UofSC TIMES Fall 2019, No. 1

ENDNOTES

Over the years, Gamecock faithful have expressed school spirit by trotting out live birds and donning homemade gamecock costumes, but the university’s first named mascot was Big Spur, an imposing 8-foot tall bird that debuted in 1978. Big Spur only ruled the roost for a short time, however, as university archivist Elizabeth West explains. “Cocky made his first appearance alongside Big Spur at the 1980 Homecoming game, and fans were not impressed by the softer, rounder mascot,” says West. “He and Big Spur were co-mascots that year, and he was at one point limited only to women’s basketball [inset], but by the following year he had won over fans through his interactions with the crowd, and he has been extremely popular ever since.”

ORIGIN STORIES When we commissioned local illustrator Dré Lopez to draw Cocky for our latest cover, we had no idea what to expect. We knew it would be good, we’d seen his portfolio. But apart from saying “Cocky, comics, something, something, origin story,” we gave him almost zero direction.

Editor Craig Brandhorst Assistant editor Megan Sexton Designer Brandi Lariscy Avant Contributors Dan Cook, Chris Horn, Page Ivey Photographer Kim Truett Campus correspondents James Raby and Leslie Hull-Ryde, Aiken Candace Brasseur, Beaufort Shana Dry, Lancaster Jane Brewer, Salkehatchie Erin Duffie, Sumter Annie Smith, Union Jessica Blais, Upstate Jay Darby, Palmetto College University of South Carolina TIMES is published and printed twice per semester during the regular academic year by the Office of Communications and Public Affairs, Jeff Stensland, interim director.

Questions, comments and story ideas can be submitted via email to Craig Brandhorst at craigb1@mailbox.sc.edu or by phone at 803-777-3681.

The University of South Carolina does not discriminate in educational or employment opportunities on the basis of race, sex, gender, age, color, religion, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, genetics, veteran status, pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions.

And we couldn’t be happier with the result. Dré’s take on our lovable feathered mascot is simultaneously whimsical, charming and deeply philosophical. It’s also the perfect introduction to our cover story, “Fantastic Four,” which is all about comic books and their rightful place in the academy (page 6).

Just don’t get hung up on the chicken and the egg. Causality dilemmas may be great for conversation, but we’ve got an entire issue laid out for you — and a dozen or so causality answers about ready to hatch.

Which is brings us up to speed, or at least “Up to Now,” which is our snapshot of new faculty (page 12). We couldn’t feature all the new professors who joined our flock this semester, but the ones we did include shared some pretty cool stories about their dissertations, their research and their road to South Carolina. They also made us feel pretty good about the larger pool of talent.

photo by Todd & Chris Owyoung

TIMES STAFF

Speaking of talent, we also welcomed a pretty impressive freshman class this fall, not to mention a brand-new president. President Bob. Caslen, retired lieutenant general, U.S. Army, and former superintendent at West Point, delivered his first convocation as a Gamecock this August, and TIMES was right up front, taking notes. See “Fresh Faces” (page 2).

Finally, since we’re talking about history in the making, we give you “History in the Making” (page 18). The University of South Carolina boasts plenty of innovative programs, including some that have been around so long we assume they’ve been here forever. But the fact is, they haven’t, and it’s worth a look back to see how they took flight.

FALL 2019

U N IVE R S IT Y O F SO UTH C ARO LI NA ALU M N I M AGA Z I N E

In the end, everything started somewhere, both the chicken and the egg. Cocky’s on our cover, looking whimsical, charming and deeply philosophical, but don’t worry how he got there. Ponder where he’s been.

TIMES to get cracking,

Rear View Reflection

CRAIG BRANDHORST EDITOR

Hootie & the Blowfish look back at the weekend that made them famous.

GROUP DYNAMIC

When Hootie & the Blowfish announced their Group Therapy Tour earlier this year, Carolinian magazine didn’t miss a beat. But Hootie isn’t the only act on the bill. The latest issue of the University of South Carolina alumni magazine also boasts features on Bert and Richard Sorin (the father-son duo behind strength equipment manufacturer Sorinex), Columbia-based brewer Scott Burgess and Hall of Fame baseball writer Bill Madden, plus Q&As with ten South Carolina mayors — all of them proud alumni of the state’s flagship public university.

Carolinian. It’s who we are.

The University of South Carolina alumni magazine is published three times a year by the Office of Communications and Public Affairs.

PHOTOGENESIS Fresh faces / 2 President Bob Caslen takes the reins, welcomes new Gamecocks, smiles for the camera.

ROUNDTABLE Fantastic four / 6 Campus comic bus dive into the Gary Watson collection at the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.

page 2

FEATURES Up to now / 12 New faculty talk about their education, their inspiration and their plans for the future at the University of South Carolina.

History in the making / 18 Everything started somewhere, even those programs that seem like they’ve been here forever. page 6

page 18

FORWARD THINKING Paving the way / 26 Civil engineering professor assists S.C. DOT using predictive modeling.

Cultivating compassion / 27 Researchers test virtual reality videos with medical students.

Year of the fish / 28 page 12

page 28

Biologists use spectroscopy to estimate age of fish for commercial fishing industry.

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PHOTOGENESIS

Fresh faces

South Carolina’s new president hosts first convocation, school spirit enlivens campus. by Craig Brandhorst Preliminary numbers put the University of South Carolina’s latest freshman class at 6,250 students, not including transfers. That makes it the largest freshman class in the university’s history — and that’s before you add new president Bob Caslen’s name to the mix.

Obviously, the retired 3-star general and West Point superintendent isn’t a true freshman. Caslen entered the United States Military Academy back in 1971, graduated in 1975, and served his alma mater in a leadership capacity from 2013 to 2018. But joking about his new “freshman status” underscores his commitment to the student body at South Carolina, where he took the reins in August.

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“You see, we have something in common,” he told students at the New Student Convocation Aug. 21. “This is my first year at Carolina as well.”

And who are the 29th president’s new “classmates”? For starters, they’re a diverse lot.

As Caslen pointed out during his inaugural address, approximately 55 percent of the new students on campus this fall are female. Twenty-four percent self-identify as non-white. Seventeen percent are first generation college students. Sixty percent of the state’s flagship public university hail from the Palmetto State, but all 50 states and the District of Columbia are represented by the class of 2023, as are 30 countries.

The newest Gamecocks are also bright, with an average SAT score of 1273 and a weighted core grade point average of 4.14 on a 5-point scale. Among new South Carolina Honors College students, the average SAT score balloons to 1473, and the GPA to 4.77.

“That’s amazing,” Caslen said after rattling off the numbers. “And that places you among the top students in the country.”

But the new president’s first big address to students wasn’t strictly a bythe-numbers affair. After taking the stage in the official presidential regalia, including the presidential medallion, Caslen offered a little insight into his own journey, what it was like to head off to college at the height of the Vietnam War, in an era of tumult and change.

“I was interested in what was going on, but also just interested in spreading my wings and looking beyond the small rural town I had grown up in with its population of 197,” he said. “I knew it would not be easy to leave the security and comforts of home and go to a school where there were plenty of people smarter and better prepared than me.”

“You see, we have something in common.

This is my first year at Carolina as well.”

— President Bob Caslen, freshman convocation, Aug. 21

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“I want you to know that the reason I am here is you.”

— President Bob Caslen

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He then offered a few kernels of advice, encouraging students to broaden their academic horizons but not to change majors too often; to ask questions; to “be organized, be engaged, be healthy.”

After inviting students to join him sometime for his high-intensity morning CrossFit routine — “Make it through 10 sessions and we’ll even give you a special recognition,” he said — Caslen returned to the broader theme.

