University of Richmond Magazine, Spring/Summer 2021 by UR Scholarship Repository

LEGACY OF REDLINING • A SPIDER FINDS NEW ROOTS • FROM BATTLEFIELDS TO VERDANT FIELDS

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ON EXHIBIT Visitors give the University Museums their purpose, so museum staff turned to new tools during the pandemic to welcome them. The staff created virtual tours to allow visitors to walk through galleries. The experience is available in 2D on a monitor or screen or in 3D with virtual reality. Visit museums.richmond.edu to see what’s on view.

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Page 2, clockwise from top-right: Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Gordon Parks, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans Page 3, clockwise from top-right: Carl Mydans, Gordon Parks, Russell Lee, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn

UR’S DIGITAL SCHOLARSHIP LAB DOES IT AGAIN Its new project, Photogrammar, provides tools for exploring a treasure trove of more than 170,000 Depression and World War II-era photographs commissioned by the federal government. The site offers location-based browsing and tools for sifting images chronologically, by photographer (including Gordon Parks and Dorothea Lange), and other ways. dsl.richmond.edu

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EDITOR’S NOTE

A note of appreciation for Richmond College a steward who can take over managing the enslaved and free workers on campus. The report says that a relieved Ryland wrote that he looked forward to “less vexation of the spirit, but more leisure, more time to read & visit with friends.” The impulse is understandable. Ryland is in a position to simply turn his back on the unpleasant “vexations” of enslavement that sometimes apparently troubled him, and he does, to his comfort. The harder course would have been confronting them and his role in them. Crutcher, with strong encouragement from many in the Spider community, has led UR in the opposite direction, prompting the institution to shine light on hard truths about its past, place them alongside its values today, and ask, “What now?” Students have also been significant leaders in this effort. It is the less comfortable path, as we’ve seen recently in the university’s wrestling with whether and how to rename two buildings on campus. The differences of opinion that vex us today are a sign that we are asking new questions of ourselves and answering with more diverse voices than ever about what it means to be a Spider. While I will miss visiting with President Crutcher, I very much look forward to bumping into Professor Crutcher. After a sabbatical, he will return to a faculty position at Richmond and, I hope, provide more opportunities for us to enjoy seeing him perform on his cello.

Matthew Dewald, Editor

Illustration by Gordon Schmidt

I’m going to miss visiting with President Crutcher when his tenure in Maryland Hall ends. One of the perks of editing the university’s magazine is that I talk with a wide variety of Spiders in just about every corner of the community, on campus and off, including the president. I felt a personal bond with him the first time I interviewed him, in 2015. It was via Skype shortly after his appointment was announced, and he was still in Germany. He grew up in Cincinnati, a city I lived in for a decade. When he described buying his first cello at a little shop on a brick street in one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, I knew exactly where he meant because I had been there myself as a teenager with a friend who was buying a double bass. I imagine that a lot of Spiders had similar experiences when they met him and his wife, Betty Neal Crutcher. The couple’s many strengths include their warmth, authenticity, and ability to make personal connections. You can see it in the way President Crutcher introduces himself to others. Rather than saying, “Hello, I’m President Crutcher,” he says, “Hello, I’m Ronald Crutcher, president of the University of Richmond.” I’ve heard him talk about this as a conscious choice that arises from his knowledge that being president is a role he fills, not who he is. I suspect that one of his most significant legacies will be the way he has led the university to reexamine itself. One of the early steps he took in his presidency was commissioning research into the university’s history. There is, for me, a very telling moment in a recent report published on former president Robert Ryland. It’s 1842, and Ryland has just hired

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S P R I N G / S U M M E R 2 0 21 DEPARTMENTS

6 INBOX Saying thank you to our 10th president Forum President Crutcher reflects on his tenure

Vol. 83, No. 3

8 NEWS Fresh thinking, smart energy, and more

President Ronald A. Crutcher Vice president, university communications John M. Barry

Portrait A gift in honor of President Crutcher — and an invitation

Editor Matthew Dewald Class notes editor Cheryl Spain

Samantha Tannich Associate director of design services Katie McBride Graphic designer/publications Gordon Schmidt Photographer

Photograph by Jamie Betts

Director of creative services

Perspective The pandemic and K–12 education Voices The Spider who led the revision of Virginia’s constitution

FEATURES

16 SPORTS A championship for men’s cross-country

18 The Crutcher years

Moment The swim/dive dynasty continues

Jamie Betts Web designer/developer Chad Devers

Associate vice president for communications and digital engagement Phillip Gravely, ’96

Staff contributors Ashley Bentley, GC’19, Catherine Amos Cribbs, ’07, Mike Domina, Joedy Felts, Paul Heltzel, Kevin Heraldo, Alicia Hubbard, Brian Ivasauskas, Pamela Lee, Joe Minick, Cynthia Price, and Cindy Smith

University of Richmond Magazine Puryear Hall 200 118 UR Drive University of Richmond, VA 23173 Email: magazine@richmond.edu Web: magazine.richmond.edu University of Richmond Magazine is produced by the Division of University Communications. The publication was launched in 1936 as The Alumni Bulletin and is currently published three times a year. Diverse views are presented and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or official policies of the university. © 2021, University of Richmond

on the cover: Photograph by Cade Martin

A look back as Ronald A. Crutcher steps down and an introduction to Richmond’s next president, Kevin F. Hallock.

24 Curbed appeal

A UR digital project has become the national go-to source for understanding the modern legacy of New Deal housing discrimination.

