ENGAGE

TRUE PREPARATION

MTSU’s most unique service-learning efforts enhance students’ education through applied learning and thoughtful reflection, while also meeting key community needs.

For instance, each year MTSU co-sponsors the four-day session of the Tennessee Intercollegiate State Legislature (TISL), which attracts student delegations from almost every public and private college and university across the state. Former Tennessee Speaker of the House Beth Harwell (r), now a Distinguished Visiting Professor at MTSU, recently served as mentor to this past year’s MTSU’s delegation. She met with students to critique and mentor their strategies in drafting bills for the mock legislative session.

MTSU’s most recent TISL delegation, led by junior Emily Oppmann, was named Best Overall Delegation. Senior Kobe Hermann served as TISL’s treasurer.

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TRUE INNOVATION

MTSU is continuing to ramp up research efforts at a rapid pace. Scholarly research not only provides the foundation for MTSU’s strong academic programs but also drives innovation and economic progress across the region, state, nation, and globe.

Creating a culture of research and inquiry is at the heart of the University’s mission among faculty and students and in vital industry partnerships. This work often involves undergraduate research opportunities that simply are unique for non-master’s and non-doctoral students at MTSU.

On top of that, MTSU has aggressively transitioned from a primarily undergraduate institution to a doctoral research university with significant research activity. Increasing graduate student enrollment helps strengthen MTSU’s position as a publicly funded research university; enhances MTSU’s reputation as a research institution from both faculty and students’ points of view; meets market need for a more educated workforce in Tennessee, within the region, and across the nation; and increases revenue from both tuition and fees and the state funding formula.

Her challenge became the Recapture Project, which empowers “ students and creative artists through academic research.

TRUE ENDEAVOR

Ask Assistant Professor Deborah Wagnon about intellectual property (IP) rights, and she answers like a woman who just got religion. When songwriters have creative control over their work, she says, “it’s magnificent. You can go crazy with a catalog that you own. All those clichés are really true: Ownership is king. Content is power.”

Power has been a major theme of Wagnon’s professional life. As an attorney in the notoriously male-dominated entertainment industry, she became general counsel of Landmark Entertainment Group. Later, she was a partner with an international law firm representing a stable of powerhouse recording artists, including Gloria Estefan, Olivia Newton-John, and Reba McEntire.

Wagnon was lured to that highflying position from the Department of Recording Industry, where she taught in the mid-1990s. When she returned to MTSU in 2011, a timely change in copyright law gave her a unique opportunity. Her challenge became the Recapture Project, which empowers students and creative artists through academic research. Until 2011, songwriters or authors who sold their work relinquished creative control over it in exchange for a percentage of the profits later. That left the financial fate of their work in the hands of whoever held the copyright.

But now these artists can apply to “recapture” a copyright after a 35-year moratorium. With restored creative control of a work, they can give it a fresh shot at profitability, Wagnon said. An old song might be rerecorded by a younger artist, or even reinvented as a Broadway play, as Carole King did with her song, “Beautiful.”

Wagnon’s Recapture Project, part of her Copyright Law curriculum, takes students back into the pop-culture past (in the case of the project’s inaugural year, back to 1978 and their parents’ vinyl). Once they’ve chosen a work they consider particularly marketable, they create a plan to recapture and exploit it. Projects are later presented to the artist through his or her representatives.

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TRUE QUEST

retain: “to continue to have (something); keep possession of . . . “to not abolish, discard, or alter . . . “to keep in one’s memory . . .”

Launched in 2013, the Quest for Student Success radically rethought the University’s approach to student attrition. While MTSU has always supported at-risk pop- ulations, the Office of Student Success we created in 2013 continues to work to boost every student’s chance to succeed. mtsu.edu/quest2025