“I want you to know that the reason I am here is you,” he said. “I love education. Moreover, I love what it does for young men and women — like you — who aspire to better yourselves through education.

As a generation, you inspire me. You come here to not only take the requisite hours to earn a degree. You are eager to engage, and you want to make a difference in the world.” T

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FALL 2019 NO. 1 7

FANTASTIC FOUR

by Craig Brandhorst and Michael Weisenburg

Campus comic book aficionados dig into the Gary Watson collection.

This spring, University Libraries acquired something extraordinary: a collection of more than 143,000 comic books, 20,000 magazines, 15,000 paperbacks, 5,000 pulp publications and related items. The massive collection, entrusted to the university by longtime collector Gary Lee Watson, is now housed in the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, and, once processed, is expected to draw scholars, teachers and fans from around the world. To learn more about the acquisition, and how comics fit into a university curriculum, TIMES invited four of the biggest comic book bus on campus to gather for a quick round of four-color show-and-tell.

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TIMES: You guys all share a love of comic books, not just as scholars and teachers but as fans. And you’ve all had a hand in promoting this acquisition. Share a bit about your history with the medium, how you first got into comics.

QIANA WHITTED Professor, English and African American Studies; Director, African American Studies

DAVID: I’m actually a relative latecomer, despite what people think. My interest started in high school and college. I could never afford them before that. But I had friends who introduced me to the different characters. One friend was very into Doom 2099 [a 1990s Marvel series based on the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby character Doctor Doom].

MICHAEL: That’s actually how I got into comic books in high school. I read comics intermittently. I would pick them up off the spinner racks at shoe stores or the grocery store.

But I never followed any particular story in great length. Then when the 2099 series came out, I got really into the whole thing. Now that I’m an adult, I’ve read the criticism.

Some people pan that attempt to reboot Marvel in the 1990s, but I really liked 2099.

That’s when I started reading comics issue-by-issue, following a character through its arc.

I knew Doctor Doom because I had read random issues of Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, and I just thought 2099 was cool. The whole cyberpunk thing. I watched Robocop a lot as a kid, and there were similar visuals. I still like that series, warts and all.

MARK: Both of you got into comics through Doom 2099? Really?

QIANA: No apologies! [Laughs] No shaming!

MARK MINETT Assistant professor, Film and Media Studies

MARK: No, I read Doom 2099 as well.

MICHAEL: For me, it was that and trading cards. That’s what was happening when I was

a kid.

TIMES: How about you, Qiana?

QIANA: I grew up reading Mad magazine and Garfield. I was into funny animals. But my origin story really starts at Hampton University. My boyfriend, now-husband was an artist. He liked to airbrush jeans and T-shirts. And there was a bookstore, Bender’s Books, near campus. The way the store was divided there were art books, there were used paperbacks, there was porn [Laughs] and there were comics. While my boyfriend was looking at art books, I thought, “Well, let’s see how comics have changed since Mad magazine.”

MICHAEL WEISENBURG Reference and instruction librarian, Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections

One of the first comics I picked up was Spawn from Image Comics. It wasn’t a typical superhero comic. The main character happened to be African American, but the story wasn’t simply about his identity as an African American man. It was about him being returned to Earth as a Hellspawn to fight evil and find his family, which I thought was cool because I’ve always liked horror and fantasy. After that, I started collecting.

By the time I got to USC I was reading Watchmen and Sandman, catching up to the interesting things comics were doing at that point. And then I was given permission to do a Maymester class on Sandman. My main area of scholarship is African American literature and cultural studies, but I enjoy looking at some of the same issues that I study in prose fiction and poetry through comics.

MICHAEL: All four of us have different approaches to teaching. Mark, how do you use comics in the classroom?

DAVID SHAY Cataloguer, Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections

MARK: The State did an article on the acquisition, and they wrote that I teach literature through comics, but it’s the opposite. When I teach Superheroes across Media, students want to talk about the cultural significance of superheroes — what deep things comics have to say about society, the superhero as a modern myth. I try to get over the idea that we should only talk about comics for the values associated with high art or high culture.

That’s not to say they don’t interface with those values, but I take more of a historical approach. It’s not, “Superheroes are profound because they say something about our

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culture.” Comics are worthy of study because it’s an interesting art form. And superheroes are important to the history of the comic book industry and the history of media.

So we talk about intellectual property moving across different media. And we talk about legitimation, the idea that comics are worthy of study, not something to be ashamed of, which was my experience growing up. I wore my X-Force T-shirt freshman or sophomore year of high school, around when Rob Liefeld, who created X-Force, was in the 501 Jeans commercial. I thought, “Well, he’s in this commercial talking to Spike Lee. It’s fine now, it’s safe.” And immediately I was harassed. It was the whole, “Comics are for kids” thing.

MICHAEL: Rare Books hosts a lot of visiting courses, so I do a lot

that’s similar to what Mark does. But I actually do teach literature through comic books. I was just looking through the collection the other day for a children’s lit class — we were looking at different iterations of Alice in Wonderland. We have the first edition of Alice in Wonderland, and we have fine art editions, but then I was also showing them comic book adaptations.

I’ve found at least half a dozen so far. Whitman Books did a comic book edition of Alice in Wonderland that you got if you bought two pounds of Folgers coffee. It was something to give your kids. Or there’s a Wonderland comic book that was given out by Wonder Bread — except in Wonderland Alice has all this Wonder Bread. They’re appropriating these properties, then manipulating

them to sell this commercial item, a mass-produced white bread, which was a relatively new thing at the time.

QIANA: In my Race, Gender and Graphic Novels class I go back to the ’40s and ’50s and the way that people of color were represented then. We look at newspaper strips, things of that nature.

But we spend most of our time on the graphic novel. We examine some comics in translation — Aya, which was a French comic that takes place in the Ivory Coast. We look at comics from Brazil.

We look at historical comics about Nat Turner, John Lewis. And there’s an occasional superhero entry. Oh, and Harvey Pekar and Lynda Barry. I teach them as well.

But a lot of the students aren’t particularly familiar with comics.

They may only have seen Avengers at the theater. Or they only associate comics with a particular kind of story. I try to get them to see that a comic book writer or artist’s job, in many ways, is to get the reader to slow down and take in all that’s on the page, to appreciate not just the narrative flow but the way the design and artwork lead us through the experience.

I love using Watchmen as an example. You can look at the scribble on the walls or the crumpled papers in the gutters — they all have something written on them. There are recurring images and icons. It’s a nice sort of puzzle. There so much there that, if you flip through quickly, you’re going to miss. So I spend a lot of time talking about form before we move into the social and political content. Our students may not become comics scholars,

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but they may figure out ways to incorporate what we study alongside the other work they are doing.

as a model or a cultural trope to make you feel good about corporate America.

MARK: There’s more to comics than just, “What’s going on with Batman?” There are the advertisements, which are a lot of fun but also give a sense of the culture. For instance [picks up a comic and reads], “Getting a Daisy BB gun is like getting a good grade.

You have to work for it.” The kid is actually sitting in the back of class reading a comic book. [Laughter] There’s weight training ads, there’s letters from fans, selected by the editors. Publishing information, postal rates — there’s the sea monkeys, of course.

TIMES: David, you’re more behind the scenes, but you also teach with the collection. In a different sense.

QIANA: I had the sea monkeys!

MARK: Comic books are full of information that we can use to understand cultural history.

