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Senior Zachary Manfredi Named Rhodes Scholar
Emory College senior Zachary Manfredi was named one of 32 American college or university students selected as 2007 Rhodes Scholars, the Rhodes Scholarship Trust announced Nov. 18.
Manfredi plans to use his scholarship at Oxford to pursue a master's in philosophy. His research will focus on the philosophy of international relations and human rights, and its potential to influence policy concerning the development of institutions like the International Criminal Court. He is currently pursuing a triple major in philosophy, international relations and comparative literature
Once he completes his degree at Oxford, Manfredi plans to pursue his passion for human rights and earn a joint law degree and doctorate in political philosophy, focusing on cases of war crimes, political prosecutions and genocide.
Manfredi has dedicated much of his time at Emory to raising awareness about human rights issues. He serves as president of Emory's Amnesty International chapter, and is founder and president of the Student Activist Coalition on campus. Manfredi also served as an intern in the democracy program of The Carter Center, working on civil society building programs and election monitoring in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cote d'Ivoire and Haiti.
The ongoing humanitarian crisis in Darfur, Sudan, has been a particular focus of Manfredi's, who is co-founder and president of the non-governmental organization Paperclips for Peace in Sudan. The organization raises funds for humanitarian relief, about $6,000 so far, and advocates for political action in Darfur.
In addition to his activist work, Manfredi was a member until recently of Emory's nationally ranked debate team, the Barkley Forum, and continues to volunteer with the Urban Debate League, a partnership between the Barkley Forum and the Atlanta and Decatur city schools. He also has served as a writer and editor for the Emory Political Review and Emory Undergraduate Research Journal. A member of the Emory Scholars program as a Goodrich C. White Scholar, he was inducted in to Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society his sophomore year.
Manfredi is the 18th Emory student to be selected for the scholarship that provides for two or three years of study at Oxford University in England. He is the third Emory Rhodes Scholar in the past seven years, and was selected from 896 applicants endorsed by 340 colleges and universities nationwide. Two hundred seven applicants from 94 institutions were finalists.
The journalism sky isn't falling
By Sheila Tefft, director of the Emory Journalism department
Representing four generations of Emory journalists, they marked the tenth anniversary of the new Journalism Program, reopened in 1996 almost a half-century after an earlier Journalism Division closed. A $1.35 million gift from Cox Newspapers, owner of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, restored journalism education at Emory.
The celebratory reunion mood was set against the sobering backdrop of perils facing today's journalists: declining readership, Wall Street demands for high profits, government secrecy, newsroom cutbacks, the Internet revolution and faded public trust. "Journalism as we know it is over," pronounced a recent report on our profession.
Still, something sparked. The journalism debate across generations energized us. Young interviewed old and discovered the journalism past.
Earlier alums reconnected to a tradition they thought was lost.
We reaffirmed journalism's future and our role in shaping it. A celebration of the Emory journalism revival became a revival for journalism itself.
The Journalism Reunion conjoined two traditions separated by more than four decades. Emory first offered journalism courses almost 100 years ago. Those blossomed into a full-fledged graduate and undergraduate division in the 1930s and 1940s. But a panel of deans branded the division a "trade school" that didn't belong in the liberal arts and shut it down in 1953.
"Congratulations on your tenth anniversary and greetings from the last member of the teaching crew to go down with the sinking ship when journalism was scuttled at Emory in 1953," Richard Joel, who turned out the lights on the old division, wrote in a special message to the reunion. Many returning alums, his former students, nursed the same regrets.
Students in the new Journalism Program, restarted 43 years later, were unaware of this contentious past. "Who are those guys over there?" asked a recent graduate nodding at the cluster of gray-haired gentlemen at the opening reception.
They soon got acquainted. Panel discussions on sports journalism, the relevance of newspapers, the changing broadcast scene and controversies in science journalism brought together journalists from across the years.
The generational divide was deep, good-natured and invigorating. Old-timers cringed at celebrity journalism and infotainment. The youngsters thought it fun. Veterans called for a return to journalism as public service. Newcomers didn't see the crisis.
Student journalists saw the Internet as the predominant news source. The experienced cautioned that technology—whether radio and television 50 years age or innovations in the future—has always changed journalism. Older journalists said newspapers as we know them must survive. Their younger counterparts said they can't last.
"Sorry, Professor," 1999 alumnus Jenn Hildreth, an on-air reporter at Fox Sports Net South, said to her former journalism instructor Gary Pomerantz. Pomerantz, moderator of the sports panel, had argued that stories off the field—race, drugs and crime—make sports journalism about more than games.
"I know you will disagree with this," Hildreth said, "but the public watches sports for entertainment."
