is taking the best presentations to Australia, where students at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology will build on those ideas.

Today the world. Tomorrow Vanderbilt football.

Find out more about Lighthouse Ventures and Scarborough Fair Foods »

Keith Bergman’s conversion happened because of a spur-of-the-moment decision made while his daughter was on a college tour of Vanderbilt. It was a Monday afternoon in March 2006, and Bergman heard on the radio that former Vice President Al Gore, ’73, would be speaking about global warming at Middle Tennessee State University later that day. He made a quick, executive family decision—over the strenuous objections of his daughters—that they would drive to Murfreesboro to hear the lecture. Gore spoke for a mesmerizing 90 minutes, without notes or slides, and the entire Bergman family became believers.

“It was what I’ve come to call ‘Al Gore, Unplugged,’” says Bergman, who is the town manager of Littleton, Mass. “It changed my life. It opened up to me this whole issue of climate change and global warming. At the time, I was town manager of Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod. When I got back to the Cape, a group of us started the Cape Cod Renewable Fuels Partnership. Our purpose was to look at alternative fuels and to make a community-wide effort to be more conscious of our carbon footprint.”

A short time later Gore founded The Climate Project, a Nashville-based nonprofit organization focused on a grassroots approach to solving the climate crisis. Gore also embarked on his Inconvenient Truth tour, with a book and film about climate change, and he put out a call for an army of volunteers to help spread the message.

Out of thousands of early applicants, Bergman was among the first 50 trainees chosen to deliver the Inconvenient Truth story to the public. He has mentored and helped train 200 additional volunteers since then.

“When I introduce the Inconvenient Truth slide show to an audience, I tell them that when I attended Vanderbilt University 30 years ago, I studied political science, not climate science. But the global climate crisis is as much a political issue as a scientific one,” he says.

Bergman admits that he is a latecomer to the issue of global warming—not some aging tree-hugger who suddenly decided to step up his game. “I tell people,” he confesses, “that I’m having my ‘midlife climate crisis.’”

As a public servant he has come to realize that climate issues play a major role in many of the challenges all communities face: pollution, growth, and the cost of energy. In Massachusetts his audiences tend to be receptive to the ideas he presents, and often use his discussions as jumping-off points for finding solutions to reduce their negative environmental impact. Despite tough economic times, his constituents continue to value public funding for environmental conservation, for preserving parks and open spaces.

The United States is now on an untenable path that threatens the future of human civilization, Bergman insists. Interestingly, he puts his faith in capitalists and entrepreneurs to come up with business models that will force legislators to put the right public policies in place. That, Bergman says, is the ultimate goal of The Climate Project.

Find out more about The Climate Project »

Jennifer Casale had always been a proponent of good environmental practices, but she never truly appreciated the earth’s delicate balance until she lived in the desert. After earning a Vanderbilt degree in English, Casale worked in the music industry for a few years before pursuing a graduate degree in creative writing at the University of Arizona in Tucson. There she took a part-time job teaching elementary students about recycling and water conservation. These young children understood the challenge.

“Water is becoming a critical issue,” Casale says. “The environment is so extreme that people who live in the desert are forced to be more aware of how to interact with it and how to survive there.”

Soon Casale was informally consulting about ways to be more environmentally conscientious and advising people on where to get organic and planet-friendly products. Although she could find these products, she had to drive all over town to get what she needed. She decided to open a one-stop shopping place for an array of “green” products—an old-fashioned general store for a new generation. She considered Nashville ripe for such a venture, so she returned to her college town and opened The Green Wagon on Murphy Road, only a few miles from Vanderbilt.

The problem with most “natural” products, Casale says, is that they are unregulated. A company may repackage an old product, slap a “green” label on it, and sell it for a higher price—and consumers have no idea they’re being duped. Casale personally vets and scrutinizes ingredients in every product she sells—from toothpaste to organic mattresses to biodegradable balloons. The idea is to assist the community in reducing its carbon footprint in ways that are affordable and accessible.

“One main way that I make sure accessibility to the product is not cost-prohibitive is by using local suppliers,” she says. “Because the majority of products I sell are made in Tennessee, the carbon footprint of the store is reduced and it helps me keep costs down. I’m not paying for shipping, and I know a lot of vendors personally, so it’s a nice personal connection, too­.”

Another way to keep costs down is to sell supplies in bulk. The Green Wagon has a “filling station” where customers can bring in their own containers and fill up on soap, shampoo, laundry detergent or dog biscuits. Casale spreads her message by offering a variety of gifts made from recycled materials, and by hosting private “green” birthday parties, baby showers and wedding showers. She has begun sponsoring community events where patrons can learn how to make, for example, their own household cleaning supplies from readily available items.

Casale plans to open a second store in East Nashville that will feature not only general merchandise, but also organic foods, locally grown and raised, as well as a catering service.

“People come into the store and they’re happy,” Casale says. “This is a positive space to be in every day.”

Find out more about The Green Wagon »

Luke Boehne believes wearing deodorant is simply unnatural. “I realized it’s not healthy to put on antiperspirants that keep you from releasing your natural toxins,” he explains. “These smells indicate your personal identity, your natural signature, and they’re important for sexual attraction within the species.”

Wait a second. Is Boehne ditching his Speed Stick so he can become a chick magnet?

“Well, yeah,” he answers.

Boehne is only half-joking. To him environmentalism is a matter of ethics. The cognitive studies major who graduated from Vanderbilt in May was known around campus for drawing attention to wasteful consumption and addictive consumerism. Sometimes a guy has to go radical to get his point across.

“We now think humans can experiment on anything without repercussion,” he says. “In actuality, the universe and humans all cycle in an intimate way. My empathy extends to all life forms.”

When he first arrived at Vanderbilt, he was appalled by the amount of wastefulness he saw. People were throwing away tons of perfectly good paper, office supplies, notebooks, furniture, textbooks, computers, cell phones and electronics—which could have been donated to needy freshmen, public schools or shelters, or could have been refurbished and recycled.

Then there was the food. Boehne joined the campus organization SPEAR (Students Promoting Environmental Awareness and Recycling) and became its vice president in charge of dining and composting. He began protesting the amount of food being wasted on campus by eating only leftovers, and he didn’t even have to go dumpster diving (which he does not oppose) in order to eat three square meals a day.

Every department in every building at Vanderbilt hosted events, and every event served an excess of food, says Boehne. So he attended a lot of events, and afterward he would load up on the available food to try to save it from being thrown away.

“Every trash receptacle on campus is loaded with pounds of food by the end of the day. And in Tennessee, any post-consumer food waste is classified as a hazardous material on the same tier as sludge and industrial byproducts,” he says.

Through SPEAR, and with the support of Vanderbilt Dining Services and other campus offices, Boehne took the lead in creating a compost demonstration site at The Commons. Since its inception, hundreds of gallons of discarded food from the prep kitchen of The Commons’ dining facility, as well as coffee grounds from its coffeehouse, have been composted and will be used by the university for soil enrichment and tree rejuvenation across campus.

Post-graduation, Boehne hopes to take an advocacy role in the revival of local folk wisdom and in clean energy. He also wants to serve as an umbrella voice, asking healthy questions about the true energy consciousness of Vanderbilt and whether its students and academicians are following the mission of the university to better the world.

Boehne certainly has walked the talk. As a student he spent, on average, no more than $20 a week, which included food, gas, entertainment and philanthropy.

That alone should make people stop and take notice.

Find out more about Students Promoting Environmental Awareness and Responsibility (SPEAR) »

Pilot Greg Stoddard and flight nurses Kathy Nippers and John Kennedy immediately leave their base and fly two counties north, landing at 1:47 p.m. at the scene of an accident. There they find a 17-year-old male who so far has managed to survive a lengthy extrication from his mangled automobile.

During his accident the young man sustained multiple injuries to his skull, a spleen laceration, pulmonary contusions, facial fractures, and a lacerated right kidney, and somehow aspirated fluid into one of his lungs. Unconscious and intubated, the patient is being hand-ventilated by the EMS crew on the scene.

The man is quickly loaded into the back of LifeFlight 1 for the flight to Vanderbilt University Hospital, arriving at the Vanderbilt skyport at 2:23 p.m., where his lengthy hospitalization begins.

Managing a phone call an average of every 45 seconds, the Office of Emergency Communications is constantly under the gun. Radios crackle with updates from pilots, flight crews and ground ambulance crews. Flat-panel monitors display news updates, Doppler weather radar, the configuration of flight crews, camera feeds from inside hospital elevators and at four helicopter bases, and each aircraft’s position in real time.

Most of us will never hold the outcome of a critically ill person’s survival in our hands, or know the surge of adrenaline, anxiety, stress and awesome responsibility that comes with critical care medicine. As if it isn’t challenging enough to keep someone alive long enough to get them to a hospital, imagine the skill and concentration necessary to practice critical care medicine inside the belly of a noisy helicopter—bouncing up and down on air thermals—traveling 120 miles an hour at an altitude of 3,000 feet.

For Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s LifeFlight crew, it’s a typical day at the office.

“These are people who do extraordinary things under extraordinary, difficult circumstances daily,” says Dr. John A. Morris Jr., professor of surgery and director of the Division of Trauma and Surgical Critical Care. “You just have to look at the back of the aircraft. It’s like practicing intensive-care medicine inside the space of a bathtub that’s traveling at 3,000 feet and bumpy.”

Morris should know. He’s been at the helm of LifeFlight for a quarter century now.

Since its first flight on July 6, 1984, LifeFlight has logged more than 33,000 patient transports and now averages 250 patient transports a month. LifeFlight is VUMC’s most visible brand—walking, flying and rolling billboards. LifeFlight staff serve as Vanderbilt ambassadors in every community within the medical center’s 65,000-square-mile catchment area (see sidebar). Today, LifeFlight consists of several distinct and complementary components: five helicopters, a turbo prop airplane for long-range transports, a highly sophisticated communications and data center, ground ambulance transportation, and a newly launched “event medicine” program.