MICHAEL: It’s true. You could easily use this collection to talk about advertising in the 20th century, as Mark mentioned. Or there are non-narrative comic books — BFGoodrich tires gave away comics, Chrysler gave away comics, institutions have given away comics. We have a bunch of Tandy computer Whiz Kid comics from the ’80s. You might not think there’s a comic book that speaks to a particular discipline, but give me an hour, I can probably find a comic book that speaks to any discipline on campus.

A lot of things pop up: government offices producing comic books to reach broader audiences; there’s a character named Mark Steel, who was invented to promote the values of the steel industry. Corporate entities would co-opt ideas like the superhero

DAVID: As a cataloguer, I teach cataloging to SLIS interns. Most libraries you might end up working at will have comic books and graphic novels. School libraries will have comic books and graphic novels. No matter what field of librarianship you go into, you’re probably going to have some of this material, or something like it. I want interns to ask questions: “What kind of object is this?” “Is it a monograph? Or is it more like a magazine? Or a serial?” “How are you going to create access points so patrons can find these things? Or find things that are similar?” I deal in the practicalities of handling, finding and working with this material in library settings.

MARK: When you say access points — DAVID: Writers, inkers, artists — searchable terms. Mainly people’s names, subject headings. There’s always a time constraint as to how much detail we can put in. But there are big indexing projects on the internet. Grand Comics Database, for example.

And some have very in-depth listings of who has written what, and what appears where.

TIMES: Speaking of handling the material, will patrons need to wear gloves?

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MICHAEL: We actually discourage people from using gloves. We encourage them to wash their hands. “Clean hands and a pure heart” — that’s a phrase we use. You’re more prone to rip or tear a book because you get clumsy when you wear gloves. Even people who come to work with our medieval manuscripts don’t wear gloves. Sometimes we ask you to with original photography, but that’s a single item, or a few items. It’s a huge debate, though, among rare books librarians: Should you ask people to wear gloves or not? Most don’t anymore.

QIANA: Is there also a concern that people might come in who aren’t familiar with the process?

MICHAEL: It becomes another opportunity to educate. Some items will probably have restrictions. Amazing Fantasy No. 15 [featuring the first appearance of Spider-Man] probably won’t be something you can just come look at any time you want.

But Gary gave us this because he wants people to work with and enjoy the comic books. Some people might come as literary tourists, just to see a few examples, and we encourage that. We see that with our Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Pat Conroy collections all the time.

It’s a question of access. Historically, these items were very inexpensive. If you had a dime, you could go to Woolworth’s and buy a comic book. They were geared mostly toward children, though not exclusively, and most people didn’t keep them. Some people, like Gary, kept a lot of them. And now they’re here. But whereas before they were ephemeral, they have become this rarified thing that we have next to medieval manuscripts in the rare book department.

TIMES: I assumed the “clean hands, pure heart” rule was so

patrons could appreciate an item’s tactile aspects.

MICHAEL: It’s that, too. Mark has talked about this. Handling something that’s newsprint, four-color printing, as opposed to holding a tablet — I read comics on my iPad all the time, but it’s a different experience to burn through 12 issues on an iPad than to sit down with the physical item and take your time.

DAVID: If you go from a book from the ‘70s to one from the ’80s, the paper quality is totally different. In the ’70s it’s rougher, it’s yellower. You can see the difference in the color of the paper and the colors on the paper.

MARK: Without the material item, you lose the sense of what the creators were working with. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons probably had twice the resources when they were doing Watchmen as everyone else. They had a much bigger palette. They could have really solid blacks and give the comic the aura of quality it needed versus someone who was doing a regular comic book in the early ’80s. Those people had to work with fairly cheap materials. They had coloring options based on the paper they were using, how it would absorb colors.

MICHAEL: And then you look at something like The Dark Knight.

It’s perfect binding. It’s not saddle-stitched the way most other comic books are. It actually feels like an oversized paperback.

It’s physically heavy.

TIMES: If I could interject. That issue of Dark Knight Returns — is that a comic book? Or a graphic novel?

MICHAEL: And therein lay the great question. Roy Thomas [former editor-in-chief at Marvel, friend of the Irvin Department of Rare Books] jokes that a graphic novel is a comic book with delusions of grandeur. I would call it a comic book. Mark and Qiana might tell me it’s not.

QIANA: I say they’re all comic books. I also think when people first saw this [holds up an issue of The Dark Knight Returns], they might have been pleased. It elevates the work to see it bound as a book.

TIMES: Hearing you guys talk, even just seeing what’s on the table here — just how big is this collection?

MICHAEL: There are approximately 500 long boxes. And Gary was good at getting a lot of comics in each box. But we’re still guessing. I mean, if it appeared in comic book format, he bought it. I mentioned before we started recording, there are Oral Roberts comics and Billy Graham comic books. There’s a whole series of Catholic comics. But there are sports comics as well, which were very popular. There’s romance comics. Westerns. And superheroes, of course.

DAVID: There’s also a lot of the military comics. Sgt.. Fury. Sgt. Rock.

MICHAEL: And the EC comics [Entertaining Comics, an American comic book publisher from the 1940s and ’50s]. Qiana can talk about EC way better than I can. They did Tales from the Crypt, a lot of horror and crime comics. They also published sensational medical tales, this series called M.D., which is basically like House or Grey’s Anatomy, but in comic book form. Gary had those as well.

QIANA: I just published a book on EC. I don’t look as much at the horror or the crime comics, but I do talk about some of the conventions that they developed through their storytelling. They started trying to brand a kind of story called the “shock suspense story.” They were very similar to O. Henry tales or Twilight Zone.

They have a kind of surprise twist. Typically, someone has done something morally questionable. The ones I look at tend to deal with racism.

MICHAEL: There’s quite a lot in this collection. And I’m sure we’ll have visiting faculty from other institutions who will come and do research. And students will be able to work with it — once we work out everything that’s in it. T

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UP TO NOW

Where did you study? What was your dissertation? Why do you do what you do, and what did you do before you did it? More than 100 new faculty members joined our ranks this semester, and every one of them has a story. We randomly chose five and asked: What have you been up to — up to now?

JOHN DOERING-WHITE

Assistant professor / College of Social Work and Department of Anthropology I had the fortune of working with some incredible professors while in undergrad at Earlham College who gave me a deep passion for what’s possible in academia in terms of intellectual exploration but also applied work, connecting research with real world problems. We were encouraged from day one to be very directly involved with work outside of the classroom.

I started getting interested in immigration issues as an undergrad. There was a significant immigrant community, specifically from Oaxaca, in rural Indiana, which was still considered a new destination for immigrants from Mexico in those days. That led to an AmeriCorps VISTA position in community organizing with immigrants in Illinois. There, I met a lot of people who had recently immigrated up through Mexico from Central America, hopping freight trains and passing through a loose network of migrant shelters, which are nongovernmental humanitarian spaces that provide short-term relief.

Hearing about those shelters was really intriguing. How had these places that are essentially facilitating the passage of undocumented immigrants managed to exist so openly? I applied to graduate school wanting to study new immigrant communities in the Midwest, but I quickly shifted to pursuing a project that would explore the politics of humanitarianism with Central American migrants in Mexico. So, my dissertation was an ethnography based on my time living and working in migrant shelters in Mexico, especially in central Mexico.

I’ve learned a lot about gray zones through that work. Talk about undocumented immigration is often black or white, “us versus them.” But when you live with people who are in the midst of migrating, and when you work alongside people who are providing humanitarian aid — and I mean helping in the most basic ways, providing a bowl of hot food and a place to sleep at night, providing sanctuary and safety — you get beyond that black and white narrative. You come to appreciate a more fundamental, albeit messy shared human experience.

