Tisha Holloway was exhausted. She had been laboring in a North Carolina hospital for almost 26 hours to give birth to her first child, but the baby just wouldn’t come.

“I tried to do everything right during my pregnancy,” the 27-year-old woman says. “I ate right, exercised, kept my weight down. Just before I went into the hospital, my obstetrician said everything was fine.”

But something began to go wrong. Worried about the baby’s size, Holloway’s obstetrician decided to induce labor before her due date. The long labor began to stress both Holloway and her baby. Eventually, baby Jeda had to be delivered by Caesarean section.

Four days later Holloway left the hospital with a healthy 7-pound baby girl, postoperative pain, and a bill of $9,000.

“I was very upset,” she says. “I shouldn’t have been induced. If I had waited three or four days, Jeda might have come naturally. I decided I would never have another child.”

But when Jeda was 1 year old, Holloway changed her mind. This time she searched the Internet for a way to have a vaginal birth after Caesarean section (VBAC). Her search led to the Vanderbilt nurse-midwifery fac-ulty practice and to certified nurse-midwife Linda Hughlett, MSN’04.

Hughlett reviewed Holloway’s records and explained that she had an 85 percent chance of delivering her second child vaginally. She monitored Holloway throughout her pregnancy, explaining the process each step along the way and involving Holloway in planning the baby’s birth. Last August, after 17 hours of labor, Holloway safely delivered another daughter, Jxia, vaginally at Vanderbilt University Hospital.

Vanderbilt nurse-midwives do not offer home births; all of their patients deliver in Vanderbilt Hospital’s labor and delivery suite. Women can labor in any position that feels comfortable. They can get out of the labor bed to walk around and even use hydrotherapy (immersion in a warm tub of water) to relieve labor pains. Their husbands and families can be with them throughout labor and delivery. They can choose to have their babies by “natural childbirth” or to receive analgesics and epidurals.

“It was amazing,” says Holloway of the nurse-midwife–assisted delivery. “I felt great and went home two days later. I recommend it 100 percent.”

Holloway had the kind of low-intervention birth she always wanted, supported by her husband and midwife. No surgery, no scarring, at half the cost of her first child’s birth.

Midwives Deliver

More than 4 million babies are born each year in the United States. Nurse-midwives assist in slightly more than 7 percent of those births. In 2005 the average hospital charge ranged from $7,000 for an uncomplicated vaginal birth to $16,000 for a complicated Caesarean section, according to a study funded by the Milbank Foundation.

Those figures have implications for the current national discussion about health-care reform.

After a difficult labor and an eventual Caesarean delivery of her daughter Jeda, Tisha Holloway turned to the nurse-midwife practice at Vanderbilt Medical Center for the successful delivery of her second daughter, Jxia.

“If you look at the statistics on maternal and infant health in many other countries that are much poorer than we are, they have much better outcomes,” says Colleen Conway-Welch, dean of the Vanderbilt University School of Nursing and a certified nurse-midwife. “I would suggest that one of the major reasons is that they make ample use of nurse-midwives.”

According to the American College of Nurse-Midwives (ACNM), 85 percent of all births are considered normal and don’t require medical intervention. In 2006, the most recent year for which statistics are available, certified nurse-midwives and certified midwives (both are certified by the American Midwifery Certification Board) delivered more than 300,000 babies in the United States, an increase of 33 percent since 1996.

Are nurse-midwife–assisted births safe? The ACNM says yes, and that midwife-assisted births result in lower rates of intervention. Certified nurse-midwives (CNM) follow the standard of care developed by the American College of Nurse-Midwives. The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology recommends against using midwives who have not been certified by the ACNM or have not passed the American Midwifery Certification Board exam.

“The word ‘midwife’ means ‘with woman,’” Conway-Welch says. “Nurse-midwives have a special philosophy: They are very patient. They take their cues for medication needs from the woman. The midwife role is to be supportive to the woman as she has her baby.”

Every year nearly 3,000 babies are born at Vanderbilt University Hospital. Today about one-fourth are delivered by certified nurse-midwives, who have delivered about 4,500 babies since the program began in 1995. Only about 135 babies were delivered by CNMs the first year, says founding director Barbara A. Petersen, associate professor of nursing.

Last year CNMs delivered 799 babies at Vanderbilt Hospital. Of those, 4.1 percent were premature. Ten percent of the mothers were referred to obstetricians for Caesarean sections. About 30 to 35 infants were transferred to the neonatal intensive care unit. One fetal death and no maternal deaths occurred.

By contrast, 14.8 percent of all babies born in Tennessee in 2006 were premature, according to the Tennessee Chapter of the March of Dimes, and the state’s overall infant mortality rate was 8.8 per 1,000 births.

Vanderbilt has two nurse-midwifery programs: one based in the School of Nursing and another in the School of Medicine.

The School of Nursing offers the only master’s-level nurse-midwifery program in the state of Tennessee. Its clinical practice is the only one in Nashville where certified nurse-midwives deliver full-scope care to low-risk mothers.

Vanderbilt School of Nursing offers one of only 38 fully accredited nurse-midwifery programs in the United States, says Francie Likis, BS’93, MSN’94, associate director of graduate studies for Vanderbilt’s Institute for Medicine and Public Health and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Midwifery & Women’s Health.

Since 1996, 168 master’s-level nurse-midwives have graduated from the VUSN program; 44 nurse-midwifery students are currently enrolled. Vanderbilt nurse-midwifery alumni practice all around the United States and internationally. They have won numerous awards, including the ACNM’s prestigious Kitty Ernst Award, which has been presented to both Likis and Julia Phillippi, MSN’99, instructor in the School of Nursing.

Role Reversal

Nurse-midwives at Vanderbilt play a major role not only in labor and delivery but also in educating Vanderbilt University School of Medicine residents. In the Division of Midwifery and Advanced Practice (MWAP), experienced nurse-midwives serve on the faculty, teaching obstetrics residents how to manage and deliver babies to low-risk mothers. MWAP is the first School of Medicine division completely staffed by non-physicians. It includes six certified nurse-midwives and seven women’s health nurse practitioners, according to director Deborah Wage, MSN’91, CNM, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology. Wage developed the division in 2006 along with Dr. Nancy Chescheir, then chair of the ob/gyn department.

Wage and her colleagues are integrating the midwifery model of care into the School of Medicine’s academic program—an approach that has proven successful at many of the top schools of medicine, including Brown, Duke and Tufts universities.

(For more about the important role that certified nurse-midwives play in the education of medical residents, view the July–August 2009 issue of the Journal of Midwifery & Women’s Health, including a paper by Wage co-authored with Assistant Professor Angela Wilson-Liveryman, CNM, and Joan Slager.)

Deborah Wage is director of the Division of Midwifery and Advanced Practice within the Vanderbilt School of Medicine. Her team of nurse-midwives teaches obstetrics residents how to manage and deliver babies to low-risk mothers.

“When we are in labor and delivery, we function as the ‘gatekeeper’ and have constant interaction as sort of a team leader among patients, residents, nursing staff and our M.D. colleagues,” explains Wage. “It is a very busy and robust role.

“Our goal is to give the residents more hands-on experience with normal obstetrics. In cases of high-risk patients, midwives team with perinatalogists, with the nurse-midwife providing for collaboration.”

“It’s a win-win situation,” observes Dr. Frank Boehm, MD’65, professor and vice chair of the Vanderbilt Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. “Nurse-midwifery is a wonderful addition to our department and hospital. They deliver low-risk pregnant patients and, in the event that low-risk status turns into a high-risk situation, the many resources of Vanderbilt staff and technology are there to help.”

Dr. Howard Jones III, the Betty and Lonnie S. Burnett Chairman of Obstetrics and Gynecology, concurs. “At Vanderbilt our nurse-midwives are a very valuable group of faculty members. They have a special ability to connect with and educate patients.”

Jones also points to one of the challenges posed by nurse-midwives. “At some point certain patients will need Caesareans or other interventions. It is very important for nurse-midwives to have a good relationship with obstetrician consultants. By and large we meet that challenge very well.”

Wage has received a $1 million grant from the state of Tennessee to institute a new prenatal care and educational program called Centering Pregnancy. A model that provides care to patients of similar gestational ages in a group setting, Centering Pregnancy is used at the ob/gyn department’s satellite clinic at Nashville’s 100 Oaks shopping center. The Tennessee Chapter of the March of Dimes is also funding a similar program at the Vine Hill/Franklin Road Community Clinic in Nashville’s Melrose area.

While new to Vanderbilt, Centering Pregnancy has been used at other medical centers for about 10 years. “It has a track record of improving perinatal outcomes,” Wage says. “We believe residents will take this model with them when they leave Vanderbilt.”

Tonia Moore-Davis, clinical practice manager for Vanderbilt School of Nursing’s nurse-midwifery faculty practice, examines patient Heather Olson at the West End Women’s Health Center.

Care Across the Lifespan

Vanderbilt School of Nursing’s nurse-midwifery specialty prepares students to manage the obstetric and primary health-care needs of women across the lifespan, as well as care for the typical newborn. Students who opt for the dual midwife/family nurse practitioner program are qualified to care for both the woman and her family. VUSN graduates also are eligible to take the national board certification exam.

VUSN supports clinics at two sites: the West End Women’s Health Center and the Vine Hill/Franklin Road Community Clinic. The university owns the West End site, where the mostly Caucasian patients have an average age of 30, are often college educated, and are generally covered by commercial health insurance.

Vine Hill/Franklin Road is a federally qualified health center owned by University Community Health Services Inc. The company contracts with VUSN nurse-midwives to provide care for their patients, many of whom are African Americans or immigrants with an average age of 26. Most are underserved and either uninsured or covered by TennCare, the state’s Medicaid program.

Patients at both sites range from teenagers to women in their 40s. The nurse-midwives also provide primary gynecological care, including pap smears, breast examinations, and referrals for mammograms and bone-density tests for osteoporosis.

Professional fees are based on a sliding scale. The maximum charge for an uncomplicated labor and delivery by a certified nurse-midwife is $1,200, while the average insurance reimbursement for comprehensive
obstetrical care is $3,000, says Tonia Moore-Davis, clinical practice manager of VUSN’s nurse-midwifery faculty practice. Hospital fees are extra.

“Patients can also save money by choosing nonmedicated deliveries; having fewer unnecessary tests, inductions and surgeries; and shortened hospital stays,” Moore-Davis says.

When a woman like Tisha Holloway chooses to see a nurse-midwife, she is followed closely, just as she would be by a physician. Her weight, blood pressure and baby’s size are checked with each office visit. However, she only receives and pays for laboratory tests that are necessary for her individual situation. Repeated ultrasounds and unnecessary blood tests are rarely ordered, but women may choose genetic counseling and amniocentesis if desired.

“We believe that pregnancy and birth are typically normal, healthy events,” says Mavis Schorn, associate professor of nursing and director of nurse-midwifery at the School of Nursing. “We include the woman in decisions about her pregnancy and birth. We strive to prevent complications through prenatal education about such issues as appropriate weight gain to decrease the incidence of pregnancy-related diabetes and high blood pressure.”

Nurse-Midwives and Health-Care Reform

Studies show that childbirth in the United States routinely involves relatively low nurse-midwifery rates, high Caesarean-section rates, and high neonatal death rates. According to the Milbank Foundation, childbirth is the leading cause of hospitalization in the U.S., and Caesarean sections are the most common operating-room procedures. Pregnancy and delivery are the most costly hospital conditions for both Medicaid and private insurers, followed by care for newborns.

“The United States spends a substantial portion of its health-care dollars on maternity care with no improvement in perinatal outcomes,” wrote Francie Likis in a 2009 Journal of Midwifery & Women’s Health editorial. “In addition, some maternity-care trends in this country are associated with an increase in adverse outcomes. For example, the rate of Caesarean deliveries continues to increase annually despite evidence that this major surgery is overused and has associated health risks for both the mother and newborn.”

Nurse-midwives have the potential to save money for mothers, hospitals and society by providing low-intervention, high-quality health care for less money. “Certified nurse-midwife patients have shorter lengths of stay, fewer NICU admissions, lower C-section rates, fewer low-birth-weight infants and higher breastfeeding rates,” says Moore-Davis. “Those are all measures that translate to less health-care expense.”

According to the ACNM, certified nurse-midwives and certified midwives assist in 11 percent of vaginal births. If midwifery is safe and cost effective, why isn’t it more widespread?

Mavis Schorn, director of nurse-midwifery at Vanderbilt School of Nursing, says nurse-midwives continue to face longstanding barriers to their practice despite the fact they provide high-quality health care for less money.

“Nurse-midwives face several barriers to practice, particularly in the Southeast,” says Professor Schorn. “Some insurance plans don’t cover our services. Tennessee laws mandate that nurse-midwives must be under a physician’s supervision to write prescriptions. In addition, hospitals are not required to grant us admitting privileges even with appropriate credentials.

“The ACNM is working with Congress to remove various barriers in order to improve women’s health care and allow nurse-midwives to practice to the full extent of their education and training,” she continues. “But it’s very important that our alumni become involved in the current health-care debate.”

The current debate is more about health-care financing than health-care reform, says VUSN Dean Conway-Welch. “Before we address health-cost reform, we must address the non-system of health care in this country. We need to have the right provider at the right time giving the right care to the right patient for the right reason at the right cost.”

For women with low-risk pregnancies, that provider just might be a certified nurse-midwife.

Dr. O. Gordon Robinson, BA’53

When Dr. O. Gordon Robinson, an established plastic and reconstructive surgeon in Birmingham, Ala., saw his 50th birthday on the horizon, he started a to-do list.

“One of the things I wrote down was ‘plastic surgery in the Third World,’” says Robinson, who specializes in pediatric burn treatment and cleft lip and palate surgery. He signed up with the Christian Medical Society, which sent him on several trips to Coyoles, Honduras, a remote, impoverished town where the Dole Food Co. (then known as Standard Fruit) runs a 17,000-acre banana farm.

Robinson fell in love with Coyoles. No other medical aid organizations had a presence there. There was a tiny hospital—not much more than a clinic compared to what might be found in the United States—and a big need. After his two-year arrangement with the medical society ended, Robinson decided to start his own small operation, so he began looking for a site.

“I flew all around the Caribbean in my Cessna looking for a place,” Robinson says. “I went to several, but I always ended up back in this little village. I think you bloom where you’re planted, and that’s where we got planted.”

Robinson’s work in Coyoles has continued to bloom for nearly 30 years. He takes a team two or three times a year for about 10 days per trip. When he started, the teams were small: Robinson; his wife, Kitty; a nurse and another doctor. Now he takes up to 12 people, including several nurses and doctors. He estimates they’ve performed more than 4,000 surgeries, mostly on children.

“Now we average about 80 general anesthesias a trip, and about 30 cleft palate surgeries,” Robinson says.

“We take care of a lot of burns and cuts from machete fights, and we do a lot of hand surgery. They cook on charcoal clay stoves, and the children have no supervision whatsoever, and they get burned.”

Robinson’s team also arranges a clinic day during the trip when as many as 300 people come for general-practice care. The patients often receive supplies along with their medical treatment. “We give them toothbrushes, toothpaste. We had a little boy—he and his mother walked for about six hours to reach us. We fixed his eye and gave him shoes.”

For nearly 30 years cosmetic surgeon O. Gordon Robinson has traveled regularly to Coyoles, Honduras, leading a team of medical volunteers who perform cleft lip, cleft palate and hand surgeries, and treat burns, cuts and other injuries for the impoverished people of that town.

In short, when Robinson sees a need, he acts to fill it. In 1981 he set up a private foundation to solicit medical supplies, equipment and shipping services for his Coyoles work. In the early 1990s, using mostly their own money, the Robinsons built and equipped a surgical addition to the small Coyoles hospital for two operating rooms and a recovery room. When Hurricane Mitch devastated Honduras in 1998, Robinson rounded up planes, including two C-130s through one of Alabama’s U.S. senators, to carry 1 million pounds of food and supplies and two airplane loads of medicine to the area.

“In Honduras we ran into a Canadian MASH unit with two helicopters and no medicine, so we hooked up with them,” Robinson recalls. “And we went to two villages a day that were wiped out in the hurricane.”

Now in his late 70s, Robinson thinks about retiring, but it’s not going so well. He made an attempt five years ago, leaving Birmingham to live southeast of the city on a spread near Alexander City, but he’s back to a four-day work week as a cosmetic surgeon. In September he took another team to Coyoles. Nevertheless, Robinson eventually plans to hand over his Coyoles operations to doctors from the University of Alabama, while staying involved on the administrative side.

In the meantime, what about the other items on his decades-old to-do list?

“You know, I can’t remember the other nine,” Robinson says, and he bursts out laughing.
Find out more: www.therobinsonfoundation.com

Jon Albert

Jon Albert, BA’84

Jill Albert was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer when her two children were still in elementary school.

“Her biggest fear was that they would forget her,” says

Jon Albert, her husband. “For parents facing late-stage cancer, there’s tremendous dread, tremendous guilt. You can take drugs to mask the physical pain, but you dread missing the milestones.”

Jill died in November 2006, two weeks after sharing with her family the kickoff celebration for the Jack & Jill Late Stage Cancer Foundation, founded by Jon to help families like theirs create memories that would outlast cancer. Her son was 13 years old, and her daughter was 11.

Above: Jill Albert shortly before her death. Right: Jon Albert with his two children, Jamie and Jake.

The Jack & Jill Late Stage Cancer Foundation provides dream vacations—the foundation calls them WOW! Experiences® —for families with a parent who has terminal cancer. Above, the Comeau, Magras and Canady families enjoy their vacations together. “Most of the moms and dads the foundation ‘treats’ die within two to five months after their WOW! Experience,” says foundation founder Jon Albert. “This time as a family is meaningful, tangible and indispensable. Our supporters are giving these families a cherished timeout together, while they still can. What a gift.”

The Atlanta-based foundation arranges for families battling late-stage cancer to go on weeklong vacations—the foundation calls them WOW! Experiences®—designed to help them escape the day-to-day and focus on enjoying each other. Many families travel out of town for this week, but those who need to stay close to home, typically for medical reasons, receive the same pampering, with special activities, hotels, transportation and meals provided. All participating families are referred to Jack & Jill by an oncologists’ network that Jon continues to expand.

The week’s goal is twofold: to allow the nuclear family some protected time together, and to help the children cope with the scary reality they face.

“It’s sad and cruel when a child must watch a parent deteriorate and die,” Jon says. “When cancer strikes, the focus is on the patient. Nothing else is ever the same. The vacations, the weekends, the holidays aren’t the same. And as much as a 9-year-old can understand, it’s hard to accept that you can’t be a normal kid. So we focus on the children.”

This, Jon says, helps the parents, too. “When you get to late-stage cancer, you don’t give up. My wife was parasailing four months before she died. You want to be there for your kids.”

Jon’s idea for the foundation was informed by conversations he had with others in his family’s situation.

“When you’re going through treatment with your wife, she’s in and out of chemo, in and out of radiation. You meet other parents,” Jon says. “Despite advances in research, thousands of parents in their 20s and 30s die every year from cancer.”

Jon approached his idea with deliberate skepticism.

“I played devil’s advocate in the oncology community, with families and doctors,” Jon explains. “I said, ‘I’m not going to save anyone’s life. There are some people out there who don’t have enough money to drive their car to chemo or to put food on the table. There are more pressing concerns.’ But everybody said, ‘You’ve got to do this.’”

Establishing the foundation allowed Jon to redirect the skills he had learned as a successful business and marketing executive toward a project deeply connected to his life and family. When he explains the foundation’s operations and the hard work involved, his voice rushes with energy.

“It is exceptionally rewarding,” says Jon, who left the private sector when his wife’s condition became critical. “And it has given my two children an incredible amount of solace, a little bit of meaning behind what happened to Mommy.”

Find out more: www.jajf.org

Jeremy Barnicle

Jeremy Barnicle, BA’94

Jeremy Barnicle wants your attention.

He directs communications for Mercy Corps, an aid and development organization that operates in more than 35 war-torn and impoverished countries. This work demands resources. Mercy Corps’ budget tops $225 million a year, and it employs more than 3,700 people worldwide. Through his outreach, Barnicle helps bring in the money that makes its work possible.

“I spend most of my time thinking about how to connect with and mobilize Americans,” Barnicle says. “What are Americans doing with their time? What moves them? How can we mobilize this into social change?”

Barnicle grew up in a family that emphasizes public service. His father worked for the government, and Barnicle spent his teen years steeped in the political culture of Washington, D.C. At Vanderbilt he explored the three interests that inspire his professional life: politics, communications and foreign affairs. He wrote for The Vanderbilt Hustler, majored in public policy and traveled abroad. As a volunteer with Alternative Spring Break in Guatemala, he saw severe poverty up close for the first time.

Barnicle worked for a political campaign after graduation and then decided to join the Peace Corps, which sent him to Hungary to teach English.

“While I was there I worked in a refugee camp in southern Hungary for Bosnian war refugees,” he says. “I had the opportunity to work with and get to know people who were fresh out of the war zone. That was incredibly powerful to me.”

Mercy Corps, based in Portland, Ore., is an aid and development organization whose mission is to alleviate suffering, poverty and oppression by helping people of war-torn and impoverished nations to build secure and productive communities for themselves. Above: Jeremy Barnicle, communications director for Mercy Corps, photographs some children in Niger.

After the Peace Corps, Barnicle continued to pursue a career at the nexus of politics, foreign affairs and the media. He worked for a U.S. congressman, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He eventually made his way to the Woodrow Wilson School of International and Public Affairs at Princeton.

Top: Barnicle interviews a school principal in a Darfur refugee camp. At Vanderbilt, Barnicle was editor of The Vanderbilt Hustler. Bottom: Barnicle meets with the elders of a small town in Somalia.

In his work for Mercy Corps, Barnicle has stayed on the move. He has traveled to hot spots all over the globe—Gaza, Darfur, Burma and Afghanistan, to name a few—collecting stories to share with Americans back home.

“One thing I concluded from all these trips: There actually is a universal humanity,” he says. “People are way more alike than they are different. They want a livelihood, work, safety for their kids, prospects for their kids. In war zones people still laugh and get married and do all sorts of things.”

He has been floored by the generosity of people with little of their own.

“In Darfur, in ’05, I was at a displaced-persons camp during Ramadan,” Barnicle remembers. “I was walking around talking to people, and I went into one hut where there was a mother with her children. I asked her about Ramadan. I asked why she was fasting, and she said, with a straight face: ‘So we understand what it’s like to be poor.’ I found that very powerful. She was poor, facing unimaginable difficulty, and she was still thinking generously.

“A small sacrifice from us can have a huge benefit for people in the developing world. In Niger, $150 would give supplemental feeding and medical care to 10 mothers and their kids for six months,” Barnicle says. “I don’t want to preach or scold people about not doing enough. I think if people understood the impact they could have, they’d do it. My job is to help them understand.”

Find out more: www.mercycorps.org

Dr. Rebekah Naylor, MD’68

When she was a teenager, Rebekah Naylor realized the two great loves of her life: her Christian faith and medicine. She devoted herself to both, growing up to become a dedicated surgeon and missionary in Bangalore, India.

During her 30 years at Bangalore Baptist Hospital, Naylor treated thousands of patients, served as an administrator, established a nursing school that now bears her name, and helped to train the Indian doctors and administrators who would become the hospital’s next generation of leadership. She combined this medical service with her missionary calling, using prayer, teaching and music to promote her faith with patients, workers, and the community beyond the hospital’s walls.

“I was there first and foremost as a missionary, and I was there to share my faith in Jesus Christ and to show, through medical care, the love God has for them,” Naylor says. “There is no conflict between imperatives. They go hand in hand.”

Bangalore Baptist treats people of all faiths and means. The vast majority of its patients are Hindu. “There were many people who didn’t want to listen to a Christian message, and we didn’t force anyone to listen,” Naylor says. “It was up to them.”

Naylor pursued her career when female doctors were still unusual.

“At Vanderbilt there were seven women in my class—seven out of 48—which was unheard of,” Naylor says. Still rarer were female surgeons.

“During the summer between third and fourth year, I worked in a rural mission hospital in Thailand, and the surgeon let me help in the operating room,” Naylor says. She loved it and decided to train in surgery. “The internal medicine folks and the surgeons tried to convince me otherwise. They kept telling me, ‘Women don’t do this.’ They said you can’t have a family and be a surgeon.”

Left: Naylor visits with church members after a service honoring her for her work in Bangalore. Right: Dr. Rebekah Naylor, often called “the Mother Teresa of Bangalore,” makes the rounds with two interns and their professor at Bangalore Baptist Hospital. The hospital’s school of nursing is named in her honor.