Football Field as Landing Zone

LifeFlight’s day-to-day operations, with myriad moving parts, are managed by Jeanne Yeatman. A former LifeFlight flight nurse with more than 1,000 patient transports under her belt, Yeatman has risen through the ranks and has been its program director since 2003.

“As a flight nurse you really feel like you’re doing something that matters,” says Yeatman. “You’re being invited into someone’s life at its very worst moment. But being in these situations has also caused some of the most difficult times in my own life. When you’re in the moment, you may not realize the stress of what you’re doing, but afterward, when you remove yourself from that moment, you recognize that what you see as a flight nurse isn’t normal. It’s very much like being on the front line of a war.”

LifeFlight’s program concept has always been to use specially trained nurses with an expanded skill set who can take Vanderbilt’s services into rural communities rather than merely transport patients to the hospital.

While saving lives is the goal, Morris says the program’s biggest challenge and most important product from day one has been safety. “Without a doubt, the balance between safety and cost, and the appreciation of that balance by the enterprise, has been the most gratifying part of this job.”

Vanderbilt was among the first academic medical centers to add air medical transportation for critically ill patients. In 1983, Dr. John Sawyers, professor and chairman of the Department of Surgery, and Dr. Joseph Ross, MD’54, professor of medicine and associate vice chancellor for health affairs, made the decision to add a patient transport helicopter to the services of Vanderbilt University Hospital. The move was part of a larger strategy by the medical center to build and brand top-level trauma surgery and emergency medicine programs.

The following year Morris joined the faculty, starting his tenure several weeks ahead of time in order to coincide with the arrival of the medical center’s first helicopter.

“I remember the first day. Needless to say, we were all excited. Our first lesson in aeromedical medicine was how to open the door of the aircraft,” Morris says with a chuckle. “We paid close attention to how to open and close a door because you don’t want it opening at 3,000 feet. It was that basic and demonstrated just how new the whole concept of air medical transportation was to academic medicine.”

As the hands-on father of LifeFlight, Morris recalls a flood of vivid memories. “We did things 20 years ago that were the right thing for the individual patient,” he says, “but were horrific in terms of the risks we took—though we didn’t know we were taking them at the time.

“We once landed an aircraft on Garland Avenue [the street in front of Vanderbilt University Hospital] so we could treat a guy with a stab wound to the heart, and we got that guy to live. Imagine landing a helicopter in the middle of Garland Avenue to do this. But we knew from the flight nurse’s report that the patient wouldn’t make it the 500 yards from the football field [LifeFlight’s landing zone during its early days] to the ER. There are those kinds of heroic but horrendous stories.”

Nearly 25 years later those few people and that one aircraft known as LifeFlight have evolved into a large, fully integrated critical-care patient transportation system.

“The elements of the LifeFlight program have been determined by the needs of the Vanderbilt enterprise, and by the needs of the community we serve,” Morris says. “What we found over time is that a huge amount of transportation is needed by the enterprise.”

“You can’t afford to become complacent,” says Program Director Yeatman, whose years of experience as a flight nurse give her great insight and empathy into the extreme challenges her staff often faces. “I may not have walked in every staff member’s shoes in every situation, but I have a better idea of what they face because I’ve been out there on more than 1,000 flights.”

Despite the cramped quarters, noise and turbulence inside an aircraft, Yeatman says the environment becomes a familiar venue where nurses are able to focus their considerable skills on patients, achieving a remarkable success rate. LifeFlight’s flight nurses typically have multiple years of critical-care nursing experience as a prerequisite to selection for the program.

“Each nurse’s role is very clear. You and your partner develop a rapport, and much of what is done is unsaid as far as the patient’s care,” Yeatman says. “But you must communicate with EMS personnel on the scene and with the patients’ families. Communicating with the families about what to expect is a big part of what the flight nurses do.”

A leader with a clear passion for her work, Yeatman says, “I tell my staff that if you ever get to the point that you’re so OK with what you’re doing that you’re not tempted to jump out of the aircraft on occasion, then it’s time to get out.”

Kevin High, who has been with LifeFlight since 1993 and now serves as manager of the trauma program, agrees. “I have been on five or six missions during which I’ve been so scared of what was going on—of what was happening to my patient—that if I could have jumped out, I would have,” he says.

“We are called upon to make decisions that most people in the span of their lives will never have to make—I mean walking up to somebody and in 30 seconds sizing them up and saying ‘he’s going to live’ or ‘he’s going to die’ and walking on. There’s no way you can train somebody to do that. It’s something you have to want to do, and it’s something that you have to want to keep doing.”

The toughest part of Yeatman’s job, she says, is “staying ahead of the curve and feeling like I am being proactive and not reactive, that I am constantly keeping the program’s core value—that safety is our No. 1 product—at the forefront. Yet I am also staying abreast of everything going on around us inside and outside of Vanderbilt, such as with the Federal Aviation Administration.”

A successful air ambulance program also must contend with various hospital regulations, community EMS regulations, and specific air ambulance/air medical regulations. Staying current with regulatory compliance is one of the most challenging aspects of the air medical industry, says Yeatman. “Basically, it always comes down to putting safety first and doing the right thing for the patient.”

Safety is an ever-present concern for Vanderbilt’s LifeFlight crew: The program has had zero accidents during its 25 years of operation. Nationwide, medical helicopter crashes killed 35 people in 2007 and 2008 alone.

The Eyes and Ears of LifeFlight

Perched 180 feet above Medical Center Drive atop Vanderbilt University Hospital is LifeFlight’s skyport—an outwardly unassuming structure that is in reality a $4.5 million engineering marvel. The two-story facility was designed and constructed on top of VUH while the hospital and LifeFlight remained fully operational.

The opening of the skyport in December 2000 solved several of LifeFlight’s logistical issues, finally bringing together into one location several pieces of the program. One floor below the landing pad sit the flight crew quarters and the program’s administrative offices. The helipad has enough space to land two large helicopters, while the facility features a nearly 360-degree approach path for incoming aircraft. The Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital, thanks to a gift from the Christy-Houston Foundation, added its own rooftop helipad in November 2005.

Squeezed into three crowded rooms just off the VUH skyport’s helipad is LifeFlight’s Office of Emergency Communications, the program’s nerve center.

Inside these three rooms is enough specialized communications equipment to echo the look and feel of a Pentagon-like war room. As various radios crackle with updates from pilots, flight crews and ground ambulance crews, large flat-panel monitors surround the communications coordinators, displaying local and national news updates, Doppler weather radar, that day’s configuration of each of the five aircrafts’ flight crew, video feed from cameras monitoring the inside of hospital elevators and the four helicopter bases, and satellite tracking of each airborne aircraft’s position in real time.

Managing a phone call an average of every 45 seconds, 24 hours every day, the staff of the Office of Emergency Communications is constantly under the gun.

“We are known as Flight Comm,” says Jeff Gray, director of communications for Vanderbilt LifeFlight. “However, we not only handle LifeFlight dispatch communications, but our responsibilities also include the Neonatal Emergency Transport teams, LifeFlight Event Medicine, both of Vanderbilt’s emergency departments, all ground ambulances transporting patients to Vanderbilt, and paging of appropriate teams within the hospitals—such as the STAT teams, rapid response teams, paramedic teams and stroke teams—based on predetermined criteria. We serve as a communications funnel for all those teams.

“Within the last two years, we have added regional communications responsibilities, a state concept funded by Vanderbilt that places us as the communications resource for the 13 counties and 26 hospitals in this region.”

In 2006 the Office of Emergency Communications was designated as the EMS Regional Communications Center for the Mid-Cumberland Region by the Tennessee Department of Health. In the event of a large-scale disaster, the Office of Emergency Communications will serve as the point of contact for the region’s hospitals and emergency medical services.

And in 2007 the Office of Emergency Communications also assumed responsibility for Nashville Medcom, now serving as the traffic controller for Metro Nashville-Davidson County’s 11 hospitals. All 11 of the county’s hospitals share a unique radio frequency enabling ambulance services to radio in patient reports.

“With the regional medical center communications responsibilities, we are handling about 2,000 radio calls per month,” says Gray. “LifeFlight averages about 250 patient transports per month. Those flights involve many radio and phone calls. About 60 calls per month are associated with the various teams within the hospitals. So when you add all that up, we’re pretty busy.”

“You never know what a day at LifeFlight is going to bring,” says chief flight nurse Wilson Matthews, who has been with the program for 12 years. “I’ve met the president [of the United States] at work. I’ve had pizza delivered to a hayfield while at work. I’ve had dinner from a snack machine at a small-town airport while at work. You can never predict what you’ll be doing.”

And that’s no small part of the attraction for the more than 100 men and women who make LifeFlight run like clockwork. After nearly a quarter century of service to Middle Tennessee and tens of thousands of saved lives, LifeFlight is a growing, evolving entity that began with and continues the philosophy of safety first while bringing Vanderbilt to the patient.

“When people hear the roar of those rotor blades overhead, I always want them to remember two things,” says Dr. Harry Jacobson, VUMC’s vice chancellor for health affairs. “First, that a life hangs in the balance, and second, that this life is in the hands of the most expert and skilled team on earth.”

  The Juilliard School and the Manhattan School of Music each offered admission to Roumain after he finished high school, but insufficient financial aid put both schools out of reach.

His father suggested Daniel consider Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music. Still mourning his lost chance in New York, Roumain said no, despite the scholarship money available. His father then insisted and, one visit later, Roumain decided to give Vanderbilt a try. Early trepidations soon gave way as he found himself, happily, among a group of musicians in Nashville all eagerly mixing genres, trying to bridge, as Roumain puts it, “what we saw weren’t gaps at all.”