As told to Craig Brandhorst

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NABIL NATAFGI

Assistant professor / Arnold School of Public Health I grew up in Beirut, and I did my undergrad at the American University of Beirut. I studied medical laboratory sciences with the aim that I would become a medical doctor. But one of the required courses was Introduction to Public Health.

I originally wanted to go into medicine to help others — that was the appealing side of it. And when I learned more about public health, that it’s really about generalizing across populations instead of treating one individual patient at a time, I knew that was what I wanted to do.

After I finished my master’s in public health, I had an opportunity to work as a research assistant in the same school. That got me into academia. I love doing research, the autonomy and independence. You can do what you want but still have high expectations for rigorous research.

I did my Ph.D. at the University of Iowa. My focus was on rural health services. There were two main areas that I focused on. The first was quality and patient safety in critical access hospitals. Usually these are very small hospitals in rural areas, remote areas. They have less than 25 beds. Most are operated by family physicians or nurse practitioners, etc. They are required to have emergency departments.

So I looked at the quality of care in those kinds of hospitals. We also did an evaluation of telemedicine: How effective can telemedicine be in terms of providing care in those remote areas? And how can we reduce transfer rates to tertiary hospitals, particularly from the emergency department?

For my postdoc at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, I wanted more interactions with people, with patients. I learned more about community-based participatory research and patient centered outcome research. Basically, it’s a way of involving patients, or people before they become patients, in the research that you’re doing — even in designing the research, asking the right questions, how we frame the questions.

As told to Craig Brandhorst

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BRUNO ALCALDE

Assistant professor of music theory / School of Music I was born and raised in Brazil and was there until I was 28 years old — except for one semester at the Berklee College of Music, when I was 18, for jazz. I thought I would be able to get a scholarship, but I didn’t. So I went back to Brazil, and I spent some time just playing in rock bands. That’s my background. I started as a rock guitar player. Then I thought, “Why not try composition?” It’s creative, it’s somewhat free, and I thought it would add to my guitar playing. That was 2003. I was 22 years old. I studied for five-and-a-half years and got my degree from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. I came to the United States with the goal of studying music theory from a cognitive perspective. Music cognition is, “How do we make sense of music?” “How do we make sense of a pitch?” The sense-making is very wide. It’s how you engage with music, how you make it useful, be it intellectual or moving your body.

The reason I got into this area is that it makes it possible to share music theory with more people. That armchair research thing is really not for me. I hate the idea that people should respect music theory just because we say it is important. You won’t get respect for something, or make something important, just by claiming that it is important. People have to connect with it.

Music education in general has this sense of high art. We teach Mozart, but we don’t teach Kendrick Lamar. I think there are ways of connecting these things. We can tackle music beyond the classical repertory, which can be very important to students. As a musician, you need to know basic tools and concepts, but you also need to be able to extrapolate from them and apply those ideas in other realms. Pedagogically, that’s essential.

I was always interested in the systematization of music theory and composition, but it always felt really disconnected from reality. Because when I am writing music or thinking about music, I’m thinking about different things than when I am playing or improvising. I wanted a way to connect those different things. It’s about trying to make music theory connect to how we think, rather than being something that just a handful of people understand.

As told to Dan Cook

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NICOLE COOKE

Associate professor, Augusta Baker Chair in Childhood Literacy / College of Information and Communications I went to college (at Rutgers) to go to pharmacy school. All of the math and science I had learned and was reasonably good at, they covered that in the first two weeks, and I thought, “Now what?” By the end of the first year I could see the writing on the walls.

Luckily, I had a scholarship to Rutgers that was “Rutgers-wide,” and I was going through the Occupational Outlook Handbook at the library, book nerd that I am, trying to figure out what to do. My mother made an offhand comment, “You’re always in the library, why don’t you work in one?”

At that point, I didn’t know anything about librarians. I didn’t know you had to have a master’s degree. I went to the person in charge of the office and said I wanted to sign up for the library program. She said, “Have you even graduated?” The school had multiple programs — library science, journalism and communications, very much like here. I majored in communications as an undergrad. Then I went right upstairs into the library (master’s) program.

At first, I wanted to work in newspaper and magazine libraries. I did a couple of internships and I hated it. Then I took the first job I could get that didn’t require me to move. That was children’s services at the Montclair Public Library.

Then I worked at the medical library at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. From there, I went to Montclair State University and worked as a reference and instruction librarian for nine years.

I have a second master’s degree from Penn State. It was all online, and I hated every second of it. It was the early days of distance education for a lot of people, and Penn State knew they had to be online, but the faculty didn’t want to do it.

And they didn’t know how to do it. I thought, “There’s got to be a better way to do this, and that’s what I want to do my research on.”

My dissertation focused on the information behaviors of online graduate students. In a nutshell, information behavior is how people use, seek and avoid information. In the last year and a half, that work has been focused on fake news, and disinformation and how people are interacting or not with that type of information.

As told to Megan Sexton

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MYISHA EATMON

Assistant professor of history / College of Arts and Sciences I’ve always been interested in history, since I was a little girl. It goes back to being a kindergartener and learning about slavery and the Holocaust and Jim Crow. Those are the three areas that really have kept me interested in history.

Looking at the continuities and discontinuities between what we are seeing in our current moment and in the things that have happened in the past — it’s too similar to what was before. I’ve always had this idea that if we continue to learn history and really familiarize ourselves with those dark periods, we might be able to avoid going back there. But clearly not everyone has the same philosophy, because here we are.

My dissertation, titled Public Wrongs, Private Rights: African Americans, Private Law, and White Violence during Jim Crow, explores black legal culture in the face of white-on-black violence under Jim Crow and black civil litigation’s impact on civil law. Essentially, what I’ve done with my dissertation is historicize what we see with police brutality. African Americans are having to sue in civil court because the police are not being indicted. I wanted to know if that was something that had started happening recently or if it was something that had a legacy in Jim Crow. What I found is that from the 1880s all the way up until Brown v. Board of Education, African Americans were suing individuals and companies for similar types of racialized violence.

The second project I want to do is look at ways African Americans and Jewish people created a legal culture in the face of anti-Semitic violence and anti-black violence during the inter-war period (World War I and World War II).

There were Jewish people who helped found the NAACP, which means that either they had the means to help black people or they had an interest in helping black people. I want to explore that relationship a little more and help historicize what we’re seeing with the rise of anti-Semitism and anti-black violence in the U.S. in the 21st century. I want to see if there is a continuity or if this is something different.

I deal with very dark subjects, but those stories have to be told. My historical philosophy is to recover the stories of people who can’t tell their stories for themselves.

As told to Page Ivey

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JUAN TELLEZ

Assistant professor of political science / College of Arts and Sciences I thought I was going to become a lawyer, but in my last couple of years as an undergraduate I got interested in pursuing an academic path, and my professors showed me the path to getting a Ph.D. My dissertation at Duke focused on the negotiation of the Colombian peace process from 2012 to 2016. That process was happening while I was in grad school, and I traveled there to do field research, talking to community organizations and stakeholders involved in the peace process. After four years of negotiating, the government expected there would be political backlash, so they decided to put it to a popular referendum, thinking that would buy public support. The referendum very famously failed, and it has become a very contentious and polarizing issue there.

Conflicts within countries and peace agreements aren’t just an academic interest for me. I’m Colombian myself. I lived there until I was 10 years old — my family left at a time when the conflict was at fever pitch.

After we moved to Fort Lauderdale, I grew up where a lot of Colombian ex-patriots lived. A lot of my scholarly work has been about Colombia, but I also have projects in India and in Guatemala where I’m looking at crime and policing and civilian interactions with the police.