Lee Clontz, a 30-something multimedia designer who teaches online journalism, said traditional newspapers will remain an important source of ground-breaking reporting, but they will not be where readers go first. Clontz was a panelist in the discussion, "Do Newspapers Matter?"
"Should we shoot him now or later?" Claude Sitton, a civil rights era reporter, award-winning newspaper editor and panel moderator, quipped as Clontz threw up his hands in feigned defensiveness.
Many journalists say the best part of their jobs is learning something new and interesting every day. How many other professionals can say that? At Emory, journalistic curiosity grows out of a broad-based education.
Ten years ago, the Emory journalism renaissance reflected new thinking that rooted journalism education firmly in the liberal arts and sciences. Today, the program is an established campus presence in partnership across the liberal arts.
All Emory Journalism students combine another major, be it neurosciences, theater or economics, with journalism study. Liberal arts study cultivates in students the depth and qualities one seeks in great journalists: a spirit of inquiry, the sense of discovery and a wonder at the world.
Dean Robert Paul nurtured the Journalism Program first as director of the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, the program's formal home, and then as Dean of Emory College. Journalism's many collaborations with the liberal arts—such as the summer South Africa program, initiatives with Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies, and a new effort to create a campus studio—set Emory apart from other schools, Paul told alumni at the opening reception.
Ten years ago, the Cox endowment called for drawing students from the sciences and humanities into specialized reporting. Students can put their expertise to work in a variety of interdisciplinary courses, from arts criticism for journalism and performing arts students to covering ethnic communities with Asian Studies and Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
A campus-wide science writing initiative is the latest project. It involves faculty and students from the Journalism Program to undergraduate sciences to the graduate biomedical sciences to the medical school.
President Jim Wagner recalled that science was once part of everyday lives and conversations. Discussions of the latest developments in the space program or nuclear power could be heard around many family dinner tables. Journalism and science writing, he said, are key to restoring science literacy and reengaging scientists in public life and discussion.
As the Reunion ended, easy answers remained out of reach but all wanted the conversation to thrive and grow. Julia Wallace, ieditor, in her closing banquet speech, said the Web is having a revolutionary impact but remains unable to support the large investments required in newspaper journalism.
"But I believe that things that have value survive and are made stronger through transformational change. And I believe passionately in the value of what we do," she concluded.
"Just because we change platforms and methods of delivering journalism doesn't mean that we have to shortchange the standards that guide the journalism we do."
From Emory Report, October 30, 2006
'Rushdie comes to Emory' heard around the world
By Elaine Justice
"Not only was he proud of Emory's news about Rushdie, but also that the newspaper headline referred to Rushdie and his works coming to ‘Emory,' not ‘Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.' It's nice to know that we are gaining name recognition even in South India," said Wagner.
News of Rushdie's appointment as Distinguished Writer in Residence and his considerable archive coming to Emory set off a wave of worldwide media coverage, including articles in The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune and The Guardian. "The teaching appointment of Salman Rushdie and the significance of his archive underscore the importance of the humanities in addressing the global issues of our day," said Provost Earl Lewis in the announcement.
Rushdie, in addition to being a master of world literature, is one of the most prominent voices for human rights. Though the subject of a nearly decade-long fatwa after his 1988 publication of "The Satanic Verses," he continued to champion oppressed artists and peoples.
"How we fight it is going to be the great civilizational test of our time," Rushdie has said about terrorism. Principles of human rights and religious and artistic freedom, he has emphasized, are crucial in this world struggle.
"Mr. Rushdie brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to help us understand the fault-lines between cultures that threaten to rupture societies around the world today," said Emory College Dean Bobby Paul of the appointment. He stressed that Rushdie will be an important presence on campus "not only in the study of literature and creative writing, but in Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies as well."
This is Rushdie's first extended relationship with a university. His position as Distinguished Writer in Residence is a five-year appointment in the English Department, beginning in the spring of 2007. During each of these five years he will be teaching for at least four weeks, lead a graduate seminar, participate in undergraduate classes, advise students, engage in symposia and deliver a public lecture.
Rushdie began his relationship with Emory in 2004 when he delivered the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature, said Stephen Enniss, director of Emory's Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library (MARBL). "Rushdie arrived on campus familiar with the high literary standards of that lecture series [past Ellmann lecturers have included Seamus Heaney, Denis Donoghue, Helen Vendler, Henry Louis Gates, A.S. Byatt and David Lodge], and while here he learned that Emory has one of the fastest-growing literary archives in the country."
In other words, Rushdie found an institutional commitment to the literary arts "that was well established and that served to preface the negotiations that followed," said Enniss.
In placing his papers at Emory, Rushdie is joining an elite group of modern masters. "Emory has become one of the major literary archives in North America," said Dana Gioia, chair of the National Endowment for the Arts. Emory's research collections have become well known among scholars and literary experts in recent years as the personal and literary papers of such modern literary giants as the late British poet laureate Ted Hughes and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney have been added to MARBL at Woodruff Library.