After Vanderbilt came five years of graduate school at the University of Michigan, where he studied with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer William Bolcom and others. Then, in 1998, he moved to New York, specifically Harlem, where he had always dreamed of living.

His first professional decade seemingly has been one of nonstop ascent. He collaborates frequently with such partners as composer Philip Glass, choreographer Bill T. Jones, and hip-hop artist DJ Spooky, among others. He has enjoyed commissions from such diverse sources as the Orchestra of St. Luke’s (Fast Black Dance Machine, which calls for the orchestra to add a drum kit), the Lark Quintet (“Rosa Parks,” one of five string quartets collectively known as A Civil Rights Reader), and the University of Alabama (The Tuscaloosa Meditations, whose subject is Vivian Malone Jones, the student Gov. George Wallace tried to block from the university’s doors in 1963). He’s taught at the Harlem School of the Arts and teaches frequent workshops on the road, as he will this fall at his old elementary school in Margate. And he has his own eight-piece band, DBR & The Mission.

Roumain, says one critic, is a “force of nature.”

This October, for the second year in a row, he debuted a new piece at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. Last year Roumain created One Loss Plus, a multimedia work for violin, piano, electronics and video, including thoughts on loss solicited from the public and submitted via YouTube and MySpace. 

“Mr. Roumain’s eclecticism was wide-ranging as ever,” said The New York Times’ critic of One Loss Plus. “Early in the score a Minimalist section, built on a repeating pizzicato violin and piano figure, gave way to more raucous bowed fiddling with a flourish borrowed from Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Child (Slight Return).’”

This year’s composition is Darwin’s Meditation for the People of Lincoln, which Roumain is creating with playwright Daniel Beaty and which he describes as a “quartet concerto based on the real and imagined relationship among Darwin, Lincoln, and the people of the United States born after the end of the Civil War.” (Scientist Charles Darwin and President Abraham Lincoln were born within hours of one another Feb. 12, 1809.)

In August we sat down for an hour’s conversation at a recording studio in Manhattan just north of SoHo.

What are you working on today?

I am finishing a CD of the sound tracks that I have written for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company during the last 10 years or so. I hope to release it this year and start touring it with my group, DBR & The Mission, in 2009.

And I’m finishing up Hip-Hop Studies & Etudes, which is also recorded and performed by DBR & The Mission.

Don’t you have a new piece debuting at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this fall—Darwin’s Meditation for the People of Lincoln?

I’m working on that, too. [Laughs.] In the studio next door, one guy is mastering the Bill T. Jones CD and another is working on the hip-hop CD. At the same time, on my laptop, I’m composing the Darwin piece.

Darwin’s Meditation for the People of Lincoln is a large work—a quartet concerto for four soloists and a chamber orchestra. Phrases from the libretto will be projected in English and Creole on a screen above and behind the orchestra, but there will be no coordination between what is seen and heard. That’s a Glassian technique. I got the idea from Glass’s opera Satyagraha. Also, in the middle of the work, the musicians stop playing for a seven-minute monodrama, an imagined conversation between Darwin and Lincoln, performed by Daniel Beaty.

As a child of the South, did you grow up with a strong sense of Lincoln?

The earliest memory I have of Lincoln is my Haitian father taking the family to Washington, D.C. Literally, he was awestruck by the Lincoln Memorial, as was I. I was about 6. This was the classic all-American family trip to D.C., but with my Haitian father, who had a very different understanding of Lincoln. And Darwin is, in fact, about understanding the ideas of Lincoln and Darwin through an island nation called Haiti.

Was Lincoln a hero for you? 

Like many people, I think, I have struggled with Lincoln. What is his legacy? What were his intentions? My struggles with Lincoln started at Vanderbilt when I set the Gettysburg Address to music, for piano and baritone. When you’re a young composer asked to tackle a legendary historical text, I think you tend to gravitate toward the sensational—I’d even say the controversial. The piece that I wrote, Abraham’s Address, ended up being pretty innocuous, a pretty clear setting of the Gettysburg Address—actually, just fragments of it. I didn’t really take a stance, and I’m glad I didn’t. That was the right choice, the mature choice to make.

I remember thinking at the time that I might include text from Lincoln’s contemporaries who in their letters to him were very clear in their sense of the South’s right to secede from the Union. Lincoln would write them back, and he was always a diplomat. But it became confusing for me because I didn’t realize his diplomacy was in no way a surrendering of his morality. It was his diplomacy. So that was the confusion. It would have been controversial and sensational to include excerpts from those letters, but for all the wrong reasons.

[Darwin’s Meditation conveys] what I think about Lincoln now. Haiti had its first black president in 1804. It’s a little more interesting to me to look at American notions of democracy and liberation and freedom and equality through the eyes of other countries. We have been dealing with the “threat” of a black presidency while other countries have had black presidents for years. The notion of a woman being president in this country is radical, yet women are leading nations right now in Germany and elsewhere. So to me there’s something a little more informed about thinking of Lincoln and Darwin, not from North America or London, but from this island nation called Haiti.

So you’re drawing from different cultures for perspective as well as music. 

It’s almost become a cliché to look at different styles and perspectives in musical vernaculars and integrate them into a musical language. But hey, I’m guilty of that, absolutely. I think I’m also a little more specific. I deal from African-American music and Haitian music almost exclusively. But there’s a moment in Darwin where I suggest the sounds of Gregorian chant because my father talks about being a young boy in Haiti and only knowing the Catholic mass in Latin. If you were a young boy in Haiti in the 1950s, you learned the mass in Latin.

What drives me creatively is always about conversation. When you meet somebody for the first time, what will you say to them? I think the question for all of us is, Can we have great, substantive, amazing conversations with anybody? That’s not an easy thing to do. So as a way of preparing myself for the conversations that are coming, I’m a voracious reader. I love to see movies. I try to have an understanding of the struggles that other people have had and figure out how I can create a musical portrait of their struggles.

You’ve lived in Harlem for 10 years now. Has it turned out to be the place you thought it might be for you?

Everything and more. My landlady, Mrs. Logan, whose voice appears in Harlem Essay for Orchestra and Digital Audio Tape, knew Ralph Ellison. She saw Josephine Baker at the Apollo. She talks about this on the tape that plays during Essay.

Harlem’s history, its current gentrification and its future have all found a place in my music. I’m very much aware that when you live somewhere else, you’re not only living with the people who are there. You’re living with the people who were there and eventually died, all the things that they did, loved and felt. You kind of inhabit all the things they left behind.

For me that’s incredibly important. I don’t think it would be possible for me to have any sense of identity without being able to identify in a profound, meaningful, connected way not only with other people, but with their perspectives on life and loss.

And I cannot imagine being 37 years old and not having that sense of, What does it mean to suffer? Harlem, for me, is the people who are there. They suffer every day to eat, to get food for their children. Forget about real estate—they’re just trying to pay the rent and make sure their kid doesn’t get shot today. That’s the reality for most of the people still on my block. At the same time there are very young black families there who have what they call “disposable income.” There’s the contrast.

I hate to say this, but I’m beginning to think about not being in Harlem. As a composer I travel a lot. I have fortunately been all over the world. The 10 years I’ve spent in Harlem have been very good for my craft. Now I need to spend 10 years somewhere else because I think it would also be good for my craft.

In the U.S. or elsewhere? 

I’ve never wanted to live abroad, only because I’ve spent so much time traveling. I was just in Australia and Berlin. To me Europe, Asia and Australia are not foreign at all. They’re places I go to regularly. It’s a great honor and privilege. It’s funny, but I want to live in Margate.

You want to go home?

I do. Margate, in South Florida, is going through some very tough times. Margate is doing its best not only to survive but to renovate itself. And my parents are getting older. I feel a sort of paternal calling kicking in, toward their care. I want to buy a home in South Florida, not too far from my parents, and make my peace with those ghosts, the ghosts of Margate.

Now—you see—that’s how the title of a piece happens.

The Ghosts of Margate—that sounds like a good one. Wasn’t it your dad who picked Vanderbilt for you? 

Yes. I didn’t want to go.

You didn’t want to go to college, or you didn’t want to go to Vanderbilt?

Both. [Laughs.] I have to be honest about that. I wanted to go to Juilliard. I got in, but my family couldn’t afford it. I also got in the Manhattan School of Music, but we couldn’t afford that, either. So at that point I thought, “Well, if I can’t go to New York and study music, I’ll just make a career on my own.” I was working for 2 Live Crew, and I was 18 and I was just going to stay in hip-hop music and make great money.

My father persuaded me to go see [Associate Professor of Composition] Michael Rose [at the Blair School of Music]—it was through some sort of program that the Black Cultural Center had. I think it was called Black Student Weekend. They paid for minority students to come visit the school for the weekend, so I did.

Everything just happened very quickly. Professor Rose and my father came up with some sort of scheme where I would go for a semester and if I didn’t like it, I could quit. Of course, I fell in love.

With Blair, with the campus, with Nashville? 

I fell in love specifically with Michael Rose. I fell in love with [Joseph Joachim Professor of Violin] Chris Teal, [Associate Professor of Viola] John Kochanowski, and Dean [John “Del”] Sawyer. I fell in love with Chancellor Joe B. Wyatt, who was very supportive of my work as a composer and became a patron, literally, of a piece I wrote there, Haitian Essay Orchestra, using Haitian folk themes.

I fell in love with the Blair School, with the building, the atrium, Nashville. It was 

September. The leaves were changing. I’m from South Florida. We don’t get seasons, so I wasn’t accustomed to any kind of fall.

I was scared to go to Nashville. To me, Nashville represented rednecks and cowboys. I had no sense of the South versus the Deep South. 

So Nashville was different than what you were expecting? 