This fall, I’m teaching Revolutions and Political Violence, a 400-level course that will zoom in on what’s happened in Colombia, Peru, Nicaragua and Guatemala. We have a very narrow idea of what armed conflicts are, who participates in them and how they are fought, but in my own research I argue that conflicts can be very broad and involve many different segments of civil society.

I’m also teaching a methods course for undergraduates that emphasizes building skills in the programming language R, and topics in causality. It will give them the programming know-how to get off the ground in quantitative research and become more critical consumers of research in the media. In the future, I want to make a course that’s specific to Latin America.

And I plan to continue research in Colombia, looking at land reform and land ownership issues. Many Colombians who fled the country have gone back but they don’t have titles to their land. This has created a huge administrative and legal hurdle for the government and also raised concerns about the future of the peace process, given that land conflicts are at the heart of the Colombian civil war. T As told to Chris Horn

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HISTORY IN THE MAKING

At the University of South Carolina, we love to look forward — and why not? We’ve been on an upward trajectory for years, and there’s no reason to think we won’t keep climbing: in research, in the rankings, in the overall student experience. TIMES has highlighted a mere five examples here, but similar success stories could be told from one end of campus to the other: in your own program, unit or division; in your classroom or lab; in your office, by the person sitting next to you or just down the hall. After all, it’s never a bad idea to revisit history. It’s how we build on prior success.

by Craig Brandhorst, Page Ivey and Megan Sexton

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BIRTH OF BARUCH For more than 40 years, researchers and students at the University of South Carolina’s Belle W. Baruch Institute for Marine and Coastal Sciences have studied the intricate details of the salt marsh estuary, but the work at the research facilities along the coast is the fulfillment of a dream that goes back even further.

In the early 1900s, Bernard Baruch, a Wall Street financier, investor and philanthropist, bought several pieces of land on South Carolina’s Waccamaw Neck. His aim was to reassemble the 18th century Hobcaw Barony, an original land grant from the king of England, and he put the land to use as a retreat, hosting friends and family during the winter months. Guests included Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, but it was his oldest child, Belle, who fell most deeply in love with the property.

Outdoorsy and athletic, Belle Baruch hunted, fished and rode horses on the 16,000-acre Hobcaw Barony, between Georgetown and Pawleys Island. She eventually acquired pieces of the land from her father, where she built a house, an airport hangar and horse stables. After her death in 1964, a foundation was established to follow the wishes she set out in her will: Hobcaw Barony would become a center for “teaching and/or research in forestry, marine biology, and the care and propagation of wildlife and flora and fauna in South Carolina, in connection with colleges and/or universities in the State of South Carolina.”

In the mid 1960s, the Baruch Foundation’s board of trustees approached South Carolina and Clemson about using the land as an outdoor laboratory for research and education in areas such as marine biology and forestry. The two universities agreed, and got to work building labs and studying the coastal plain ecosystems.

Fifty-five years later, that work continues.

The property is still owned by the Baruch Foundation, a private nonprofit that has agreements with universities to run research institutes on the property. The University of South Carolina operates the Baruch Institute for Marine and Coastal Sciences. Clemson, Coastal Carolina and Francis Marion universities also have institutes and research centers on the sprawling site.

“Because the property and the estuary have been under the control of the Baruch Foundation and because of Belle’s interests in preserving it in its natural state, it is one of the least impacted estuaries on the East Coast,” says Jay Pinckney, director of the Baruch Institute. “Virtually the entire watershed is under control of the foundation, which means there are no external inputs like rivers or settlements that can impact the estuary.”

In other words, it’s an ideal laboratory.

“We can’t call it pristine — there’s not a pristine place on earth — but it is minimally impacted over time,” Pinckney explains. “That allows us to look at the way a natural system works. It’s a good reference to compare to systems that are impacted so we can look at the differences between the way a system is supposed to work and way it works today.”

The extensive data collected allows researchers to document climate change and study ways that marine animals and plants change over time. The university’s institute at Baruch also is one of just 29 places around the country that are part of the National Estuarine Research Reserve System, monitoring and researching spots where freshwater from the land and saltwater from the ocean mix.

Baruch is integrated with South Carolina’s Columbia campus, particularly the School of Earth, Ocean and

Belle W. Baruch Institute for Marine and Coastal Sciences

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Environment, with faculty and graduate and undergraduate students participating in classes and research projects.

“We teach courses down there that are mostly field-based.

They allow students to get muddy and get mosquito bites and learn what field work is all about,” Pinckney says.

That commitment to education and research extends beyond South Carolina’s faculty and students. More than 90 research projects are under way from more than 100 institutions around the country.

“It’s critical for the marine science program, because we’re not on the ocean. USC is not on the coast,” Pinckney says. “We have to have a facility on the coast if we’re going to have a vibrant marine science program and attract faculty to come here and do marine related types of research.

Some institutions have a research ship. Our research ship is Hobcaw Barony.”

BEST IN THE BUSINESS

The Darla Moore School of Business

When the Darla Moore School of Business launched the master’s in international business program in 1974, the motive was pretty straightforward: to address a need of South Carolina businesses by supplying highly-educated professionals who could successfully manage investments outside the U.S. Specifically, the program grew out of conversations between then-dean Jim Kane and two members of the Business Partnership Foundation — Hartsville, South Carolina-based packaging company Sonoco and Springs Industries, a textile company then based in Fort Mill.

“They had issues with overseas investments they had made that didn’t turn out the way they wanted,” says Randy Folks, distinguished professor emeritus and first director of the Moore School’s international department. “They needed people who understood international business for these overseas assignments.”

Folks and four other business professors put together a Master of International Business Studies curriculum that required a strong business foundation coupled with fluency in a second language. The third piece of the degree would be an understanding of economics and politics of different regions of the world. That last piece would include an international internship.

“We had to find those internships, then we had to get the countries to agree to take our students,” Folks says.

The initial program was quite rigorous — out of 40 students who started in the first MIBS class, only 20 graduated.

Most of those who failed to complete the program were done in by the language requirement, which started with an intensive set of language courses over the summer before the

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students even entered the program. The language lessons continued throughout the first year, and the following summer the students would be immersed in the language with their internship.

As interest in the program grew, applicants were better prepared for the rigors of the language and other nonbusiness requirements, Folks says. And the school added a component for foreign-nationals studying here.

The program grew steadily throughout the 1980s and had its largest class in 1992 with 180 graduates. But toward the end of the decade, things began to change.

“We had been able to attract really bright people who didn’t have much business experience because we were going to give them an internship for six months, and that generated real value for the companies,” Folks says.

But around 2000, companies began looking for more seasoned business professionals who were going back to school after getting experience in the workplace. These students were older and the language requirement was more difficult for them.

“The school tried to respond with changing the name in 2001, and we had to start rethinking the program completely,” Folks says. “Now it’s really nothing like the program it was because the students coming in are completely different. The students are more internationally oriented than they were in the 1970s.”

About this time, the school had started an international business concentration for undergraduate students. The program was so popular that it became the top-ranked international business undergraduate program in the nation — without actually offering a degree in the field.

And it has been ranked No. 1 for 21 consecutive years, including the most recent U.S. News & World Report rankings that came out in September.

“So we reacted quickly to create a degree program that would be world class and consistent with our standards in the graduate program,” says Kendall Roth, senior associate dean for international programs and partnerships.

The partnerships required for the undergraduate program were with universities in other countries where students would study during their immersion semester, rather than the internship that graduate students did.

“They needed to have that experience of living abroad,” Folks says. “Even if we couldn’t create internships, we needed to internationalize our campus.”