30 The stories within us A DNA test reshaped everything one Spider thought he knew about his roots, his family, and his connection to UR.

36 And there was a great calm Battlefields around the world are finding new purpose as parks and refuges.

40 ALUMNI Spiders are advancing careers — their own and students’ Portrait K-pop expert Crystal Anderson, W’92 44 NOTES Updates from friends old and new Back Then The football that sold for $20,000 Profiles Stories of Spider lives Postscript A closer look at Richmond’s rise in U.S. News & World Report rankings

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YOUR MAGAZINE, YOUR VOICE Let us know what you think about what you read in this issue. Email your thoughts to magazine @richmond.edu or send us a letter (our postal address is on Page 5). Please include your class year, city, state, and name you were known by as a student, if applicable. All letters to the editor may be edited for clarity or brevity and should not exceed 200 words. We also welcome your story tips at magazine @richmond.edu.

STAY IN TOUCH AND SHARE YOUR PRIDE Social media, hashtags, and sites: • @urichmond • #spiderpride • #urichmond • urnow.richmond. edu

THANK YOU, PRESIDENT CRUTCHER Editor’s note: As Ronald Crutcher’s tenure as president comes to its conclusion this summer, Spiders have been reaching out with notes of appreciation. The following are some of the messages that have been posted in reply on UR’s social media accounts. To read more about Crutcher’s tenure, see Page 18. Follow UR’s social media (@urichmond) on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and LinkedIn.

Big shoes to fill! We are grateful our son will finish UR under his stellar leadership! Thank you, President Crutcher! —Jackie Yost Limongelli via Facebook

Thank you for serving our university! I’m proud I could be a student and alumni under your tenure. —@rvaruss via Instagram

Oh this makes me so sad! He and his wife are such attributes to the university. —@kww930 via Instagram

Thank you for all of your hard work! Once a Spider, always a Spider! —Lou Graham via Facebook

We still have work to do together. I’m eternally grateful for him placing his trust in me and joining his cabinet. Thankful for his leadership model and actions! Appreciate all that he has done, is doing and will continue to do for the University of Richmond. —@Keith_McIntosh via Twitter [McIntosh is vice president and chief information officer at UR]

Dr. and Dr. Crutcher have been an incredible representation of our university. I am so proud of their leadership and to have gotten to know them. —@bocbrown via Instagram

I’m sad to see him step down from his current role as president but thrilled that he’s coming back in a year to teach! —@yogishelbel via Instagram

As a parent of a student, I’ve always appreciated Dr. Crutcher’s tone (musical pun not intended) of voice and calm manner. Congratulations on serving U. Richmond so very well. —@george.pomeroy via Instagram

A wonderful leader and a good soul. Richmond has been lucky. —Ellen Purtell via Facebook

President Crutcher has been such an important part of UR’s identity. He will be greatly missed! —@ulterinomuench via Instagram

I am in his fan club!! His presence creates security and safety. He clear[ly] leads with excellence based on the results U of R is getting through all the challenges with COVID, both last year’s exit and this year’s entrance. He is awesome and I’m sad to know he’s leaving. May blessings chase you down and all that you have poured into others come back 10 fold. —@cyndeegress via Instagram

Sad to see them move on. Kind, brilliant peripheral-thinking leader with a great heart and head. And Mrs. Crutcher will remain one of my faves. True class acts. —@kgframes via Instagram

… we will miss President and first cellist Crutcher — wishing him the best of luck on his next phase in life. —David Greeley via LinkedIn 6

Looking forward to more cello concerts … —@yvette.sally via Instagram

No actual cellos were harmed while creating this image, which riffs on our Autumn 2015 cover photo of Crutcher as he began his presidency at Richmond.

We are so sad to hear this news. We have felt so fortunate to have Dr. Crutcher and Dr. Betty [Neal] Crutcher lead and represent the university. Personally we have loved getting to know them. We wish them both all the best and thank them so much for their service to the university! —@debbie_nagpal via Instagram

He’s incredible and will be a tough act to follow. Glad he’ll return and teach. —@carolinaklms via Instagram Thank you Dr. and Mrs. Crutcher. My husband and I enjoyed talking to both of you when you were in Summit, N.J., a few years ago. —@christinecoxmurray via Instagram Some HUGE shoes to fill … —@pahuhnnj via Instagram

Such a wonderful man, leader, role model. Students will be fortunate to have him as their professor. —@lmgcook1 via Instagram

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Ronald A. Crutcher reflects on the accomplishments of the last six years as he prepares to step away this summer. When I stepped down as president of Wheaton College, I told my wife, Dr. Betty Neal Crutcher, that I did not intend to take on another presidency. There was, however, one caveat: If I could find a small institution whose faculty and staff prized their roles as mentors above all else, I would reconsider my plans. I fully expected that I would return to the performing arts, where I had begun my career. Then an executive search firm contacted me about the University of Richmond. I had always known that Richmond was a very fine institution, but its quality far exceeded my expectations. I was especially impressed with the university’s commitment to supporting close faculty, staff, and student collaboration. As our alumni community exemplifies so well, this commitment has helped prepare generations of students to contribute to and succeed in a complex world. One of the greatest pleasures of my job has been working alongside our community to advance our educational mission. I am proud of everything we have accomplished together to advance our goal to be, and