Totally different. I fell in love with [late music director and conductor of the Nashville Symphony] Kenneth Schermerhorn. He let me come to rehearsals at the War Memorial Auditorium. I rode my bike there. He’d see me there, and on a couple of occasions he let me follow along with the pocket score—really deep, heavy stuff for me at the time.

Did you go to Vanderbilt knowing you could get deep into that kind of music, hanging out with the Nashville Symphony and whatever else you could find in the city? 

It became obvious the first week that Nashville wasn’t just about country music; it was about great musicianship and great musicians—like Mark O’Connor, Edgar Meyer, Béla Fleck, the Blair String Quartet, all the musicians on faculty at the Blair School. It was instantly clear that these were great musicians who could play just about any kind of music.

And they were very welcoming of what I call my youthful transgressions and experiments in trying to combine hip-hop music with classical music. For them it was more about experimenting with folk music. Mark O’Connor was trying to combine bluegrass with classical in a sophisticated, intelligent way. Edgar Meyer and Béla Fleck were doing that also with bluegrass music. A lot of musicians there were trying to bridge what we saw weren’t gaps at all.

When my mother gets very mad, a sentence might begin in English, go into French, and end in really bad Creole. A lot of people have stories like that, and that’s the thing: As a musician it was very easy for me to take Bach and give it a beat or give it an inflection.

That’s what is so great about Nashville. It’s so open-minded on so many different levels—culturally, racially and, of course, musically.

Roumain’s ensemble, DBR & The Mission, includes a string quartet, rhythm section and a DJ.

But being black at Vanderbilt and in Nashville must have also offered some challenges.

Of course. But I take responsibility for that. If I had wanted a deep, meaningful African-American college experience, I could have gone to Howard University. I chose to go to Vanderbilt, specifically to study with Michael Rose and others, and a happy accident happened—Nashville.

That is not to say there weren’t moments of prejudice, moments of pain or feelings of segregation. Absolutely there were, but whether it’s Miami or Nashville, that, to me, is part of the American experience, quite frankly. It has happened to me here in New York.

There were certainly bad days, but I’ll say this: If it were not for Vanderbilt, I never would have ended up at the University of Michigan, and if not for the University of Michigan, I certainly never would have ended up in Harlem. I credit Vanderbilt University and Chancellor Wyatt with providing the tools and the equipment and the preparation for great success and great pain.

Coming from Miami, it would have been something less to have gone to Howard or even New York. It was important. Now I realize this. It was important for me to have that Southern experience.

You’ve studied and collaborated with an impressive range of talented musicians and performers. I’d like to go through a list and have you tell me, in a phrase or a sentence, what you think you’ve learned from them.

Philip Glass. 

Never surrender. If you create original music, you must take responsibility for that music and for creating an audience to support it.

Bill Jones.

Never surrender. Life is wonderful and precious and brutal. Now, create a piece based on those ideas.

DJ Spooky.

Never surrender. Give me one record, and I’ll give you a universe. Every sound is connected to every idea. Let me show you how.

William Bolcom.

Never surrender. Never surrender. Concern yourself with being a composer first, not a careerist.

Luther Campbell. 

[Laughs.] Wow. If you have something to say, don’t just say it—shout it over and over and over again. And never surrender.

One of the movements in your string quartet Rosa Parks is called “Klap Your Handz.” You’ve talked in other interviews about the clapping in Rosa Parks and other of your works as being a communal sound for you.

I grew up Catholic, so I’m well aware of those ever-elusive communal experiences. As much as I love the Internet and my laptop, I’m well aware of those truly communal experiences when you can make community with one, when you can communicate with someone.

Is it trite to clap one’s hands? Is it trite to do that in a string quartet? Well, even in that string quartet, it all had to be planned out. It’s a little more sophisticated. With the clapping I am talking about the Baptist church and how that referenced Rosa Parks and her father and what she was thinking about in that moment when she was asked to leave that bus seat.

Now, it’s one thing to hear Rosa Parks on a recording. But in an auditorium with 2,000 school kids, when unexpectedly the violinists start clapping—that’s how the string quartet starts—and suddenly, all these children are clapping their hands in perfect time along with the music. And not so loudly that they can’t still hear the music. It ebbs and flows and has a dynamic and a meaning, and they know that it’s going somewhere.

There’s a true collaboration going on and at the end of it, it’s reflected in the ovation. The best knowledge, to me, can be implied and the best experiences, to me, can also be implied. I’m very much interested in translating those things that remind me of what it is to be alive, what it is to be connected with something much larger than anything I might do.

“Some people gasped and others snickered,” Ginsberg remembers. “I threw up my hands, told him I did not understand the case, and suggested he call on somebody else. He was visibly stunned by the impertinence of the first student he ever called on.”

That August day in 1987 was not only Ginsburg’s first day as a law student–it was also Nicholas Zeppos’ first day as an assistant professor. And neither could have known that, because her name just happened to appear at the top of the second column on the student roll, every professor had zeroed in on her as the first victim. Ginsburg’s law school career could have been off to a rocky start, but Zeppos, she remembers, “did not hold it against me. Months later, we had a good laugh when he told me he had learned of my plight that day and was sympathetic.”

Ginsburg, JD’90, is now an attorney with the Cincinnati firm Ulmer & Berne. “I think his gifts as a professor,” she says, “were his ability to accept students as humans with both strengths and foibles, his genuine interest in our development as lawyers, and his sense of humor and knack of never taking himself too seriously.”

Nicholas Zeppos has matured and evolved during his 21 years at Vanderbilt, but he has not lost the attributes that characterized him that first day teaching law school. He has climbed the academic ladder from assistant professor to associate dean for research and faculty development at the Law School, to associate provost to provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs. He has served as Vanderbilt’s first vice chancellor for institutional planning and advancement, as interim chancellor and now chancellor. That’s just the condensed version. He has written widely about legislation, administrative law and professional responsibility; earned national renown as a scholar; won multiple teaching awards; and shaken the trees for scholarship money.

Universities like Vanderbilt do not often choose their top leader from within their own ranks. Vanderbilt has done it only once before: 71 years ago, when Oliver Carmichael ascended from dean of the graduate school to chancellor.

Yet Zeppos has been so much at the center of every major initiative at Vanderbilt in the last decade, it’s difficult to imagine Vanderbilt having made any other choice. He has spearheaded innovative efforts in undergraduate admissions and financial aid, the planning process for The Commons and College Halls of Vanderbilt, the Strategic Academic Planning Group, and development of new programs in neuroscience, law and economics; Jewish studies; and medicine, health and society. He has overseen the university’s Shape the Future fundraising campaign, helping raise more than $1.5 billion more than two years ahead of schedule.

New plans are on the drawing board for initiatives in the environment, religion, health care, and life sciences and engineering.

“In my time at Vanderbilt, I’ve known professors who are brilliant intellectuals. And I’ve known administrators who possess a gift for making complex institutions run well,” says John C.P. Goldberg, now associate dean for research at Vanderbilt Law School and one of the faculty members to whom Zeppos has been both a mentor and friend.

“What makes Nick almost unique is that he is exceptionally able on both scores. He is a first-class academic and a masterful leader.”

Zeppos, age 2, with older brothers Evan (left) and Jon (right). Their grandfather immigrated to Wisconsin from Greece around the time of World War I.

Zeppos at center with his brothers and cousin Joel.

Zeppos in his early days as a lawyer

Eloping with Lydia Howarth at age 31.

Story time with sons Benjamin (right) and Nicholas.

Zeppos, with Benjamin (left) and Nicholas, says he likes Nashville both for its creative vibe and its long golf season.

Zeppos and Lydia Howarth attend the Symphony Ball in Nashville.

Howarth is flanked by sons Benjamin and Nicholas.

“I always tell students, work for something bigger and more important than you,” says Zeppos, shown here at a Vanderbilt Visions event.

With Vanderbilt students volunteering with Habitat for Humanity.

Leading a freshman Vanderbilt Visions seminar.

At a fundraising event with Monroe Carell Jr., chair of Vanderbilt’s Shape the Future campaign.

Zeppos peppers his conversations with phrases like “wouldn’t it be great if … .” He pounds the table frequently as he talks, in a way that reveals enthusiasm rather than anger. His natural exuberance masks a Midwesterner’s ingrained modesty, a deftness for turning any conversation around to focus on the other person or on the institution.

“I think I’m a pretty good lawyer, a pretty good professor, and I hope to be a pretty good chancellor,” he allows. “But I don’t like being the center of attention. I love doing all the work that comes with being chancellor. But there’s nothing inherently important about me. Vanderbilt is so much more than the chancellor.”

“Anyone who meets Nick will immediately observe two things about him,” says Goldberg. “First is his love of knowledge. I’ve spent my life around academics and have never met anyone who is more widely read and more intellectually curious. Second, there is his love of humanity. Most of us like to tell the people we meet about ourselves. Nick is more interested in learning what is going on in others’ lives and minds. Really, these two qualities are the same one–he is insatiably interested in the world around him.”

A Lawyer Called to Teach

Now a youthful 53, Zeppos grew up in Milwaukee, the youngest of three brothers in a family just one generation removed from its Greek origins. His grandfather, who was born in Athens, left for America with his four brothers and never returned.