Naylor’s persistence eventually won her support. She became the first woman to join the surgery program at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. “I was the only woman while I was there, and for five years afterward,” she says.

Naylor speaks with fellow physician Stanley Macaden during a return visit to Bangalore Baptist Hospital. She served 35 years as a missionary physician in India with the Southern Baptist International Mission Board.

Today Naylor is on the surgery faculty at UT Southwestern, having moved back to the United States in 2002 to care for her mother. Among her other activities, she mentors students interested in international health; this year an elective course she set up will send 21 students to work at Bangalore Baptist Hospital.

Naylor’s tenacity served her well in India, too, where she faced daunting professional and personal challenges.

“India itself, and certainly the people with whom I interacted, had a profound effect on my life. I don’t know how to really describe that. I’m not sure I have readjusted [to life in the United States] even yet,” says Naylor, who is pictured on the cover of her recently published biography in a bright pink sari. “There were hard times. A lot of people say, ‘You went there and gave up all these things.’ But for me it was a privilege. I felt tremendous joy.”

Find out more: The biography Rebekah Ann Naylor, M.D.: Missionary Surgeon in Changing Times, written by Camille Lee Hornbeck and published by Hannibal Books, is available online from Amazon.com and other retailers.

Zac Hood

Zac Hood, BA’05

It is difficult to imagine Zac Hood, the exuberant founder of Sports Servants, as a dispirited, disappointed man. Yet that was his state of mind five years ago.

Hood had dreamed of becoming a professional tennis player and had devoted years to his training. When a college injury put an end to his aspirations, he returned to his native Nashville, enrolled as a junior at Vanderbilt University, and went through the motions of being a student with his whole life ahead of him.

“I was a washed-up tennis player at that point, and bitter about it,” says Hood, now 26. “My senior year I had a spring break and free time—playing tennis during my first few years of college, I had never had much free time—and through a series of conversations with friends, I got hooked up with a guy who was going to Belize. I didn’t know anything about Belize.”

Since the founding of Sports Servants in 2006, 87 volunteers from 12 states and four countries have served 186 weeks in Belize. More than 700 Belizean children have attended the organization’s sports camps. “Our goal,” says founder Zac Hood, “is to empower people through sports in order to help build community in Northern Belize.”

Hood signed up for the mission trip, arranged by two campus ministries unaffiliated with Vanderbilt. The students were going to help build an addition to a school in a place called Corozal. Hood anticipated a “cookie-cutter mission trip.”

The week transformed his life.

“Every afternoon we would go to do vacation Bible school, and we would play soccer with the kids in this wide-open field for an hour,” Hood says. “When the kids heard our bus, they would come running out of their homes—a couple hundred kids in a couple of minutes.

“I began to realize the power of sports in my life, the way it shaped my character growing up. I saw that these opportunities weren’t available to these kids. I was naïve, and experiencing culture shock, but I put down my shovel while I was digging a ditch and had this vision of starting a basic sports program, and using it to help nurture and guide these kids in a way that I’d experienced.

“I went home from that week fully alive. I’d heard that you come back [from a mission trip] with a high, and then it slowly dissolves and you’re back to normal. But for me it only increased.”

After graduation from Vanderbilt, Hood took a full-time job at his high-school alma mater, Montgomery Bell Academy, working in alumni relations and coaching tennis. In his free time he created Sports Servants, a nonprofit that would bring organized sports programs to children in Belize. It launched its summer soccer camp in 2006.

“I really had no idea what I was getting into, being the CEO of a nonprofit, all the different hats and responsibilities,” Hood remembers. “For the first two years, it consumed all my hours outside work. It was my pulse, my heartbeat.”

Friends, colleagues and mentors, such as Mac Kelton, director of the nonprofit Belize Project, were his first co-conspirators, but word spread. Hood says 60 to 70 volunteers are now on board. Many are Vanderbilt students.

“It’s been quite a journey, a lot of hard work, a lot of people giving of their time,” he says with gratitude.

This year Hood cut back his MBA hours and became Sports Servants’ first paid staffer, drawing a part-time salary.

“We’re looking to start eight to 10 school programs this fall for about 2,000 kids, versus 200 to 400 kids during the summers,” he says. In the long term Hood envisions expanding Sports Servants throughout Belize and into other countries, turning programs over to local leaders as they become sustainable.

Asked how he would advise peers interested in public service, Hood replies, “Jump in and serve something that really draws you. You have to be alive in what you’re doing.”

Find out more: www.sportsservants.org

PHOTO BY HERB PECK"I have sometimes said that during the half dozen or so years from 1967 to 1973, I never relaxed once," Vanderbilt’s fifth chancellor, Alexander Heard, once remarked. “That’s not technically true, of course, but I was constantly aware of the local and national matters that affected Vanderbilt’s welfare.”

The former dean of the graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a brilliant political scientist, Heard became Vanderbilt’s fifth chancellor in 1963. That same year George C. Wallace declared in his inaugural speech as Alabama’s governor, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!” Betty Friedan launched the women’s movement with the publication of The Feminine Mystique. In Dallas, President John F. Kennedy was shot to death while waving to crowds from an open convertible.

And his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, confirmed that the U.S. would continue supporting South Vietnam militarily and economically.

As vandalism and violent protests became the norm at colleges and universities during the 1960s and 1970s, Vanderbilt remained a relative citadel of peace. Fellow U.S. higher education administrators admired Heard for maintaining campus stability during a tumultuous time. Faculty members embraced him as a distinguished scholar in his own right. And students loved him because he listened to them. Early on, Heard began holding quiet regular meetings with student leaders, including campus radicals. His defense of the open forum survived challenges from both ends of the political spectrum.

“The university’s obligation is not to protect students from ideas, but rather to expose them to ideas, and to help make them capable of handling and, hopefully, having ideas,” he said in 1966.

Under Heard’s leadership Vanderbilt added three schools, constructed three dozen new or radically enlarged buildings, conducted two highly successful fundraising campaigns, doubled enrollment, increased the annual budget tenfold, and recruited faculty who achieved new levels of quality in teaching and research.

Heard, right, hosted John F. Kennedy when the president delivered the convocation address on May 18, 1963, at Dudley Field in celebration of Vanderbilt’s 90th anniversary.

Alexander Heard retired as Vanderbilt’s chancellor in 1982. That same year a secretary in Vanderbilt’s computer science department was injured by a bomb mailed to the university by the Unabomber. In Chicago seven people died after ingesting Tylenol capsules laced with potassium cyanide. And in Washington, D.C., groundbreaking ceremonies were held for a memorial to honor 58,000 Americans who gave their lives in Vietnam.

The world by then seemed more sinister and more cynical. But Heard, in his parting remarks to graduating students on Curry Field that May 14, quoted Thomas Jefferson: “[L]aws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times.”

Alexander Heard would live another 27 years after his retirement as chancellor, frequently lunching with faculty members at the University Club on campus and working from his office at Kirkland Hall well into his 80s. He was 92 when he died on July 24, survived by his wife, Jean Heard, and four children: Stephen, a Nashville attorney; Christopher, an acknowledgements coordinator for Vanderbilt’s Division of Development and Alumni Relations; Frank (BA’75, MBA’80), a Florida businessman; and Cornelia Heard, the Valere Blair Potter Professor of Violin and chair of the string department at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music. Chancellor Heard’s ashes were interred at Benton Chapel, near the main building of the Jean and Alexander Heard Library.

For this issue Vanderbilt Magazine asked five people who knew Heard to share their memories.

Frye Gaillard, BA’68

It happened again and again in the 1960s. Chancellor Alexander Heard would appear at a Vanderbilt basketball game—one of his favorite pastimes back in those days—and as he made his way to his courtside seat, the entire student body would stand to applaud. All across the nation these were days of student unrest, and more and more as the decade progressed, there were activist stirrings at Vanderbilt as well. But the rebellion was never directed at Heard.

On the contrary, most of us in school at that time, especially those who knew him well, regarded the chancellor with a respect that shaded almost into awe. Part of it was simply his accessibility. Once at a “meeting of the university,” events that were usually held in the spring at which students could ask anything they chose, a young woman rose to question the dress code. Was it really true, she demanded to know, that women students were forbidden to wear shorts on campus except to play tennis? And were they expected to wear raincoats on their way to the courts?

The dean of women, one of maybe 20 administrators arrayed on the stage to answer such questions, replied a little officiously that those indeed were the expectations. “Well,” said the student, growing testy herself, “how about a plastic, see-through raincoat?”

There was a moment of tension that Heard broke with a smile. “There goes the dress code,” he said, and with that the issue seemed to be settled.

The chancellor was never a stickler for rules, at least not the silly and artificial ones. He believed that students, in large measure, should govern themselves, for how else could they make their way in the world? As historian Paul Conkin would later conclude, Heard saw Vanderbilt as “a place where pleas for fuller freedom could be calmly heard.”

Talking with students in 1971

The most demanding test of that philosophy came in the spring of 1967, when the student-run Impact Symposium invited, among others, black power advocate Stokely Carmichael to appear on campus. Only a few years earlier, such an invitation might have been unremarkable. Carmichael had worked as a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organizer in some of the toughest places in the South, winning the respect of local black leaders for what one of them called his “hip and fear-no-evil style.” They knew that he carried a .22 pistol, but they also knew he didn’t want to use it, preferring instead to rely on his wits.

By 1967, however, Carmichael had become, theoretically at least, an advocate of violence in pursuit of black freedom. At Vanderbilt he delivered a well-reasoned address, introducing many of us to the concept of institutionalized racism—the notion that injustice in the country went deeper than the bigotry of sick individuals. But he also spoke the same day on the African-American side of town, shouting black power slogans that were followed by a riot. Some in Nashville blamed Vanderbilt, and specifically the chancellor, for refusing to rein in the unruly students who were responsible for Carmichael’s visit to the city.

“Nothing that could be said in the way of apology,” declared the Nashville Banner, “can remove the stench of Stokely Carmichael’s visit.” At a Vanderbilt Board of Trust meeting on May 5, 1967, there were some who wanted Heard to “eat crow,” as one historian would later put it. The chancellor responded with an unflinching calm. He rejected the offers of some of his allies to push through a vote of confidence by the board, contending instead that the Carmichael visit was simply routine, requiring no action by the trustees.

It was, Heard explained, a case of the university “being a university.”

“It hardly seems necessary,” he said, “to burden you with a defense of the free exchange of ideas, or of the freedom to hear and the freedom to read for our students, or of the educational value of these freedoms.”

In the weeks that followed that persuasive talk, Heard won national acclaim for his stand—and for Vanderbilt. For many of us who were students, meanwhile, he made an impression that never went away. In all of our meetings regarding Impact, there was never a moment—and I mean, not one—where he displayed the faintest trace of cynicism or departed from the public principles he espoused.

Of all the things I learned at Vanderbilt, nothing was more important than that.

Frye Gaillard, BA’68, was chairman of Impact the year that followed Carmichael’s visit. He says his experiences with Heard “put a human face on the definition of integrity.”

Susan Ford Wiltshire

I was not there, so I cannot vouch for this, but when I came to Vanderbilt in 1971, I heard it said that Alexander Heard concluded his inaugural remarks to his new faculty as follows: “And if we do this right, we’ll have some fun.” I still smile when I think of it.

Nor was I present during the tumultuous later ’60s, but I have friends who were Vanderbilt students at the time, and they adored Chancellor Heard. He stood up when it counted most, proclaiming the highest values of a university, the unbending commitment to the open forum as requisite for an open society. They believed him because his actions matched his words.

When Chancellor Heard decided to turn down the presidency of Columbia to remain at Vanderbilt, the faculty gave a huge party to thank him. And this was only the refusal we had heard about. He made a home with us because he was one of us.

One day I passed by as Chancellor Heard was rushing to get into his car in front of Kirkland Hall. “Where you going, Mr. Chancellor?” someone asked. He gave the only proper response: “I’m going to be late, that’s where.”

Heard returns to campus in 1969 after declining the presidency of Columbia University.

Heard had an exquisite work ethic. It was not unusual to see him headed home at the end of the day with not one but two briefcases. A friend in political science said that during Heard’s tenure as chancellor, he always had the highest number of scholarly publications of any member of the department—each year.

In 1976 I edited a special collection of papers on the Classical Tradition in the South, and I had found a venue for their publication as a special edition of the Southern Humanities Review. The journal, however, required a subvention of $1,500. I spent the better part of the next year being turned down—more than a dozen times as I recall. Finally, I wrote a memo to Chancellor Heard, describing the efforts I had made and asking him if he had any further ideas for me. A day or two later, I received a one-sentence memo on the chancellor’s distinctive blue paper: “I am happy to provide $1,500 from the Chancellor’s Contingency Fund. Good luck.”

When Alexander Heard called himself the senior faculty member, we believed him. With Heard as chancellor we felt confident because of his competence and confidence. Even in times of serious disagreement about policy—and I was publicly involved in such a disagreement in the early 1980s—no one ever worried about retribution or had reason to suspect dissimulation. We respected one another, and we were each doing our proper jobs. No one understood that better than the canny political scientist.

Heard was never chummy, never made plays for approval. Sometimes I thought that was because he was simply too busy. Now I rather think it was because he was focused. He was centered. Most of all, he was trustworthy.

Susan Ford Wiltshire, professor of classics, emerita, joined the Vanderbilt faculty in 1971 and is the former chair of the Department of Classical Studies.

Cornelia Heard

My husband has always been mercifully tolerant of my belief that my father, like Mary Poppins, was practically perfect. For me there is no bad memory, no time he was unfair, no time he was inconsistent, no time he was anything but a loving, generous, graceful, brilliant man. All my life I have felt fortunate in the extreme to have Alexander Heard as my father.

Papa, as we called him, loved life and appreciated every aspect of it. He loved his work and handled it with such ease that it didn’t seem like work. He loved his family and was devoted to my mother, to whom he was married for 60 years. He led by example and never imposed his opinions. He was a role model and set a high standard, and yet he always made others feel that their accomplishments and contributions were significant.

I have childhood memories of my three brothers and me going with my father at Christmastime to knock on doors for Big Brothers of Nashville, memories of sledding down the hill with him at night and ice skating on frozen Richland Creek, of decorating our 18-foot Christmas tree while hanging from the banister in the stairwell, and of hearing a strange humming noise outside the window one night at our friend’s cottage in Jamaica during a summer family vacation and realizing it was the dreaded “Jamaican Tickler” (Papa), who then burst in the house doing what ticklers do.

I still have the instructions he left the baby sitter when my parents went to Europe while we were quite young, stating our allowances: “Stephen 15 cents, Kit 10 cents, Frank 5 cents and Connie 1 cent, to be paid weekly.”

When we lived in Chapel Hill, N.C., I remember someone asking Papa how long it took him to mow the lawn, and he answered that it took one hour or, with the children’s help, two. In Nashville for years as a child I would hide behind the front door each day as Papa walked up to the house in the late afternoon; I’d pull the door open just as he reached for the knob. I remember my parents’ 40th wedding anniversary celebration at the home of our dear friends the Brittinghams, dancing with my father on the patio, then through the house, and out into the front driveway.

I remember a time when I was living in New York that he came to town and asked if I was free for dinner. When I told him I had to drive to New Haven, Conn., for an orchestra rehearsal, he decided to ride in the car with me for the 90-minute trip and then went directly to the station to catch a train back to New York.

Papa lived by his maxims, including, “Never write anything you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of The New York Times” and “It is not only that you must not violate ethics or break the law, but you must not have the appearance of doing so.”

The Heard family in 1962, from left: Frank, Stephen, Jean, Christopher, Connie and Alexander.

I remember my poor father cleaning up after our little dog, Alouette, who continually wet the carpets in the chancellor’s house. I remember summers at Pawley’s Island, S.C., in the Swinnie Cottage with our friends the Holstens—four adults, seven children and one bathroom. I remember the day he found out his mother had died; I saw him through the bedroom window at Pawley’s, lying on the bed for hours with his hand on his forehead.

Papa was from Savannah, Ga., and considered it the center of the universe. He loved jazz big-band music and Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole.

When he was in the Navy during World War II, he read the Bible from cover to cover, and when he was a graduate student at Columbia University, he went to a different New York church every Sunday. One of the cards we received after Papa died was from John Livingston, a fellow officer from the USS Laurens, the attack transport they served on in the Pacific during the war. Another was from Sam Olden, with whom my father spent two years as vice consul in Quito, Ecuador.

My father was a man of compassion and understanding. When my parents’ close friend Blanche Henry Weaver was ill and at the Health Center at Richland Place, my father visited her almost every day for the last year of her life.

After a Blair Patrons dinner and concert one night years ago (and a number of years after he had retired as chancellor), I was walking with my father back through the tables after it was over. A waiter approached my father and said, “Chancellor, I just wanted to let you know that my daughter will be enrolling in Vanderbilt this fall.” My father thanked him warmly for sharing that news and said it was the best news he had heard in six months.

Jean and Alexander Heard at home in 1984

My father’s integrity was a powerful example to my brothers and me. One memorable experience occurred when I was a sophomore in high school. Each student at my school was required to sign an honor pledge in the fall, stating that she would not cheat or break school rules and that she would report anyone whom she observed cheating or breaking school rules.

That fall I made the decision not to sign the pledge. I did not want to be bound to turn in my classmates, and I felt the pledge had lost meaning because there was quite a bit of cheating and students did not report infractions they observed. As a result of not signing the pledge, I was called before the student council and strongly urged by a faculty representative to sign it.

A subsequent meeting of the student council resulted in minutes that stated that all current students would be required to sign the pledge in the spring, or not be allowed to return in the fall.

I went to my parents and explained the situation and the new policy. When my father asked what I would do if I had to choose between signing a pledge I didn’t believe in and being asked not to return to school, I said I supposed I would have to sign the pledge.

He surprised me by saying that if I believed in my position, I should stand by it, even if it meant not returning to the school. He set up an appointment for me with the dean of students at Vanderbilt to discuss the Vanderbilt Honor System and the pledge the university used. The dean met with me, and we discussed many aspects of the pledge and the honor system. My father supported my efforts to draft a revised pledge and encouraged me to feel that I could participate in the process of bringing about change. He taught me that principles are more important than individual situations and that they are worth defending even when consequences seem harsh.

My father used to say that children needed parents who love them and are consistent in their expectations and behavior. He provided that love and consistency to the four of us, as well as much inspiration and a joyful approach to life.

Cornelia Heard is the Valere Blair Potter Professor of Violin and chair of the string department at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music.

John S. Beasley II

He was the most urbane and polished man I had ever met, and, like others, I was completely taken. On the law school faculty at the time, I saw him first a few days after his arrival on campus when he and Rob Roy Purdy, then vice chancellor, paid us a visit, and he went round the room giving each of us a handshake and a steady look into the eyes. He made a few appropriate remarks before leaving, again shaking each hand and this time calling us
every one by name as though he knew precisely who we were. Mercy, I thought. This man is remarkable.

I had the good fortune to work with him as a faculty colleague, then volunteer, then closely in other capacities at Vanderbilt, for more than three decades. He had a quick rich laugh which erupted from deep inside, and his sense of humor was acute. He used the language as a skilled surgeon would use the scalpel, precisely and with elegance. But he was kind, and I never saw him use that tool, over which he had such mastery, at the expense of another. On one early occasion when I wrote for him, he was careful with his “emendations,” ever in the educating mode. (“You have used ‘comprise’ here, John, when what you mean is ‘compose.’ Not only do they not mean the same thing but, in fact, each is the obverse of the other.” Who would have thought? But after that, who could forget?)

He was a good and patient sport when we hit the trails much later in search of the oil that would power the institution. Old trip reports recount the grace with which he undertook the difficult and, occasionally, the unpleasant. There were no “air kisses” in those days, and when he had to bestow a real kiss, he did it. He knew where the university needed to go, and he seldom shrank from urging those who could help, to do so.
He was modest and fair, a fine raconteur who could listen as well as talk. And his ability to listen helped him guide Vanderbilt through the turbulent ’60s and ’70s. He was a man of granite principle who sought skillfully and tirelessly to bring others to his point of view. He was often the ball bearing in the race between the inner collar of stability and the outer of change. At times everyone knew he was dead wrong, but history has tended to suggest that, despite their view, he was right. He led by example, and it was unselfconsciously both stylish and substantive.

It may seem presumptuous of one to write about such a person. But I have seen the testimonials from alumni who were students here under his chancellorship, both those who rallied for him and those who railed against him, and they all end with expressions of love and gratitude and an appreciation of who he was and what he meant to them and to Vanderbilt. And thus I am in position to attest to his remarkable legacy, one that is etched indelibly and gracefully on the tablet of the university as it is on the hearts of thousands and thousands of students whose lives, because of him, have been enlarged and made fuller and thus more useful to the world.

Often his thank-you note to some donor would begin, “Many and true thanks … .” On Vanderbilt’s behalf, and on all of ours, beneficiaries of his life and service, it is perhaps not inappropriate to end with a salute in that fashion. Many and true thanks, Mr. Chancellor.

John S. Beasley II, BA’52, JD’54, is vice chancellor, emeritus, and counselor to the chancellor.

Hail and Farewell With pinkies raised and tongues in cheek, founding members gather around Chancellor Alexander Heard (center, kneeling) on April 26, 1979, for the last rites of The Wild Bunch, a prank-loving group of students who came to signify the Heard era. “He really was a tremendous influence, especially the way he encouraged using the university as an open forum for the expression of new ideas,” says Wild Bunch member Mike Bagot, BA’77. Raised pinkies served as the official recognition symbol for Wild Bunch members. Read more about Vanderbilt’s fifth chancellor beginning on page 36. Photo provided by Vanderbilt University Special Collections & University Archives.

Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos

Alex Heard brought to the problems confronting college presidents a rare combination of personality and principle. His calm and confident approach to conflict helped. His curiosity and appetite for analyzing the history, context and possible consequences of problems were important. And his steadfast belief in the university as a special institution dedicated to—here I paraphrase him—“reinforcing and developing” the qualities essential to “a self-governing society, a political democracy, and the rule of law” surely helped him get through more than one meeting with impassioned students and outraged faculty.

I think the key to his success lies in the unique marriage of these personal traits and firm beliefs. Their authenticity, both the way he reasoned and related to others and what he believed in, gave him true authority as chancellor and drew to him the willing and ardent support of his students, faculty, staff and board of trust.

Jean and Alexander Heard at home in 1984

One of the important lessons I learned from Chancellor Heard has to do with his success in leading Vanderbilt through a period of financial distress. We are so preoccupied at the moment with our own sense of financial peril that we forget that the 1970s were also a period experienced as the “worst economy since the Great Depression.” The economic growth America had known since World War II disintegrated into growing unemployment, interest rates topping 20 percent, stagflation, and two crippling energy crises. After Vietnam and Watergate, there was a prevailing loss of faith in political leaders.

Yet between 1973 and 1981, Vanderbilt and Alexander Heard launched and saw to successful conclusion the largest capital campaign in the university’s history to that date. Chancellor Heard’s remarkable ability to speak to his times and simultaneously invoke the timeless value of the university inspired all to give of themselves.

He reminded listeners of the age-old relationship between social progress and the improvement of higher education. He kept a focus on the special significance of the American South as a place deeply in need of national attention and federal support to make improvements. He told a story in which significant universities led America to a land of perfected race relations and equal opportunity for all. He drew all eyes to Vanderbilt as a place where these noble goals ought to be pursued and inspired faith in a worthy mission.

And at the same time, he managed to remind the chancellors who would follow him of what he called one of the “modern paradoxes of the university,” that, as he phrased it, “A strong and alert institution will be willing with impunity to bite the hand that would feed it, to turn aside support for ends that it cannot properly claim or make its own.”

He cautioned us from his own time of shrinking university endowments, collapsing federal support, and alumni whose businesses and personal fortunes were at risk, you “must be on guard to remember that [you] raise money in order to run the university, not run the university in order to raise money.”

In his last commencement address, Chancellor Heard referred to what he called “the world’s irresistible compulsion to change.” I am convinced it was his careful, and what has to be called loving, attention to the characteristics of his time which enabled him to welcome change as the inevitable path to a better future.

He understood the unique economic, social and psychological conditions that had influenced and shaped the generation of students entrusted to him. He spoke knowingly to his faculty’s inherent need for autonomy and simultaneous need to identify with the destiny of their university. He studied and responded actively to the problems of immediate concern in Vanderbilt’s surrounding community, in Nashville, in the South, in America, and in the world at large.