to be recognized as, one of the strongest liberal arts institutions in the nation. Together, we have advanced academic excellence, from bolstering support for faculty development to creating new living-learning communities, such as the Richmond Endeavor. We have made significant strides in recruiting and retaining diverse and highly qualified students and faculty. We have advanced the university’s reach and reputation, including by establishing a successful Office of Scholars and Fellowships. And our new Well-Being Center has put us at the forefront of higher education’s well-being movement. I am grateful to the countless alumni who have given their time, energy, and resources to advance our educational excellence. Today, U.S. News and World Report ranks us 22nd for national liberal arts colleges — our highest ranking ever in this category. We have made great progress, but there is still more work to do. When I challenged our community in my inaugural address to use our rich diversity to change the university’s culture so that everyone could thrive, I wish I had added this transforma-

tion could not be achieved in five or even 10 years. Our efforts at making Richmond more inclusive are — and will be — a continuous work in progress. We will continue to have impassioned debates about how best to advance this work, as we have this spring on our campus. Such difficult conversations are part of the evolution of becoming a truly inclusive community. I remain confident that if we press forward together and navigate our differences with patience, empathy, and intellect, we will emerge stronger than before. Our university has come a long way from the days when our focus was preparing white Baptist men for the pastorate. However imperfectly, our institution increasingly embodies the belief that diversity, equity, and inclusion are inextricably linked to academic excellence and the work of preparing our students for lives of purpose, whatever path they may choose. Thank you for making my six years as Richmond’s president some of the most fulfilling of my life. Your commitment to the university has been a constant source of pride and inspiration for me. I salute you for the many ways you have helped make UR the great institution it is today — and will be tomorrow.

FURTHER READING For more on Crutcher’s presidency and a Q&A with him, see Page 18.

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ON BEING RICHMOND’S PRESIDENT By Ronald A. Crutcher, president

Illustration by Maria Fabrizio

FORUM

A ‘fulfilling’ presidency

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ADMISSION

Illustration by Mike Domina

INNOVATION

The 2020–21 academic year was shaped in almost every way by how the university community rallied with common purpose to respond to the COVID-19 crisis.

Fresh thinking ➤ WHAT’S OLD IS NEW Mathematics professor Della Dumbaugh customized a classic teaching strategy to address virtual classroom concerns. That strategy? Oral exams, which she said “helped students improve their communication, conquer anxiety, solve problems quickly, and think creatively.” She’s started using them during in-person instruction, too.

The university has just emerged from another successful semester of on-campus, in-person instruction, despite the challenges of the COVID19 pandemic. As the campus community worked diligently to maintain safe and efficient operations, faculty and staff innovated, often in ways that will continue after the pandemic. Many of the innovations were aimed at supporting students’ mental health and well-being. For example, Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) launched a mental health chat service called a warmline, a non-urgent text-based option for UR students who want to talk to a peer. The line is staffed by CAPS peer support specialist interns from diverse backgrounds trained to provide empathetic and confidential mental health support. The chaplaincy leaned heavily on online sessions to continue its programs for various religious communities on campus, including with a Sacred Pause virtual meetup every Friday afternoon. “A lot of the grief is hidden,” said

Craig Kocher, university chaplain. “Many of us are grieving, and we may not even be aware of all the things that have been lost. If you’re 19 or 20 years old, maybe you lost the end of your senior year in high school or the opportunity to meet new friends in your first year. You may have lost a loved one to COVID, or your parents have experienced economic distress that they didn’t expect. Hopefully we can help students process those feelings in positive and productive ways.” Other innovations were curricular. SPCS education professor Bob Spires and political science professor Monti Datta led a webinar on human trafficking during which the two connected with a global network of social justice activists. “We were all able to do this from the convenience of our smart phones and computers and to have a moment of connection,” Datta said. “I may not like the pandemic, but I am grateful it has given rise to moments that have fostered fresh and new ways of thinking about ways to achieve connection and meaning.”

Record applications

The university received nearly 14,000 applications for the Class of 2025, a new high-water mark. There were 1,900 more applications than during the previous year, a 16% increase. Gil Villanueva, associate vice president and dean of admission, attributed the increase to nimble adjustments during the pandemic, Richmond’s compelling value proposition, and its ability to protect its community with in-person instruction during the fall. “I tell everyone it takes a whole campus community to attract bright, talented, and diverse students,” he said, “because what we talk about in admission, what we promote, the stories we tell are all coming from the university — and the alumni, of course.” ACCOLADE

Top-rated

Poets&Quants, a leading news source for undergraduate business education, gave the Robins School of Business its highest ranking yet in its latest listing. The Robins School rose three spots to No. 23 among all undergraduate business schools in 2021. “It is gratifying to see the hard work and dedication of our faculty and staff in providing students with a transformative business education be reflected in these rankings,” said Mickey Quiñones, dean. “Of course, it is not rankings per se that we seek, but to make a positive difference in the lives of our students.”

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IN THE NEWS

QUOTATION

“Awesome things are created from a child-like wonder.”

When media cover news and events, they come to Richmond for perspective and expertise. Here’s a sample of recent stories that put the university in the news:

Comedian HASAN MINHAJ, recently voted one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People,” during a virtual live discussion hosted by the Modlin Center in the spring. Nearly 800 Richmond students, alumni, faculty, and staff tuned in.

Can consumers sue when the power goes out? Law professor JOEL EISEN, an energy law expert, helped Bloomberg answer this question in an article about power companies’ liability. “Customers can raise complaints about their utility’s performance with their local public service commission, which in turn can order site-specific improvements or broader grid resilience efforts,” he said.