“He and others in our family came through Ellis Island. There was a big migration west to Detroit and Chicago among Greeks,” Zeppos says. “I’m sure they knew somebody in Milwaukee and went where the jobs were.” The area was Green Bay Packers and Chicago Cubs country by the time Nicholas Zeppos came on the scene. He developed an early interest in both sports and history. “I love history, and I love the history of civilization,” he says. “I thought I would teach history.” At the University of Wisconsin, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1976, with a history major and a growing interest in the law. He enrolled at the University of Wisconsin Law School, served as editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Law Review, and was outstanding graduate of his class. He thought he would be the kind of lawyer who helps people who most need it. Zeppos met his future wife, Lydia Howarth, in Madison, where she developed her skills as an academic editor. They married in Washington, D.C., when Zeppos was practicing law and Howarth was working at National Geographic. “We lived in Dupont Circle, and I would walk Lydia to work and then get on the subway and head down to the Justice Department,” Zeppos remembers. “One of our regular ‘romantic dates’ was meeting after work at the Washington Monument and then running home together along the mall and through Rock Creek.” Busy with their careers, they decided to elope. “Eloping was one of the best things I’ve ever done,” Zeppos says cheerfully, “especially since it was with Lydia. I got married relatively late. I was 31. By then we had both lived away from our families for some time and were working all the time. We thought, why spend a lot of money and a lot of time?” Zeppos remembers filing a brief in the Second Circuit that day and meeting Lydia and her “bridesmaids” at the Gallery Place Metro station. They headed off to get married and were back at work the next day. Zeppos discusses the practice of law with passion, crediting great mentors along the way. He first practiced in Washington, D.C., at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, and then worked for more than five years at the Justice Department, taking a substantial cut in pay to go from private practice to the government. “I was in court all the time. Each case was like a challenging law school exam, and when I stood up to argue I was privileged to say, ‘I represent the United States of America.’ That was an honor and well worth the cut in pay. I learned so much and am grateful for being able to represent our nation in court.” Among his law career highlights: “Arguing before then-Judge Antonin Scalia was an intense and demanding experience. Judge Richard Posner taught a cerebral seminar, and then-Judge Stephen Breyer was the consummate and reflective professor but cared deeply about the real world. “I’m intellectually drawn to the law and its intersection with politics, history, philosophy, psychology, biology, sociology,” he adds. “It is the ultimate multidisciplinary area, yet it has a practical side.” But he still felt called to teach, and in 1987 he headed south to Vanderbilt with Lydia and their 8-month-old son, Benjamin. “I had never been in Nashville. I found that Vanderbilt mirrored the wonderful things about the region: community, civility and warmth. There’s something very special about this region of the country and its sense of being nice to each other as opposed to everything being zero-sum and dog-eat-dog.

“People want to be here. Vanderbilt bears a lot of the qualities and characteristics of this region, and I like that. It distinguishes us,” he says, speaking like someone who has just gone on the local chamber of commerce board.

“It’s one of the most entrepreneurial, creative cities, and it’s a lot more interesting than cities where other universities are located. Faculty love it.”

His first year at Vanderbilt, Zeppos claims, his students gave him teaching evaluations that were “brutal.” But, he adds, “Student evaluations are pretty reliable indicators. There’s a myth that they’re not good predictors, or that you can inflate grades and get your evaluations up. That doesn’t work. Where you really get evaluated is when you read your students’ examinations. The ultimate feedback is when you read a great set of examinations.”

By the time John Goldberg joined Vanderbilt’s law faculty in 1995 as an entry-level professor, he says, “Nick was already one of the school’s leading lights. Although he was incredibly busy with his own work and with the life of the law school, he was a generous, constructive and inspiring mentor. I have vivid and fond memories of the hours I spent as Nick listened patiently to my half-baked ideas, then steered me–sometimes gently, sometimes not so gently–toward a better way of thinking through a problem.”

Zeppos is proud to have raised his children in Nashville.

“This is a wonderful community for families. My only disappointment was that our second son, Nicholas, could not be born at Vanderbilt. They were on diversion and had no room for us.” Now, he says, “We’ll have at least two freshmen beginning at Vanderbilt this fall who were with my younger son at Vanderbilt’s preschool since age 1.”

What Happens Next

What can those students expect with Zeppos as their chancellor? Student debt is clearly a top priority, and the university is stepping up efforts to make Vanderbilt accessible. What parents care about for their college-bound children, Zeppos believes, is not only the intellectual and academic challenge of academia, but the kind of adults they will become–ethically, emotionally and socially.

“That’s what Vanderbilt has always cared about, and that’s what our strategy and mission are.” Beginning this fall all first-year students will live in The Commons, Vanderbilt’s first step in making residential life at the heart of the Vanderbilt experience. “We have small classes and great teachers who are committed to the undergraduate experience,” Zeppos says. “Why not build on that? “My hope is that all these great youngsters in America–rich, poor, black, white, north, south, east, west–will say, ‘I’ve been blessed with the ability to achieve in school. I want to be a leader. I’m a hard worker. I should look at that place called Vanderbilt.’ And we work with them to develop their human potential.”

He believes the university needs to examine its role in educating the next generation of scholars, scientists and researchers and how Vanderbilt’s undergraduate, graduate and professional schools can feed into each other, and that graduate studies deserve more emphasis and more resources.

“It goes back to our core mission and aspirations: research, discovery, teaching and healing,” he says. “We are a research university, and we want to take a more prominent place in training the future leaders in research, policy, and at the great educational institutions of the world.”

Ever the optimist, Zeppos publicly tells audiences that Vanderbilt will go to a bowl game this year “absolutely. I don’t make predictions–I make promises.” He embraces wholeheartedly the integration of athletics into student life begun under his predecessor, Gordon Gee. ”

An important part of leadership in America is athletics,” he says. “Some years a third of our freshmen are athletic-team captains. Part of what distinguishes Vanderbilt is our sense of balance. The kids have multiple interests–they are interesting intellectually and also service-oriented community leaders. Athletics is a critical part of our culture and our balance.”

His ability to step out of a scholar’s comfort zone and look at the university’s needs as a whole is part of what has elevated the former professor to the halls of Kirkland. In 2001, Gordon Gee appointed Zeppos as Vanderbilt’s first vice chancellor for institutional planning and advancement. Up to that point, Zeppos says, “I had not been involved with fundraising at all. I think the reason some provosts don’t become president is that they don’t enjoy it.

“I always emphasize that the word philanthropy doesn’t mean ‘give me money.’ It means ‘love of humanity.’ I’ve had wonderful training, from the most junior development officers at Vanderbilt to our most senior people. “I’ve worked with Martha Ingram and Monroe Carell Jr. and other fabulous philanthropists. What I’ve learned is that people who have been blessed with resources want to make a difference in somebody else’s life and in society.”

Ingram is chairman of the Vanderbilt Board of Trust, which unanimously elected Zeppos as Vanderbilt’s eighth chancellor in March. “Chancellor Zeppos is both a visionary and a pragmatist,” she says. “He is a deeply ethical person whose guiding principle is, ‘What’s the right thing to do?’”

The University as Utopia

Zeppos refers to universities as a kind of utopia “of intellectuals who don’t think it has to be a race to the bottom.” His speeches often draw on his love of the ancient classics and of history. “I like to refer to things that I know about, that are important to me, because I think my only value as a speaker is to talk about things that are in my heart and in my mind.” He has a richly textured voice and a sincerity that makes you believe Vanderbilt really can and does change the world. This is important business, he is saying, even though he seems to be incapable of taking himself too seriously.

Vanderbilt is in the final 30 months of its university-wide Shape the Future campaign, stretching toward a goal of $1.75 billion. During a recent address, his first since being named chancellor to a crowd of development and alumni relations staffers at Vanderbilt, the room is hushed as Zeppos outlines the university’s ambitious goals and lofty mission.

“There are challenges ahead,” he says. “I think we’ll meet them, just like my predecessors met them. We’re one of the greatest universities in the world, part of a very small group of Research 1 universities that educates undergraduates. It allows us to focus on leadership and educating the whole person. I believe very deeply that it really matters for Vanderbilt to be here, to thrive, and to have the resources to heal and teach and discover.”

Somewhere in the crowd a cell phone shatters the quiet with a jaunty tinkle. A crimson-faced staffer scrambles for her purse.

“Is that the ice cream truck?” Zeppos asks gleefully.

In the face of a weak stock market, a housing industry in crisis, and a long list of other economic woes making headlines every day, Vanderbilt is about to bite off a very big obligation in scholarship assistance. The Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital is undertaking a $203 million expansion. The athletics department has just announced a planned $50 million in facilities upgrades. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

“I graduated from law school in 1979,” Zeppos says. “I have lived through stagflation and hyperinflation. I’ve lived through probably the highest unemployment since the Great Depression. I’ve lived through recession, stock market crash, the insolvency of the American banking system. I’ve seen the Internet bubble, I’ve seen 9/11. I’ve seen wars–popular and unpopular. I’ve seen the subprime crisis. And I think of Chancellor Kirkland and Chancellor Carmichael dealing with wars and depression and plagues and epidemics. I think of Chancellor Heard during the Civil Rights Era and the Vietnam war, the oil embargo, hyperinflation, the Peabody merger. These great institutions endure and lead.”

Nicholas Zeppos is clearly enjoying the challenge.

“I plan on finishing my career here,” he says.

One of the perks of being chancellor, he adds, is the option of being buried on the Vanderbilt campus.

“I’m thinking 50-yard line.”

lockwise from top: Max Notowitz is the first boy standing on the left end of a group of Jewish boys wearing Star of David armbands as they shovel snow; Notowitz (in white suit) with a friend before the war; Fred Westfield's identity card; Inge Smith in 1936; Star of David armband worn by Walter Ziffer.

When Walter Ziffer applied to Vanderbilt University in 1949, he was a 22-year-old man with only six years of formal education and six high school credits on his transcript.

Walter Ziffer

Ziffer’s youth had allowed little room for childhood, let alone school. The Nazi war machine overtook his town in Czech Silesia at the start of World War II. When Ziffer emerged from the war, having survived seven slave labor and death camps, he was 18 years old and weighed 87 pounds.

His body, he says, healed long before his spirit did, but he was determined to reclaim his life. In 1948 he left Europe to live with an uncle who had escaped to Nashville before the war. He quickly enrolled in high school, graduating in less than a year. Ziffer then appealed to Fred Lewis, dean of Vanderbilt’s engineering school, to take a chance on him. Lewis did.