After 20 years of leading Vanderbilt, he said goodbye in 1982 by reminding graduates and their families that universities must change “not their primary values, but their ways of living” and by encouraging them to help lead Vanderbilt “across new thresholds to create a better university, better in its educational distinctions, better in the range and value of its public services, better in the richness of spirit and daring imagination with which it looks forward.” Nearly 30 years later I find his words both inspiring and comforting. V

Nicholas S. Zeppos, Vanderbilt’s eighth chancellor, delivered this eulogy at a memorial service held in Benton Chapel on July 29. His remarks have been adapted for publication.

Heard at a 1966 news conference announcing the launch of the university’s new $55 million campaign

Moses immediately underwent surgery at Vanderbilt to remove a portion of her colon and ovaries—a procedure that can halt colon cancer if performed in time. But her cancer had metastasized to her lymph nodes, and three large liver tumors could not be removed without chemotherapy to reduce their size. The prognosis was not good.

“I was not at my best,” Moses recalls dryly. “I was in shock, losing blood, and on heavy pain medication. But I knew if I had to have this disease, Vanderbilt was the place to have it.”

Patient Jeanne Moses, in collaboration with clinical trials nurse Pamela McClanahan, is participating in clinical trials of an investigational drug that shows promise in halting tumor growth.

That’s because Vanderbilt offered a ray of hope, she says, in the form of oncologist Dr. Jordan Berlin and the Phase II clinical trial he was conducting to test an investigational drug that showed promise in halting tumor growth.

“I didn’t know a thing about cancer trials, which is odd when you consider my father’s work,” says Moses. “But I thought this was my best chance. Just the hope was enough for me to sign up, even if I got the placebo. But I would have done it anyway. That’s what you do: give back.”

Every year Vanderbilt investigators conduct more than 620 clinical research studies and drug trials with the goal of finding new treatments and cures for the diseases that plague us. Their work is that ray of hope—hope in science, discovery, and the belief that every person can help mankind.

And Vanderbilt investigators do mean every person.

“When we evaluate vaccines, it’s in healthy people between the ages of 18 and 49 first,” says Dr. Kathryn Edwards, director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Research Program, who has conducted successful vaccine trials for 43 years. “They have no underlying illness and can tolerate it the best.”

Edwards also heads the Vanderbilt Vaccine Treatment and Evaluation Unit, a $24 million program funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to test vaccines rapidly for a variety of developing infectious diseases. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have tapped Edwards and her team to test the H1N1 (swine) flu vaccine.

If swine flu becomes a bigger problem, “it will hit in all people, not just healthy adults,” Edwards explains. “We need to study it in children, then healthy people over 65, then the infirm over 65. We need Hispanics and African Americans, to make sure there aren’t differences in the way people respond. We need it all.”

Dr. Kathryn Edwards, shown here with a pediatric patient and the patient’s mother, has been conducting vaccine trials for 43 years.

Edwards, who has conducted major vaccine trials for smallpox, avian flu, malaria, cytomegalovirus and pertussis, actually welcomes the challenge of preventing swine flu.

“Swine flu is a good issue to engage people in research,” she says. “Pandemics or diseases that appear suddenly and infect a large number of people point out that you can do social distancing and hand washing, but ultimately you need a prevention strategy. You need a vaccine.”

For that you need a clinical trial—a regulated, systematic way to answer a question related to health care. Also called medical research or research studies, clinical trials are used to determine the safety and effectiveness of new drugs or treatments.

Edwards points out that volunteering for a research study offers benefits beyond the rewards of altruism. Trial participants receive a vaccine for a disease before it is made available to the public. Volunteers may be paid for their time and, depending on the study, may also receive free medical tests or treatment.

Risks also may be involved with clinical research. These risks must be spelled out in simple language on the research consent form—a federal requirement that applies to all studies involving humans. Trained nurses and physicians go over the risks with each potential volunteer and answer all questions before the person signs the form and enrolls in the study.

“People need to fully embrace and understand all the potential benefits and risks,” Edwards says. “If people can’t understand what’s involved, we don’t enroll them.”

Research volunteer Jennifer Gilbert, shown here with nurses Shawan Carr and Katie Crumbo, says her concern for others helped her overcome any misgivings about being a research volunteer. Safety concerns are the most common barrier to clinical trial participation, according to a Vanderbilt survey.

Research volunteer Jennifer Gilbert, BS’06, admits she was scared at the thought of volunteering for a Phase I clinical trial to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of an HIV vaccine in healthy, non–HIV-positive adults. A recent Vanderbilt survey showed that safety concerns are the most common reason people hesitate to join a clinical trial.

“I worried. I didn’t want to get AIDS,” says the 25-year-old Peabody College doctoral candidate. “But the HIV vaccine is different. No HIV enters participants’ bodies. There is zero percent chance of contracting HIV from participating in the study.”

Ultimately, Gilbert’s concern for others overcame her safety worries. “The church I attend does work in Africa, and I became aware of how devastating HIV is,” she explains. “As a grad student I won’t get to do work in those areas, but I thought if I could help in any small way, I would.”

Gilbert met with the HIV vaccine research coordinator, who explained benefits and risks and answered all her questions. She enrolled in the study, which required her to receive three vaccine injections and monthly follow-ups during the course of a year. She was paid $390 and experienced no side effects.

“Two or three nurses would work on me at one time to get me in and out as soon as possible,” Gilbert says. “They were amazing to work with. They cared and treated me with respect. They are the kind of people you want to help.”

This personalized service can be crucial in cancer trials, says Dr. Jeffrey Sosman, director of the melanoma program and co-leader of the signal transduction program at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center.

Cancer patients, by their very definition, are seriously ill. They need not only the best treatment, but also the best possible guidance regarding whether or not they should participate in a clinical trial.

“For the patient, a clinical trial offers a number of advantages,” says Sosman. “But they should not be in a trial where there’s better available therapy that the patient’s not getting. They should always get the option of standard of care, or it must be included in the trial.”

That said, Sosman believes the only way the best cancer treatments can ever be found is for more patients to participate in clinical trials.

Cancer patients always ask the same question when he suggests they take part in a clinical trial, says Dr. Jeffrey Sosman. “What would you do if your wife had cancer?”

“I tell my patients that my care comes independent of a clinical trial. But this is the way I can offer the best treatment,” he explains. “By going into a trial, you’ll have a team of people taking care of you. You have backup checks and balances. If I forget to do a test, they remind me. If I don’t have time to check the result, they check it. The patient gets a much closer, more thorough evaluation.”

Sosman says his melanoma and kidney cancer patients always ask him the same question when he suggests a clinical trial: “What would you do if your wife had cancer?”

“I give them the same answer,” he says. “If my wife had cancer, I would find the place that was most comfortable, that had the best care. I wouldn’t go blindly into a clinical trial, but I would take input from the physician I felt most comfortable with.”

Although Sosman and Edwards perform different research on different people, their work faces the same challenge: Not enough people are willing to volunteer for research studies.

According to CenterWatch, only about 2 percent of the U.S. population gets involved with clinical trials each year. Among people who suffer from severe, chronic illnesses, only 6 percent participate. Ninety-four percent of the public recognizes the importance of participating in clinical research, and more than 70 percent say they would consider volunteering but don’t know how to find information about research studies.

These percentages keep Edwards awake at night. “That’s one of the things I worry about—where I’ll get enough people to fulfill our mission,” she says. “We feel frustrated that we go to the same well for volunteers. We recruit heavily at Vanderbilt, but we need engagement in the broader community.”

Vanderbilt is taking steps to solve this problem. In late summer the medical center will launch a Web site for investigators that will help them harness professional marketing and communications techniques to recruit research participants. And a major marketing campaign is in the works, with the goal of raising awareness and educating the public about the importance of volunteering for medical research.

Vanderbilt also is using resources from the largest federal grant in its history [see related story at the top of this page] to make it easier for people to find and enroll in a research study. A portion of the NIH Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) funding supports the Vanderbilt Clinical Trials Web site and its recruitment registry—a searchable database where volunteers may sign up to be contacted for research studies.

“Right now anyone can access Vanderbilt’s recruitment registry,” says Dr. Gordon Bernard, assistant vice chancellor for research and principal investigator for the CTSA grant. “They don’t have to be in Nashville or Middle Tennessee. When they register they can specify how far they are willing to travel to take part in a study.”

Bernard is cautiously hopeful that more federal funding will be available in the near future so Vanderbilt can invest more in community engagement and educating the public about why and how to volunteer for research.

“We’ve really been hurting with the flat NIH funding,” he explains. “For the past three or four years, research funding has actually fallen 3 to 4 percent.”

Dr. Gordon Bernard is principal investigator for the largest federal grant in Vanderbilt’s history, a $50 million NIH Clinical and Translational Science Award.

Now, President Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) legislation is providing an unprecedented $8.2 billion to advance scientific research.

“That sure got people excited,” Bernard says, noting that the NIH has received approximately 16,000 applications for the 600 grants that will be funded. He points to the length of time for which grants will be funded as another downside to ARRA stimulus money.

“Research programs will only receive two years of funding rather than the standard five years,” he says. “You can do some things in two years, but it’s not the answer to everything. What happens when you hire people but can only keep them two years? But I think it will help loosen the belt at the NIH.”

Whether or not Vanderbilt receives a windfall of ARRA money, its research studies will move forward and expand as the institution’s research enterprise grows.

“We have a long and successful track record of clinical trials at Vanderbilt,” Edwards says. “We have an incredible safety record and lots of experience. We enter into very close relationships with our volunteers. In the past we’ve risen to the challenge of smallpox, pertussis and avian studies. We’re poised to do it again.”

But, Edwards cautions, Vanderbilt and other research institutions cannot meet that challenge without research volunteers.

“Each volunteer is important,” Edwards says. “The impact you can have on the world is enormous. We all have a responsibility to others. If we can help in terms of answering research questions, that is our responsibility.”

The Vanderbilt Aid Society elected Elizabeth Boddie Elliston (above) as its first president and Mary Barbour Wallace (left) as its first secretary/treasurer. The “simple fare” served at their organizational meeting included chicken salad, scalloped oysters, beaten biscuits, sandwiches, individual ices and cakes, almonds, and pink and white mints.

It began with a $50 loan, a few women from Nashville’s most prominent families, and a young chancellor struggling with the fallout from an economic crisis that parallels our own time.

The year was 1893. James Kirkland, a 33-year-old Latin professor with a doctorate from the University of Leipzig, had just become chancellor of Vanderbilt at a critical point in the life of the young university. The United States was mired in the Panic of 1893, brought on by overbuilding and speculation. Railroads and banks were failing. Credit evaporated. Unemployment soared above 12 percent.

Against this bleak backdrop Kirkland faced enormous fiscal challenges. Yields from Vanderbilt’s small endowment were dwindling. The university’s tiny operating budget was stunted by too few paying students: Nearly half of Vanderbilt’s student body fell into some category which entitled them to free tuition—professors’ sons, sons of ministers, and public school teachers among them. The half of the student body that did pay tuition sometimes struggled to stay solvent. The vote by Vanderbilt’s board to raise tuition from $50 to $85 must have seemed like an insurmountable obstacle to many of those students.

When Kirkland learned of one financially strapped student who was considering abandoning his studies, the chancellor appealed to Elizabeth Boddie Elliston, a fellow parishioner at West End Methodist Church. She agreed, anonymously, to provide the young man with a $50 loan.

Mary Barbour Wallace

Inspired by this success, a few months later Kirkland presented a plea for a student aid fund to the women of Nashville at a tea in the home of Mrs. Nathaniel Baxter Jr. It was a gathering that ultimately would affect the lives of generations of Vanderbilt students.

In the 115 years since the Vanderbilt Aid Society (known as the Ladies Aid Society for Students of Vanderbilt University until 1900) was founded “to raise funds to be loaned to worthy and needy young men in the Academic Department of Vanderbilt University,” the organization has provided loans to more than 6,000 students. For many years it was the largest internal source of loans at the university. Over the group’s history, Vanderbilt Aid Society members have contributed more than $400,000—funds that have been lent over and over again. In fact, the cumulative loans made are in excess of $2.5 million.

Nancy Anthony, BA’72, was a mathematics major and the recipient of one of those loans. She is now executive director of the Oklahoma City Community Foundation, which operates the largest independent scholarship program in Oklahoma. “Providing support for students during the first year is a key element of encouraging students to go to college,” she says.

“Had I not gotten significant assistance during the first year, I don’t think that I could have gotten to Vanderbilt in the first place. Vanderbilt invested in me through its financial support, my family invested in me through the support that they were able to provide—and I invested in myself through work-study and loans.”

Lee Owen, BA’98, remembers receiving a loan just when he needed it most. He recalls, as a high school senior, “I was pretty set on journalism as a career path. I was strongly considering the University of Texas and the University of Georgia—both have excellent journalism programs and would have been far less expensive. But Vanderbilt was where I wanted to go.”

Owen won a Fred Russell-Grantland Rice Scholarship in Sports Journalism, the John R. Loomis Scholarship, and the Jenard Gross Scholarship, enabling him to attend Vanderbilt and major in interdisciplinary studies. But following his sophomore year, Owen’s father lost his job. “I’d describe my family as the average suburban American family,” he says. “Having a sufficient amount of financial aid was pretty important.”

By the time his father found another job, a younger brother was also in college at Auburn University, “making it even more important for our family to have financial assistance,” he says. “Vanderbilt really went to bat for us to cover the shortfall” with a loan from the Vanderbilt Aid Society fund.

“We were often the fund of last resort,” says Morel Enoch Harvey, BS’67, PhD’79 (Peabody), who has been a Vanderbilt Aid Society member for 25 years. “When a student exhausted all other sources of loans and scholarships, we provided that last little piece that could make the difference between staying at Vanderbilt and leaving.”

Harvey and the group’s current members will occupy a special place in Vanderbilt Aid Society history. Harvey is the last president of the organization, which voted to disband last spring now that Vanderbilt will replace need-based loans with grants and scholarships in its financial aid packages beginning this fall. (See the “Opportunity Vanderbilt” feature in this issue.) But Vanderbilt Aid Society monies will continue to help students in the form of an endowed scholarship, which will benefit eight students this coming academic year from Nashville and surrounding areas—and more students in the future.

Back in Kirkland’s day, members paid annual dues of $5. More recently, dues were $30, or $200 for life membership. Members met yearly in one of their homes or at Vanderbilt venues such as the chancellor’s residence or the Dyer Observatory.

In both its longevity and the number of its members, the Vanderbilt Aid Society is unique among women’s clubs. For more than a century, the Vanderbilt Aid Society continued to flourish. Even in its final year, the group included about 1,000 women on its membership roster, a list of names that reads like a compendium of Nashville history.

“It was prestigious,” says Harvey. “It was a social thing as well as a benefactor opportunity. But the primary purpose was always to fund student loans.”

Chancellor James Kirkland

Gray Oliver Thornburg, BA’76, is also a former Vanderbilt Aid Society president—and a third-generation Vanderbilt graduate. “When I was in my early 20s, my mother looked me in the eye and said, ‘You are going to join the Vanderbilt Aid Society,’” she recalls. “In a way it was a group before its time—women organizing 115 years ago for the purpose of seeing that others receive a college education.”

Janet Farrar Worthington, BA’85, recalls being asked to give a talk about her student experience at a Vanderbilt Aid Society luncheon. “I drove out to a nice lady’s gorgeous home in my ’72 Mazda, which burned so much oil that I kept a case of Quaker State in the car at all times,” she says. “When I turned off the engine, it tended to backfire, so I arrived with a bang.”

Worthington, who majored in English, has worked as a science writer, served as a commentator for American Public Media’s radio program Marketplace, and also co-written a college survival guide, among other pursuits. “The loan I got made a big difference,” she says. “Although it doesn’t seem like much now, back then it pushed me over the edge from not being able to afford Vanderbilt to being able to come to this wonderful place. My college tuition was a kind of patchwork quilt: My parents paid for part, I had a government loan and scholarship, plus the Vanderbilt Aid money—and I still had to work while I was at school, so I didn’t have a free ride by any means.”

Elizabeth Boddie Elliston, shown in her family home, “Burlington,” continued as Vanderbilt Aid Society president until 1899. The home was occupied by federal soldiers during the Civil War, and the plantation surrounding it stretched into what later became part of the Vanderbilt campus.

The organization’s loans have played a critical role at times when federal monies and the national economy fluctuated. During World War II, for instance, when Vanderbilt instituted an accelerated year-round curriculum program, students who otherwise would have worked during the summer to pay their way through college had few options besides Vanderbilt Aid loans.

Angela Powe Johnson, BE’00, is a biomedical engineer who works with the Defense Logistics Agency in Virginia. Johnson says her loan enabled her to take summer school courses and thus lighten her class load during her senior year. “I needed to take summer classes in order to graduate,” she remembers. “Considering my engineering course work, it was extra helpful. I would not have been able to attend summer school without it. And the Vanderbilt loan had a lower interest rate, which made it more attractive.”

Though the Vanderbilt Aid Society has disbanded, it will continue to change the lives of future students like Johnson. On a Tuesday afternoon this spring, approximately 70 members of the Vanderbilt Aid Society met at the Vanderbilt Student Life Center for the final annual meeting of the organization. Those attending included Carolyn Southgate Sartor, BA’48, great-granddaughter of the organization’s very first president. President Morel Harvey announced that the loan fund balance will be converted to the endowed Vanderbilt Aid Society Scholarship Fund.

“We can still make donations, and our legacy will continue to grow,” Harvey told the women, noting that those who wish to help students with financial needs can contribute to the scholarship. Students with outstanding loans will continue to repay them to the endowment.

Lisa Littlejohn, BS’77, MS’78 (Peabody), presented a final check from the organization for $5,500 that Vanderbilt will add to the scholarship. Harvey and Douglas Christiansen, vice provost for enrollment and dean of admissions, unveiled a plaque that will be displayed in the Undergraduate Admissions Building to honor the society and its accomplishments.

“I cannot begin to tell you how important you have been, each of you, in changing the lives of our students,” Christiansen told the women. “We are thrilled that the new endowment will continue to change lives in the years ahead.”

With any luck, future students will go on to live out their dreams as Lee Owen has. Following graduation from Vanderbilt, he worked as a sportswriter for a couple of start-up Nashville newspapers, covering the Tennessee Titans during the 1999–2000 season of their Super Bowl appearance. “I got to travel across the country covering the NFL. It was about as memorable a first job as anybody can have,” says Owen, who has spent the past eight years in higher education—most recently teaching and serving as an editor at Mercersburg Academy near Washington, D.C.

“Though I appreciated the financial aid I received while I was a student, I’m even more grateful for it today,” he says. “While having Vanderbilt or Harvard or Stanford on your diploma is certainly not a slam-dunk guarantee of professional success, it opens doors. I’ve seen it firsthand. All qualified students should have access to the best education. Cost should not be a barrier.

“The fact that Vanderbilt and the Vanderbilt Aid Society thought it important enough to commit money to students with financial need made an impression on me,” he continues. “It was a signal that Vanderbilt cared more about the things students can control—grades and achievement—than things they can’t—family background or ability to pay.”

Forty-four years after James Kirkland became chancellor during the Panic of 1893, he retired in the midst of another economic crisis, the Great Depression. In his remarks to the Society in 1937, he said:

“It so happens that I have a memorandum of the first 150 loans made by the Society. … Glancing through these 150 names, I was easily able to select a group of 26 names that were still very familiar to me. Of these 26, 11 are teachers, one is a preacher, six are lawyers, and eight are business men. Three are members of the present faculty at Vanderbilt, and three are members of the Board of Trust.”

He ended his remarks by assuring the women:

“I feel, therefore, sure that no dollar contributed to the Society by its members will ever be lost, but that it will continue its circuit of blessings, passing from one hand to another through the long years of university history yet to come.”

Now, looking back on its long history, Morel Harvey concludes, “It was a wonderful opportunity for the women of Nashville to participate with Vanderbilt. We hated to see it go. It was probably Vanderbilt’s original outreach into the community, and it’s a great heritage.”

That heritage will live on, thanks to 115 years of generosity by a dedicated group of Nashville women, the thousands of Vanderbilt students they have helped, and generations of students who will benefit in the future.

Those at the final annual meeting of the Vanderbilt Aid Society included:

Ann Marie Deer Owens and Frances Payne

Morel Harvey and Douglas Christiansen

Anna Wadlington, Allister Estes and Jere Phillips

Alice Mathews and Gray Thornburg

Debbye Oliver, Sharon Hogge and Susan Pitts Dale

Much of the historical information in this article was provided by Lyle Lankford, senior officer for university history and protocol at Vanderbilt. Lankford’s 2007 presentation to the Vanderbilt Aid Society, “Women to the Rescue: Making Dreams Reality,” which includes additional historical photos, is available online.

Rodes Hart (left) and Orrin Ingram

Rodes Hart and Orrin Ingram believe in Vanderbilt.

As alumni, trustees, philanthropists and visionaries, they reflect on the opportunities—and challenges—of eliminating need-based loans and increasing scholarship endowment.

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

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

Vanderbilt Magazine asked these two leaders to discuss Vanderbilt’s commitment to replace need-based undergraduate loans with scholarships and grants—and the $100 million philanthropic effort, Opportunity Vanderbilt, that will sustain this historic expansion of financial aid.

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

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

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

RH: While these are challenging financial times, I believe raising philanthropic support is always challenging. Time is of the essence, and time in any endeavor does not wait. We must develop the best minds to meet the many challenges our country and the world face. It is up to the expanded Vanderbilt community of trustees, alumni, parents and friends to meet this essential priority now.

VM: What has been Opportunity Vanderbilt’s progress toward the $100 million goal?

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

Vanderbilt has been addressing the challenge of student debt for many years, and since 2000, students’ loan burdens have been reduced by 17 percent. Scholarship giving to our Shape the Future campaign has had a vital role in those debt-reduction efforts. Vanderbilt’s historic announcement that undergraduate loans will be replaced with scholarships and grants builds directly on the university’s long-term focus on this challenge of student debt. We’re not alone—many of the country’s best universities are adopting similar strategies.

Approximately 60 percent of Vanderbilt’s students receive some sort of financial aid. And it’s important to keep in mind that even as we eliminate loans in our financial aid packages, all families still have an expected financial contribution, and some families will meet that contribution through loans—so this expanded financial aid initiative does not make Vanderbilt cost-free.

OI: Traditional student loans might have allowed a student to attend Vanderbilt, but upon graduation these new graduates were not only entering the work force but also had a huge burden of debt hanging over their heads. One of the great things about philanthropy is helping people who need a boost—and hopefully they’ll be successful and will continue the tradition of giving back and making a difference for future generations of Vanderbilt students.

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

RH: When I was in engineering school, we used a slide rule. It was fairly accurate, but slow. Good engineers were educated using that tool, but my grandchildren have never heard of a slide rule. The tools of today are completely different. To maximize education today and tomorrow, students need a broad educational experience to cope with the fast pace of change and expansion of knowledge. More emphasis on math, science and foreign languages is needed, as well as an understanding of our global community.

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

OI: Leaders of tomorrow will be educated at Vanderbilt today. We have very smart students who also have great judgment, maturity and a sense of service. Vanderbilt students today are extremely well-rounded—a vast majority of them participate in community service, and they take full advantage of opportunities to study abroad, to engage in leadership opportunities. That’s the kind of student Vanderbilt is training.

Vanderbilt recognizes that big, important, game-changing breakthroughs and discoveries typically come at the interdisciplinary crossroads. You can find neurologists partnering with musicians on research projects at Vanderbilt. Undergraduates work side by side with Ph.D. candidates in our medical center. Students can study medicine, health and society as a major, or work at the interface of the physical/biological sciences and engineering, or combine their passions for history and economics. With this interdisciplinary approach, we’re finding ways to make the world a better place by having such bright students learn and collaborate with a great faculty, across all the arts and sciences.

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

RH: I tell them that every contribution is important and every contribution makes a difference. Of course we need large contributions to reach the Opportunity Vanderbilt goal of $100 million and our overall Shape the Future goal of $1.75 billion—but we need gifts at every level. The endowment for scholarships needs to be increased to help our current and future students meet the cost of education. It will take success at all levels of giving to reach the goal—and I think you would agree with me that our students, the young men and women who will be tomorrow’s leaders, deserve the best we can offer.

One time as we chit-chatted, he spied some smoke, just barely above the treetops outside my window. He looked in that direction several times and suddenly said, “I’ve got to go.” A fire had erupted at an apartment house and displaced some Vanderbilt students. Neil got there about the same time as the fire engines.