BUSINESS

Photograph by Jamie Betts

SPCS education professor KATE CASSADA and two students co-authored an article about the successes of remote learning for SmartBrief. “Perhaps the changes we are experiencing now will help us rethink best practices for teaching and learning and create better, richer educational experiences for future generations,” they wrote.

A Robins business student started UR’s first business accelerator.

Ventured, gained Julien Wadhwa, ’22, is an entrepreneur among entrepreneurs. “I saw the need to provide students with an atmosphere to do whatever they want in business,” he said. “To chase their dreams, to be as risky as possible with their business ideas. Because really, now is the time to do it.” That’s why he started Spider Ventures, UR’s first business accelerator. His goal for Spider Ventures was to create an organization that would make a tangible impact at UR and connect students to the real-world tools needed to start a business. “Our accelerator provides young entrepreneurs with the capital, connections, and resources they need to fast-track their business,” he said. “It breaks down the barriers that might otherwise prevent students from ever pursuing their business idea.”

Spider Ventures connects students to internship opportunities, career advice, professional development experiences, pitch competitions, and more. Its first 10-week program launched in February with virtual workshops featuring nationally recognized business leaders. Speakers included Google’s CFO, Microsoft’s head of machine learning, and AOL’s former CEO, to name a few. More than 50 students have already benefited from Spider Ventures’ programming, and Wadhwa hopes that number will continue to grow. “I’d encourage every student to see the connections and resources we offer. Whether you’re starting a business or furthering your career, there’s a spot for you at Spider Ventures,” he said. “Oh, and we’re hiring.”

EDUCATING ENTREPRENEURS The Robins School of Business offers innovation and entrepreneurship as a track in the management department. Many students also participate in the Entrepreneurship Club, which sponsors a popular business pitch competition annually.

Jepson School lecturer KENNETH RUSCIO spoke with The Christian Science Monitor about presidential humility and democratic leadership. Leaders with humility recognize “that power is to be deployed in service of goals larger than the self, and certainly never in service only to the self,” he said.

Economics professor TIMOTHY HAMILTON, an expert on environmental economics, authored a piece for The Conversation exploring whether carbon border taxes could slow climate change. “It can result in ‘carbon leakage,’” he wrote. “That happens when the products — with all their carbon emissions — are simply produced somewhere else to save money.” For the latest stories, go to news.richmond. edu/placements.

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SCIENCE

ACCOLADES

AWARD Chemistry professor Miles Johnson received more than $500,000 in grant support from the National Science Foundation when it awarded him the NSF Early Career Development Program Award. The grants “are rarely awarded to faculty in undergraduate science departments,” said Carol Parish, chemistry professor and associate provost. “They are very prestigious.” SUSTAINABILITY

UR’s first Luce scholar

Senior Fiona Carter-Tod became UR’s first recipient of the Luce Scholarship. The program, launched by the Henry Luce Foundation in 1974, aims to enhance the understanding of Asia among potential leaders in American society. The nationally competitive fellowship is awarded annually to 15 to 18 graduating seniors and young alumni nationwide. Carter-Tod conducted research under the mentorship of biology professor Shannon Jones on the inflammatory effects of smoke produced by burning natural materials for heat, light, and cooking in predominantly emergent nations. More than 3 billion people use biomass fuels in open fires, primarily in developing countries. Exposure to the smoke can lead to acute lower respiratory infections, pneumonia, asthma, lung cancer, and other conditions. “I’m excited to continue expanding my understanding of biomedicine, inequality, and health disparities beyond the United States,” Carter-Tod said.

Two Goldwaters

Two University of Richmond students are among this year’s 410 Goldwater scholars, which were announced in the spring. The Goldwater scholarship is the nation’s preeminent undergraduate award in science and math. Junior chemistry major Julia Vidlak plans to earn a medical degree and a doctorate in biochemistry and microbiology and study pediatric cancer treatments. Sophomore physics and mathematics double major Nicolas Ferree aspires to be an astronaut and plans to pursue a doctorate in astrophysics. Including these awards, UR has had 32 Goldwater Scholars since the program’s inception in 1986.

Spider Solar has moved UR closer to its goal of becoming carbon neutral.

Smart energy HERE COMES THE SUN The energy production of the solar array on the roof of the Weinstein Center is reported in real time via a solar dashboard available at bit.ly /URsolardashboard. The dashboard’s data has been used by students for research projects.

When UR’s newest and largest solar project went online Dec. 31, Richmond became one of only two higher education institutions in the country to match 100% of its electricity needs with a single power source. Spider Solar is a new 20-megawatt solar energy facility that replenishes the electric grid with the same amount of renewable solar energy that the campus uses to run day-to-day operations. The 47,000-panel solar array began operating on Dec. 31, 2020, and will produce 41,000 megawatt-hours of solar energy annually — equivalent to the annual electricity use of 5,000 homes — and will neutralize 19,720 metric tons of carbon annually. Located in Virginia’s Spotsylvania County, it was built and is operated by sPower, which merged with AES’ clean energy business in early 2021.

“The university pledged in 2015 to accelerate its transition to low-carbon energy while enhancing sustainable and resilient practices across our campus,” said Rob Andrejewski, director of sustainability. “With Spider Solar now online, UR’s greenhouse gas emissions will be 57% below where they were in 2009, putting us in a great position to aim for carbon neutrality.” Spider Solar is the university’s second foray into a solar power purchase agreement. In 2016, the university constructed the first solar array in Virginia under the commonwealth’s PPA pilot program, installing 749 solar panels on the roof of the Weinstein Center for Recreation. The panels cover roughly 22,000 square feet of the rooftop, and classes sometimes conduct research by using them as a living lab.