Ziffer, BE’54, believes his education transformed his life. Inspired by his liberal arts courses–he still talks about the spark he felt in Professor Samuel Stumpf’s philosophy classes–he went on to graduate from Vanderbilt and then earned advanced degrees from the School of Theology at Oberlin College and from the University of Strasbourg.

“Vanderbilt was a life-changing experience for me,” he says. “It is a sad fact that after World War II, many survivors of the Holocaust were not able to put their broken lives back together because of the damage inflicted upon them by their Nazi captors and torturers. I have been one of the lucky ones.”

Ziffer was one of more than 300,000 Jewish Europeans who made their way to the United States between 1933 and 1952. Some had escaped Germany’s reach before the war broke out. Others had been forced to fight for their lives in the crucible of the Nazi genocide. Many were young people whose childhoods had been destroyed by war. But for Ziffer and others, despite all obstacles, education remained a cherished goal and a crucial step on the path back to a better life.

Each year fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors and refugees remain to tell their stories. We thank the alumni interviewed here for sharing theirs. In the face of cruelty and destruction, they chose to create and rebuild. Pushed toward despair, they sought meaning. Through their commitment to education, they answered barbarity with civilization. We also thank the Tennessee Holocaust Commission and the Western North Carolina Center for Diversity Education for sharing many of the photos that accompany this piece.

Max Notowitz (near center of front row, wearing white collar) with schoolmates at Hebrew School in Kolbuszowa, Poland, before the war.

Max Notowitz, BA'52

On a shelf across from his desk, Max Notowitz keeps a photograph taken in Kolbuszowa, Poland, more than 70 years ago. It is of his cheder, the Jewish religious school he attended in the afternoons. Notowitz, about 9 years old, sits smiling in the middle of the first row. There are several dozen boys and teachers around him. Only four, including Notowitz, survived the war.

Notowitz still can repeat from memory religious lessons he learned as a little boy. He remembers reciting them while perched on his father’s arm.

Notowitz is matter-of-fact as he talks about this, as he is when he holds out a picture of his father taken at Auschwitz. Osias Notowitz was murdered there in 1941, one day after Max’s 14th birthday. Less than a year later, the Germans imprisoned Max in a labor camp and executed his mother, brother and sister at the Belzec death camp.

“I tell this story simply because it happened to me, and because I witnessed it,” Notowitz says. “I’d much rather it hadn’t happened to me.”

Notowitz’s story is overwhelming in sadness and cruelty. Yet he tells it gently, in a soft, kind voice. It almost defies belief that he could survive such horror with any impulse toward gentleness intact. In 1942, Notowitz escaped the labor camp with 41 other prisoners. Only eight lived through the end of the war. Many were murdered while foraging for food.

“I saved my life by devious means,” Notowitz says. “I didn’t follow the rules. You were supposed to surrender and be killed, but I didn’t follow the rules.”

After the war Notowitz worked hard to find a way out of Europe. He earned money as he could, again not following the rules. In 1947, using false papers, he secured a visa to the United States. Once in New York City, he worked at a handbag factory by day and studied at night. He was a 20-year-old in fifth grade.

Notowitz's father before the war and at Auschwitz shortly before his death.

“I asked myself, ‘How long do I have to be in fifth grade?’ Others encouraged me to stick with the factory work–that it was a steady, dependable living–but I noticed they did not want it for their children,” Notowitz says. “I had in the back of my mind a letter I got from my mother when I was in the camp. I think she knew she would never see me again. She wrote, ‘I hope to be able to see you again, but if the good Lord denies me that, I want you to do one thing for me. Promise me that if you have a chance, you will get an education.’ This thing stuck with me. My mother said education was the best way to make your way in the world. That was my dream.”

Notowitz held fast to this dream. He found a cousin in Memphis, Tenn., who took him in and sent him to private high school. Less than two years later, despite his lack of credits, he applied to Vanderbilt.

Notowitz before imprisonment in a labor camp where his mother, brother and sister were executed.

“At Vanderbilt nobody asked me where I came from, what I did. And I didn’t talk about it. But my work was recognized,” Notowitz says. He graduated in three years, a member of both the Phi Beta Kappa and Omicron Delta Kappa honor societies. “Vanderbilt gave me something that I really had to earn. By the time I graduated, I was established.”

Though their years at Vanderbilt overlapped, Notowitz never knew Walter Ziffer, who also survived the Holocaust as a teenage boy.

“I always wondered if there were other survivors at Vanderbilt,” Notowitz says. “I never met any.”

Notowitz found success in the insurance industry and, after a stint with U.S. military intelligence in Germany, settled down in Memphis with his wife, Fannie. They have four children and two grandsons. He has embraced his roles as philanthropist, active Jewish community member and Holocaust educator.

In 1997, Notowitz returned to Kolbuszowa with Fannie and his 14-year-old grandson. They went to visit the man who, on the night of the escape from the labor camp, turned to Notowitz and asked, “Are you coming?” After the war Notowitz gave this man, Janek, a photo of himself, writing on the back, “To the man who saved my life.” Janek still had the picture.

“When we got to the town, we had a lot of trouble finding his house,” Notowitz says.

“He’d met a Polish girl, converted, and become a sexton in the church. But when we finally found him, his granddaughter said to us, ‘You should have asked where the Jew lived.’

“He has died since then. With him died the last Jew in the town.”

When the Nazi regime seized his silk wholesale business in Dresden, Germany, Walter Meyring no longer had a way to support his family. But he was just as devastated by her expulsion from school because she was Jewish. He resolved to leave Germany.

Inge Meyring Smith, BA'65, MA'67, EdS'74

“What was going to happen to his child? My father’s friends–friends who had connections in the Nazi regime–told him it was not going to get better.”

Meyring had a nephew in the United States who sponsored the family. Two nights before they boarded a ship in Hamburg, in November 1938, Kristallnacht raged across Germany. During the rioting, thousands of Jewish businesses and synagogues were attacked. Tens of thousands of Jews were arrested. Meyring, who had gone to say goodbye to his mother, spent the night hiding in her apartment. He would never see his mother again; she was too old to qualify for a visa. Smith’s family learned after the war that to avoid deportation, she had been euthanized by a doctor and family friend. Most of Smith’s extended family died in Auschwitz.

The Meyrings arrived in New York City at Thanksgiving. The following Monday, Meyring enrolled his 15-year-old daughter in school.

Her father, once a successful businessman, took whatever work he could find. In order to go to the opera, which they had attended regularly in Dresden, her parents worked nights at the Metropolitan Opera. Her mother sold candy there.

“We came to the U.S. with $15 between us. That’s all they would let us take,” Smith says.

“The Council of Jewish Women helped us with so much. We would have starved to death without them.”

In the meantime, Smith became Americanized. She studied hard. She took her textbooks home, translated the lessons into German, did the exercises, and translated them back to English. After graduation she worked as a secretary and went to night classes at City College of New York.

Inge with Paul, a Tennessee native who began corresponding with Inge after seeing a photograph she’d sent to another U.S. soldier during the war.

When Paul Smith took a job in Franklin, Tenn., his young wife panicked.

“I loved New York City. I adored my job. My family was there. All my friends were there. I loved going to school,” Smith remembers. “But my father said, ‘You are married now. You have to go.’ It was very hard.”

Smith spent her first few years having children and adapting to her new home.
“It’s a wonder they didn’t run me out of town,” she says. Her faux pas included going to the liquor store and taking her baby out for walks in the winter. “People would say to Paul, ‘You want to know what Inge did this time?’ They would say, ‘Oh my goodness, that poor foreigner.’”

Church was an important part of life in Franklin. Smith and her husband, who was not Jewish, joined a Presbyterian congregation, to which she still belongs. Smith remembers choosing it because she heard it had the best Sunday school in town.

Smith had left much behind in New York City, but not her passion for education. In 1952 she founded Franklin’s first kindergarten in her church’s basement. She took her own children to work with her.

First grade at Inge’s girls-only school in Dresden, with Smith in the center of the back row (wearing white collar).

In 1958, after Inge’s mother died, Inge’s father came to live with her family. He helped her to build a small school adjacent to her home. The bustling Smith Preschool, with lovely tree-shaded playgrounds in the backyard, still serves about 55 children a year.

Then, with money and babysitting, her father helped her return to college. She earned three degrees from Peabody College, including an educational specialist degree. Her career blossomed. She helped to launch Tennessee’s Head Start program and supervised early childhood educators across the region. She helped to establish Franklin’s Harpeth Academy, an elementary school that has since merged with a larger institution. Smith headed the school until her retirement in 1991. She loved her work.

“My father always told me, material things can be taken away from you from one day to the next, but what you have in your mind–no one can take that away from you,” Smith says.

“Going to Peabody was a very special time in my life. Without my father’s help, I couldn’t have gone back. My father saved my life twice. He fulfilled his promise to give his daughter an education so she could become the woman she was meant to be.”

Walter Ziffer, BE’54

His journey started in his hometown of Cesky Tesin, Czechoslovakia, where he, his parents and his sister reunited after liberation. All four had survived years in Nazi slave labor and concentration camps. Ziffer was 18.

“I was afraid of everyone,” Ziffer remembers. “Four years in the camps had really set me back. It was a rough time.”

By 1947, Ziffer knew he could not stay in Czechoslovakia. Communist takeover of the country was imminent, and the military draft loomed. Ziffer left for France, where he spent almost two years, all the while hoping to join his uncle in Nashville.

Ziffer’s family in late 1930s Czechoslovakia, with young Walter in knee socks. Of those pictured, two uncles, a great-uncle, a cousin and two aunts perished in Nazi concentration camps; Walter survived seven slave labor and death camps.

“My friend Burton Grant, whom I met in class, was going away to study. He asked me to move in with his mother to help take care of her in his absence,” Ziffer says. “Through Mrs. Grant I was exposed to the Churches of Christ, and I converted.”