Neil cared so much about Vanderbilt’s having the best sports photography that he made a point of being at every crucial game. And he had some pixie dust in that camera. Rod Williamson, Vanderbilt’s director of media relations for athletics, was fond of saying, after Neil would turn in his shots of a football game, “We may not have the best team in the SEC, but we sure have the best photographer.”

Neil was a larger-than-life personality and became known to nearly everyone on campus. He was full of passion and determination, fun and foolishness. If he had an opinion about something, it was a strong one. When he put himself into something, it was whole-hog.

Neil was born in England and moved to the United States with his parents when he was 5. When he was 13 and a paperboy for the Birmingham News in Alabama, he suffered massive injuries in a motorcycle accident. He endured dozens of surgeries and lived with pain for the rest of his life. The accident was reported in the paper, and he became fascinated by the photographers who covered his recuperation.

By the time I hired him to come to Vanderbilt in 2000, he had worked at several newspapers and freelanced for wire agencies. His work was published in several books, as well as in Sports Illustrated, Time, Newsweek, Life, The New York Times and USA Today. He worked in Vanderbilt’s Creative Services for seven years before moving to Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Office of News and Public Affairs.

 One day a few years ago, Neil showed me a beautiful fall image he had captured. I did not recognize the stand of trees and asked where it was. Turns out it was just outside our offices, between Wilson Hall and the Kissam Quad. Neil saw what the rest of us didn’t see from the ground—and knew that if he went up to one of the upper floors, he’d get this amazing view. I’ve kept the photo on my desktop ever since, and each fall when this group of trees changes color, I am reminded of Neil. He lives on through this and the thousands of remarkable images he left us.

illustration by liz asher/www.lizasher.com

Clarksville, Tenn., a city of 125,000 on the Tennessee–Kentucky border, is best known for its proximity to the sprawling Fort Campbell Army Base. The town takes pride in attracting new industry and bills itself as the “Gateway to the New South.”

But Clarksville is also a place that “represents the perfect circle of classical studies,” says Professor Barbara Tsakirgis, chair of Vanderbilt’s Department of Classical Studies. “Throughout the years I’ve been at Vanderbilt, we’ve had a steady stream of high-school students come to us from Clarksville.”

What is it about Clarksville and classical studies? “There are five Latin teachers there,” Tsakirgis says, “and we trained four of them.”

Anonymous, Italian (Etruria), Head of a Maenad, from an Antefix, sixth century Polychromed terracotta Vanderbilt Art Association Acquisition Fund

One of those teachers, Ed Long, BS’88, MAT’90, estimates that about a dozen of his students alone, during the 18 years he’s taught in the Clarksville public schools, have gone on to study classics at Vanderbilt. Long’s wife, Laura Lindsey Long, and another married couple, Grady Warren (BA’68) and Kaye Phillips Warren (BA’67, MA’71, PhD’76), are the other Vanderbilt-trained Latin teachers who so often inspire students there to devote their college years—and sometimes their careers—to the ancient world.

“Grady Warren was one of the most dedicated and motivated teachers I have ever had,” says Dr. John Frattarelli, BA’89, who went on to double-major in classics and general biology at Vanderbilt, became an Army doctor, and now directs the largest in vitro-fertilization center in Hawaii.

“I think there were two other classics majors from Clarksville in my year,” says Elizabeth Brown, BA’01, “so the department should probably give Mrs. Warren and the others a recruitment fee.” Brown, a double major in classics and economics, went directly into investment banking after graduation and is now in London as the head of finance at Virgin Galactic, the company that is developing the world’s first commercial space-tourism business.

What would the ancients think about Brown, or anyone else, creating a vacation in outer space? Most of us wouldn’t know exactly, but a classics major probably would have a pretty good idea, having spent her college years trying to get inside the heads of everyone from Homer, the Greek historians Thucydides and Herodotus, and philosophers Plato and Aristotle to Roman writers such as Virgil, Lucretius and Ovid.

When asked what inspired them to study the classics at university, almost everyone points to a high-school Latin teacher, explains Daniel Solomon, senior lecturer and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Classical Studies at Vanderbilt. “Of all my high-school teachers, the Latin teacher was by far the most enthusiastic, the most dedicated. This is a teacher who would collapse and break down in tears when reading Greek tragedy or about the victims of Roman imperialism. We were just intrigued by what made this material so compelling to her,” recalls Solomon, an American who grew up in Italy.

Barbara Tsakirgis’ archaeological digs in ancient Sicily and Athens provide insights into how patterns of human behavior have been repeated over time.

There came a time in the 1970s when high-school Latin teachers in the United States were crying for a different reason, as society started to question the relevance of Latin in the curriculum and schools moved to replace Latin teachers with those who taught “living” languages.

“But here in the South, and especially in Tennessee, there was less of that pressure,” says Tsakirgis. “I don’t know why. Perhaps because of some conservatism among educators here. But in fact, while high-school Latin programs in some other parts of the country were reduced in size, that didn’t happen in the Southeast.”

At the university level, however, Tennessee was not immune from the winds of change. Buffeted by accusations that Greco-Roman civilization was both the root of and the justification for our own white-male-dominated world, “classics in general was in danger of disappearing in the ’70s,” says Solomon. “And since then we’ve had to claw our way back year by year.”

A Broader View

But let’s start at the beginning, a few centuries ago, when the study of the classical world was considered in the West to be the very foundation of a good education, when it was the foundation of the United States thanks to our classically trained Founding Fathers, and when, later, it was indeed the foundation of Vanderbilt University.

Vanderbilt started life in 1873 with 10 professors, two of whom were professors of classical studies. “That number, and that percentage, expressed very well how classics was regarded from the foundation of Vanderbilt and of universities across the country,” says Tsakirgis. She points to a framed photograph she keeps in her office of Milton Humphreys, a professor of Greek who was considered to be one of, if not the finest scholar among the 10.

Despite a strong start, however, the growth of classical studies did not keep pace with the growth of Vanderbilt, and by the end of World War II the department was languishing—a victim perhaps of larger forces such as the Great Depression and the war.

The Haverford Painter, Apulia (present-day Italy)
Red-figure bell krater, ca. 330–320 B.C.
Terracotta
Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery purchase

Then in the early 1950s, Vanderbilt brought in H. Lloyd Stow from the University of Oklahoma, basically to re-found the department. During the next two decades, Stow steadily grew the department and the faculty until, by 1969, it had six tenure-stream professors.

The secret to Stow’s success was a modern, broad view of classics. “His training at the University of Chicago made him believe that classics was not just the language and literature, as Milton and his colleague had taught, but also the history and the material culture,” explains Tsakirgis. “He hired ancient historians and the first classical archaeologist here. It’s really his vision of a broader classics department that resulted in what we are today.”

To understand the breadth of the discipline now, consider the definition of classics, which is the study of the culture, in a very broad sense, of the lands of classical antiquity. That included everywhere Greeks lived, where people worshiped the Greek gods and spoke the Greek languages—an area that stretched from parts of Spain, France and Italy to Greece, Turkey and Egypt. Ultimately, at the height of the Roman Empire, it included everywhere from Britain to North Africa and from Spain to Iraq.

These civilizations—which lasted from the eighth century B.C. to the fifth century A.D. before gradually giving way to the Middle Ages—are studied through their written culture; through the massive body of literature, philosophy, drama and science that survives them; and, nowadays, through their material culture, the art and architecture, as well as objects of everyday life.

“If you view classical antiquity solely through the lens of what was written down,” says Tsakirgis, “you’re talking about [elite, male Greeks and Romans]. But if you broaden your focus, you’re looking at men and women, young and old, free and enslaved, and at all the people in the lands that the Greeks and Romans came in contact with.”

Comparisons among various types of evidence allow you to get a sense, says Solomon, “not only of how the intellectual elite lived, but how the other 99 percent of Greek and Roman society fared, of what was going through their minds.”

As a classical archaeologist, Tsakirgis spends her summers sifting through material culture at the houses around the Agora, the town square of ancient Athens, on a site that Americans first started digging in 1931.

Daniel Solomon supervises Vanderbilt’s Latin language program and teaches a variety of Latin courses from introductory through graduate seminars.

“I’m interested in the way that people lived in antiquity,” says Tsakirgis. “I have been looking at Greek houses across all the lands where the Greeks lived, considering how they built and lived in their houses. While I’ll grant that temples are wonderful, I think houses ultimately are more valuable for informing us about daily life—in particular about the lives of women, who don’t get much of a voice in literature.”

Abigail Humphrey, BA’03, a double major in classics and French, cites Tsakirgis’ class in Egyptian art and architecture as one reason she was particularly drawn to art history, and to the multidisciplinary aspect of the classics major. “My first course in classics went straight to the heart of my intellectual curiosity for the big picture,” she says. “I decided rather quickly afterward to major in it, as it offered me the opportunity to learn about the philosophies, artistic movements, historical moments, languages, and even the sciences and economic trends that were all great contributors to the centuries that followed, even to how we think today.”

New Answers to Old Questions

While classical studies had begun to reinvent itself, its biggest challenge was yet to come. In the late 1960s and 1970s, as students began to question authority and tradition with a vengeance, classics became a particular target.

It was a reaction against 2,000 years, but especially against 200 or 300 years, of colonial teaching of the classics, says Solomon. The British, in particular, used the classical world to prop up their own empire, to justify their exploitation of their colonies. Many believed that Americans were starting to do that, too, in the 20th century. And the reaction against the inherited American tradition translated into a reaction against the classical tradition, which was largely seen as responsible for many of these international abuses as well as for inequalities in American society.

So classical studies was pushed further toward the precipice and further toward reinvention. “The crisis in which classics found itself was something of a godsend for us,” argues Solomon, “because it really prompted our entire profession to question ourselves and reevaluate not just how we went about our jobs but what classics meant to us. For the first time in 2,000 years, we were giving new answers to those questions.”

For Kathy Gaca, associate professor of classics and director of graduate studies in the Department of Classical Studies, the change couldn’t come fast enough. “I found classics rather overly focused on dead white males when I was an undergraduate and graduate student,” she says. “I stayed in the field partly because I saw great opportunities for reshaping our awareness of women’s history by staying in classics and retrieving women’s experience in antiquity.”

In this effort Gaca got more than she bargained for, as she started studying the impact of warfare on women and children (and girls in particular) in antiquity. “A lot of evidence indicates that they were specifically targeted for exploitation.

“One still has to deal with lots of dead white males to elicit this parallel universe,” she says. “One of my brothers gave me a picture he put together of a woman sitting and looking bemused partly on top of and in the midst of a collage of a bunch of Greek male statues. It’s on my office desk. I’m her!”

Anonymous, Greco-Roman from Hellenistic East
Head of a Young Girl or a Goddess, 1 B.C–1 A.D.
Marble
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David K. Wilson

Beginning in the 1980s, enrollment in classical studies gradually recovered and grew each year at Vanderbilt. Yet as goes the zeitgeist, by the 1990s there was a growing backlash. Pundits and politicos—mostly conservative though occasionally liberal—lamented the broad, multicultural approach, arguing that universities had gone too far in marginalizing the canon, the writings that are the pillars of Western culture.

Solomon himself agrees with that assessment—to a point. “Most teachers in the last 30 years have gone too far in the opposite direction. Most have taken it upon themselves to emphasize the more destructive aspects of classical civilization, particularly of Roman civilization.

“I think this was necessary at the time to balance, to redress the inequities, in classical education previously. But now, a generation later, I think we’re in a better position to take a more nuanced view. My understanding is that most younger professors in particular are more open to the idea of weighing up the pros and cons.”

Solomon promises in his own Roman Civilization course description that “throughout this semester we will try to abstain from passing value judgments, whether on the excesses of Roman cruelty or on the benefits of Roman empire.”

As for Gaca, “I think there is a creative tension between the two approaches [traditional vs. broad],” she says, “and classics is the stronger for it.”

One for the Parents, One for the Heart

For years Romans had been portrayed as the bad guys in Hollywood movies. But classical studies got a boost from pop culture in 2000, when the more sympathetic portrayal of them in the film Gladiator sent students rushing to Latin classes and pushed up enrollment in Roman Civilization at Vanderbilt by 50 percent.

The spell cast on young readers by the Harry Potter series hasn’t hurt, either. As The New York Times suggested last October in an article titled “Latin Returns from the Dead,” “The resurgence of a language once rejected as outdated and irrelevant is reflected across the country as Latin is embraced by a new generation of students … who seek to increase SAT scores or stand out from their friends, or simply harbor a fascination for the ancient language after reading Harry Potter’s Latin-based chanting spells.” American students are signing up to take the National Latin Exam in increasing numbers.

That trend is reflected at Vanderbilt, which has increased the number of upper-level Latin courses each of the past three semesters. The department is also in the process of adding a new tenured position—the first since 1969—which will bring the faculty total to seven tenure-track professors and one senior lecturer.

The department now has an average of 30 to 35 majors and four to seven master’s students each year. The vast majority of undergraduate students are double majors—“One major they do to keep the parents happy; the other is for the heart,” says Solomon.

Professors describe the typical classics major as a self-aware, mature student who takes a long-range view of his or her education. No one comes to classics as the easy option, as Vanderbilt expects classics majors to read both Greek and Latin at the intermediate level in order to be able to investigate these ancient cultures on their own terms.

In fact, a few years ago when the department added a third major (along with classics and classical languages) with less stringent language requirements, they expected mass defections from language classes. But it didn’t happen. “I give full credit to Vanderbilt students,” says Solomon. “They made the choice, and they didn’t want to be shortchanged.”

Most classics majors do go on to further study, many to law or medicine, realizing there aren’t necessarily jobs available for them to teach Latin at the high school or college level, says Tsakirgis.

Clarksville Latin teacher Ed Long was not the only person interviewed for this article who said his parents were a bit disappointed at first when he decided to major in classics, wishing he had chosen something more marketable. They have since told him repeatedly that they are proud of his career choice.

“I love it,” he says. “I can’t see myself doing anything else. And as a bonus, I get to take students to Italy and Greece every two or three years to show them where it all began.”

Kathy Gaca’s research in Greek and Roman philosophy includes social justice and the effects of warfare on women and children.

Marilyn Reinhardt, BA’71, MAT’73, teaches Latin at Memphis University School, a prep school with three Latin teachers and more than 150 members in the Latin Club. Reinhardt says she originally had planned to be an English teacher, but had such a great professor at Vanderbilt, John Zarker, that she changed her mind.

She also calls her semester abroad in Rome at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies—to which Vanderbilt encourages all majors to apply—“one of the best experiences of my life.”

At least one student majoring in classics went on to graduate work at Vanderbilt and classics teaching positions at the university level before switching tracks: Lynne Ballew, BA’68, MA’74, PhD’75, who now runs a hotel for the homeless in Anchorage, Alaska.

Many majors admit they have no intention of a career in classics. “I just studied it for the enjoyment and intellectual challenge,” says space-tourism pioneer Elizabeth Brown. She says this background has paid off more than expected in the world of British high finance.

“It helps to counteract some negative stereotypes about Americans from the South,” she says. “You don’t expect a redneck to like Cicero!”

Thomas Greener, BA’86, who majored in classical studies and minored in religious studies, is now the minister of a 1,000-member United Methodist Church in Durham, N.C. “Classical studies teaches the most foundational elements of thinking in Western civilization, and those broad themes still influence us today,” Greener says. “It’s hard to watch the current financial collapse and not think about Greek tragedy and hubris in its truest sense. It’s hard to listen to various speakers and not hear echoes of Cicero and Plato.”

“The 21st century is not the first time humans have experienced an explosion of communication, trade, environmental degradation, resource shortage or ideological conflict,” notes Richard Davis Jr., BA’96, who teaches Latin and Greek at The Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn. “I hope my students learn some sense of how to encounter other cultures inquisitively, respectfully and critically. And I hope they come away with a critical mass of knowledge, as I did, that informs everything else they do—from recognizing a mythological reference in a commercial to reading literature to rhetorically dissecting an inaugural address.”

That is exactly what the Vanderbilt Department of Classical Studies strives for. It trains students to be excellent researchers and writers—which is invaluable in almost any career—but most of all, it trains them to be critical thinkers.

For example, those who have taken Solomon’s classes may find themselves turning to his teachings in Epicurean philosophy during these trying times precipitated by greed and excess.

The Greek philosopher Epicurus and his followers were not addicted to luxury, as often has been the interpretation through the millennia, but were instead concerned with maximizing pleasure in life without becoming either addicted or inured to it. They taught that you should never lose sight of why something is giving you pleasure in the first place.

“The idea is to first begin a complete self-evaluation from top to bottom,” says Solomon. “Rethink everything anyone has ever told you, question every single one of your authority figures. And once you have a better sense of who you are, then you can re-relate to the outside world.”

Not a bad prescription for our times, straight from the classical world.

The largest open dump in Latin America, La Chureca was named one of the “20 Horrors of the Modern World” in a contest sponsored by the Spanish magazine Interviu.

For outright squalor and heartbreak, the city dump of Managua, Nicaragua, where 1,500 people live daily on rotting scraps, could serve as a global image of hopelessness.

When Lori Scharffenberg first encountered the dump in all its stink and chaos, she saw unspeakable human struggle. But not hopelessness.

“Unless you are there to smell the smells and see the dust and all the devastating conditions, it’s hard to describe,” she says.

“But no, it’s not hopeless, because people are there, and people can change. People change when they know other people want to serve them and love them.”

Hope is an organizing principle for Scharffenberg, BS’04, and for the humanitarian organization she runs, Manna Project International. It was started five years ago by a group of young idealistic Vanderbilt graduates who felt anguished by the poverty they saw in their Latin American travels but who also summoned determination to find solutions to the suffering. Today, Manna Project is deepening its roots in Latin America, spreading its vision across U.S. campuses, and expanding its dream for the future.

Most stories about Manna Project begin with Managua’s city dump, called La Chureca, where much of Manna Project’s daily work is done. La Chureca is a hellish place that could have sprung from the pages of Dante—a zone of toxic air, burning debris, fetid drinking water, lead poisoning, drug addiction and chronic malnutrition, where people jostle for each new haul of garbage, and where youngsters prostitute themselves with trash workers in order to get a better pick of the latest haul.

Into such conditions step Vanderbilt volunteers who help monitor needs at a health clinic on the grounds, tutor at a school, give health talks to families, and carry out a nutrition program for kids who scavenge and grow up among the trash heaps.

“The volunteers walk the community and make friends with people. The relationships add so much,” Scharffenberg says. “It lets the mothers know that other people care for them and want to know how to help them. It instills accountability and purpose. When you show someone you care, they care more about those around them.”

The Managua municipal dump does not exhaust Manna Project’s reach or identity. The cadre of Vanderbilt grads and others who have joined Manna Project—living on small stipends, taking cold showers, exploring a dramatically different culture from the United States—enhances neighborhood health and education elsewhere in Managua (through classes in literacy, English, math, exercise) and now in Ecuador, too, giving voiceless people a reason to dream.

“There are lots of theories about how societies develop,” says Scharffenberg, whose office is in Managua, “but what people need as human beings, no matter what the culture, is encouragement, support, hope, having someone believe in them. If they see no future for themselves, then it doesn’t matter if we teach them to read. They’ll see no point in it.

“So often the American assumption about people in poverty is, ‘Oh, they have dreams; they just need money.’ But in actuality, they’ve never been asked about their dreams for a better life. They’ve never been encouraged. They need to know that dreams are a possibility.”

Some 200 people annually do the work of Manna Project, signing on for various time commitments and bringing an array of vocational goals. The core group is the volunteers who work a 13-month stint, sometimes stretching it to two years. These program directors (PDs) raise their own money back home—$7,500 a year is needed—in order to dive into the program work and local partnerships forged by Manna Project in Nicaragua and Ecuador. There are currently 10 PDs in Managua and eight in Quito, Ecuador.

“Until Manna Project, everything I’d done in my life had been for myself; I wanted to see if I could do things for others,” says Chris Taylor, who worked for Manna Project in Nicaragua for a year and now oversees Manna Project’s U.S. campus chapters, based in Nashville.

“I was looking at other programs abroad, but I liked that Manna Project was started and run by young people. Most of my focus in Nicaragua was on teaching English. It turned out to be a teacher’s dream—an open-air setting, where students showed up because they purely wanted to learn.”

Some volunteers sign up to work through Alternative Spring Break, arriving in groups of college students who work for a week under Manna Project’s direction. Others are part of student groups that come for a month or so during the summer for a deeper immersion experience.

Or they find the Manna Project through the Vanderbilt Initiative for Scholarship and Global Engagement (VISAGE) program, which combines international study with hands-on experience abroad. VISAGE sends students to Nicaragua for a few weeks to aid Manna Project.

Professor of History Marshall Eakin and a group of nine students operated in three Managua neighborhoods last summer, working with disabled children and health clinics and organizing youth sports.

“Though the students are incredibly well-prepared academically, there is culture shock nevertheless, even for those who know Spanish,” Eakin says. “They are moving into some of the poorest areas in the Americas.

“I want them to be shaken by what they see. Their experience might be brief there, but the idea is to get them thinking about the world in new ways. For some students the transformation is quick: They change their major to Latin American studies, or they consider social justice work for the first time. They are confronting the issues of Latin America in ways that will have impact on the kinds of choices they make later. They are changing the way they look at the world.”

A shanty in La Chureca before a nearby lagoon flooded during last fall’s rainy season, destroying some of the meager homes.

Eakin’s remarks hint at one of the dramas of the Manna Project story: the theme of transformation. Several Vanderbilt students and graduates testify to making shifts in career goals after their experiences abroad with struggling families and children.

“Because of this experience I want my life’s work to be wrapped up in where the U.S. meets the rest of the world,” says Mark Hand, BA’06, who is Manna Project’s site director for Ecuador and based in Quito, the capital city.

After his Ecuador work he’ll consider law or business school, with an eye toward social entrepreneurship.

“I love the creativity and challenge of starting things,” he says. “I have real internal drive to affect the way America relates to the rest of the world, whether it’s trade policy, immigration policy, foreign policy or development. I want to help other young Americans get out of the country and see how the rest of the world functions and operates. I want to help break down the category of ‘the other.’”

Manna Project’s beginnings arose out of one such fateful, jarring encounter of Vanderbilt students with the larger world. In 2003 a dozen Vanderbilt undergraduate men, including Hand, took part in an Alternative Spring Break in Lima, Peru. They were there to interact with orphaned street kids—kick the soccer ball with them, tutor and befriend them. The Vanderbilt men arrived with little idea how hard the youngsters’ lives were, or that such dire conditions could exist in the world outside the prosperous, complacent United States. They quickly learned otherwise.

“It was a typical gringo-goes-abroad-and-experiences-poverty-for-the-first-time kind of trip,” Hand recalls. “I was a freshman who got invited to Peru. I had no expectations. I took a pocket translator on the plane. When I say I was clueless, that’s the perfect word.”

The experience turned out to be a deeply emotional journey in getting to know the kids, he says. Peru made the Vanderbilt students see how fragile is the human condition and how urgent it is that people put their passion and expertise into the search for solutions.

“These kids, abandoned by their parents, had sexually transmitted diseases by age 6. Many would be dead by 19. They sell their bodies until they are old enough to steal. But when we played soccer with them, they were kids again. They loved that. It was incredible.”

The trip fired the imaginations of several who journeyed to Peru, including undergraduate Luke Putnam. After they returned, some of the students sought ways to enhance campus connections with Nashville immigrants. Manna Project was incorporated by 2004, after Putnam and others established contacts in Managua, where new initiatives in children’s education and health care were under way.

In talks with Manna Project veterans, certain themes emerge. Some students keenly embraced their global adventure because they had positive exposure to foreign travel in high school or college; the simplicity of life, the food, the sense of community were revelatory.

“In the United States we’re surrounded by so much materialism and safety,” says Putnam, BS’04, now a medical student at the University of Guadalajara in Mexico, “so we’re amazed by how little they have in Nicaragua and yet what joy they experience in being together and depending on each other.”

Another theme expressed by volunteers is the humbling feeling of confronting the social problems encountered in the work undertaken for Manna Project. Workers discover there is no simple fix-it answer to poverty. Strengthening partnerships is slow work. The Managua city dump, for instance, ought to be closed, but that’s not realistic or plausible.

Nevertheless, another theme resounds among Manna Project alums: an unexpected self-discovery concerning their sense of vocation once they immersed themselves in the work at hand.

“My time abroad took me completely by surprise,” says Abigail Foust, BS’06. “I knew I loved learning about different cultures, and I loved speaking Spanish, but I had no idea how touched I’d be working with people and discovering what I could contribute.