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U N I V E R S I T Y of R I C H M O N D N E W S

AN INVITATION The Pecks are among the many alumni, parents, and friends who have reached out to see how they might honor Crutcher’s presidency. The Crutchers have asked that gifts be made to the honorary scholarship in their name and to the Dialogue and Inclusion Fund, which supports UR’s efforts to foster an equitable, inclusive, and skilled learning community.

By Matthew Dewald

designed to increase access and affordability to talented students of all backgrounds. On average nationally, first-generation students come from families with less than half of the median parental income as students whose parents attended college, according to NASPA, a national association of student affairs administrators. Significant support such as the Crutcher Honorary Scholarship helps alleviate this barrier. Once on campus, UR’s first-generation students have a built-in network of support through Common Ground. The office has forged partnerships with departments across campus to connect first-gen students with mentoring, advising, and other services. It also maintains a list of current faculty and staff who share the experience of having been a first-generation undergraduate. Among the names on that list: Ronald A. Crutcher, president. Bob Peck would also be on the list if he were a UR faculty or staff member, one reason that the couple makes first-generation students a philanthropic priority. They say that increased support for first-generation students is just one part of the Crutchers’ impressive legacy at Richmond. “They’ve given so much to the university, including their longtime leadership in raising awareness of racial and social inequities and the need for concerted efforts to right past wrongs,” Bob said. “We hope this opens up the way for others who are similarly inclined and want to honor them. There’s nothing special about us in this. What’s special in this is Ron and Betty.”

BOB AND ELLEN WALSH PECK, W’91

Not long after Bob and Ellen Walsh Peck, W’91, heard the news that Ronald Crutcher had announced his retirement as Richmond’s president, they picked up the phone. They wanted to tell a friend of theirs, Terry Heilman Sylvester, B’76, about an idea they had. Why Sylvester? “No one has a warmer heart, and no one has more love of the university,” Bob said. And therefore, no one was a better partner for helping them decide how to do what they had in mind. They wanted to honor Crutcher and his wife, Betty Neal Crutcher, the university’s retiring first couple. Sylvester was not the least bit surprised that the Pecks were mulling this idea. She had previously helped them develop an endowed scholarship and provide support for URISE, a pre-first year program that aims to increase the number of students from groups

traditionally underrepresented in science and math disciplines. She also knew they see the promise of the university through the eyes of their son Reilly, ’22. “The Pecks have such humility and such sincere hearts for giving back,” said Sylvester, UR’s director of parent philanthropy. “They’ve invested because they see Richmond’s potential.” Together, they talked with the Crutchers and created the Ronald A. and Betty N. Crutcher Honorary Scholarship, an endowed scholarship that provides support to first-generation students with financial need. Richmond currently enrolls approximately 430 traditional undergraduates who are the first in their families to attend college, a number that has risen in recent years because of policies

PORTRAIT

S P I D E R F A M I LY Future first-generation students will benefit thanks to a gift that honors Richmond’s retiring first couple.

For more information about how to make a gift before his term ends Aug. 14, go to giving.richmond.edu/ crutchers.

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PERSPECTIVE BACKGROUND

As an educator at heart and in practice for more than 30 years, first as a primary school teacher for 10 years and then in higher education, I have come to realize that our students need more from our education systems, now more than ever. With COVID-19 driving learning online, the whole concept of education as we know it is in question. Our current system is lacking in its ability to give our students the opportunity to be immersed in real-life situations; in using all parts of their brains; in having fun while learning — a fun that is a self-fulfilling kind of fun; in learning from failure; and in approaching learning holistically, weaving different disciplines together to create a tapestry that is richer than each thread by itself. Before COVID-19 we were already questioning the future of education. Information was readily available online at the fingertips of students. “So why do we need to go to school,” they often asked. Today, COVID-19 has propelled us into that future without

By Rana Dajani

PEER-TO-PEER LEARNING

E D U C A T I O N With the post-pandemic era coming into view, a visiting scholar in the Jepson School looks ahead to the changes that will last in K-12 education.

Rana Dajani is a tenured professor of biology and biotechnology at The Hashemite University in Jordan. She has been at Richmond since 2019 as the Zuzana Simoniova Cmelikova Visiting Scholar in the Jepson School of Leadership Studies. In 2020, she received the Nansen Refugee Award from the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

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schools, just as students were imagining. And what have we learned? Students are still learning, but because they want to, not because they have to. This is the future of education. The future of education is all about motivation, fostering curiosity, resiliency, and the desire to learn so that students can seek out opportunities to learn what they want and need to learn. And if they can’t find those opportunities we will teach them to create and design them out of necessity. The role of the teacher becomes the guide on the side: the one to inspire, to provoke, to motivate, to coach. Such services cannot be provided by the internet. Inspiration and motivation require human interaction. However, because of COVID-19, we currently are not able to interact human to human. This requires educators to be creative ourselves and find ways to inspire students to initiate this needed interaction with who they can interact with — their families or with