Ziffer also married. He had met Carolyn Kinnard, BA’52, in an introductory social science class. After graduation they moved to Ohio, where he had taken an engineering job with General Motors, only to find himself drawn toward a life in the ministry.

“At GM I dealt in car parts, but through church contact I became interested in people, in educating,” Ziffer says. “I wanted to improve the world a little bit.”

Religious study also spoke to Ziffer’s profound need to make sense of what he had witnessed during the war.

In a Holocaust Remembrance Day speech he gave in Florida last April, Ziffer described in graphic detail a murder he had witnessed in the Brande labor camp:

“The blood streams in rivulets from the man’s mouth, nose, ears and body wounds. I see the man’s eyes being beaten from their sockets … The Kapos lift Rabinowicz from the blood-, urine- and excrement-drenched floor and carry him out. They dump the body into the coal bin. … I, 14 years old, stand there, unable to move, sick to my heart and stomach. My feelings? They have gone dead. I am paralyzed … ashamed, speechless, motionless …

“How can a 14-year-old, witnessing this unspeakable brutality, survive and then go on with his life, even though the picture of that murder often haunts him in waking and sleeping hours? How can the rest of the world let this happen, stand by this obscenity of obscenities, reenacted hundreds of thousands of times all around Germany and its occupied lands? And finally, question of questions, where was God in that moment at Brande?”

Walter Ziffer with George Loeffler, his best friend during the two years
between the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia and deportation. George, whom Ziffer remembers
as “a lovely boy with big blue eyes,” died in a concentration camp.

“I had become interested in anti-Semitism,” Ziffer says. “I’d run into it all the time in my years as a minister–not against me, but in front of me: anti-Semitic jokes, remarks about the Holocaust. I set out to do some research, which resulted in a book, The Teaching of Disdain, about New Testament attitudes toward Jews. And then I realized that my place was with the Jewish people.”

After more than 25 years as a minister, Ziffer converted back to Judaism and became active in synagogue life. He moved once more, in 1993, to a town near Asheville, N.C.

This year he will have lived there longer than he has lived anywhere else in his life.
Now divorced and remarried, he turns 81 this year and continues to teach as an adjunct professor of Jewish studies at Mars Hill College in North Carolina. He published The Birth of Christianity from the Matrix of Judaism in 2000.

After years of study, teaching and searching, Ziffer seems to have found some of what he sought. At the end of his speech in Florida last spring, he was able to offer an answer to his question of questions about God’s presence in the world. He quoted a rabbinic interpretation of God’s words to Israel in the book of Isaiah: “When you are my witnesses, I am God. When you are not my witnesses, I am not God.”

“What does that mean?” Ziffer asked the audience. He answered with conviction. “The miraculous is for us to achieve. By witnessing to God–by practicing kindness, compassion, justice and love–we, you and I make God present. When, on the other hand, we turn our heads away in an effort not to see and not to get involved, God is truly absent.”

Fred Westfield, BA’50

The realities of refugee life dampened Fred Westfield’s faith that he would attain a college education.

He and his family escaped Germany before World War II started, but not all at once. Westfield’s older brother, Erich, was the first to obtain a U.S. visa. He joined his uncle Robert in Nashville in 1936, when he was just 15.

In January 1939, 12-year-old Fred was sent to England as part of the Kindertransport, the famed rescue effort that relocated 10,000 German, Austrian and Czechoslovakian Jewish children to Great Britain in the late 1930s.

“Every night I doubted whether I would ever see my parents again,” Westfield says. He was placed with a foster family of Polish Jewish immigrants in London.

Westfield’s parents managed to secure visas to England in the summer of 1939. They were helped by money that Westfield’s uncle Walter had smuggled out of Germany. It was painful for them to have to use it.

Twelve-year-old Fred Westfield as his train departs Germany en route to England, where he would stay with a foster family.

Walter was in prison for two and a half years. At the end of his sentence, the Nazis deported him to concentration camps. He died in the death chambers at Auschwitz.

Westfield and his parents were allowed to immigrate to the United States in 1940. They joined Erich in Nashville. Another of Westfield’s uncles, the artist Max Westfield, also escaped to Nashville with his wife and two children.

Fred was born Fritz Meinhard Westfeld, but German officials added “Israel” to Jewish males’ names and “Sara” to Jewish females‘ names when they issued identity cards.

“He didn’t want to use my Uncle Walter’s money,” Westfield remembers. “How would you feel using your brother’s money–a brother who’s been imprisoned and later murdered? My father took odd jobs. He sold cola at the Mays’ hosiery factory. My mother worked, too.”

Westfield wanted to do his part.

“The summer before I turned 16, I took a job,” Westfield says. “There was a program where you could go to school an hour early and then get out in the afternoons to work, with the idea that you were learning a trade. My father–with all that was happening to us–I think he liked the idea of a Jew on the move learning a trade. I became a watchmaker and sold jewelry. I was good at it. I thought that is what I would become.”

The Army changed all that. Westfield served as an instructor at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, applying his watchmaking skills to the repair of optical instruments used in weaponry. After his service, Westfield used the G.I. bill–which included an extra stipend for those who were supporting parents–to go to college. He chose Vanderbilt, as had his brother, Erich, BE’43.

A 1936 portrait at the family home in Essen, Germany, includes Fred, at the front and to the left of his cousin, Gerd Michael Westfield, BA'49, with brother Erich, BE'43 (wearing breeches), and cousin Hannah Westfield Kahn, BA'48, at the right end of the back row.

After earning his Ph.D. there, he became a professor at Northwestern University. In 1965 he accepted a professorship from his alma mater and came home to Vanderbilt. Now retired, he is professor of economics, emeritus.

Besides Fred and Erich, who lives in Oklahoma, there were others in the family who came to Vanderbilt, too–their cousin Hannah Westfield Kahn, BA’48, who lives in New Jersey; Hannah’s late husband, Charles Harry Kahn, BA’46; and another cousin, the late Gerd Michael Westfield, BA’49.

Dietrich Westfield, who was an intellectual at heart–in his 70s, he started reading the classics in Greek–was proud of his sons’ academic and professional achievements. He had lost much in the war. But his sons had found their way in a new country.

Vanderbilt’s Holocaust Lecture Series

Each fall Vanderbilt invites the community to participate in
what has become the longest-running Holocaust lecture series
at any American university. Begun in 1977 by Beverly Asbury, then Vanderbilt University chaplain, it provides a forum for diverse perspectives on the Holocaust and other genocides.
Find out more:
www.vanderbilt.edu/religiouslife/holocaustlectures.html

Last winter Shane Thurman, a 42-year-old construction worker from Crossville, Tenn., became one among an estimated 45 million Americans without health insurance when he was dropped from the rolls of TennCare, Tennessee’s state-run Medicaid insurance program. Thurman’s employer didn’t provide health insurance, and his income wasn’t sufficient to meet his other basic needs and pay for medical insurance.

On Jan. 10, 2007, a few weeks after he lost his insurance coverage, Thurman was working on the roof of an old building in Crossville, helping to demolish it, when his body came into contact with an electrical transformer attached to a power pole. In a millisecond, the high-voltage electrical current grabbed his body and held him in its deadly grip for what felt like forever. When Thurman finally broke free from the current, he was thrown from the roof to the ground 30 feet below.

Thurman sustained critical electrical burns to 40 percent of his body. The fall broke most of his ribs and several vertebrae in his back. He was flown by Vanderbilt’s air ambulance, LifeFlight, 110 miles to the Vanderbilt Regional Burn Center where he spent the next 52 days.

“I wasn’t even aware I was alive for 48 days,” Thurman says. “I had eight or 10 skin grafts and four or five back surgeries.”

The accident left Thurman a paraplegic, paralyzed from the torso down. “I’m lucky to even wake up each morning,” he says. “The doctors told my family on several occasions that I was going to die. But I fooled them.”

Total charges for Thurman’s lifesaving care during the 52 inpatient days he spent in Vanderbilt University Hospital: $919,587.76.

Thurman’s will to survive certainly helped, but the real reason he’s still alive is the comprehensive and highly specialized medical care he received, without consideration of cost.

Vanderbilt opted to write off Thurman’s nearly $1 million in medical bills. “That tickled me to death,” he says, “because I have enough else to deal with.”

During fiscal year 2007, Vanderbilt University Medical Center provided $240 million worth of uncompensated medical care to patients.

Across the country, treating patients like Shane Thurman is becoming an ever-greater challenge for academic medical centers that are struggling with unprecedented growth in the numbers of uninsured patients.

“The increase in uninsured patients is placing the entire health-care system in jeopardy, and academic medical centers are especially vulnerable,” says Dr. John Sergent, BA’63, MD’66, professor of medicine and vice chair for education in the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. “Our emergency departments are usually the major sources of emergency care for our communities. And we often are the sole providers of critical services.”

In addition to caring for patients like Shane Thurman who face immensely complicated courses of treatment, Vanderbilt University Medical Center each year provides uncompensated care to thousands of other medically uninsured or underinsured patients, young and old, whose health problems span the spectrum of illness and injury.

To put $240 million worth of free medical care into context, this dollar amount represents approximately 7.4 percent of the medical center’s $3.2 billion in gross patient revenue for the current fiscal year.

“Teaching hospitals end up bearing a disproportionate share of the cost of treating the uninsured because they are typically the only providers in a marketplace for trauma services, burn services, organ transplantation, and limb amputation due to mismanagement of diabetes,” says Paul Keckley, executive director for the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions in Washington and one of the nation’s leading experts on health-care economics and policy. Keckley helped establish, and is currently a professor in, the Owen Graduate School of Management’s Healthcare MBA Program.

“This type of care happens largely in the world of academic medicine,” Keckley says. “And the care of these patients represents one-half the impact of the nation’s total uncompensated care pool.”