“I also learned that a short-term experience doesn’t make for much of a lasting difference. To make a real difference, you must make a long-term commitment.”

Foust, now in medical school at the University of Colorado-Denver, worked for Manna Project for a year in Nicaragua, then for a year in Ecuador. In Quito she helped create, among other projects, a community-assets survey of neighborhood attitudes and needs. Manna Project trained seventh graders to help in interviews with hundreds of households.

“They started out as giggly seventh graders but soon became poised interviewers,” she says.

The Manna Project experience appears to reinforce the observations of commentators who see this generation as markedly different from their elders’. Pollster John Zogby calls today’s demographic of 19- to 29-year-olds “First Globals”—the first generation truly to feel at home with global perspectives. Whatever the reason—an era of great prosperity and cheap travel, or the media revolution of instant global e-mail networks and YouTube immediacy, or a post-9/11 consciousness—many young adults embrace an outward-looking orientation, with a zest for practical solutions to intractable problems.

“I think this generation of young adults views international work as an investment in their futures,” Scharffenberg says. And recruiters for corporations and professional schools have come to view a year abroad as a plus, she says.

“It’s not postponing your life or taking a year off. It’s an incredible experience to have. We hope an old attitude is changing—the compartmentalization of service work and work in the ‘real world.’ They don’t need to be separated. The world of a Nicaraguan farmer is as much the real world as the corporate ladder. We’re all human. Our experience shows us how much bigger the world is, yet at the same time how connected we all must be.”

Several years ago I was asked to develop a course on risk management at Vanderbilt based on case studies of actual historical events. The course has since evolved into a popular offering on campus. Each case is researched, debated and reconciled: Could the incident have been prevented? Preventable or not, what could have been done to manage the emergency response more effectively? What actions have we taken since the event to make the world a safer place? Could it happen again?

While man-made accidents, intentional acts and natural disasters may seem dissimilar, a closer look at how these events unfold reveals a remarkable similarity. Collectively, they provide a wealth of information about how disaster situations evolve, what can go wrong, the aftermath of these events, and whether we remain vulnerable to the recurrence of a similar event.

My Vanderbilt students, colleagues and I have drawn 12 key lessons from a number of actual disasters that can be applied to improve the way we manage risks as individuals, communities, businesses and public servants. It is not necessary for history to repeat itself.

U.S. Coast Guardsman Shawn Beaty searches for Hurricane Katrina survivors from a helicopter over New Orleans. [U.S. Coast Guard]

August 2005—Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina caused nearly 2,000 fatalities and an estimated economic loss of $125 billion, in addition to displacing hundreds of thousands of people. The destruction and loss of life cannot be attributed entirely to the storm itself. Numerous failures of the city’s flood-protection system, due to poor design and construction, deferred maintenance, and a lack of funding, left New Orleans vulnerable. As the city filled with water, insufficient emergency planning and preparedness, and the inability of responders to communicate, compounded the hurricane’s effects. Moreover, drilling for fossil fuels and engineering of the Mississippi River had destroyed wetlands that could have buffered the storm’s surge.
[Joseph F. Nickischer/ISTOCK]

The Edmund Fitzgerald was the largest carrier on the Great Lakes when it launched in 1958.

Nov. 10, 1975—Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

Under the command of 37-year veteran captain Ernest McSorley, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank during a freak early-winter storm in Lake Superior. The ship was loaded with iron-ore pellets for a trip from Superior, Wis., to Detroit, Mich. Of the 29 crew members aboard, none was ever found.

A variety of risk factors has been cited as contributing to the Fitzgerald’s loss, including captain’s pride. The sinking helped lead to numerous changes in maritime regulations, industry practice and technology.

Two hours after the trip began Nov. 9, the ship encountered the SS Arthur M. Anderson, a cargo vessel traveling along a similar route with Capt. Jesse Cooper at the helm. By early evening the National Weather Service (NWS) had issued gale warnings for Lake Superior. Early the next day, the NWS upgraded its forecast to a storm warning. Both captains changed course and headed northward. That afternoon changing winds left the vessels exposed to large waves, and Cooper radioed that his ship would alter its course again. McSorley responded that he would stay on his current course although the Fitzgerald was “rolling some.”

An hour later Cooper radioed to McSorley that he thought the Fitzgerald might be too close to an area of shallow water known as the “Six Fathom Shoal.” As the Fitzgerald was taking on heavy seas over the ship’s deck, Capt. McSorley did not call for help even after it had been clear for several hours that his ship was in serious trouble.

A boat rests on top of a house in the distance as a woman surveys the rubble of Banda Aceh, Indonesia, after a 2004 tsunami virtually leveled the city. [Lynsey Addario/Corbis]

Dec. 26, 2004—Sumatra-Andaman Tsunami

The second-largest earthquake ever recorded spawned a massive tsunami that struck the coasts of Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India and several African nations. (The largest ever recorded occurred in Chile in 1960.)

Damage from the Sumatra-Andaman tsunami resulted in more than 300,000 people declared dead or missing and more than 1 million left homeless. The many countries that suffered from exposure to the tsunami had neither the knowledge nor the means to institute an effective warning system. A reasonable disaster-preparedness plan and early-warning system might have averted most of these consequences.

Tsunamis have been fairly unusual throughout recent history in the Indian Ocean, with the last major occurrence more than 120 years ago. Because giant earthquakes often occur in groups—seven of 10 occurring in the 20th century happened in a 15-year span, and five of those were clustered in one geographical area—it is reasonable to expect other major quakes in southern Asia in the near future. Countries bordering the Indian Ocean are working with the United Nations on early-detection and public education systems to avert future disasters.

Children run through the streets of Bhopal, India, after the Union Carbide Corp. leaked a poisonous gas. [Pablo Bartholomew / Getty Images]

Dec. 2, 1984—Nightmare in Bhopal

A chemical plant in Bhopal, India, owned and operated by a subsidiary of Union Carbide Corp., accidentally released 40 tons of methyl isocyanate gas (MIC). Plant workers had allowed water to seep into the MIC tanks, causing a reaction that led to the release. Poorly maintained safety systems failed to contain its movement.

A toxic cloud drifted over residents of Bhopal while they were asleep and eventually covered an area of more than eight square miles, affecting a population of nearly 900,000 people. As many as 4,000 men, women and children died that night while in bed or trying to escape the fumes. Estimates of those injured or disabled are as high as 400,000. Within three days, estimated fatalities had risen to between 7,000 and 10,000 people. As many as 15,000 more have since reportedly died from residual exposure.

The Union Carbide Corp. was one of the earliest U.S. companies to establish a subsidiary in India, beginning in 1934. India was seeking to attract foreign investors to strengthen its economy and often did so, like many other developing countries, by relaxing safety standards or ignoring violations. Union Carbide, without any objection from the Indian government, applied different safety standards than those used in its West Virginia plant that manufactured similar products.

The Bhopal disaster involved such a large number of risk factors—including lack of planning and preparedness, poor communications, hands-off management, understaffing, and a culture and company that placed economic priorities over safety—that the occurrence of a catastrophe was not so much a matter of “whether” but “when.” It led to the worst disaster in the history of the chemical manufacturing industry and served as a bellwether event for the industry and a catalyst for safety reform.

Cranes lift the tail section of the downed United DC-10 onto a flatbed truck at the Sioux City airport. [James Finley, AP/Wide World Photos]

July 19, 1989—United Flight 232

Flying debris severed all three hydraulic systems on United Airlines Flight 232 while en route from Denver to Chicago, leaving the pilot without any control of the DC-10 aircraft. Through the integrated effort of a well-trained cockpit crew and a highly coordinated emergency response, the plane was able to make a crash landing at the Sioux City, Iowa, airport. Exemplary risk-management practices both in the air and on the ground meant that of 296 passengers and crew on board, 184 survived.

Survival was aided, too, by the lack of thunderstorm activity during a time when it is typically frequent, occurrence of the incident on the one day of the month that the Iowa Air National Guard was on duty, and the presence of an off-duty instructor pilot as a passenger on the aircraft.

The eruption of Mount St. Helens was the worst volcanic disaster in U.S. history. [U.S. Geological Survey]

May 18, 1980—Eruption of Mount St. Helens

After two months of increasing seismic activity, Mount St. Helens in Washington State erupted in full fury, leaving a path of destruction. The blast and ensuing landslides, mudflows and eruption cloud killed 57 people, destroyed 27 bridges, ruined 200 homes, and toppled about 4 billion board-feet of timber. Nearly all wildlife within a 15-mile radius was wiped out.

Before 1980, concerns about Mount St. Helens and other peaks within the Cascade Range had caused the U.S. Geological Survey to request additional funding for volcano monitoring and hazards studies, but when these requests went unfulfilled, the agency focused its limited resources on Hawaiian volcanoes, which were thought to present a greater threat. Available monitoring technology was not able to predict the type, magnitude or affected areas of an eruption, leaving geologists unaware that a massive explosion was about to take place.

After the eruption of Mount St. Helens, the federal government dramatically increased funding for volcano monitoring and research.

Circumstances beyond human control, often called luck, always influence the extent to which a potentially catastrophic situation becomes a reality. Sometimes, due to poor risk management, bad luck allows a vulnerable situation to unravel. In other instances, as with United Flight 232, good luck enables a well-managed situation to prevail against seemingly long odds.

Some people believe that you make your own luck through effective planning and preparedness. If you consider a variety of disaster scenarios and devise strategies to limit their likelihood and severity, then—when faced with bad luck—there is a better chance your contingency plan can offset an unfortunate roll of the dice.

Two skywalks at a new Kansas City hotel collapsed onto a crowded dance floor in 1981, killing 114 people and injuring 216 others. [Pete Leabo, AP/Wide World Photos]

July 17, 1981—Hyatt Regency Walkway Collapse

A tea dance in the atrium of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, Mo., ended in tragedy when the second- and fourth-floor skywalks collapsed onto a crowded dance floor, leaving 114 people dead and another 216 injured.

The hotel had opened its doors just a year earlier. Flaws in a simple design change made to a support mechanism went unnoticed, allowing the skywalk to buckle at the worst possible moment. The fourth-floor walkway fell 30 feet to the floor below, but not before landing on the second-floor sky bridge, causing it to collapse as well. More than 70 tons of debris fell, crushing or trapping hundreds of partygoers, some of whom could not be reached for more than seven hours.

The engineering contractor had failed to follow the formal design-review process, allowing a flaw in the hanger-rod configuration to go uncorrected. Design of the connections in the walkways was never even checked, despite the project engineer’s written assurance to the contrary. Seven weeks before scheduled completion, a worker noticed deformation of the walkway and reported it to the architect’s on-site representative, but the report never received attention. The following February two more observations were made of deformation in the walkways, but both were discounted.

U.S. space shuttle Challenger lifts off from Kennedy Space Center, 72 seconds before explosion kills its crew of seven. [NASA, AP/Wide World Photos]

Jan. 28, 1986, and Feb. 1, 2003—The Challenger and Columbia Disasters

The U.S. space shuttle program suffered a serious setback in 1986 after the shuttle Challenger disintegrated shortly after takeoff, killing the entire crew. Although the official cause of the disaster was mechanical malfunction, it was discovered that NASA and its contractor knew about the existence of the O-ring design flaw but allowed the flight to proceed.

NASA subsequently took corrective actions to ensure that such institutional failures would not allow for another shuttle disaster.

But in 2003 the shuttle Columbia tore apart during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. The post-accident Columbia investigation revealed risk factors eerily similar to those of its Challenger predecessor. Once again, design flaws—this time associated with the insulating foam on the external tank—were known ahead of time, yet the launch was not stopped.

A Ferris wheel near Chernobyl was scheduled to be unveiled for May Day festivities in 1986. Instead, it has grown rusty in the still-contaminated ghost town of Pripyat, built in the 1970s as a home for Chernobyl workers. [photo by Sergey Dolzhenko/Corbis]

April 25–26, 1986—Meltdown at Chernobyl

A planned experiment gone badly at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the former Soviet Union created a reactor core explosion that sent a huge radioactive cloud into the atmosphere. Thirty-one people died from immediate radiation poisoning, 130,000 residents were evacuated, and radiation effects were felt across most of Europe and beyond.

For 12 days after the accident, an immense plume of radioactive material more than 400 times the magnitude released at Hiroshima spewed from the explosion site into the upper atmosphere, where weather patterns carried it north over Russia, then northeast over Poland and Scandinavia. Within days, Danish and Swedish nuclear monitors began detecting elevated levels of radiation, but the first media coverage did not occur until April 29, when a German newscast reported that there had been a major nuclear explosion at Chernobyl. Though the Soviet government initially denied the allegations, increasing international pressure finally caused Soviet leaders to acknowledge what had taken place.

The Chernobyl accident caused staggering economic losses for the USSR and the former Soviet nations. Long-term human health effects of radiation exposure are now being realized, and a large area around the plant site remains off limits to human habitation.

In the mid-1980s, as the Soviet Union was locked in a decades-old power struggle with Western Europe and the United States, participants on both sides attempted to gain political, economic and military advantage, with new technologies being developed to strengthen their cause. One of these was the nuclear reactor for creating electricity. Many believe the Chernobyl meltdown was the catalyst for ending the Cold War.

A fireman calls for more rescue workers to make their way into the rubble of the World Trade Center. [U.S. Navy photo by Preston Keres]

Sept. 11, 2001—The World Trade Center Attacks

Terrorists affiliated with the international al Qaeda organization hijacked two commercial airliners, crashing the planes minutes apart into the two World Trade Center towers in New York City. Each aircraft was directed into a different tower, resulting in the eventual collapse of both buildings and destruction of other infrastructure in the vicinity.

Nearly 3,000 people died in the towers and on the ground, including more than 400 firefighters and police officers. The terrorists exploited weaknesses in U.S. aviation security and communications gaps in the U.S. intelligence system.

The federal government implemented a number of changes as a direct result of the attacks. Little more than a month later, the Patriot Act was enacted, aimed at bolstering counterterrorism resources, improving border security, and undermining terrorist funding sources. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 was passed one year later, establishing the U.S. Department of Homeland Security within the executive branch of the federal government.

Since September 2001, terrorists have made numerous attempts to carry out large-scale attacks against the United States, all of which have been disrupted by U.S. and allied efforts.

Storm King Mountain bears the scars of a Colorado wildfire that began in South Canyon. [Raymond Gehman/CORBIS]

July 1994—South Canyon Fire

What began as a relatively small Colorado wildfire July 3 grew into a dangerous blaze during the ensuing days while firefighting resources were allocated to other fires in the district. Once fragmented resources began to arrive, the fire could not be easily contained, and firefighters found themselves with no escape routes if a sudden reverse in the direction of the blaze occurred.

The afternoon of July 6, a cold front created a wind shift and subsequent “blowup” that trapped and killed 14 firefighters. Management, leadership and communication within the firefighting community contributed to the tragedy.

They are the first entering Vanderbilt class to live and learn in The Commons, in close community with one another and with 10 of their professors.

 
They made it through the most competitive admissions pool in Vanderbilt history—16,944 applicants for 1,569 slots. They come from 934 different high schools. They are the most academically prepared and the most ethnically and geographically diverse class ever.  

They are leaders in 1,569 different ways. One is a state debating champion. Another owns a baking business and founded the high school culinary club. A third was the only student member of the state board of education.

A fourth earned one of 10 National Caring Awards after helping raise more than $60,000 for school supplies for two villages in India.

And talk about bright. “The light from up here is almost blinding,” Frank Wcislo, dean of The Commons and associate professor of history, remarked during Convocation as he surveyed the Class of 2012. Their average SAT score is 1400, and 25 percent of the class scored 1500 or higher. This year’s average is a 21-point increase over last year; in 2000 the average was 1313.

More than 84 percent ranked in the top 10 percent of their high school class. More than 130 were valedictorians or salutatorians. One hundred seventy are National Merit scholars; eight are National Achievement scholars.

These students hold a unique place in university history, but as they embarked on their college journey in August, they shared the same mixture of exhilaration and apprehension as generations of Vanderbilt first-year students before them.

“It’s a great idea,” said first-year student Yousuf Ahmad when asked for his impressions of residential life on Move-In Day. “By putting freshman students together, we can share the same anxiety that comes with being a first-year student and learn and grow together and make mistakes together.”

Move-In Weekend		First-years say their goodbyes
Navy ROTC first-year orientation graduation.	First-years say their goodbyes	Chancellor Zeppos on the hall.
Move-In Weekend	Dorm life, week one.
	Dorm life, week one.	Frank Wcislo, dean of The Commons
Dorm life, week one.		Games on The Commons Lawn.
Games on The Commons Lawn.	Habitat for Humanity service work
Party at the Hank Ingram House.	Dancing and cruising on the showboat.	Signing of the honor code.
“I know how you feel. I was a little homesick when I moved in,” Murray House faculty head Sharon Shields tells students.
Dodgeball and pizza at the Student Recreation Center.	Games on The Commons Lawn.
	Dancing and cruising on the showboat.

Starting in the 2009–2010 academic year, all undergraduate students—both new and returning—who normally would have received need-based loans as part of their financial aid package to meet their demonstrated financial need will qualify for this program. All seniors slated to graduate in May 2009, in addition, will have their need-based loans for the spring 2009 semester replaced with Vanderbilt grant/scholarship assistance.

“This step is in keeping with Vanderbilt’s commitment that ability, achievement and hard work—not a family’s financial circumstances—should determine access to a great education,” said Vanderbilt Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos in announcing the move.

During the past seven years, Vanderbilt has worked aggressively to reduce student loan debt, and this new initiative is the pinnacle of that strategy. Funding will come from a combination of strategic internal allocations and increased scholarship endowment, including an additional $100 million in gifts and pledges in new scholarship endowment that will need to be raised during the next several years.

“This ambitious goal gets at the very heart of what Vanderbilt is all about,” says Randall W. Smith, executive associate vice chancellor for development and alumni relations. Vanderbilt will be seeking new philanthropic gifts from alumni and friends for this initiative, he says. “As we look to the university’s future, the case for making education accessible is a compelling one that virtually everyone who cares about Vanderbilt appreciates and embraces.”

A top priority of Vanderbilt’s ongoing Shape the Future campaign has been increased scholarship support, paving the way for elimination of need-based loans in the financial packages the university offers to all eligible undergraduates. The Shape the Future campaign has been one of the sources that has allowed Vanderbilt to reduce students’ loan debt by 17 percent during the past several years, even as the cost of attending Vanderbilt has increased approximately 5 percent annually.

By eliminating need-based loans, notes Provost Richard C. McCarty, “We also free our students to consider choices about their careers or further study that they might have overlooked because of concern about the pressure of repaying student loans.”

Vanderbilt has determined not to impose specified income-level caps in deciding eligibility for the program. Vanderbilt’s policy is to admit students on the basis of their talents and ability, rather than their ability to pay. The university also commits to meeting 100 percent of students’ demonstrated financial need. In determining a student’s demonstrated financial need, Vanderbilt takes into account each student’s individual family circumstances and all educational costs such as tuition, fees, housing, meals, books and course materials; in addition, allowances are made for personal and travel expenses. With the additional investment by Vanderbilt, many students pay no more to attend Vanderbilt than they would to attend a college with a lower total cost. 

“Eliminating need-based loans is not only the competitive thing to do—it’s also the right thing to do,” says Douglas Christiansen, associate provost for enrollment and dean of admissions.

“The generosity and activism of those who are contributing to this massive need-based initiative reaffirm everyone’s passion for helping the most academically talented, diverse and engaged students.”

In the past few years, a handful of universities and colleges across America have announced similar initiatives—primarily top institutions with which Vanderbilt competes directly for students. Brown, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania offer need-based loan waivers for students from lower-income families. Harvard University offers free tuition to students whose parents earn less than $60,000 a year; Yale and Stanford have similar programs. Princeton and Dartmouth have also eliminated need-based loans in their financial aid offers based on demonstrated need, which most closely resembles Vanderbilt’s new expand-ed aid program.

At the same time, Vanderbilt has become both more selective academically, and more diverse culturally and geographically. Admissions applications jumped 31 percent for the undergraduate Class of 2012 over the previous year, according to Christiansen. Of the 1,569 students in this year’s entering class, 930 high schools are represented. Prior to enrolling, “most of our first-year students didn’t know anyone at Vanderbilt,” Christiansen says. 

“This bold step will allow Vanderbilt to continue recruiting the most highly achieving students in a very competitive way and will ensure a student body composed of young men and women of all economic, cultural and geographic backgrounds,” said Zeppos, “which will only further enrich the Vanderbilt experience for all of us.” 

For information about how this initiative will impact a specific financial aid award, contact the Office of Student Financial Aid at finaid@vanderbilt.edu.

Find out more: www.vanderbilt.edu/expandedaidprogram

TO: Mick Jagger, Barry Manilow, Joe Namath, Al and Tipper Gore, Tuesday Weld, and the other nearly 3 million Americans turning 65 this year

FROM: The Baby Boomers

Happy birthday, everyone. (To be frank, the rest of us weren’t sure all of you would make it this far.)

Now more than ever, it’s important to look after your health. Had a fecal occult blood test lately? How about that colonoscopy? You are keeping up with those annual mammograms and prostate exams, aren’t you? Please don’t put them off—in the future, it may be harder to get in to see your doctor.

In less than three years, the first wave of baby boomers will hit 65—the age at which cancer incidence and mortality start to climb. The largest population bulge in America’s history is about to hit the health-care system like a freight train loaded with junk food.

For all cancers combined, the incidence of cancer is 10 times greater for people 65 or older. And older cancer patients are 16 times more likely to die from the disease than their younger counterparts.

By the time the last baby boomers reach 65 in 2030, the number of individuals in the United States who are that age and older is expected to double, from about 35 million to 70 million. By then, the group that is 85 and older is projected to reach about 9.6 million, more than double the number in that age range at the turn of the century. All this signals a runaway cancer hit barreling down the tracks, with twice as many people expected to get that diagnosis—about 2.6 million—by 2050.

Even though the individual cancer rate has remained stable since the early 1990s, the big boomer group will push up the nation’s overall cancer burden as they move into old age. Observers worry about a range of issues, including whether we’ll have enough oncologists (more than half the country’s oncologists are over age 50) and other specialists to treat them and whether patients will be able to pay for care.

Older cancer patients often suffer from one or more chronic conditions, with hypertension, arthritis and heart disease leading the list. These co-morbidities make treating cancer more complicated.

And while older patients in the United States aren’t excluded from clinical trials based solely on age, they don’t participate in great numbers. This means the learning curve may be steeper for managing the side effects of new cancer drugs and therapies for older patients.

“I think the bright side is that we are making continual inroads into our understanding of cancer and how cancer comes about in the first place,” says Vanderbilt-Ingram’s deputy director, Dr. David H. Johnson, past president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

Recent research breakthroughs hold the promise of great progress toward understanding the basic biology of cancer and devising treatment approaches that will manage it for a lifetime or perhaps even prevent it altogether.

The sequencing of the 20,000 or so human genes already has improved our understanding of the genetic “switches” that turn on tumors. One benefit: discovery of new compounds that can switch off malignant growth without harming normal cells. Also on the horizon: screening blood tests that harness the power of proteomic “fingerprints” to detect early cancer, even before symptoms occur (see sidebar article).

“The cancer field has made great progress,” says Jennifer Pietenpol, who in January was named director of the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center. “The decline in cancer deaths across the country continues. That’s good news, but we still have a lot to do.”

Pietenpol, who is also the B.F. Byrd Jr. Professor of Oncology and a professor of biochemistry, was named to head the VICC after having served as interim director following the departure of Dr. Ray BuBois, who in 2007 left Vanderbilt to become provost and executive vice president of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

Pietenpol received her doctoral degree in cell biology from Vanderbilt in 1990, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in oncology at Johns Hopkins University. In 1994 she joined the Vanderbilt faculty and soon after received a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Award for her research in cancer biology and toxicology.

Whether in conversation or in formal presentations, Pietenpol speaks clearly about the center’s overarching purpose—to eliminate death and suffering from cancer, for individual patients by delivering first-rate, evidence-based care, and on a global scale through its innovative science and translational research.

“Our goal is not to be one of many centers or hospitals doing the same thing,” Pietenpol says. “It’s to be at the cutting edge of research and clinical care and to set the example. I am very optimistic about our future.”

She has assumed leadership of VICC at a pivotal point in the growth and development of Vanderbilt-Ingram, which in only its second decade has established itself as one of the nation’s premier cancer research institutions and as the region’s leader in consumer preference for cancer care.