those in their small social bubbles. This allows the student to foster a sense of responsibility and actively engage in their own peer-to-peer learning. Currently, as a visiting scholar at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond, I teach a course called Reimagining Success, and it is all about fostering curiosity, seeking answers, and peer-to-peer learning. Students create skits with their family members. They create a children’s book with students halfway around the world and from a different culture. Students have had to figure out how to communicate, build skills of respect, grit, perseverance, and empathy along the way. This unique “learn from home” setting allows the student to embark on new experiences and journeys of learning that we as educators would have not imagined otherwise because we were never forced to try them. It is this type of learning that brings us back to our roots. It taps into how humans evolved to learn. Humans evolved to learn through interaction with other humans. Education now and after COVID-19 must realign with this type of learning. In the end, I believe COVID-19 will make stronger and more well-rounded students if we as educators are given the room to embrace the moment and to foster these creative peer-topeer learning opportunities. Making these types of student experiences a priority will give them a taste of real life — a life with the frustrations, the epiphanies, the comradeship, and shared humanity across the globe, which today is more relevant than ever. I see a world where when our future leaders are tasked with a problem, they know how to identify and then attempt to solve that problem together. This starts with our children. We must teach them how.

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SENSORY EXPERIENCES

QUOTATION

“I told him he had to share it with everybody.” CHRISTINE CATON, a UR dining hall employee, describing giving homemade fudge to sophomore Simon Curry. Caton was quoted in a March 5 Collegian story about friendships between students and dining hall staff. RESEARCH

See a dance film

Photograph by Jamie Betts

A 2020 film “about memory and history and telling untold histories and stories” that was created and directed by two UR faculty members continued to pick up awards and film festival invitations in 2021. The 17-minute film, Entre Puerto Rico y Richmond: Women in Resistance Shall Not Be Moved, was directed by dance professor Alicia Díaz and co-created with theater professor Patricia Herrera and other collaborators. It is available on Vimeo. Filmed in a former American Tobacco Company warehouse in Richmond, the film honors Black female tobacco stemmers who worked in segregated facilities in Richmond, Puerto Rican tobacco factory workers, and anticolonial activists Dominga de La Cruz Becerril and Luisa Capetillo.

Richmond’s famous driving rats have new wheels to cruise in.

The fast and the furriest One of this year’s most exciting pieces of automotive news didn’t come out of Detroit but from a science lab in Richmond. This spring, Kelly Lambert, a professor of behavioral neuroscience, unveiled Rat Car II. It’s the newest iteration of a research tool that she and her team in the Gottwald Center for the Sciences are using to study how rats learn complex tasks, which may better inform us about conditions in humans such as anxiety and depression. “This research study found that rats housed in a complex, enriched environment (i.e., environment with interesting objects to interact with) learned the driving task, but rats housed in standard laboratory cages had problems learning the task (i.e., they failed their driving test),” Lam-

bert said. “That means the complex environment led to more behavioral flexibility and neuroplasticity.” You read that right: “driving task.” The rats learn to operate the small vehicles so they can earn a reward — a tasty Froot Loop. “It’s just fun to see a rat driving a car, but in the context of sharing that with someone or an audience or writing about it, I have an opportunity to talk about the impact of enriched environments, to talk about individual differences, to talk about sex differences, and learning the impact of training healthy brains throughout the lifespan,” Lambert said. “So it’s become a great springboard to talk about some of our laboratory research.”

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RAISING RICHMOND’S PROFILE When Lambert and her team first reported on their research involving teaching rats to drive in 2019, the findings caught the attention of more than 1,500 news outlets in 40 countries.

Hear the chimes

Wind chimes are bringing sweet sounds and greater accessibility to the sidewalks around the Robins School of Business. Facilities staff installed two — one metal and one bamboo, with different tones — this spring as aural guideposts for visually impaired students and others. “When we think about landmarks in a three-dimensional space, it’s hard when there are either too many or not enough, and this was a case of having too many,” Emily Helft, director of disability services, said of the walkways around Robins. She thought of wind chime soundscaping when she noticed the sound of hers on her deck one evening. “It starts amazing conversations,” she said. “I don’t think that most people actively overlook accessibility, but if you don’t know someone in your life who is disabled, it’s not something you always think about first.”

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UR IN RVA

AROUND CAMPUS

TAX TIME More than 30 students received training to become IRS-certified so they could help prepare tax returns at no charge for those in the Richmond community who needed assistance filing their 2020 taxes. This marked the 10th year of UR’s participation in the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program, which is done in partnership with the United Way of Greater Richmond and Petersburg. CAREERS

As electrical signals go, the ones generated by our nerve cells are pretty tepid. “As an analogy, the electrical current in each of our nerve cells is 1 billion times less than that used by your computer,” said Linda Boland, biology professor. “That’s a weak signal, and we need to amplify it to better measure and understand it.” Boland received a grant from the National Institutes of Health to help her do that. It will support the creation of a tool to amplify electrical activity in cells to make them easier to measure. Studying ion channels is important for a variety of biomedical applications and targeted pharmaceutical treatments for conditions such as epilepsy, cardiac arrhythmias, and some diseases of the kidney. Boland’s award is part of a larger NIH grant to the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. “They will be building the new tool with a team of undergraduates, and my research group, which includes UR undergraduate students, will inform the design and assist with developing research questions and prototype experiments that will test it and show the research applications,” she said.

New equity tool

In January, the university launched a new website to support and report progress on its diversity, equity, and inclusion goals. The site, equity.richmond.edu, tracks recent progress toward the goals of representation, belonging, and capability; explains Richmond’s innovative approach of using a distributed leadership model; and provides statistical information about demographic trends among students, faculty, and staff.