Undergraduates also had to have a second major, not just international business. And it has worked. The program, now known as the international MBA, continues to be ranked No. 1, including in the most recent U.S. News & World Report rankings that came out in September.

Now, Roth says, the focus is on using the partnerships developed through the undergraduate program to create something entirely new.

“We have developed 80 partners, most of whom are the No. 1 or No. 2 business schools in their countries,” Roth says.

“This creates an academic exposure for our students that is exceptional.”

As Roth and Folks and other members of the international business department made these calls to create these partnerships, the Moore School’s reputation got them in the door. Each new successful partnership led to others.

“It created a snowballing effect,” Roth says. “The universities together can collectively do what neither could do alone.”

The latest tweak to the program is an international cohort: two classes of students from two different countries — specifically, to start, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Moore School — who will matriculate together over their last two years of undergraduate study.

“This will build a network among these students,” Roth says. “They will be developing those relationships that will pay off for years to come.”

Looking for ways to redefine the program has been its hallmark over the decades, Roth says, and one reason why it has managed to stay at the top of the rankings.

“My objective is to make sure that people are successful, and that requires constant innovation,” he says. “What’s the next frontier? We are always pressing to redefine that.”

QUIET RIOT: U101 President Thomas F. Jones had a simple goal for a new course the university was creating in the early 1970s: teach students to love the University of South Carolina.

If they care deeply about their university, he reasoned, they would not riot as they had in May 1970, when a group of students ransacked part of the Osborne building, occupied the first floor and trapped Jones and some members of the Board of Trustees on the second floor. The students, protesting the Vietnam War, perceived social injustices and local campus issues, fled when National Guard troops arrived several hours later. As the protesting students and a crowd of onlookers moved to the Horseshoe, they were followed by police and guardsmen, who used tear gas to disperse the crowd. Tensions on campus remained high for several days.

Soon after, Jones and the administration sought out student advice for ways to improve the university community. Those conversations culminated in a retreat at Camp Gravatt near Aiken in October 1971, a meeting that

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Students cross Gibbes Green on the first day of the fall semester.

allowed students to voice frustrations about the academic atmosphere at the university. Among the suggestions from the Gravatt conference was an overhaul of the university’s freshman program, and a faculty committee was formed to put together a plan to improve the academic orientation of freshmen.

In the summer of 1972, the faculty senate approved a trial course: “University 101, the Student in the University.” The course would attempt to build trust and open lines of communication among students, faculty, staff and administrators. It was taught by newly trained faculty and staff members and offered to a few hundred students. Fortyseven years later, University 101 is still being taught — now to about 80 percent of incoming freshmen — helping new students adjust to college life and learn about all the university has to offer.

After guiding University 101 for two years, President Jones appointed John Gardner, an assistant professor in the College of General Studies and one of the course’s first instructors, as faculty director. Gardner ran University 101 for the next 25 years.

“It works because it’s directly focused on what new students need. It’s successful because we are still teaching them to love the university,” Gardner says. “It’s also been successful because the whole university owns it. It’s had broad input. It collaborates with all of the different schools

along with Student Affairs. It has never lost sight that it was a university-wide initiative.”

Another reason for its longevity? Assessment data show that it works. Students who take U101 return to school for their sophomore year and graduate from the university at higher rates than students who don’t take the course as freshmen. What started as a freshman experiment helped birth an international movement called the first-year experience, with Carolina earning national recognition for its work with students, peer leaders and instructors. U.S. News and World Report has consistently recognized University 101 and the first-year experience as a “program to look for.” This year, for the first time in nearly 20 years, U.S. News included a numerical ranking for first-year experience programs and named South Carolina the top first-year student experience among the nation’s public universities Dan Friedman, who has been director of the program for the past 11 years, says University 101 becomes more important each year as the university continues to grow.

More than 6,000 new students will start classes on the Columbia campus this fall, and there will be about 260 sections of U101, with dozens of sections geared to specific majors or programs. Each section has just 19 students.

“How does Carolina feel so small and so personal when we are so large? University 101 is one of the primary drivers of that,” Friedman says.

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University 101 offers an opportunity for students to quickly connect with classmates. And along with a staff or faculty member teaching each class, there also is a peer leader who can be a mentor and resource for first-year students.

“The No. 1 predictor of a student’s decision to stay (in college) is a sense of belonging,” Friedman says. “The whole thing is about community. The No. 1 reason our students tell us they’re taking this course is they want to make friends. The second reason they want to take the course is they want to learn about everything this university has to offer them. We give students what they need — whether that’s information, resources or support — at the time when they need it and when they are most ready for it.”

Over the years, as students’ needs change, the topics covered by the course have changed, too. The class is tweaked each year, and every five years the curriculum is rewritten to ensure all facets are still relative to today’s students. While students who take the course have a higher retention rate than those who don’t, the numbers are even higher among students from low-income homes, first-generation college students and those who have a lower anticipated GPA. For the first-year students arriving in Columbia this fall, University 101 is there to offer what Friedman calls “an extended onboarding experience.”

“We can’t just say to a person, ‘Welcome to the University of South Carolina. Now go be successful.’ We wouldn’t say to a new faculty member, ‘You’re bright. You’ll figure it out.’ So why would we do that with our most precious resources, which are our students?” Friedman says. “University 101 is a way to demonstrate respect to our students and to maximize the potential of those students in a new environment. It’s not a course about academic survival. It’s not about surviving; it’s about thriving.”

WUSC: NO STATIC AT ALL High above the Capital City on a chilly day between October 1976 and January 1977 (memories are fuzzy and The Gamecock didn’t cover the event), a handful of brave student disc jockeys and broadcast engineers put a 20-foot antenna atop Columbia Hall and WUSC was born as a 10-watt FM station.

But this was not the first WUSC, or even the first WUSC-FM. And it wasn’t located at 90.5, as it has been for the past 36 years — although it was still “on the left of the dial.”

The original WUSC as a music outlet run by students for students went on the air in the years after World War

II and was powered with surplus transmitter parts. The signal was wired into the university’s electrical system in a process known as carrier current. It was rarely available off campus and could best be heard by plugging a radio into an on-campus outlet, says Rick Wrigley, who first broadcast on WUSC as a student in 1963.

“It was Nov. 8, 1963,” Wrigley recalls. “The night owl show — that’s where they put the newbies. It was a prerecorded show that ran from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. We couldn’t be live because the Russell House was closed at the time and we had to vacate the building each night.”

In the mid-60s the broadcast day was 4:30 p.m.–1 a.m., offering middle-of-the-road music for those studying late.

Later in his career, Wrigley says, the station started a morning rock-and-roll show from 6 to 8 a.m. called “Dawn Patrol,” a nod to the Adrian Cronauer morning broadcast on Armed Forces Radio in Vietnam.

Wrigley left WUSC in 1966 when professional radio called. Over his career, he has worked at WCOS radio, WIS television and radio and S.C. ETV. Since 2007, he’s been back at WUSC as an alumnus DJ, doing an oldies show that focuses on songs from the early days of rock-and-roll and providing listeners with a throw-back to the days when DJs talked about the music between songs.

The station began its push-back on Top 40 soon after Wrigley’s original time there and was decidedly “new music” by the time its FM license came online in 1977.

Despite this “outsider” mentality of the new WUSC, the one thing that has remained constant throughout the history of the station is the camaraderie of the students who commanded the airwaves.

Student DJs have been cranking the volume at WUSC for decades.

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“It becomes a family,” says Ernest Wiggins, who has both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from the University of South Carolina. “It made being at the university really pleasurable, spending time with people who shared your interest in music and creating a product for your fellow students.”

Wiggins, a communications professor in the College of Information and Communications, was at the student-run music station at the very beginning of its new FM days, serving as music director in 1978.