Nationwide, the National Cancer Institute has named 41 centers as Comprehensive Cancer Centers, a designation given to leaders in research, treatment, education and outreach. VICC is the only care center in Tennessee that conducts research and provides treatment in all cancers among adults and children, and one of just a handful in the Southeast.

“If you consider winning the war on cancer to be understanding the molecular basis of the disease, then we’ve made, and are making, huge strides,” Pietenpol says. “From a patient’s perspective, success means being diagnosed when you can be cured and when screening tools are available for early detection of recurrence or second cancers for years to come. That’s where we want to focus our resources. The clinical and basic research has built our reputation, and while it is expensive, it’s our most important investment.”

Over the past two years, Pietenpol has overseen a $15 million expansion that will double the capacity of the cancer outpatient clinic and chemotherapy infusion center.

Vanderbilt-Ingram’s focus is on areas that will have the greatest impact on future generations, including early detection and prevention; identification and validation of new molecular targets for therapy; design and initiation of high-impact clinical trials; development of “personalized” cancer treatment; and provision of the most innovative, compassionate care for patients, families and long-term cancer survivors.

“To this day, if there were a trial I were a candidate for, I’d be the first one to raise my hand because I’ve seen so much good come from these trials.”

~ Breast cancer survivor Teresa Lundberg, who believes participation in Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center trials of the drug Herceptin helped save her life

This emphasis on patient care, in particular, marks the recent evolution of VICC’s mission. “We have a commitment to provide excellent care to patients, regardless, but more patients also means more candidates for clinical trials, more tissue samples for research,” notes Pietenpol. “All of that increases, as does the opportunity for clinicians to provide feedback to fuel our discoveries in the lab. It’s synergistic.”

Tropic of Cancer

Before a discovery in the laboratory can become a treatment available to millions of patients, it must go through rigorous clinical trials. Among the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center’s achievements is its role in innovative, investigator-initiated trials with the greatest impact for patients.

And Vanderbilt has plenty of research subjects in its own backyard. Researchers have their own name for the Southern region of the United States—the Cancer Belt.

“When you look at a map of brain cancer incidence in the United States, the Southeast just lights up in red,” says Dr. Reid Thompson, associate professor and vice chairman of the Department of Neurological Surgery. Thompson and co-investigator Kathleen Egan are participating in a study to find clues that may explain this brain cancer cluster. (Egan, formerly of Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, is now on faculty at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute in Tampa, Fla.)

Vanderbilt-Ingram, along with four other cancer centers in the region, will enroll as many as 1,000 patients in the federally funded initiative. “We’re asking patients about their diets, possible job-related exposure to cancer-causing chemicals, and we’re collecting DNA samples,” explains Thompson, who also serves as director of Vanderbilt’s Brain Tumor Center. “We know some genetic markers are linked to other forms of cancer, and they may play a role in brain cancer as well.”

Brain cancer isn’t the only cancer taking a disproportionate toll on Southern populations. Topping the list is lung cancer. Southerners smoke more than people in other regions and are far more likely to be diagnosed with lung cancer. Cancers of the mouth and throat, also linked to tobacco use, are more prevalent in Southern states, too. “Instead of cigarettes, it is the use of snuff and chewing tobacco—among women as well as men—that causes this spike in oral cancers,” says William Blot, professor of medicine.

Behavior like tobacco use is clearly linked to some forms of cancer. But it is less easy to explain why people living in the South are developing many types of cancer at higher rates. And it doesn’t explain why African-Americans are more likely to develop and die from some cancers.

Blot leads the Southern Community Cohort Study (SCCS), the largest epidemiologic study in history, to explore why the South has become the Cancer Belt and why African-Americans experience higher rates of many types of cancer. Starting with a $28 million grant from the National Cancer Institute, the SCCS hopes to recruit 90,000 people in 12 Southern states to learn about their lifestyles, their medical histories, and their risk factors for cancer and other serious diseases. Two-thirds of the participants will be African-American, and many will be from rural areas.

The SCCS is a collaborative project among Vanderbilt-Ingram, Meharry Medical College, and the International Epidemiology Institute, as well as participating community health centers across the South. SCCS researchers rely on community health centers to enroll study participants, most of whom are low-income individuals.

“The study participants form one of the groups at highest risk for cancer that has ever been studied,” says Blot. “Most other investigations have not included large numbers of African-Americans, and few have included low-income individuals and people from rural parts of the country. This is the first large-scale study and the first in the South to include large numbers of all those groups.”

Even when the incidence of a form of cancer is higher among whites, the survival rate is nearly always lower for blacks. The reasons are not clear, but suspected culprits include differences in access to screening or treatment, stage at diagnosis and aggressiveness of disease.

Breast cancer is a good example of this anomaly. While white women in states like Tennessee are slightly more likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer than African-Americans, African-American women are far more likely to die from the disease.

“We do know that a significant lifestyle component is linked to cancer incidence,” says Bettina Beech, associate director of health disparities research for Vanderbilt-Ingram. “If we increase fruit and vegetable consumption, decrease fat consumption and increase physical activity, we can avoid a huge percentage of cancer cases. But it is not that simple for people living in some areas. For low-income individuals, regardless of whether they are minorities, there is reduced access to grocery stores with high-quality produce in many neighborhoods.”

While lifestyle factors and access to preventive surveillance and treatment play a role in cancer, scientists increasingly are finding genetic differences that may explain some of the disparities. African-American men are far more likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer than white men, and more than twice as likely to die from the disease. Researchers have discovered a combination of genes that appears to play a role in the aggressive forms of the disease often found among black men.

“It’s been speculated for a number of years that vitamin D may play a protective role in cancer,” Blot says. “Researchers have found lower blood levels of vitamin D among people living at northern latitudes, and those populations are more likely to develop certain forms of cancer. Because we know that exposure to sunlight helps the body produce vitamin D, it stands to reason that someone with dark skin may not be getting enough of the vitamin. Our study in the South found roughly half of the African-American population had insufficient levels of vitamin D versus only 10 to 15 percent of the white population.”

If researchers can determine exactly how vitamin D influences cancer risk, they may be able to supplement the diets of those who have insufficient levels of the vitamin.

Nutritional factors are thought to play a role in the etiology of more than one-third of all human cancers, yet information about the preventive potential of specific dietary compounds is scanty. But one study offers unique opportunities to fill such knowledge gaps.

Door to Door in Shanghai

Half a world away from the fast food and barbecue-laden tables of the American South, Dr. Wei Zheng earned a medical degree and master’s degree in public health at Shanghai Medical University, where he also met his wife and colleague, Xiao Ou Shu. Nearly 20 years ago they immigrated to the United States for Ph.D. training at Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University, respectively.

Zheng was involved with the Iowa Women’s Health Study while working at the University of Minnesota, writing a paper focusing on consumption and cancer risk, when it struck him: “Most studies look at what is bad about diet. I thought, We need to focus on what is good about diets to help protect against cancer,” Zheng says.

And so began the Shanghai Women’s Health Study, which has yielded important clues to the mysterious connections between environment, genetics and disease. Funded since 1996, the study includes 75,049 Chinese women who were between the ages of 40 and 70 at the time of enrollment between 1997 and 2000 and who lived in urban Shanghai, where intake levels of many hypothesized cancer-inhibitory dietary factors are high and diverse. The primary focus of the research is to determine whether certain diets—those with high intakes of folate, soy foods, allium vegetables, crucifers and tea—are associated with a reduced risk of cancer.

The Shanghai investigation is known as an epidemiologic “cohort” study. It is designed to track the development of disease in a large group of people over an extended period of time—usually decades. Cohort studies can help reveal the impact that diet, exercise and other lifestyle factors can have on health and longevity.

While working with her husband on this study, Xiao Ou Shu realized that more could be gained than by simply studying women. In 2001 she launched the Shanghai Men’s Health Study. To date, 60,000 men have been enrolled, half of whom are married to participants in the women’s cohort.

“First we did a small pilot study and discovered that the husbands’ and wives’ dietary habits are very different, although they share the same living environment,” Shu says. “For instance, men like to eat more meat compared to the women.”

The studies rely on trained interviewers who go door to door. Because most Shanghai residents live in apartment towers, dozens of study participants can be found in one building.

One goal of the Shanghai and Southern Community cohort studies is to determine whether differences in traditional Asian and Western diets account for widely varying incidences of different cancers among residents of China and the United States. Researchers know that Asia and the United States have quite different cancer spectra. In China and Japan, stomach cancer used to be the No. 1 culprit, followed by cancer of the esophagus, whereas in the United States, lung, colon and breast cancers dominate.

However, the cancer spectrum in some parts of China, such as Shanghai, is starting to more closely resemble that of the United States. For people who move from China to the United States, the risk of stomach and esophageal cancers decreases while the risk of lung, colon and breast cancers dramatically increases.

The Shanghai Women’s Study already has begun to shed light on a number of areas. “Sometimes the associations between lifestyle and disease are so striking it surprises us,” says Wei Zheng.

Among the findings: “Women who are nonsmokers but who are exposed to the cigarette smoking of their husbands have an increased risk of dying of stroke,” Zheng says. “We also learned that soy-food intake reduces the risk of fractures, hypertension, coronary heart disease and diabetes.”

Simply adopting Asian eating habits may not yield the same benefits in the United States. “Even though lots of people in the South eat rice and greens, as do people in Shanghai,” Shu says, “the specific type of vegetables and the way the food is prepared is very different.”

Both the Shanghai studies and the Southern Cohort Study track participants by name, address, Social Security number and, in Shanghai, by citizenship ID number. Researchers regularly monitor government registries in China and the U.S. that track disease and deaths reported by health officials. Participants also are contacted periodically to update their disease and exposure information.

Biological samples—urine, blood, cheek cells (for DNA)—are sent to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where they are stored in freezers for future analysis.

“We need to understand why people are at increased risk, to be the ones leading early detection and diagnosis, to use our research capabilities to offer the best treatments with the least side effects,” says Pietenpol. “That’s the position of this cancer center—to understand the molecular basis well enough to detect cancer early and to offer the most streamlined, individualized, multidisciplinary care.”

More than one-third of Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s funding from the National Institutes of Health is cancer based. Traditionally, the federal government has led the charge in the war on cancer and other public health efforts by funneling dollars through national agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. But federal funding to fight cancer, which will directly impact one in three Americans, has stalled. And the NIH-funding slice for the National Cancer Institute—the nation’s principal agency for cancer research—is expected to continue to decline.

“We’ve remained remarkably competitive for large collaborative grants, even in these tight times,” Pietenpol says. “For example, on the last four major grants for which we’ve competed, we not only received outstanding scores but the top scores in the nation. Yet we must be even more competitive for even tighter resources.

“Top-shelf research and quality care are very expensive,” she continues. “Our progress, to some extent, will be dictated by how much money is available. If we want to continue our momentum, we must be as competitive, if not more so, for the extramural funds that are available—in federal dollars, foundation support and private donations.

The progress in understanding cancer at the molecular level is due to what Pietenpol calls “mind-boggling” advances in technology, informatics, and the pace of scientific discovery in the past 20 years.

“A generation ago it was one scientist investigating one gene or pathway—or maybe pathways limited to one or two proteins,” Pietenpol says. “Today it’s not unusual for one scientist to study hundreds of proteins, thousands of genes, in collaboration with colleagues all over the world.”

No one involved in the struggle to solve cancer’s riddles is underestimating the challenge, however. Cancer is an old and wily adversary, going back at least as far as the dinosaurs—evidence of malignancies has been found in fossils dating back 80 million years.

“Yes, cancer deaths are declining, but one in every two men and one in every three women will have cancer,” Pietepol says. “Tennessee is one of seven contiguous states with the highest cancer death rates. As a Comprehensive Cancer Center located right in the middle of these states, it is our obligation to focus our work where we can make the most impact. Until those outcomes change significantly, our jobs are not done.”

What keeps Pietenpol and Vanderbilt’s 300 other cancer investigators optimistic is part scientist’s curiosity and part pride in the team of professionals around them. “It’s the clinical enterprise, the investigators involved in treating patients with cancer,” says Pietenpol. “It’s the clinical, basic, translational and population-based research aimed at cancer. It’s the people who do the valet services for our patients. It’s the people doing the most complicated surgical resection.”

Not long before she became the VICC’s interim director in 2007, Pietenpol recalls, a childhood friend died of renal cancer. “She was diagnosed right after Labor Day and died the week after Thanksgiving—90 days from diagnosis to death. She was 40, and died three days shy of her daughter’s first birthday. So this is personal, and the older I get, it seems to get more personal every day. We must pick up the pace.

“I know far too many people who have suffered from cancer. It’s what’s always propelled me. When you’re involved in cancer research, cancer treatment and cancer education, everything you do, you’re doing for a reason.”

Cynthia Manley, Dagny Stuart, Elizabeth Older, Bill Snyder, Heather Newman, Stephen Doster and GayNelle Doll contributed to this story.

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

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

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

Same war, different fight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Soldier Mentality

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

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

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

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

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

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

Warriors in Transition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fighting the System

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

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

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

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

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

When the War Becomes Personal

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

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

“We validate for them that what they feel is real–and that physical reasons are behind those feelings.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Daniel Dubois.

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

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

 

Vanderbilt Federal Relations staffers work within a stone’s throw of the Capitol Building, congressional offices, the Supreme Court, and the
Library of Congress.

Photo by Shane Stezelberger.

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

Since the early 1990s, Vanderbilt’s Office of Federal Relations has existed as an embassy of the university in the nation’s capital. The office sits a block away from Union Station and within a stone’s throw of the U.S. Capitol. Its staff–all full-time employees of

Vanderbilt’s Division of Public Affairs–as well as frequent visitors from campus, wave high the Vanderbilt flag and bring a bit of black and gold to the Beltway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

“Capitol Hill is an oral culture, and you talk in broad strokes. You’re meeting with people who have 15 to 20 meetings a day–and that’s on top of what they’re supposed to be doing.” –Professor Dave Piston

Photo by John Russell.

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

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

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

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

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

 

“At the end of the day in Congress, the words you never want to hear are, ‘We never heard from you guys,’” says Jeff Vincent (left), retiring assistant vice chancellor for federal relations.

Photo by Daniel Dubois.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Photo by Daniel Dubois.

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Photo by Daniel Dubois.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   

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

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

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

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

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

   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   

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

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

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

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

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

   

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

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

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

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

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

   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   

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

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

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

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

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

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

   

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

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

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

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

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

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

   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   

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

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

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

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

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

   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   

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

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

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

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

“It was an economic competition,” says Dornbush, “and that’s my cup of tea.”

   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   

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

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

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

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

But Wait–There’s More

These alumni have also served as ambassadors:

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

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

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

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

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

John Geer

Christian Grose

Bruce Oppenheimer

Mitchell Seligson

Neal Tate

Photos by John Russell and Steve Green

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Troubled Waters

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

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

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

Illustration by Kevin Rechi

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unconventional Wisdom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The worst of it came when she entered law school.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Such was the view of her doctors at Yale.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elyn Saks at Vanderbilt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you approach investing?

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

How many people are involved in investing for Vanderbilt?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Illustrations by Hal Mayforth

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

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

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

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

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

What Is Nanotechnology, Anyway?

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

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

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

Solid-State Lighting

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

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

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

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

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

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

Early Virus Detection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We’re not talking about something that can be done five years or 10 years down the road. We’re talking today.”

Early Cancer Detection

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stronger, Lighter Concrete

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

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

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

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

What’s Next?

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

There’s still plenty of room at the bottom.

Call them “the disappeared.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Early Action Is Crucial

Carolyn Hughes, professor of special education and human and organizational development in Peabody College, believes that creation of inner-school “small learning communities” is one place to start. Studies by the Gates Foundation and other organizations reveal that, in most cases, the decision to drop out of school is a long, gradual, cumulative process. It often begins in middle school as students become disengaged from schoolwork and disenfranchised from higher-achieving peers. Once they reach high school, these students see no connection between what they’re learning and their own lives. They begin acting out, missing class, and slowly falling through the cracks. Many times teachers are too overwhelmed to notice.

“We are realizing that the impersonal nature of attending a huge high school with little time for teachers to mentor adolescents is probably not healthy for kids,” says Hughes. “We have come to ask ourselves, are freshmen ready for this?”

The Small Learning Community (SLC) is a way to address the new “Three R’s” of education–relevance, relationships and rigor. In this model, ninth graders enter a separate academy and teachers follow a set group of students throughout their high school careers, challenging them to think and linking academic content to their real-time life experiences.

“The idea is to create schools within the big school to increase rapport and relationship-building among students and teachers, and to increase the relevance of the school day,” Hughes says. “A small learning community results in greater parent involvement. That leads to a lower dropout rate. A smaller academy also leads to greater accountability and more peer-to-peer connections.”

Because they know the students well, teachers in the small learning community can help students set goals for life after high school. They can be attuned to students dealing with profound family and personal problems. Because truancy is the primary precursor to dropping out, they notice and take action when someone has missed too many days of school.

When researchers break down students into male/female and into various ethnic groups, they find that the high schooler most at risk for dropping out is the African American male. The problem begins with low expectations for black males, says Donna Ford, Betts Chair of Education and Human Development and professor of special education, whose research focuses on gifted and talented poor and minority students.

“You see an over-referral of black males in special education classes,” Ford says. “Plus, negative peer pressure is real. If you are a high-performing African American student, you face a strong possibility of being accused of ‘acting white.’”

Gilman Whiting, assistant professor of African American and diaspora studies, agrees, explaining that studies show a correlation between the number of friends a teenage boy has and his grade-point average. “The more friends you have, if you’re a white male, the more likely you are to have a high GPA. It’s the reverse for African American students. The more friends you have, the lower your GPA,” Whiting says.

Black men are the least likely among all groups to go to college. Among all students who do go to college, they are the most at risk for quitting before completing their degrees.

It’s a different story for African American females. While their high school graduation rates are lower than for white students, black females are more likely to attend college than black males. At Vanderbilt, which has a very high completion rate in general, black females are the most likely among all groups to complete their coursework and receive their degrees. In other words, not only is the achievement gap between African

Americans and other racial groups growing ever wider, but so is the achievement gap between African American women and men.

“People talk about fear of failure, but for females, particularly for African American females, there is fear of success, as well,” observes Ford. “Females face that fear factor that if you’re too intelligent or too studious, you risk not getting a boyfriend. You’re going to be by yourself.”

The answer, Ford and Whiting insist, is to raise the bar for minority male students in particular, beginning in middle school and carrying all the way through college. The change starts by developing what Whiting calls a “scholar identity,” meaning that black and Hispanic boys view themselves as academically capable, studious, intelligent and talented in the school setting–and that being well educated is both cool and empowering.

To that end, Whiting, Ford, and a group of service-minded African American professionals known as the 100 Kings established the Scholar Identity Institute, a two-week summer program for fifth- through 10th-grade boys from low-income urban neighborhoods. The boys come to Vanderbilt’s campus and engage in games and lectures to stoke their interest in academics and to change attitudes about school and learning.

“We don’t focus on your test scores, your GPAs, your school attendance. We focus on the need for the right attitude so that you do well in school,” Whiting says. “Even if you think what you’re learning is boring and trivial, you’ll listen and you’ll do the homework. Even if your mom is not involved in your school, even if you think your teachers hate you, you still need an education. So despite your unfortunate situation, what can you do to persist and be resilient?”

The Great Divide

A generation or two ago, a high school dropout could get an entry-level job at the nearby plant or factory with health insurance and benefits, and retire 30 years later with a decent pension. Those days are over. Most manufacturing has left low-income neighborhoods, having shut down or moved overseas. Where businesses still operate, even entry-level jobs call for a high school diploma or two years of vocational or community college. The options for dropouts are menial, minimum-wage employment or public assistance.

Yet study after study shows that students start out believing in the American dream.

Around 90 percent of ninth graders say they plan to go to college. But something happens between ninth and 12th grades, between intention and reality. Sometimes it’s family finances, sometimes it’s poor academic performance. Sometimes it’s detachment from the grind of studying.

Whatever the cause, it has produced an intellectual sinkhole. Right now, for example, only 22 percent of Tennesseans over age 25 have a bachelor’s degree or above. Because a person with a bachelor’s degree can expect to earn over his or her lifetime a million dollars more than someone with a high school diploma or less, the disparity foreshadows the emergence of a new aristocracy.

To keep big-dreaming students on the track for college, some schools have instituted university-based mentoring programs (see sidebar articles) and grant programs like AVID and GEAR UP. AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) is designed to help selected students from underrepresented populations, often first-generation college-goers, navigate the college application labyrinth.

Though Carolyn Hughes approves of the program, she says it’s not enough. “The AVID kids are the lucky ones. They get individual attention that helps them go through the process,” she says. “But a lack of resources and counselors in high-needs schools means that only a few kids will be able to take advantage of the AVID college-prep services. Everybody should be able to access services like AVID, everybody should get the college prep courses, even if they’re going to trade school. The bar needs to be raised across the board for our high school kids.”

GEAR UP (Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs) is a federal grant program that provides college-prep services for students from seventh grade through high school in school districts where at least 50 percent of children qualify for free or reduced-priced lunches. The goal is to help students make the transition into a post-secondary school. GEAR UP in Tennessee focuses on rural, low-income school districts where high school graduation rates are comparable favorably to the state as a whole, but where relatively few go on to college.

Parents in rural families may not want their children to go off to college because they fear they won’t return to the community after they graduate, says Erin O’Hara, director of planning and research for the Tennessee Higher Education Commission. Students feel pulled in two different directions, between loyalty to family and personal ambition. The commission is planning a study to confirm if it’s true that rural students who go away for college don’t come back once they’re ready for professional employment.

With all these disparate problems and dynamics fueling the under-education of our nation’s youth, it would help if legislators and researchers could base decisions on a model school system that seems to work, one where school conditions cut against socio-demographic factors that contribute to the risk of dropping out. Claire Smrekar, associate professor of public policy and education, may have unearthed that model system in the Department of Defense Educational Activity (DoDEA) schools, which are located at American military installations around the world for the children of military personnel. African American and Hispanic students at DoDEA schools (some of the most racially integrated schools in the world) are achieving some of the highest assessment exam scores in the nation. Smrekar began a series of evaluations to uncover factors in their success and find out whether that information could benefit public schools.

In many ways the DoDEA community mirrors a high-risk public school system. Children tend to come from families of the working poor because enlisted military members greatly outnumber officers. Most of their parents do not have college degrees, and many joined the military as teenagers. Since parents are often transferred to other bases or are deployed overseas, students experience a high degree of stress related to transience, separation and family instability.

Yet DoDEA children typically perform well in school. “We found a deep commitment to education and training. Although the parents tend to hold a high school diploma only, they want more for their kids,” Smrekar says. “Instead of conditions of disengagement, we found instances of integration, support, and a seamless webbing between school and home.”

DoDEA schools tend to be smaller than comparable public schools, particularly middle schools, where adolescents usually begin to fall away. “Faculty members have this incredibly deep level of professionalism and dedication,” Smrekar says. “There’s an exceptional sense of community in these schools, so kids can’t be anonymous. They can’t get lost.”

Counselors are available for children and parents to help them cope with separation and loss. Peer-buddies and mentors are built into the system to help students who enter mid-year quickly adjust to a new setting. Teachers have discretion to adjust lesson plans and activities. DoDEA schools set high academic standards, maintain discipline, and prepare students for post-secondary study. DoDEA graduates tend to handle the demands of college successfully.

Smrekar believes DoDEA schools offer a roadmap for public education systems that face similar problems.

It all begins with caring, says Hughes, who has started a new mentoring program where Vanderbilt students meet with at-risk high schoolers at a neighborhood community center or a local branch library–sites that are neutral and not intimidating to teenagers–to talk about college and help them acquire tools for getting through high school.

“We’re not going to throw up our hands and say this dropout problem is too overwhelming,” Hughes insists. “We can’t beat the system, but we can work within it and have a positive and powerful effect.”

From the moment they step onto campus next August, the 1,550 students in the Class of 2012 will be pioneers in one of the most comprehensive changes in Vanderbilt history. Each incoming student will live in one of 10 residential “houses” led by a faculty head who lives with students and residential life staff. Collectively known as The Commons, this residential community is the first step in Vanderbilt’s College Halls program.

The Commons promises significant new forms of faculty involvement and student learning for undergraduates. Students in each house will dine together, socialize together, and call upon faculty mentors for a range of needs, academic and otherwise. Each house will create its own identity, plan its own activities, and manage its own programming budget.

“As a colleague of mine says, we’re aboutto open Pandora’s box,” says Associate Professor of History Frank Wcislo, Vanderbilt’s first dean of The Commons and a passionate advocate for the program. “But in this instance, the box is filled only with good.”