"The Rushdie papers will provide the primary resource for future generations seeking to understand an artist at the center of our era," said Enniss. Included in the archive are Rushdie's private journals detailing life under the fatwa, as well as personal correspondence, notebooks, photographs and manuscripts of all of his writings, including two early unpublished novels.
News of Rushdie's archive coming to Emory elicited congratulations to Enniss from colleagues at rare book and special collection libraries throughout the world—at Stanford and Princeton universities and at the British Library in London. The British Library is hosting an international conference Oct. 19–20 titled propitiously, "Manuscripts Matter: Collecting Modern Literary Archives."
"There is recognition that the Rushdie papers coming here is a real endorsement of the program we have and a sign of its strength," said Enniss, who will be in London for the conference.
He will be speaking at a session titled "Cultural Property and Cultural Assumptions: The Transatlantic Trade in Modern Literary Manuscripts." He expects the discussion—much of it centered on the Rushdie archive—to be a lively one.
Enniss also received accolades for his work at Emory by The Guardian, where he was described as "an indefatigable curator of manuscripts" and a "distinguished literary scholar."
From Emory Report, October 16, 2006
Emory welcomes the Class of 2010—its largest ever
By Kim Urquhart
As in years past, the ceremony began with a procession of colorfully robed faculty and the regal sound of bagpipes.
Rosemary Magee, vice president and secretary of the University, set the tone by welcoming the Class of 2010 to "join the venerable company of scholars."
In the spirit of the poet Shel Silverstein—"who describes a time and place such as this, that moment where the sidewalk ends, yet before the street begins"—Magee personalized the poem, "Invitation." "If you are a dreamer, come in! If you are a wisher, a thinker, a prayer, a hoper, a seeker, come in! If you are a dreamer, come in, come in!"
Provost Earl Lewis greeted the 1,340 new faces that filled every possible seat. "For you, the students, this ceremony initiates the journey of study, challenge and discovery," he said. "For us, the faculty and administration, this Convocation is a renewal of 170 years of tradition and our dedication to teaching, research and service."
Dwight Andrews, associate professor in the department of music, worked up the crowd's appetite for that journey by leading a clap-and-response and quick jazz lesson that had everyone swinging. "This is the beginning of your being cool," he said. "And if you are going to be at Emory, you've got to be cool."
On the plate for the Convocation address was the importance of gifts, grace and gratitude—with a side order of grits.
Frank Alexander, professor of law and director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, used the Southern staple food to illustrate how gifts, grace and gratitude lay the foundation for integrity. The story: a New Yorker orders breakfast in a Georgia diner and is surprised when his plate arrives with grits next to the eggs and bacon. He asks the waitress about this "white stuff" that he didn't ask for, and the waitress replies, "You don't order grits; they just come to you."
"As in the case of grits, none of you placed an order before you were born for a specific menu of talents—they just came to you," said Alexander, who received Emory's prestigious Thomas Jefferson Award at the 2006 Commencement. He urged students to think about their academic abilities and other talents as a gift, to recognize that "a gift is something we do not earn," and to "never confuse achievements with gifts."
"The appreciation of gifts is the first element of integrity," he said. "Knowing that they are acts of grace is the second. Responding with gratitude to that which has been gracefully given is the third."
He acknowledged the determination and hard work that brought each freshman to Emory, joking that it must have taken a "great deal of grit, perhaps even grits." He reminded them that "it matters not so much what you have been given; it matters greatly what you do with what you have been given."
In his closing remarks, President Jim Wagner emphasized individual opportunity and collective responsibility.
"From this season on, you are not merely attending Emory, you are Emory," Wagner said. "Emory offers great individual opportunity, and insists on the exercise of great responsibility to the community. I can assure you by continuing to do so you will experience satisfaction, genuine success, joy and fun, the sort of things that make us all fully alive. Welcome to Emory."
As Convocation concluded with a benediction of Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu, Christian and Muslim blessings, the freshmen followed orientation leaders in lime green T-shirts onto the lush Glenn Memorial Church lawn. Here the president offered the annual Coca-Cola toast and students enjoyed an ice cream social hosted by the Association of Emory Alumni.
Continuing a tradition started by the Class of 2005, the Class of 2010 then donned shovels for the planting of a tree, and set down roots at Emory.
From Emory Report, September 5, 2006
Emory makes the "Saviors of Our Cities" list of urban colleges and universities
The economic impact of institutions on smaller, familiar "college towns" has long been recognized, but the current reality is that many major cities are now dependent on the economic influence and impact of their colleges. Today there are numerous cities where the decisions made by these institutions play the major role in the economic and social health of their community. Dobelle noted, "In New England alone there are 270 colleges and universities in those six states that employ 250,000, including 38,000 faculty, and have annual budgets of $20 billion, exclusive of capitol construction, which approached $1 billion last year. The economic multipliers are huge."