There at the same time was Jane Daley Witten, whose father, Charles Witten, was at one time dean of students.

When she joined WUSC in 1974, it was still an AM station, but already had taken on the roots of what would become its calling card — playing new music that you couldn’t hear on any of the other stations in Columbia. Top 40 was especially verboten.

As the station and the technology of broadcasting has evolved over the past 42 years, WUSC has moved a little more left on the dial to 90.5 and boosted its signal considerably from that original 10 watts. And, although that antenna — now 40 feet — is still atop Columbia Hall, the station has added a digital channel as well as live-streaming on the internet, sending its alternative voice well beyond the confines of campus.

“It was always about the music,” says Witten, who started with a jazz show and did a second show of “import music” that wasn’t widely available in the U.S. “It was new.

It was fresh. It was cool.”

Witten, who still has a show on college radio at WXYC at UNC-Chapel Hill, also remembers when the music version of WUSC switched from AM to 91.9 FM, which it was until 1983, the same year the signal went to 3,000 watts.

“I was there when we put the antenna on top of Columbia Hall,” she says. “We had to swing it in the air, then put it in a hole on the roof.”

LORDY, LORDY — EPI IS 40 Step off the elevators on the fourth floor of the Close-Hipp Building some weekday afternoon and just listen. Spanish, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese — the world’s languages fill the halls. Now step through one of the classroom doors and listen again. The language now? That’s English, spoken by people from around the globe through the university’s English Programs for Internationals.

Yes, EPI, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, has come a long way since 1979, when it was created in response to a growing international presence on campus.

In the mid-1970s, the university had admitted 20 Latin American students to the master’s in international business

program and 30 undergraduates from Libya to the colleges of engineering and journalism, the latter cohort through a contract with the Libyan government.

When efforts to improve the students’ English language skills proved inadequate, however, the university recognized a need. They brought in a consultant from the National Association for Student Affairs and then formed a task force with representatives from the Colleges of Business, Engineering and Humanities, as well as the Office of Student Affairs.

In the summer of 1978, the task force recommended the establishment of an intensive English language center on campus, and by year’s end, the university had hired a director, James Murphy, until then the associate director of the intensive language program at Temple University.

“It was really an explosion,” recalls Murphy, now retired but still living in Columbia. “I arrived in January 1979, and the program began in June. I started with 13 students in the intensive language program, and I also managed a summer program for Japanese students. Between the two programs, I had about 30 students that first summer.”

EPI’s rapid ascent owed, in part, to Murphy’s recruitment strategy. Almost immediately, he began contacting foreign embassies, agencies and student placement services around the country, and he made a two-week recruiting trip to Washington, D.C., New York and Boston. He wasn’t merely advertising the new EPI program, though. He was advertising the University of South Carolina.

“The university realized from the get go that the purpose of the program was not just to teach English but rather to promote the university,” he says. “So I would grab brochures and everything I could from the various departments and take them with me when I presented. At that time, it really helped to get USC more known internationally.”

And his efforts were also well-received on campus.

“The master’s in international business program, engineering, math — these programs already had some international students but they wanted more,” he says. “They were very gung-ho to support a program like EPI.” Which is not to say there weren’t challenges, notably a dearth of qualified ESL instructors in the Columbia area.

The solution, though, paid additional dividends.

“Luckily, the university did have a graduate program in linguistics, and that program had some students who were planning to become teachers of English as a second language,” Murphy says. “And that really changed the graduate program in linguistics because now there were jobs in the teaching of English as a second language.”

Enrollment in the program reached 196 by 1980. By 1981, when the program switched to a quarterly enrollment

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International students practice their English inside the classroom and out. They also share their cultures with the rest of the campus community during the annual International Education Week, pictured above.

system, enrollment reached 431. And while the number of international students in EPI would ebb and flow over the next four decades, often in response to global events like the SARS epidemic in 2003—and the directorship would change half a dozen times — the unit has continued to expand its reach and mission. In 2014, it became part of the newly formed Global Carolina.

Today, in addition to the intensive language instruction program, which continues to ready potential international students for study at South Carolina and elsewhere, there are short-term cultural programs run for the U.S. Department of State, teacher instruction programs run in collaboration with foreign agencies such as the Mexican Secretariat of Public Education and a range of language assessment services.

“If you just look at the size of the student population in the intensive language program, then you’re not getting a complete picture of who we are and what we do. That’s a very important part of our mission but it’s not the entirety of our mission,” says current director Wesley Curtis, who took the reins in 2016 after the retirement of longtime program director Alexandra Rowe.

“We view ourselves as facilitators of the internationalization efforts of the university,” Curtis adds. “You will find people in every department of the university, in every college, in every administrative division, who in some way are contributing to the university’s internationalization efforts, but Global Carolina brings together what we might call the internationally facing units of the university.” T

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FORWARD THINKING

Stories by Chris Horn

PAVING THE WAY

Civil engineer assists S.C. DOT with new predictive model for pavement.

It’s one of the nation’s smallest states, but South Carolina has the fourth-largest state-maintained highway system in the country. And those nearly 91,000 lane miles of pavement are deteriorating faster than ever, thanks to record numbers of cars and trucks on the road.

Nathan Huynh doesn’t have a magic formula to fix the roadway wear and tear, but he hopes to use his modeling skills to help the S.C. Department of Transportation develop a better statistical formula for predicting the longterm health of the Palmetto State’s pavement.

“Typically, a newly resurfaced road looks great and feels smooth for several years, and then, over time, it begins to break down,” says Huynh, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of South Carolina. “Plotted out on a graph, it’s not a steady straightline decline — it’s more of an S-curve.”

The Department of Transportation has used that curve for 20 years to predict pavement health, Huynh says, and they realize it’s time for a refresh. “They want to be able at any point to know what the pavement quality index will be for a given road.”

That kind of predictability will allow the transportation department to better plan for road maintenance and

schedule repairs before the quality of a given stretch of road becomes untenable. Huynh’s study will look at new and existing roads and the treatment techniques used to rehabilitate the pavement.

“The typical ‘mill and fill’ — grinding off and replacing the top two inches of asphalt — is appropriate most of the time but not always,” says Huynh, adding that a road’s deterioration is sometimes the result of a poor foundation.

“When you see furrows in a road, it’s usually because of problems in the underlying foundation or soil.”

Huynh is also working on another project for the S.C. DOT to determine if it is cost-effective to conduct field investigation to assess pavement structural quality. He and his colleagues were recently selected by the department to perform research that will deploy a truck equipped with sensors and lasers to gather pavement functional and structural data on the state’s roads. This will help create a baseline of the state’s road health and improve the selection of roadways for rehabilitation. Improvement of this process will help S.C. DOT optimize its engineering, construction and maintenance funds.

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Cultivating compassion Researchers test virtual reality videos with medical students.

Medical students usually begin their education with a big dose of altruism, but their empathy for patients often fades before they’ve even completed their degrees.

That’s significant because gaining insight into a patient’s concerns and feelings is essential for positive clinical interactions between patients and physicians and better health outcomes. A remedy for decreased empathy might come in the form of virtual reality videos that researchers at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville are testing this fall. The project is funded by the university’s Center for Teaching Excellence and Prisma Health.

“We’re trying to get our students to understand the need to dig a little deeper when talking to patients — to try to put themselves in their patients’ shoes,” says Ann Blair Kennedy, director of the Patient Engagement Studio and clinical assistant professor.

“Empathy can be taught, and an effective technique for teaching it is perspective-taking, where individuals are invited to take the perspective of the patient.”