After nearly a decade of planning, Vanderbilt is investing $150 million in the first phase of College Halls. Much more than bricks and mortar, these projects mark Vanderbilt’s leadership in an educational movement that in recent years has been taking root at leading universities not only in the United States–such as at Princeton, MIT and Northwestern–but around the world.

While The Commons focuses on first-year students, the university’s current plan aims eventually to build a series of College Halls for all interested upperclassmen. Early planning for the next two such College Halls, each of which would house about 300 sophomores, juniors and seniors together with resident faculty and graduate students, is already under way.

The residential college movement is “a real generational transformation, and there are at least two motivations behind it,” notes Robert J. O’Hara, an evolutionary biologist who is one of the world’s leading advocates of the residential college movement. “One is a rejection of the mid-20th century’s obsession with bureaucratic centralization, an outlook that treated education almost like an industrial process. Another is a desire to repair the damage done by the self-centeredness of the 1960s. Residential colleges are being established at universities in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Germany and China, and they are joining established systems in Britain, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere.”

This model that is gaining new advocates in the 21st century is patterned after the 700-year-old residential college systems of Oxford and Cambridge universities. Whether referred to as residential colleges, a house system or college halls, the intent is the same at such places as Harvard, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania and Rice: intimate residential-based communities of faculty and underclassmen living together and engaging in social and educational programming. Hogwarts, the school of magic attended by Harry Potter, provides a literary example of College Halls, minus the moving staircases and talking portraits.

“A residential college experience is absolutely at the heart of what Vanderbilt has always been about,” says Susan Aston Barge, BA’81, associate provost for College Halls. “Even though Vanderbilt’s growth in recent years has meant more students living off campus, it was never in keeping with our mission.”

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

With the building of The Commons, notes Dean of Students Mark Bandas, Vanderbilt is finally achieving a long-stated goal that all students, with few exceptions, live on campus.

“Vanderbilt has never had enough housing available, so our insufficient space issues have allowed some students to live off campus,” says Bandas. “Especially as enrollment grew, housing couldn’t keep up with demand.”

That’s about to change. Beginning next fall nearly 100 percent of undergraduates will live on campus. Only students requesting to live with an immediate family member whose primary residence is in Davidson County may live off campus. That is a fairly substantial change from recent years, when as much as 15 percent of the undergraduate population lived elsewhere.

The move back toward a residential emphasis began nearly a decade ago when, at the request of College of Arts and Science faculty members, former Provost Thomas Burrish charged a committee of faculty, students and administrators with exploring the possibility of a residential college system at Vanderbilt. Chaired by then-Associate Provost Nicholas Zeppos (now interim chancellor, provost, and vice chancellor for academic affairs), the committee examined the educational outcomes of learning communities, met with representatives from institutions with residential colleges, and conducted internal research on the thoughts and needs of Vanderbilt students.

One troubling finding of their research at the time was data showing that during the previous five years, approximately 8 percent of Vanderbilt first-year students did not return for their sophomore year–a poor retention rate compared to other top universities. It is during the transitional year from high school to college that students face the greatest risk of isolation and benefit most from increased interaction and faculty mentoring.

“Students who are able to find their ‘niche’ at Vanderbilt tend to remain and graduate,” the committee reported. “Conversely, students who do not socially integrate and develop no strong ties to a community, student organization or academic program have a significantly lower rate of retention.”

Soon after the committee released its report, the residential college idea gained momentum from the convergence of three personalities at Vanderbilt: Gordon Gee was installed as the university’s seventh chancellor, Nicholas Zeppos became provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs, and the Board of Trust was chaired by tireless student advocate Martha Ingram.

Zeppos explains how that which is special about Vanderbilt has continuously served as the project’s Polaris. “We asked what Vanderbilt is about,” says Zeppos, “and the answer always was the unique connection between faculty and students and the transformation young people go through in their college years. Vanderbilt stands for collegiality, vitality, balance and community, respect and caring, and College Halls builds upon all of that.”

Ingram’s own residential college experience during her days as a Vassar student helped her envision such a model at Vanderbilt. “It concerned me that we had students who were bright enough to get into Vanderbilt, who had all the credentials, but who weren’t staying here because they didn’t know how to fit in,” she says. “Helping every student maximize his or her potential is what Vanderbilt is all about, and that means making the experience welcoming and challenging intellectually for everyone who comes here.”

The immediate price the university pays when a student fails to become engaged is loss of that student to another institution. But there are also ramifications if the student stays. Disengaged students make less of an academic contribution to Vanderbilt and become unenthusiastic, disconnected alumni.

“The solution is to make complex institutions into smaller units where students don’t get lost in the shuffle,” says Lucius Outlaw Jr., associate provost of academic affairs and professor of philosophy.

At present, Vanderbilt students have three very different versions of a first year at Vanderbilt depending on which of the three freshman areas of campus they live in–Kissam Quadrangle, Branscomb Quadrangle or Vanderbilt/Barnard Halls. Having all first-year students together will help standardize the freshman experience.

By building The Commons, says Outlaw, “we are creating small residential institutions within the institution that decrease our scale and increase our intimacy with students at this critical time in their lives.”

Vanderbilt already has a model of sorts in its existing Living and Learning Centers–Mayfield, McGill and McTyeire. The committee headed by Zeppos found in 1999 that students of these residences had, on average, SAT scores 30 points higher than other entering Vanderbilt students; had high school GPAs higher than other entering Vanderbilt students; and were more likely to receive an honors scholarship.

The 10 houses of The Commons are all located on Vanderbilt’s east side, adjacent to and architecturally harmonious with the historic Peabody College buildings, but within a short walk of the center of campus thanks to two bridges over 21st Avenue. They include meeting spaces for students, seminar rooms, laundry facilities, wireless Internet services, and specially designed apartments for faculty heads of house. Five of the houses were built from the ground up, and five were transformed from residence halls built at Peabody College, most in the 1920s. Also new is The Commons Center, a multipurpose recreational, educational, dining and community center. That section of campus provided the perfect location for such an enterprise, notes Judson Newbern, associate vice chancellor for campus planning and construction, because it was “a contiguous area that had been under-realized and underinvested in over the years.” The Commons continues the feeling of the original surrounding Peabody structures by using similar architecture. It features four quadrangles and takes advantage of the popular green spaces of Magnolia Lawn and the Peabody Esplanade. Every space was designed with accidental interaction as a goal. Planners found that students don’t like congregating in huge lobbies–but one place where they do hang out is the laundry room. So laundry rooms were placed right off the house lobbies. Small coffeehouse-type spaces also encourage social exchanges.

Certain amenities were omitted in order to foster integration of first-year students into campus life among upperclassmen. Student mailboxes continue to be located in the Station B Post Office, and the Student Recreational Center is still the best place on campus for a good workout and for intramural sports. A five-minute walk gets one to Library Lawn and the Stevenson Center, and in approximately five minutes more, one arrives at the Rec Center, Sarratt Student Center or Greek Row.

“It’s creating a whole new front door to Vanderbilt,” says Wcislo.

The Professor Next Door

The 10 senior faculty who will serve as heads of house are a diverse mix of empty-nesters and young professors. Faculty heads will interact with students through such formal means as sponsoring lectures and conversations with visiting faculty, as well as informal means–hosting study breaks and afternoon teas and eating meals in the Commons Center dining hall.

Faculty will live with their families in a university-furnished apartment. These two- and three-bedroom residences each have a separate exterior entrance and interior space specifically for the purpose of entertaining other members of the house and of The Commons.

“I suspect that living and learning in The Commons will redefine life at Vanderbilt, and not only for its students,” says faculty head Greg Barz, associate professor of ethnomusicology. Barz, his wife, Mona, and their two children, ages 12 and 7, will move into North House next fall. “Faculty and staff will be significantly affected by our deep involvement in the everyday lives of our students.”

Mona Barz, a pastoral counselor, adds, “While we expect we may feel a certain loss of privacy, we are looking forward to experiencing everyday life at Vanderbilt. Our children think it will be a lot of fun to eat in the dining center, use the green as their front yard, and get to know the students.”

What faculty will not be is some kind of über-RA. “I have no intention of patrolling the hallways,” says Wcislo. “I view this as an opportunity to do more of what I love best–teaching.”

Visions and Revisions

Underpinning the bricks and mortar of College Halls is Vanderbilt Visions, a first-year core program in which small groups of students, facilitated by a faculty member and a student VUceptor, come together outside the classroom in new ways. Groups will complete at least one community service project, get together for social outings, and discuss dozens of topics in the social and political realms as well as the values and expectations of the Vanderbilt community.

While first-year students won’t move into The Commons until fall 2008, Vanderbilt Visions began in fall 2006.

Stuart Hill, a senior in the Blair School of Music and president of VUcept, the student-led organization that administers the Vanderbilt Visions program, recalls his first year at Vanderbilt. “I knew my professors, and I was getting a great education,” he says. “But I wondered if my friends were more just company rather than the type of fulfilling friends I had envisioned spending time with at college. Becoming involved in summer academic orientation–a precursor to the Vanderbilt Visions program–helped me realize there were other people here and gave me a broader perspective.”

With The Commons and Vanderbilt Visions, that broader perspective could be possible for all students early on. “This isn’t just about making friends,” Hill continues. “Participants of Vanderbilt Visions are getting mentorship about how to become better learners, how to become more active participants in the Vanderbilt community.”

Not every student shared Hill’s enthusiasm for Vanderbilt Visions in its first year. An evaluation a few months into the program revealed that only a third of first-year students approved of it. Based on that early feedback from student focus groups, discussion topics have since been geared more specifically to the Vanderbilt experience. VUceptors have been given flexibility to think proactively about how their groups adapt the curriculum. And the size of each Vanderbilt Visions group was scaled down from 20 to 15.

“It is the development of relationships we’re really going after,” says Ann Neely, associate professor of the practice of education, who is participating in her second year with Vanderbilt Visions. “This is part of the purpose–to create opportunities for students and professors to have intellectual conversations outside the classroom.”

While some students have always managed to make connections with a particular faculty member–an adviser, the instructor of a favorite course, a lab director–many undergraduates find it intimidating to approach faculty beyond the confines of a classroom.

In addition to faculty heads of house, Vanderbilt Visions involves more than 100 faculty section leaders who meet weekly with small groups of first-year students. This program alone has greatly increased interaction between students and faculty.

“Students sit down with an engaged, involved upperclassman and a prominent faculty member for an hour a week for the entire year,” says Cara Bilotta, a senior in the College of Arts and Science and current president of Vanderbilt Student Government. “They can pick each other’s brains about Vanderbilt and about the world in a way that isn’t possible inside a classroom. This is where we start to blow apart the boundaries between students and faculty.”

Even with the fine tuning of Vanderbilt Visions, though, some students have yet to embrace the whole notion of their university’s becoming a residential community. “Basically, we are frustrated because we feel like students will suffer in [not having residence options for] price and quality now that the university will not have to be competitive when it comes to housing,” says Taylor Gould, a junior in the College of Arts and Science and co-founder of the Facebook group Students Against the College Halls Initiative. “Everyone is focused on College Halls, which is great, but this shouldn’t mean that no one focuses on current students.”

The rise of The Commons also has fueled rumors that the project will sound the death knell for the university’s Greek system.

“I think Greek life at Vanderbilt will continue to be a major part of the Vanderbilt community, no matter where the freshman class is housed,” counters Erik Johnson, a senior in the College of Arts and Science and president of the Interfraternity Council. “Any concerns the Greek community may have about The Commons or College Halls stem from fear of the unknown.”

As to charges that College Halls is Vanderbilt’s attempt to copy its Ivy League competitors, says Bilotta, “I think a lot of these concerns stem from a misunderstanding of what College Halls will be. They’ve been designed to adapt to student needs and student wants, and the planning process has involved students from the very beginning. We take a lot of pride in being a great university in the South, in our unique Vanderbilt-ness.”

“Some schools claim to have residential colleges and many have faculty who live on campus, but they have little interaction with students,” adds Susan Barge. “We are already unique among other top schools in our commitment to the undergraduate experience.”

So far the effort is bringing Vanderbilt positive press, including mention in a July 2007 New York Times profile of residential colleges and a U.S. News and World Report citation of Vanderbilt’s College Halls as a “Program to Look For.”

“Vanderbilt has definitely enjoyed increased exposure and interest in the university of late, which can be tied, in part, to The Commons,” says Doug Christiansen, associate provost for enrollment management. “Parents and prospective students really get it when we talk about The Commons as a community of belonging, steeped in academic as well as social traditions and an increased ability for students to explore.”

Christiansen points out that while much of the spotlight is on College Halls, Vanderbilt is being noticed for “its very public and very deliberate focus on the undergraduate experience.”

Ultimately, says Nicholas Zeppos, almost all concerns about The Commons stem from a reaction to change. By their very nature, institutions of higher education are constantly evolving.

“People don’t want things to change, but what they have and love is the product of change,” says Zeppos. “I’ve been at Vanderbilt for 20 years and am fiercely protective of this place, but I will also always ask what can make us better. College Halls and The Commons are another chance for us to take our unique values forward.”

As Wcislo explains what the university hopes to create with The Commons, he is adamant that the undertaking not be viewed as an attempt to fix something that is broken, but rather that it be seen as a tool that can be used to make that which is good about Vanderbilt even better. With first-year students more engaged with each other and with faculty, the expected byproduct is a general increase in the intellectual atmosphere on campus.

“I’ve worked with Vanderbilt students who made me marvel at their confidence, at their intention, and at the deliberateness with which they engaged me,” says Wcislo. “This type of encounter, though, happens far less frequently with freshmen and sophomores. Let’s increase the opportunities for learning in these first two years.”

Vanderbilt students, faculty and staff have already begun to make the space of The Commons their own. For the last two years, upperclassmen have been breaking in new houses and living in newly renovated halls. The Commons Center opened for business in August and has already hosted a number of campus events. It regularly draws a large lunchtime crowd and coffee lovers from across campus, as well as from businesses on nearby Music Row and Hillsboro Village.

In the more ethereal arena of campus culture, there is an attitude of great anticipation–tinged with a bit of trepidation. “We must have tolerance for ambiguity as this project evolves,” says Barge. “Our goal is to get all the building blocks in place and then step away.”

“What really matters is this complicated, nebulous thing called university culture,” says Lucius Outlaw. “It’s going to take a while to build a Commons culture, and it’s only one aspect of our university’s culture. Changing the housing experience of our undergraduates isn’t going to blow open the doors of intellectual life by itself. It remains to be seen what we can pull off and how many years it will take.”

In the City, you don’t stargaze. You don’t dig through wildflower field guides for the name of that brilliant trumpet burst of blue you saw on your morning walk. You don’t hunt for animal tracks in the snow or pause in that same frozen forest, eyes closed, listening for the chirp of a foraging nuthatch. You forget such a creature as a snake even exists. It’s as if New York is encased in a big plastic bubble, where humans sit atop the food chain armed with credit cards and Zagat guides. Native wildlife? Cockroaches, pigeons, rats. Disease transmitters. Boat payments for exterminators.

Our story begins in the bubble.

The year is 2000, the dawn of a new millennium. The Y2K scare is barely behind us. Economic good times lie ahead, with unemployment at an all-time low, the U.S. government boasting record surpluses, and the NASDAQ, which raised a lusty cheer by topping 5,000, making everyone rich. At least on paper. Living in the wealthiest city in the wealthiest nation at the wealthiest moment in history, Heather and I should be happy. We aren’t.

Burned Out

Like everyone we know in New York, we work too much. Job stress follows us home at night, stalks us on weekends. Heather’s work at a justice-reform think tank and mine hustling freelance magazine assignments keep each of us either chained to PCs or traveling. Within the past two years, Heather has flown to every continent but Australia and Antarctica to interview cops and meet with government officials. When she was seven months pregnant, she gave a talk in Ireland, flew back to New York, and left the same day for Argentina and an entirely different hemisphere. We figured that if she happened to give birth prematurely, it was a coin toss whether we’d have a summer or winter baby.

As it turned out, Luther was born more or less on time in Manhattan, in a hospital towering over the East River. By the tender age of 4 months, he was already in the care of a nanny, leaving us feeling guilty for having to hire her and also guilty about how little we could afford to pay her. (We felt guiltier still upon learning from another mother that our nanny was locking Luther in his stroller so she could gab at the park. We fired her and put Luther in day care.)

We spend too much money on housing and not enough time outdoors. We order dinner from a revolving drawerful of ethnic takeout menus and rent disappointing movies from a corner shop where the owner hides behind bulletproof glass. There’s something missing from our lives–from our relationship–and yet we’re too busy to confront the problem. At least that’s our excuse. So the two of us plod through our days hardly talking. And at night we collapse into bed, kept awake by the sound of squeaking bedsprings in the apartment above but too exhausted for any bed-squeaking ourselves.

It isn’t a physical exhaustion. The beneficiaries of a multigenerational pursuit of the American dream, we have traded the farm and factory work of our small Southern hometowns for education and urban living. Instead of a limb lost in some mercilessly churning assembly-line machine, we suffer the stress-related ills of our times: anxiety, depression, e-mail addiction, debt.

My tipping point came the day my beige plastic Dell tower–the tool of my trade–whined to a halt. The screen went black. With mounting panic, I punched the keys and poked the on/off button on the front. Nothing. Fingers followed the dusty power cord from wall socket to box. Plugged tight. My mind reeled at the thought of all that accumulated data trapped inside the wiry guts of a machine that I so little understood: pages of research, interview transcripts, an almost-finished article due three days earlier, book ideas, addresses, e-mail correspondence with friends and editors, family photos, business records, tax records. That computer was everything to me. And like a fool, I had not bothered to back it up.

Once I recovered from my initial panic, I thought back to my grandfather, a country doctor and cattle farmer. He was born in 1886, before all this so-called time-saving technology–cell phones that tie people to their jobs 24/7 and computers that keep them answering e-mails past midnight. Could someone whose tools were hand-shaped from iron, steel and wood ever grasp the ethereal nature of lithium-ion-powered digital devices? This was my dad’s dad–a mere generation stands between us–and yet he came of age in a world completely different from the one I know.

It dawned on me that no one yet understands the long-term side effects of Modern Life. Can we really adapt to all this brain-scorching change–the technological advances, the teeming cities, the breakneck pace of daily life, the disappearance of the human hand from the things we buy and the food we eat? Maybe my ambivalence about technology (and dread over my failed computer) was not something to be ashamed of. It was as if something in me shouted, Hold on a minute! You’ve been staring at the computer screen too long. When was the last time you dug in the dirt or tromped around a field, not to mention had anything at all to do with producing the food you eat? Maybe our disconnect with the natural world causes a sort of vertigo, and if so, maybe that explained my recent unhappiness. Or maybe I was just pissed off things weren’t going my way. Whatever the reason, on that day I dreamed of escape.

And yet I dutifully called a Dell technician. With a wife and child, and a career to pursue, what choice did I have?

A few weeks later I had a moment of clarity that in a flash changed everything. I was reading a newspaper story about an upcoming PBS show that pitted an English family against the rigors of 1900-era London life. Thinking back to my computer crisis and the question still ringing in my mind–What choice did I have?–I realized I had found my answer! Not the reality show itself, but rather its core concept–adopting the technology of the past. If I were so desperate for a change, why not travel backwards in time as a way of starting over?

The year 1900 immediately felt right. I wanted to ditch certain technologies, but I did not want to be a pioneer, having to build a log cabin or dig a well by hand. The year 1900–almost within memory’s reach–would serve well. A bit of research bore out my intuition. In 1900 rural dwellers still outnumbered urban dwellers. In 1900 agriculture was still the predominant occupation, thanks to millions of small-plot American farmers who raised most of what they ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner. In 1900 the motorized car was still a novelty. In rural America there were no televisions, telephones or, of course, personal computers. People still wrote letters by hand. And this was crucial: In 1900 you could buy toilet paper.

I nervously told Heather my idea one Saturday as we juggled our fussy baby in a cramped Brooklyn pub. She smiled, and I remembered why I fell in love with her.

Old Year’s Eve

After selling our apartment and cutting ties with New York, we begin laying out the practical steps necessary to recreate 1900 and live there for a year. We find a 40-acre farm in the Shenandoah Valley community of Swoope, Va., with an 1885 brick farmhouse fronted by a sweet little porch with scrollsaw pickets.

We begin chipping away at our to-do lists: make house livable and period appropriate, dig privy hole, install manual well pump, stock up on old tools, hammer up animal stalls, convert waist-high tangle of weeds into vegetable garden.

By spring 2001, a pair of milk goats nibble grass in the barnyard. Half a dozen chickens scratch around the henhouse with southern exposure. Looming over it is our 100-year-old barn. The outhouse stands atop a freshly dug hole.

In between the sledgehammer and the crowbar work, the wallpaper scraping, the digging, the hacking and hoeing, we begin hitting the books, digesting generations’ worth of farming lessons in the equivalent of a college semester: Do store carrots in layers of damp sand and apples in a box. Don’t store them side by side or the carrots will taste bitter. Don’t cellar pumpkins because they’ll rot. Do put pumpkins in the attic, but don’t let them freeze. The best laying hens, we now know, have moist rectums, though how to use such advice remains a mystery.

Since we have no trees, I pay a guy with a “Don’t Make Me Open This [Can of Whoop Ass]!” bumper sticker on his pickup truck to supply enough unsplit rounds of firewood for about 13 cords.

In place of our Taurus wagon, with its missing hubcap and 174,000 miles, we have Belle, a 2,000-pound Percheron draft horse. We stash the telephone in a drawer after canceling credit cards, car insurance, Internet account.

A guy from the power company knocks on the door. “Says here you put in an order to cut power,” he says, sounding confused.

“That’s right,” I say cheerfully.

“You want me to cut the power off?” he repeats, looking past me at a kitchen filled with food, furniture, and other signs of habitation.

“Yep. Cut it off.”

We are almost there. Soon the darkness will fall.

In the Dark

It only takes a couple of days of morning headaches and unintended brunches to realize that if we want breakfast at a decent hour, one of us–me–will have to get up early to start the cooking fire. That means waking before sunrise. Unless the moon lights my way, I am blind for as long as it takes me to strike a match–if I remembered the night before to stash the matches on the nightstand.

On Day Four, I rise in a room as dark as death. No matches. Feeling around for my shorts and T-shirt, I whisper curses, hoping I don’t rouse Heather or, in the adjacent room, Luther, who has been waking up at night screaming for a nightlight. I feel my way out of the room–easy now, slow and easy–hands caressing cool plaster along the wall to the stair landing’s low walnut railing (it hits me just above the knees). I follow my feet slowly down, down, praying Luther did not leave a wooden train car or stuffed bear on the steps. I continue, around the newel post and into the creaking hallway, around the corner and–oof!–I bump the ceiling where it slants to meet the stairs. Easing through the doorway into the sparsely furnished living room, I can feel the age of the house, my fingers rippling over the wide, hand-planed jamb.

In the kitchen I smell onions and curry, hear the cranch, cranch of scraping mice teeth. Our rodent problem started as soon as I began chasing away the black snakes. We find nibbled corners on our cheese, little turds on the kitchen table, hear scuffling claws above us in the ceilings. Where are the matches? I want to reach for a light switch. Or feel the reassuring click of a flashlight button beneath my thumb. Instead, I shuffle my feet, letting the vermin know I’m here, while feeling around for the box of kitchen matches. I stick my hands into baskets and cobwebby crannies, feeling for a rectangular box with an emery strip. My blind arms tip cups and bottles. I brush something off the shelf above the stove. It crashes to the floor with a tinny sound that I instantly recognize as made by one of our oil lamps. I stoop and carefully feel for broken glass. It is whole. When I find a box in the washroom cabinet, I return to the stove where I righted the lamp and strike a match. The darkness melts.

That night, before bed, I walk through the house like a pyromaniac Easter Bunny, hiding matchboxes on shelves and in dressers in as many rooms as possible, hoping Luther will not find them.

In more than one way, we feel our way along during these early days. Everything is trial and error, from pinning cloth diapers on Luther to battling the green worms devouring our cabbage plants. I learn to feed a new log into the firebox every 15 or 20 minutes to keep it heating consistently. Heather learns to cook all meals in the morning, letting the fire die before the sun beats down with full intensity. We’ve stocked up on the dry goods the typical 1900 family would have been able to buy at a general store–coffee, tea, sugar, oatmeal, rice, soap, baking powder, among other things. And we’ve bought extra, since there is no longer a general store where we can replenish our supply. Using a collection of misfit cookware–cast-iron pots and skillets, chipped enamelware saucepans–Heather makes oatmeal, skillet toast or fried eggs for breakfast. She boils rice, simmers dried lentils or kidney beans, steams collard greens or broccoli from the garden, and bakes cornbread, covering everything and leaving it on the warming shelf until lunch. Dinner is cold leftovers. We drink well water, ladling it from a crock that stands on a table in the kitchen.