The "Saviors of Our Cities" list is composed of 25 academic institutions that are exemplary examples of community revitalization and cultural renewal, economic drivers of the local economy, advocates of community service and urban developers, both commercially as well as in housing. They are:
- University of Southern California - Los Angeles, California
- University of Pennsylvania - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- University of Dayton – Dayton, Ohio
- IUPUI – Indianapolis, Indiana
- Rhode Island School of Design – Providence, Rhode Island
- Case-Western University – Cleveland, Ohio
- Clark University - Worcester, Massachusetts
- Virginia Commonwealth University – Richmond, Virginia
- University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee – Milwaukee, Wisconsin
- Emerson College – Boston, Massachusetts
- Trinity College – Hartford, Connecticut
- University of Chicago – Chicago, Illinois
- Mercer University - Macon, Georgia
- Middlesex Community College – Lowell, Massachusetts
- George Washington University - Washington, DC
- Carnegie-Mellon University – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
- Portland State University – Portland, Oregon
- University of Pittsburgh – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
- College of Charleston – Charleston, South Carolina
- Springfield College – Springfield, Massachusetts
- Emory University - Atlanta, Georgia
- Union College – Schenectady, New York
- University of Missouri – Kansas City – Kansas City, Missouri
- Miami-Dade College – Miami, Florida
- Creighton University – Omaha, Nebraska
These 25 urban institutions, some nationally well known and others less so, were all found to have led the way in instituting policies, which have not only had positive results on their campuses, but also produce a major beneficial impact in the cities they call home.
Dobelle said, "The extraordinary efforts of these and other colleges have made higher education one of the great growth industries in America and have given a sense of confidence and hope as well as stability to cities that would otherwise be struggling in a world of mergers, downsizing and global outsourcing that has eroded the traditional urban economic base."
Many other institutions also have a very positive impact on their communities, Dobelle noted, and hopefully the focus on a range of actions taken by colleges and universities of various sizes, both public and private, will encourage others to take additional steps. "This list is designed to recognize 25 outstanding institutions that represent hundreds of others who every day become more and more important by providing stability in every social indices in cities across America," he said.
Inclusion on the list is based on ten (10) criteria that have been designed to accommodate scale in terms of the size of the institution in geography, student population, endowment and with the population of their immediate neighborhood or city. Some, by necessity, include subjective impressions based on 20 years of professional experience. The criteria are:
- The institution's longstanding involvement with their urban community.
- The real dollars invested through their foundations and annual budgets.
- Their catalyst effect on additional partners for social and economic change.
- Their presence felt from their payroll, research and purchasing power.
- Faculty and student involvement in community service.
- Their continued sustainability of neighborhood initiatives that in many ways have supplanted government programs.
- The marked difference it has made on local student access and affordability to attend college through K-12 partnerships.
- The qualitative esprit of the institution in its engagement.
- The quantifiable increase in positive recognition of the institution as demonstrated by a rise in applications by prospective students and resources raised through renewed alumni giving becoming available for community projects and local scholarships.
- Recognition of the impact of these institutions within their communities gathered from interviews with educators and public officials throughout the country.
Dobelle, an expert in the field of Higher Education and Cities, was recognized as New Englander of the Year in 1999 for his efforts leading Trinity College in Hartford and widely praised that year for his "call to arms" in a National Press Club speech in Washington entitled "Stepping Down From The Ivory Tower." A former president at four different higher education institutions, he is a longtime Executive Board member of the National Campus Compact, a frequent speaker and recipient of numerous awards and Honorary Degrees.
For more information, contact Amanda Krupkoski or Evan Dobelle
Emory's science study-abroad program gains popularity
By Linda Wang
"A global experience is very important for budding scientists to have because they come back and think about what they are learning and how they're learning science in a very different way," says Preetha Ram, assistant dean for science at Emory University. "They're more accepting of the fact that they are going to be interacting with international colleagues and that the whole landscape of science is changing."
Read the full article on growing popularity of science study-abroad programs in Chemical & Engineering News (Sept. 4, 2006).
Newsweek picks Emory as one of the "25 New Ivies"
As the article says, "In 2005, applications to Emory climbed 18.5 percent from the previous year and came from all 50 states, proving that the school had surpassed its reputation as only an excellent regional school.
Students often cite Emory's Atlanta location, which makes it easy to get internships and jobs, as well as to cross-register with the other colleges in the area. But as a major university, Emory has plenty to keep students busy on their own campus."
Read the online Newsweek article.