To that end, a group of 50 first- and second-year students will be assigned to watch virtual reality videos featuring six-minute segments that depict a typical patient/physician visit. In the first video, the viewer watches actors posing as physician and patient as they converse. The second video is seen from the patient’s point of view only. As the doctor talks with the patient, the patient’s thoughts appear in print in the margin of the video.

“It becomes apparent that the doctor doesn’t probe deeply enough with the patient,” says Shannon Stark Taylor, a psychologist at Prisma Health Upstate and clinical assistant professor. “There is something that the provider likely missed and the patient is having a really emotional reaction because the physician didn’t ask in the right way or follow up with more questions.”

As students watch the videos, monitors will gather biofeedback data such as heart rate variability, which is a physiological measure of empathy. That data will be part of the pre- and post-assessment of students to measure the videos’ effectiveness.

A second randomized group of students will watch PowerPoint videos of similar length that contain standard lecture material on empathizing with patients.

“We’re trying to figure out if the virtual reality videos are effective in improving student empathy and, if so, how they might be used more extensively in the classroom,” Kennedy says.

Results of the study will be tabulated in the spring. Lauren Fowler, a clinical assistant professor, is a co-investigator on the project, and four students (two of them second-year medical students) have shot and edited the video and will assist in the study’s implementation.

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Biologists use spectroscopy to estimate age of fish for commercial fishing industry.

What do climate change, ear bones and infrared lasers mean for the future of fisheries management?

Add this to the growing list of side effects wrought by climate change: Fish in parts of the warming Atlantic Ocean are growing faster. That might seem like a good thing, but two fish biologists at the University of South Carolina say the phenomenon of younger, bigger fish could muddy the waters of vital fisheries management.

That’s why their NOAA-sponsored research of a faster technique to determine the age of fish could become an important tool in managing commercially important fish species such as red snapper.

“Knowing the typical size of a fish species at a particular age is key for fisheries managers,” says Joe Quattro, a university biology professor. “It’s how they monitor fish populations and make policy decisions to try to prevent overharvesting.”

When juvenile fish grow faster, Quattro says, there’s the potential to mistakenly assume that the larger-than-normal juvenile fish from a harvest sample indicate the species population is robust and can tolerate more harvesting pressure.

Traditionally, the age of fish is determined by teams of two or three inspectors who count the rings on otoliths, the

bony “ear stones” that grow inside a fish’s head. Counting the annual growth rings isn’t as clear cut as you might think; that’s why multiple people count them and the average of their tabulations is used. The otoliths themselves must be laboriously cleaned and polished before visual examination.

Michelle Passerotti, a Ph.D. candidate in Quattro’s lab, is devoting her doctoral dissertation to study the use of an older technology called near-infrared spectroscopy to estimate the age of fish. Using this method, otoliths don’t have to be sectioned or polished, and the results are obtained in less than one minute. The problem is that the science of the spectroscopy technique hasn’t been fully worked out, although it’s clear there is a high degree of correlation between a fish’s age and the infrared spectroscopy’s absorbance reading of the otolith.

“If we can find a method closer to real time to determine the age of fish, that would be great for fisheries management,” says Passerotti, who aspires to work in federal fisheries management after earning her doctoral degree.

“My research is focused on correlating the near-infrared spectroscopy with biochemistry data so that the fisheries management people can understand why it works — then they’ll be more apt to adopt it.” T

ORIGIN STORIES When we commissioned local illustrator Dré Lopez to draw Cocky for our latest cover, we had no idea what to expect. We knew it would be good, we’d seen his portfolio. But apart from saying “Cocky, comics, something, something, origin story,” we gave him almost zero direction.

Editor Craig Brandhorst Assistant editor Megan Sexton Designer Brandi Lariscy Avant Contributors Dan Cook, Chris Horn, Page Ivey Photographer Kim Truett Campus correspondents James Raby and Leslie Hull-Ryde, Aiken Candace Brasseur, Beaufort Shana Dry, Lancaster Jane Brewer, Salkehatchie Erin Duffie, Sumter Annie Smith, Union Jessica Blais, Upstate Jay Darby, Palmetto College University of South Carolina TIMES is published and printed twice per semester during the regular academic year by the Office of Communications and Public Affairs, Jeff Stensland, interim director.

Questions, comments and story ideas can be submitted via email to Craig Brandhorst at craigb1@mailbox.sc.edu or by phone at 803-777-3681.

The University of South Carolina does not discriminate in educational or employment opportunities on the basis of race, sex, gender, age, color, religion, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, genetics, veteran status, pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions.

And we couldn’t be happier with the result. Dré’s take on our lovable feathered mascot is simultaneously whimsical, charming and deeply philosophical. It’s also the perfect introduction to our cover story, “Fantastic Four,” which is all about comic books and their rightful place in the academy (page 6).

Just don’t get hung up on the chicken and the egg. Causality dilemmas may be great for conversation, but we’ve got an entire issue laid out for you — and a dozen or so causality answers about ready to hatch.

Which is brings us up to speed, or at least “Up to Now,” which is our snapshot of new faculty (page 12). We couldn’t feature all the new professors who joined our flock this semester, but the ones we did include shared some pretty cool stories about their dissertations, their research and their road to South Carolina. They also made us feel pretty good about the larger pool of talent.

photo by Todd & Chris Owyoung

TIMES STAFF

Speaking of talent, we also welcomed a pretty impressive freshman class this fall, not to mention a brand-new president. President Bob. Caslen, retired lieutenant general, U.S. Army, and former superintendent at West Point, delivered his first convocation as a Gamecock this August, and TIMES was right up front, taking notes. See “Fresh Faces” (page 2).

Finally, since we’re talking about history in the making, we give you “History in the Making” (page 18). The University of South Carolina boasts plenty of innovative programs, including some that have been around so long we assume they’ve been here forever. But the fact is, they haven’t, and it’s worth a look back to see how they took flight.

FALL 2019

U N IVE R S IT Y O F SO UTH C ARO LI NA ALU M N I M AGA Z I N E

In the end, everything started somewhere, both the chicken and the egg. Cocky’s on our cover, looking whimsical, charming and deeply philosophical, but don’t worry how he got there. Ponder where he’s been.

TIMES to get cracking,

Rear View Reflection

CRAIG BRANDHORST EDITOR

Hootie & the Blowfish look back at the weekend that made them famous.

GROUP DYNAMIC

When Hootie & the Blowfish announced their Group Therapy Tour earlier this year, Carolinian magazine didn’t miss a beat. But Hootie isn’t the only act on the bill. The latest issue of the University of South Carolina alumni magazine also boasts features on Bert and Richard Sorin (the father-son duo behind strength equipment manufacturer Sorinex), Columbia-based brewer Scott Burgess and Hall of Fame baseball writer Bill Madden, plus Q&As with ten South Carolina mayors — all of them proud alumni of the state’s flagship public university.

Carolinian. It’s who we are.

The University of South Carolina alumni magazine is published three times a year by the Office of Communications and Public Affairs.

ENDNOTES

Over the years, Gamecock faithful have expressed school spirit by trotting out live birds and donning homemade gamecock costumes, but the university’s first named mascot was Big Spur, an imposing 8-foot tall bird that debuted in 1978. Big Spur only ruled the roost for a short time, however, as university archivist Elizabeth West explains. “Cocky made his first appearance alongside Big Spur at the 1980 Homecoming game, and fans were not impressed by the softer, rounder mascot,” says West. “He and Big Spur were co-mascots that year, and he was at one point limited only to women’s basketball [inset], but by the following year he had won over fans through his interactions with the crowd, and he has been extremely popular ever since.”