Headbutt

“They’re nice goats,” I say, putting down the buckets. “They won’t hurt you. See?” I crouch and put my arm around Luther’s shoulder while petting Sweet Pea’s smooth tan coat. They are nice goats, less menacing than most dogs, even though Star, the big black one, did playfully lunge at Luther the day after we brought her home. I didn’t think much of it–didn’t have the time, really–and since then have been trying to abate Luther’s fears. He’ll just have to grow comfortable with the animals. It will be good for him. “Up, up,” he whines. I ignore him, turning to unlatch the barn door. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I see Star rear up on her hind legs. In half a breath, she cocks her head to one side and thrusts her body forward. Her bony skull meets Luther’s squarely in the forehead with a blow powerful enough to launch him through the air. He lands with a bounce on the rocky ground.

“STAR!” I yell, kicking her hard and running to Luther. His face is scrunched up and red. A scream swells in his lungs and finally bursts from his lips. I scoop him up into my arms and, crazy with rage, chase the goat, kicking at her while hugging Luther to my chest. Coming to my senses, I stop and run to Heather, who now stands at the garden gate. “Star butted him!” I say, handing Luther to her over the gate. No blood, no broken bones. “Why did you put him down in there if she butted him before?” says Heather, scowling at me. Then she changes her tone, soothing Luther with soft words while rocking side to side. He keeps screaming.

“I don’t know!” I say, breathless. “I can’t believe she really did it.”

I sprint after Star, trying to kick her again, swinging my leg so hard I throw my body out from under myself. I hit the gravel with a lung-crushing thud and roll. She runs to the back side of the barn. I follow in a fast-moving linebacker’s crouch. She’s bleating her head off, tongue wagging in cartoon desperation. I move like an animal. She tries to race past me, but I grab her stubby tail and catch hold of her collar, shoving her into her stall.

Sucking air into my lungs, I go to find Heather and Luther.

They are sitting at the picnic table in the shade of the silver maple, Luther calm now but still in Heather’s arms.

“Star butt Luther,” Luther says in a pouty voice. “Daddy give Star timeout.”

“I sure did,” I say, making the words sound upbeat, “a loooong timeout.” But inside I feel horrible–for letting it happen and for losing my temper afterwards. It must be my exhaustion, I tell myself. I can hardly face Heather. I turn and walk back towards the barn. The goats need water, and so does Belle. I need lunch, but that will have to wait.

Bad Pop Songs

In New York we had music on all the time. Latin dance music, Brazilian Bossa Nova, REM, Mahler, Miles Davis. But now, with our supply of music cut off, I am a prisoner to every stray tune that pops into my head. Some are personal favorites. Most seem to have been sent only to torment me.

The first tune that sticks is “Red, Red Wine” by UB40. It pops into my head one day while I am cultivating beans, and it stays there for days. I’ve never liked the song, but something about its simple melody and reggae beat keeps it glued there, the rap-like chorus looping: “Red, red wine, you make me feel so fine/You keep me rocking all of the time.” I can’t remember any other lyrics, so I invent words to go along: “Red, red wine I want to hold on to you/Hold on to you until my face turns blue.” And so on. “The line broke, the monkey got choked/Bah bah ba-ba-ba bah ba-ba ba-ba. Yeeaah.”

I hum “Red, Red Wine” while hoeing, mouth “Red, Red Wine” under my breath as I kneel to pull weeds, clamp my lips together to keep “Red, Red Wine” from spewing out, and then hear it sloshing around my skull. “Red, red wine make me feel so … .” Shut UP! I’m worse than the mumbling crazies we left behind in New York. I try to stop the torture by pretending to end the song, playing it out with an overly dramatic “bum-BAH.” But it comes back like the flame on one of those trick birthday candles. The only solution is to swap it for a better song. “Blackbird singing in the dead of night,” I sing through gritted teeth, holding the tune up like a crucifix. I work my way through as much of the Beatles’ White Album as I can remember, using “Blackbird” and “Mother Nature’s Son” to part the sea of “Red, Red Wine.”

But freedom is short lived. Other random tunes creep in to fill the void: Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way”–the rap version. The Go-Go’s’ “We Got the Beat.” It’s maddening. Here we are trying to faithfully recreate the year 1900, and while splitting wood or pumping water I wah-wah the theme music to Sanford and Son or thump out the bass line from Barney Miller.

Curiously, most of what sticks is from my childhood–sitcom themes, commercial jingles, songs by the Bee Gees, the Commodores, and KC and the Sunshine Band. It’s not period-appropriate in the least. If our story had a soundtrack, it wouldn’t be some Ken Burns-style collection of haunting mandolin melodies. It would groove, baby. Do a little dance, make a little love, get down tonight!

News from the Future

I am sitting on the screen porch shucking corn, with Luther at my feet tugging at the husks, tossing hairy, half-shucked ears in with my clean ones.

An engine growls up the driveway, and a Jeep Cherokee skids to a stop. It belongs to Wesley and Crystal Truxell, who live nearby.

“Have y’all heard?” Wesley says.

“It’s all over the TV,” Crystal says. “Terrorists are flying planes into the World Trade Center.”

“Man, they’re everywhere,” Wesley interrupts, words tumbling out. “They blew up the Pentagon. There’s a plane down in Pittsburgh. This is big time.”

Within 20 minutes, three cars line the driveway and we’re huddling with our neighbors, trying to fathom events possible only in a nightmare.

I think of my brother and his wife, and of our friends David and Meryl, who both work within a few blocks of the World Trade Center.

“I bet this will make you want to watch television,” says Wesley.

Yes. No. Hell, I don’t know what I think. This is all so strange.

“Come on down and use our phone,” he says. “You don’t really care about your little project enough to not call, do you?”

All day long I wonder if maybe Wesley’s right. In the shadow of such enormity, the whole project suddenly feels little. Don’t we have a responsibility to our families and friends?

Are we turning our backs on our own era during a time of need?

Here, we can only imagine what the rest of the country is going through. We can only live our lives. Which we do, with the same regularity as before, going through the motions feeling empty and strange. The peacefulness of the farm seems pregnant with irony. How can New York be reeling from death and fiery destruction, when here all is innocence and calm–chickens clucking in their nests, cats trailing me for milk as I clink down the path with a frothy pail, Luther jabbing a spade in the dirt?

At night we try to write letters but the words fall flat, and we give up. Instead, we sit opposite one another on the chilly side porch, sipping bourbon and taking turns reading Pride and Prejudice aloud to one another.

I’m not sure whether it is resignation or faith, but something helps me abide. I get by without the crutch of technology, the false sense that minute-by-minute news coverage or phone contact puts us in control. I have never been a very patient person. And yet something in me has changed. Over the past few months, I have been calmed by the lack of 21st-century distractions and humbled by the power of nature. Like the weather, the terrorist attacks were beyond my control. All I can do is cling to the simple assurance of daily chores.

We are relieved to learn from letters that my brother and his wife and David and Meryl are fine. Other mail from New York trickles in. Any time we see a New York postmark on a letter, we open it slowly, not sure of what we’ll find inside. We read harrowing details from friends about the smell of burned flesh and the greasy ash that fell like snow.

FRUITS OF LABOR

Winter marches at us. A few cold nights in September stunned the summer garden. A hard frost in early October knocked it out for good, sending a rich smell rising from the blackened plants like a final breath. We surpassed our goal by preserving more than 350 jars of food, including corn, squash, okra, pickled cucumbers, dill-seasoned pickled green beans, and more than 100 quarts each of tomatoes and green beans. We made three dozen jars of blackberry jelly, put up 14 gallons of apple cider, dumped a bushel and a half of potatoes in the bins, stored pumpkins and winter squash and onions. We put up a half gallon each of dried lima beans and field peas.

As the neighbors bring news of war in Afghanistan and anthrax scares, I realize how lucky we are to be together on these peaceful 40 acres. Not only do we now cook, clean, split wood and tend the animals with brisk efficiency, but the pressures of summer have eased. We return from the cellar lugging a basket brimming with food and a half gallon of apple cider, all of it put up by us, feeling proud and secure.

For the first time since my boyhood, I offer silent prayers of thanks without getting hung up on the theological details.

Old-Fashioned Rooster-Killing

“Would you help my friend Dot Makely slaughter some roosters?” asks Liz Cross. “She’ll give you one for every three you kill.”

Liz, who lives with her husband, Jack, on a few acres nearby, stands like a farmer, leaning back, hands stuffed in pockets. In the middle of her sentence, she shifts her weight slightly and farts, clearly but not loudly, with no blushing or begging of my pardon or comments about frogs, as if passing gas during a neighborly chat is the most natural thing in the world, which, arguably, it is. “Dot’s blind,” she says. “Well, mostly blind.”

I visit Dot Makely’s during the day, pedaling over one afternoon with a pair of canvas gloves in the basket and a nervous stomach. A big, boyish man, probably 40, wearing a grimy mechanic’s uniform, answers the door, scowling. I realize I’m dirty, too, and wild of hair. “Is Mrs. Makely here?” I ask. “I’m your neighbor. I came about the roosters.”

“Mommm!” he calls, turning and shuffling into the cramped house. I follow. He points at a woman sitting at the kitchen table and then plods into an adjoining room. I hear television voices and laughter and see blue flashes, like dull, boomless fireworks, lighting up the dark room.

“Liz Cross said you needed some help,” I say, introducing myself. Unlike her son, Dot Makely is perfectly charming, launching into conversation as if we were old friends and had been sitting over lunch since noon. We talk. Actually, she talks, and I listen. She talks about her chickens and the coyotes that come down from the mountains to stalk them; about her land, which she kept after she and her husband divorced; about her spring, which is still flowing despite the drought. It’s as if her mouth, rather than her ears or nose, has compensated for her blindness. Which is fine with me, since the talking postpones the killing. All I can think of are the neck-wringing stories I’ve heard. Now that I have chickens–and know how big they get–I can’t imagine ripping the head off one.

“Listen to me, gabbing on and on,” she says. “You’ve probably got things to do. Let’s go find those roosters!”

Like a debutante, she takes my arm, and I lead her slowly outside. She’s a tiny woman and spunky, despite her age and her lack of sight, with a bright, smiling face. I guide her around a bunch of ankle-twisting walnuts scattered on the ground.

“I was so fond of walnut trees when I was a girl,” she says. “I asked my mother once, I said, ‘Mother, will there be walnut trees in heaven?’ She said, ‘No.’ I told her, ‘Then I don’t want to go.’”

A fowl flutters past with a startled cluck.

“Is that a rooster?” Dot asks.

“I have to admit my ignorance,” I say. “I can’t tell the difference.”

I’m only here because of what I call our “country cred,” which is like street cred, only different. Because we are living off the land, people assume we know more than we do about country life. Not even Liz Cross cooks on a woodstove or drives a horse and buggy, and Liz can do anything–including strip down a car engine to a pile of nuts and bolts and parts and piece it back together (which I know because Jack Cross told me so while wearing a look of pure husbandly pride on his face). But even though I’ve learned some 1900 skills, I still have a hole a mile wide in my country-living résumé. No matter. Liz still comes to me to kill the roosters for the blind woman.

“Oh, the roosters have bigger combs on their heads,” Dot says, matter-of-factly.

“And they’re a lot more aggressive.”

We enter the henhouse, where 20 birds of all sizes, shapes and colors explode in a panicked cackling, beating up a toxic, lung-choking dust.

“Be careful,” she says. “They can be mean.”

Gloves on, I chase what looks like a rooster into a corner, yanking its legs out from under it before it can peck my eyeballs out. I carry it upside down, holding it well out of range of anything it might target below my waist. We walk back up the hill, where an axe leans against a stump.

“Just chop the neck,” she says, holding the bird’s head. “And try not to cut off my hand.” Gripping the legs in my left hand and the axe with my right, I try to concentrate, but Dot won’t stop talking.

“Roosters flop around so much after you cut their heads off,” she says. “Drop it quick. Otherwise, you’ll get blood all over you.”

I raise the axe, arm wavering under its weight.

“I hope people don’t do that,” she says.

“Do what?” I say, lowering the axe.

“Flop around when you kill them. It would be horrible–in a war or something. You’d see bodies flopping around.”

“I’m pretty sure they don’t,” I say, raising the axe. I lower it again when I realize she’s not finished.

“I hate war. The one we’re in has me so angry,” she says, referring to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, now about a month old, which we know because the neighbors have kept us informed. “I can’t really say anything, though, since I don’t vote.”

“Why not?”

“I’m a Jehovah’s Witness. We don’t believe in it.” Determined to finish the job, I stop asking questions. Soon the conversation peters out.

“Here goes,” I say, raising the axe again. The bird, still stretched across the stump, wriggles pitifully. I let the heavy iron head fall. It bounces, as though I’ve just hit a rubber hose. The rooster’s eyes bulge. I raise the axe again. Thud. The head tumbles.

Stepping back, I drop the rooster and the axe, the blade barely missing my foot. The rooster hops away, shaking out its wings in a gesture of freedom as blood spurts from its neck. But then, as if suddenly realizing that something is terribly, irrevocably wrong, the bird panics, flapping and flopping in a silent scream. Spraying blood, it somersaults down the hill, regains its feet, tries to fly. Blind–worse than blind–the bird smacks into a tree and pinballs off in another direction. It hops. It spins. My god! I think. Will it never end?

But it does, and we go after more roosters. The second one flops, just like the first. I don’t drop the third bird quickly enough, and blood spatters my cheek and pants and boots. Dot is effusive in her thanks, and it’s all I can do to convince her that I don’t need a dead rooster for my services.

Home for the Holidays

With my folks coming for Thanksgiving and Heather’s for Christmas, this holiday season will be our chance to give them a glimpse of our life in 1900.

The typical farm wife 100 years ago couldn’t choose convenience over made-from-scratch. Neither can Heather. At times she’ll stand outside the henhouse tapping her fingers, waiting for an egg to round out a recipe. (Once, while making brownies, she impatiently reached under a hen and was sharply pecked.) Using our limited ingredients, Heather has adapted to the challenge of cooking three meals a day, seven days a week, with energy and creativity. We have never eaten better in our lives.

On Thanksgiving the sight is enough to make everyone–my parents, my brother and his wife, who have joined us from Brooklyn, and our neighbors Peggy and Bill Roberson–gasp. Food rests on every kitchen surface: steaming bowls of corn pudding, roasted potatoes flecked with rosemary, green beans, and rice and gravy; pans of moist cornbread dressing seasoned with sage that Heather planted, harvested, and strung up to dry; pickles, deviled eggs, the Robersons’ cranberry salad and candied yams; Heather’s yeast rolls, including a couple of misshapen ones kneaded by Luther; her two pumpkin pies; and a platter of sliced turkey, which cooked to perfection in the intensely hot, slightly smoky box, the heat searing in the juices and Heather’s seasoning.

“I had no idea the food would be this good,” my mother admits, as we rock on the front porch (there being no televised football game to keep us inside). But it’s not just the food. It’s the lack of hurry and distraction. We have lingered over meals, pressed apple cider, and visited with the neighbors. My mother has taken walks along the gravel road, pulling Luther in his wagon. An artist, she has been sketching the cows, barn and mountains.

A couple of days later, we say our goodbyes in the driveway. After hugging Luther, my mother turns to me. “You and Heather have created a wonderful life for yourselves here.” I no longer fear silence. The bad pop songs in my head are gone. That, along with the lack of technological distractions, leaves me available both physically and mentally to witness nature’s wonders: the nightly march of the stars, muskrats gliding for great stretches beneath the river’s frozen surface, the misty-morning revelation of spiderwebs by the hundreds, glistening like spiral galaxies in the meadow grass.

I am amazed at my sturdy, competent hands and marvel at my patience and drive, a reversal from the run-down edginess that dominated my moods in New York.

Mornings have become my reading time. Once I’ve built fires in both the heating stove and the cookstove, I’ll huddle close to the kitchen stove listening to the crackle, soaking up the heat and reading a book. My new powers of concentration astound me: I’ve raced through Dickens, Hardy, Wilde, Hawthorne, Irving, William Dean Howells, the collected letters of Thomas Jefferson, and several novels published in 1900.

Preparing for Re-entry

Even though our project is not driven by nostalgia, we find ourselves growing nostalgic for our 1900 experience even before it comes to an end. One day, after we put Luther down for his nap and finish our chores, we tiptoe up to the guest room and sneak under the covers. Afterwards, we are silent, and I sense an unspoken understanding between us that soon this, too, will change. I’ll get busy again with work, the phone will ring, we’ll spend too much time in the car driving to and from town.

And then there’s the nagging reality of how we’ll support ourselves. Simmering on the back burner all this time was our idea of starting an artisanal goat-cheese farm. We have the land and the barn. With some train-ing–perhaps a few sabbaticals to France–we could build on Heather’s already considerable cheese-making skills. It would be perfect: We’d use what we learned in 1900 to build a new life once we returned to the 21st century.

But there are two problems.

They come to light one evening at dinner, when I offer Heather the last slice of an olive-oil-drizzled chevre that I have pretty much devoured.

“You can have the cheese,” she says, an odd smile on her face.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I say.

“I can’t eat it.”

“You can’t eat it? It’s delicious.”

“I can’t stand it any more. I stopped eating goat cheese a couple of months ago. I stopped drinking the milk, too.”

I’m dumbfounded. “I never noticed.”

“I kept making it for your sake,” she confesses. “I didn’t want you to find out. I thought you’d be disappointed.”

“About our farm idea?”

“Yeah.”

I burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny?” she says.

“I’ve got a confession, too,” I say. “You don’t like the cheese. I can’t stand the goats!”

Back to the Future

What do we do on our last day? Sleep late, take the day off, celebrate? No. We milk, pump, cook, clean, whack weeds, shovel manure, and mulch the garden paths. We also prepare for re-entry. John Foster drops by and helps me remove the animal nests from the Taurus and splice the chewed wires. We pull enough straw out of the engine to stuff a mattress. He takes the battery and brings it back fully charged. Even though we’re not going anywhere–until tomorrow–I can’t resist sitting in the driver’s seat and giving the key a try. She sputters and starts up. I let the engine run for a while, and then I shut it off and pocket the key.

At the end of the afternoon, Heather throws up her arms in a gesture of triumph. “Wooohoo!” she yells. “I did everything on my to-do list today. I think that’s a first.”

That evening at dinner, in addition to rice and beans, we fulfill my vow to eat fresh English peas before the project’s end. We only share a few forkfuls between us, a meager harvest, I know. But at least we’ve done it! We planted, cultivated and picked these peas–the first yield in this year’s long growing season–so that they may now nurture us. If I take away anything from our 1900 experience, it is a newfound appreciation for the miracle of the seed. Heather and I have proven that a rubber-band-bound clump of seed-filled envelopes can feed a family of three for a year. And also that an idea–no matter how quixotic–when tucked into the fertile folds of imagination, can grow into a complex and miraculous thing.

Later, both of us are on hand to kiss Luther goodnight. We smile down at him and hint at the excitement that awaits us the next morning. Though he doesn’t understand the significance, to us this night feels magical, like Christmas Eve.

“I had the craziest dream last night,”

Heather says, as we brush our teeth out back, beneath the maple tree. “I dreamed it was our last day. I decided to plug in the phone early. What’s a day? I thought. I’ll just make sure it works. But then it rang, and I panicked.”

“Did you answer it?” I ask.

“Yeah. The voice on the other end said, ‘Gotcha!’”

“Creepy.”

We climb into bed, dreaming of all we’ll do. Basking in our accomplishment, feeling secure at having found a home, we’re not worried right now about the future. We have money in the bank for renovations, though less than we had hoped. More important, we have each other. The future will fall into place.

Heather turns to me. “See you in a hundred years,” she says, and blows out the lamp.

Since re-entering the 21st century in 2002, the Wards have lived in Staunton, Va.

Gordon Gee never was one to follow the playbook. Past Vanderbilt chancellors have always pursued a more or less predictable exit strategy: After a couple of decades leading the university to ever-greater heights, they quietly retire to spend their days serving on foundations and advisory boards, growing more silver-haired and distinguished as chancellors emeriti.

Yet there, on a Thursday last July, was Gordon Gee, only Vanderbilt’s seventh chancellor in its 134-year history, speaking before a board of trustees meeting at Ohio State University, explaining his abrupt decision to leave Vanderbilt and return to Columbus, where he previously served as president from 1990 to 1997. He belonged at a public university, Gee said.

“I am following my heart and returning to a place that I consider my home,” he had told the Vanderbilt community the day before. “My decision is that simple and that complex.”

The announcement came less than three weeks after he had pronounced his “unwavering and unshakeable” loyalty to Vanderbilt when Ohio State–the nation’s largest university–had come courting.

By the time students returned to Vanderbilt in August, the 63-year-old Gee had packed his bags. Vanderbilt had a new interim chancellor, and a chancellor search committee was in place.

Gee has headed more universities than any other American–Vanderbilt, Brown University, Ohio State, the University of Colorado and West Virginia University, where he was elected president at age 37. He has always looked like a college president straight from Central Casting, with his earth-tone tweeds, horn-rimmed glasses, and vast collection of bowties. Never one to shun the limelight, he was beloved by Vanderbilt students. For his first six months at Vanderbilt, he maintained an office in the Sarratt Student Center. He was known for his impromptu visits to Greek Row parties, Vanderbilt’s rank-and-file employee workplaces, and Roads Scholars bus trips to outlying areas. He has a remarkable facility for remembering names and faces, exists on little sleep, thrives on grueling travel itineraries, embraces parades and ceremony, and is a gifted speaker and a prolific writer of personal notes.

He also didn’t mind ruffling feathers. “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less,” he was fond of saying.

He has been an outspoken critic of abuses in college athletics nationwide. His decision to eliminate the athletics department at Vanderbilt and make athletes more fully part of the rest of the university drew heated debate but ultimately has been judged successful. He recruited star faculty from other institutions and helped Vanderbilt diversify its student body significantly.

Gee’s time at Vanderbilt is noteworthy for its accomplishments, despite the fact that personal issues cast a shadow over his final year here. In September 2006, Gee was the subject of an extensive Page One Wall Street Journal piece that carried the head “Lavish Spending by Star Chancellor” and reported on Vanderbilt trustees’ efforts to more closely monitor his expenditures. It also revealed a 2003-04 total compensation package that was reportedly second-highest in the nation.

A few months later, in February 2007, Gee and his wife, Constance Bumgarner Gee, announced they would seek a divorce. She remains on the Peabody College faculty as an associate professor of public policy and education.

A native of Vernal, Utah, Gee was graduated from the University of Utah with a bachelor’s degree in history and had J.D. and Ed.D. degrees from Columbia University.

His seven-year tenure at Vanderbilt, however brief in comparison to that of his predecessors, is fairly typical of the current state of higher education. The 2007 report of the American College President Study series, conducted by the American Council on Education, found that the average tenure for presidents in 2006 was 8.5 years, and that the average age of presidents has increased from 52 years in a 1986 study to 60 years in 2006.

The Search for Vanderbilt’s 8th Chancellor

In late July the Vanderbilt Board of Trust appointed a chancellor search committee to be chaired by Dennis Bottorff, Board of Trust vice chairman and chairman of Council Ventures in Nashville. Bottorff, BE’66, also chaired Vanderbilt’s last chancellor search, which resulted in the selection of Gee in 2000.

Board of Trust members named to the search committee include Darryl Berger, BA’69; Mark Dalton, JD’75; John Ingram, MBA’86; Orrin Ingram, BA’82; Nancy Perot Mulford, BA’82; Richard Sinkfield, JD’71; Heather Souder, BA’04; and J. Lawrence Wilson, BE’58. Serving as ex officio members of the search committee are John Hall, BE’55, chairman of the Board Affairs Committee; Monroe J. Carell, BE’59, chairman of the Shape the Future campaign; and Martha Ingram, chairman of the Vanderbilt Board of Trust.

James Hudnut-Beumler, dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School, heads a chancellor’s search advisory committee comprising Vanderbilt faculty, students and staff.

Vanderbilt’s last chancellor search, after Chancellor Joe B. Wyatt announced his intention to retire in July 2000, lasted nine months and involved a review of more than 150 candidates.

Read more about the chancellor search: www.vanderbilt.edu/chancellorsearch