Illustration by Mike Domina

Louder, please

Students are finding career opportunities despite the pandemic.

Career kickstart SPIDER CONNECT Burleson and other students used Spider Connect to find their opportunities. The database, offered by Career Services, allows students and alumni to search opportunities posted by recruiting organizations. More information is available at careerservices .richmond.edu.

As offices continued in remote work mode in 2021, Spiders were forced to rethink how to pursue career opportunities through internships. Internships, after all, often lead to full-time positions upon graduation, and that held true for some UR students this spring. Trey Burleson, who majors in leadership studies and business administration with a finance concentration, landed an internship last summer with Dominion Energy. The 2021 graduate will soon join the company as an associate financial analyst. “Unfortunately, at the time the internship rolled around, it was completely virtual,” Burleson said. “Dominion sent us laptops and all the material we needed. So just getting to know people’s voices and faces has been interesting.” Senior roommates Jack Gillies and Elias Sturim saw canceled intern-

ships with AlphaSights, an information services company, turn into full-time job offers. “It was crazy because the news was all in the same email,” Gillies said. “Literally, the first paragraph said, ‘We’re sorry, but due to COVID-19, we have to cancel the 2020 summer internship program. But, congratulations, we’re happy to offer you a full-time offer.’” Senior Laurel Suchsland’s externship with KPMG her sophomore year led to an internship this past summer. That internship also turned virtual. “It takes such a weight off your shoulders the rest of the year, regardless of COVID,” said Suchsland, who majors in leadership studies and accounting. “The fact that my internship even happened despite having to adjust it, and then to get a job offer makes me very thankful.”

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Why did Virginia need a new constitution when you began work on the 1971 version? The existing constitution, dating from 1902, was tainted by a drive to enshrine white supremacy. It used such devices as the poll tax and complicated registration procedures to disenfranchise the vast majority of black voters. Its drafters accomplished their aim with grim efficiency. The 1902 constitution was also long and cumbersome. Many of its provisions belonged in the statute books. Lastly, by 1968, when the commis-

sion got underway, court decisions and national legislation required change. In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court held in 1954 that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. In 1966, the court struck down the poll tax. Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. All in all, Virginia simply could not continue with the 1902 constitution. What guided you and the commission as you developed a new constitution? First, we realized that we were working on a constitution, not writing

laws, so we deleted detail best left to the statute books. We also understood that a constitution is the charter that nurtures self-government by a free people. We sought to place Virginia’s destiny in the hands of its people. Was the adoption vote a tough fight? We brought leaders of every political persuasion on board — Democrats, Republicans, and independents. We created local campaign committees, made speakers available for meetings, and paid for advertising. My principal concern was misinformation. Some critics tried to paint the new constitution as written by people outside of

Virginia. Others claimed it would impose school busing, then a highly charged issue. Ultimately, 72% of Virginians at the polls voted yes. Did your experiences at Richmond help prepare you to lead the commission and then the referendum campaign? I firmly believe that any skills or insights that I brought to the process were nurtured by my undergraduate professors. Ralph McDanel helped me understand the place of our country’s history in measuring today’s challenges. Spencer Albright taught me to appreciate how government works and what the political process is all about. I would like

to think that they and their dedicated colleagues would see their handprints all over the revision and ratification process. Given the opportunity to lead another revision of the constitution, where would you start? I would ask a number of questions. Virginia’s constitution makes it too difficult for former felons to have their right to vote restored. A felon who has paid his or her debt to society should be restored to full citizenship. There are a number of possible questions. Partisan gerrymandering is out of tune with democratic government. The new bipartisan commission will begin to

address that problem, but will further reform be needed? We shall see. Invoking Dillon’s rule, Virginia courts strictly construe the powers of local government. Is it time to consign Dillon’s rule to the dustbin of history? Virginia is the only state that forbids the governor to run for reelection. Is it time to allow the people to decide whether the incumbent should have a second term? I am sure that any informed citizen would think of other issues. I would be guided by the admonition of George Mason that free government depends on a “frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.”

Article I Article I I Article I II

PARTNERS The commission that Howard chaired included civil rights attorney Oliver Hill, future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, and former Gov. Colgate Darden — “some of Virginia’s ablest leaders,” Howard said. “They especially wanted to further the cause of quality education for Virginia’s children.” The new constitution included a mandate providing education for every school-age child in Virginia.

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A.E. DICK HOWARD, R’54 Interview by Matthew Dewald

CC BY Image courtesy of University of Virginia Law Library

VOICES

L A W July 1 is the 50th anniversary of Virginia’s constitution. A.E. Dick Howard, R’54, led the commission that wrote it and the effort to persuade voters to adopt it.

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QUOTATION

RUNDOWN

“It feels awesome.” Women’s golfer RORY WEINFURTHER, after winning the individual championship of the Patriot League in April. With the win, the freshman earned a place in one of four preliminary NCAA championship rounds in mid-May. CROSS- COUNTRY

➤ RISING STAR Freshman Elizabeth Stockman earned Most Outstanding Rookie Performer at the A-10 women’s cross-country championship. She finished first among freshmen and eighth overall in the 5K race.