“About 6 percent of VUMC’s patients have no form of health insurance,” says Warren Beck, VUMC’s vice president of finance for the clinical enterprise. “Another 1.5 percent may have insurance but cannot pay their portion of the balance after insurance.”

A Growth Industry

Middle Tennessee’s health-care industry is enormous–by most measures Nashville has evolved into the nation’s third-largest aggregation of health-care companies.

For the health-care market in which VUMC operates–competing with other nonprofit and for-profit hospitals for its patients–Vanderbilt provides more free care than all other Metro Nashville hospitals combined, including Baptist, St. Thomas, Centennial, Metro General, Summit, Skyline, Tennessee Christian and Southern Hills.

Vanderbilt University Hospital and the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt operate at nearly 90 percent patient occupancy year-round. “One of our primary missions is to provide those unique and essential medical services that no other health-care facility in Middle Tennessee is willing to provide,” says Dr. Harry R. Jacobson, vice chancellor for health affairs. “Affording patients access to these services based strictly on someone’s ability to pay would be contrary to our philosophy and our mission.”

Over the last 12 years, the significant role VUMC plays supporting TennCare, and its commitment to providing care for the uninsured, has positioned Vanderbilt as Nashville’s charity hospital and Tennessee’s largest provider of Medicaid services.

The Decline of Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance

While TennCare has presented a significant challenge for Vanderbilt as it copes with a growing population of uninsured patients, it’s not the only factor. Compounding the problem are three significant trends that are producing huge numbers of patients unable to pay their medical bills: a decline in the number of employers who provide health benefits; more workers who carry modest health insurance on themselves but not for family members; and an influx of millions of uninsurable immigrants.

As more Americans struggle to find a way to access affordable health insurance, changes in the insurance industry and in employer-based insurance programs are causing more of the cost for health care to be shifted to enrollees. The percentage of Americans who are uninsured keeps rising largely because the percentage of people with employer-sponsored coverage continues to decline.

And therein lies the fundamental systemic flaw in our nation’s health insurance delivery, says Keckley–our dependence on employers to provide health insurance. “Only the U.S. and a few other nations such as New Zealand have similar systems of employer-sponsored health insurance. But there is no law in our country that says employers must provide health insurance.”

Approximately 60 percent of U.S. employers now provide health insurance. The 40 percent that do not offer insurance tend to employ large numbers of hourly workers and have substantial employee turnover.

As health-insurance costs keep rising, so does the number of employers that offer health insurance only for the employee but not for the employee’s family. The average health-insurance premium for a family without employer-provided coverage is about $1,000 per month.

No wonder half of all the nation’s involuntary bankruptcies are the result of medical bills, says Keckley.

“Horrible traumatic accidents most often happen to the working class,” says Dr. Jeff Guy, director of Vanderbilt’s Regional Burn Center and a member of the team of physicians and nurses who saved the life of Shane Thurman. “Unfortunately, it’s people like Mr. Thurman who are in that abyss and ineligible for health insurance through their employer, or through any other form of assistance.”

As access to various normal avenues to health insurance has dwindled over the last several years, Guy’s burn program has been left to cope with more highly resource-intensive patients with no insurance.

Guy oversees the only dedicated burn-care facility in Tennessee, and the largest burn center in several adjoining states. Burn care is so expensive that many hospitals–including every health-care facility in the state of Mississippi–have backed away from providing this service. Even one patient can make a huge impact on the bottom line, and Guy is forced to deal with the economic challenges of treating several Shane Thurmans each year.

At the same time more employers are opting out of offering health insurance, some states, like Tennessee, are aggressively working to control their Medicaid spending through measures such as denying insurance coverage or capping reimbursement fees.

“We’re at a point where Medicare and Medicaid are now paying less than the cost of care for the lives they cover,” says Keckley. Reimbursement providers that may not match the cost of care include Medicare, Medicaid, Worker’s Comp and SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program).

Charging Peter to Treat Paul

“That shortfall in reimbursements, in combination with the growing number of uninsured individuals, is forcing doctors and hospitals to try to make up the difference on the backs of employers who do provide a benefit,” Keckley says. “What we are facing is a perfect storm, a meltdown.

“We are asking a third of the people who use the system and who have insurance to pay for the other two-thirds, either in full or in part.”

Shifting costs to paying patients is undeniably a part of the budgeting strategy for medical centers like Vanderbilt. But, fortunately for all Vanderbilt patients, recent unparalleled growth has allowed it–so far–to combat major changes in Tennessee’s health-care policy.

In fiscal 2007, VUMC’s hospitals recorded 50,716 inpatient discharges, its emergency departments treated 98,107 patients, and 1,095,559 outpatients were seen in its clinics. Demand for services remains so high that in January, VUMC embarked on a $235 million construction project to erect a third inpatient tower on Vanderbilt University Hospital. The new tower will add 141 inpatient beds, new operating rooms, procedure rooms and intensive care units.

“For the last two years, we have been dealing with near double-digit volume growth across all major indicators,” says Warren Beck. “Whether it is inpatient admissions, outpatient visits, surgery or emergency-department visits, this growth has allowed us to meet our obligations and improve our ability to conquer diseases like cancer, diabetes and heart failure. If we hadn’t had this growth, we would be in a horrible situation.”

Managerial oversight during the past five or six years also has helped Vanderbilt to cope with a huge increase in uninsured patients. Efforts to add inpatient and outpatient capacity–through new clinic space and the recruitment of new faculty, for example–have allowed new growth. More patients overall means more paying patients to help offset those who cannot.

Operations-improvement initiatives that began in the early 1990s and ongoing efforts to provide the best care in the most efficient manner (called “best evidence medicine” within the industry) have so far allowed the medical center to provide services and still finish each fiscal year in the black. Every year, though, the financial picture becomes more challenging. Changes with Tenn-Care in August 2005 increased uncompensated care by $87 million in fiscal 2006 and by an additional $45 million during fiscal 2007. That sort of growth in uncompensated care isn’t sustainable.

Virtually all of VUMC’s clinical programs, says Beck, have seen growth in the number of uninsured patients they treat due to changes TennCare made in 2005. Trauma and burn-care services, cardiology, orthopaedics and general medicine have all felt the impact, with the division of trauma and surgical critical care hit the hardest. But the medical center has made an effort to ensure that clinical programs shouldering a greater percentage of uninsured patients are not penalized for financial performance based on their predicament.

“In order to recoup a portion of lost revenue, we are placing an emphasis on growing higher-margin services and offering a broader menu of services that brings insured patients into the hospital,” Beck says. “We’ve learned that we’re far better off to have our margin spread across all our services rather than rely on just a few.”

The Road Ahead

“Clearly, one of our ongoing challenges is figuring out how to better manage the population of uninsured patients,” says Beck. “We need the state to develop a broader network of doctors and hospitals participating in TennCare so patients don’t have to travel long distances to come to Vanderbilt. Another initiative we have pursued is working with Nashville’s Emergency Medical System to make sure patient transports by Metro EMS are rotated from hospital to hospital–not just brought to Vanderbilt. But implementation can be slow and difficult to monitor.”

At the same time Vanderbilt is taking on an ever-growing number of uninsured patients, Tennessee’s state treasury is sitting on a huge budget surplus. A large pot of money in reserve probably means drastic changes to TennCare are unforeseen for the time being, Beck says.

“And, optimistically, this might indicate a possibility of some form of relief in the TennCare program–perhaps an expansion of benefits offered through TennCare’s new program for employees of small businesses called Cover Tennessee,” he adds. “Something like that might push excess reserve funds back to the hospitals and doctors that are bridging the gap for so many of the working folks who are uninsured.

“The clinical programs we want to provide are very expensive, high-acuity programs you don’t see in community hospitals. If we are the only provider in the region who offers them, then everyone needs to have access,” Beck says.

Jeff Guy likens his role and responsibility to that of a park ranger in a national forest. “We have to be good stewards of our resources so those resources will be around for all of us,” he says. “We have never denied anyone access to burn care based on their ability to pay, and we won’t.”

Until academic medical centers like Vanderbilt and their patients get some form of relief, says John Sergent, “virtually every doctor I know will continue to be an amateur social worker trying to help uninsured and underinsured patients get the care they need.

“Tax credits, medical savings accounts, purchasing pools for small businesses and other ideas have been floated,” he adds, “but it is unlikely that any of them would have a significant impact on the uninsured.”

Keckley says flatly, “There are no solutions that do not require us to think about funding some level of benefit for those 45 million people who are uninsured.”

Americans already spend more money per capita on health care than any other country, says Vice Chancellor Jacobson. But he doesn’t believe the entire responsibility should fall on the state or federal government. Better cooperation between health-care providers who are focused on patient care and insurance companies who are focused on the bottom line could help. “Eighteen percent of health-care costs goes to insurance companies getting their money, and 2 percent goes to the provider battling the insurance company.”

And more health-care providers need to step up to the plate, Jacobson adds. “Hospitals and doctors need to share more evenly the burden of caring for uninsured patients, rather than leaving it to the academic medical centers. If doctors were true to the Hippocratic Oath they took, they would take care of their fair share of Medicaid and TennCare patients and the load would be distributed more evenly.”

Small employers also should be asked to contribute to the solution somehow, says Jacobson. And patients themselves need to consider how their own behavior is driving up costs. “We overuse the health-care system. We run too many tests and give out too many prescriptions.”

“I don’t think anyone at Vanderbilt would want to say we have to start discriminating on trauma patients or premature babies based on their ability to pay,” says Beck. “Taking care of these patients is our mission, it’s our job, and the thing that keeps us coming to work every day.”

“It is our mission and our responsibility to heal people regardless of their ability to pay,” adds Jacobson. “For the moment, that means we have to work hard and be as efficient as we can be.”