Men’s cross-country won its second Atlantic 10 championship in March. The team placed four Spiders in the top 10 of the A-10 championship meet and earned head coach Steve Taylor his fourth Atlantic 10 Coach of the Year award. As the team celebrated, Taylor praised his runners’ discipline and determination. “Since August, these men have been living a monk’s life of running, studying, running, studying,” he said. “Not one single positive COVID test by any of our cross-country runners. It’s like they’ve been a caged animal getting poked by a

stick for eight months, and today the cage door was opened, and they let it all go on the course.” The Spiders were led by freshman Stuart Terrill, who finished second overall and was named the Atlantic 10 Rookie Performer, UR’s first since Andrew Benford was the conference’s top rookie in 2006. Junior Peter Borger finished 5 seconds behind Terrill to take third place. Both were recognized with first-team All-Conference honors. After the season’s end, the sport’s coaches association named Terrill and Borger All-Academic Athletes.

Busiest calendar ever

Richmond’s student-athletes showcased their talents during the busiest spring sports schedule in the university’s history. In addition to the regular spring sports, multiple fall sports made up for lost fall seasons with shortened spring ones. Every single Spider varsity program competed during the month of March. A too-quick recap of fall-turned-spring highlights: Football climbed to No. 10 in the polls and finished the season 3-1; redshirt junior Kobie Turner was conference Co-Defensive Player of the Year. Field hockey entered the A-10 tournament as a No. 4 seed after finishing the regular season 4-2. Soccer senior midfielder T.J. Anderson landed on the A-10’s All-Academic team for her second year.

Basketball

Women’s basketball continued its rise under second-year coach Aaron Roussell, earning the No. 6 seed in the A-10 tournament after a 12-8 season. Freshman forward Addie Budnik was named Atlantic 10 Rookie of the Year and was one of 10 national finalists for Freshman of the Year by World Exposure Report. Men’s basketball finished its 14-9 season in the NIT quarterfinals. Grant Golden, Nathan Cayo, and Jacob Gilyard all announced their intention to return next season, taking advantage of an NCAA eligibility extension due to the impacts of COVID-19. Gilyard will enter next season with 358 career steals, just 27 shy of the Division I career record held by Providence’s John Linehan. Golden will start the season with a shot at becoming the Spiders’ all-time points leader. He currently sits at sixth place, 644 points behind record-holder and Spider legend Johnny Newman, R’86.

Photography by Richmond Athletics

Champion ‘monks’

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“These women were on fire.” What better words than these from Spider swimming and diving head coach Matt Barany? They sum up the Spiders’ performance as they brought back their 16th Atlantic 10 championship of the last 20 seasons. This latest championship was a no-doubter on the final day. The Spiders ended the third day of the four-day tournament with a commanding 73.5-point lead and the knowledge that 18 competitors qualified for the finals of their respective events on the final day. The team finished with the highest point total of any A-10 champion since the 2013 Spiders. “We had 39 personal-best times this week,” Barany said at tournament’s end. “They were outrageously good.” Before this year’s championship, Barany admitted that he wasn’t sure what to expect. Health and safety considerations related to the pandemic curtailed the schedule, and the team hadn’t participated in as much competition as in a typical year. “The excitement around going to a championship meet is pretty powerful,” he

said before the tournament. “But I think the idea that we’re all passionate athletes and we’re just looking to race — I think that’s probably going to shake the inner spirit more.” Multiple Spiders brought home individual hardware. Junior Maggie Purcell highlighted the individual award winners, winning gold in the 200-yard individual medley and the 200-yard breaststroke and bronze in the 400-yard individual medley. She was also part of three medal-winning relay teams.

“We’re going to hold onto these memories for a long time.” Sophomore Lauren Medlin made her mark in the freestyle races. She took first and set a school record in the 100-yard freestyle and was the lead leg of the 400-yard freestyle relay that took first. She finished third in the 50-yard freestyle and added a pair of fourthplace finishes in two other events. The A-10 named freshman Alexa Connors the meet’s Most Outstanding Rookie Performer. She finished with three silver medals and tallied points as part of the

800-yard freestyle relay and the fourthplace 200-yard freestyle relay team. She took home a silver medal in the 500 freestyle and the 1,650 freestyle while winning sixth place in the 200 freestyle race. Barany has built a legitimate dynasty at Richmond by embracing what he calls an “athletics is education” approach. Just as in the water, his teams also succeed in the classroom, having earned Scholar All-America Team designation from the College Swimming Coaches Association 10 consecutive years. Multiple Spiders on his team have earned the Academic All-American distinction, and in 2013 Mali Kobelja was the first Spider — and A-10 swimmer — to earn A-10 Scholar of the Year honors. Although championships have come in a steady stream during his tenure, he often says that each one is different. This year’s was marked by ongoing adaptability as the pandemic changed rhythms and disrupted routines. “When we look back at this time, I think a lot of people will try to block out COVID and all that went with it from their memory, but we’re going to hold onto these memories for a long time,” he said. “I’m extremely proud of these ladies. How they have performed not only at this meet, but how they’ve handled this entire year, is truly remarkable.”

NATIONAL LEADERSHIP This fall, head coach Matt Barany will begin a four-year term on the NCAA Division I Men’s and Women’s Swimming and Diving Committee.

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CHAMPS ARE HERE (AGAIN) By Matthew Dewald

A N O T H E R T O U R N A M E N T, A N O T H E R A - 1 0 T R O P H Y After a three-season drought, Spider swimming and diving returned to the top of the Atlantic 10 with a commanding performance in the 2021 championship.

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the

CRUTCHER years After six years at the helm, Ronald A. Crutcher steps down as Richmond’s president. He leaves a legacy of academic excellence, reputation-building, and institutional self-examination. BY MATTHEW DEWALD | PHOTOGRAPHY BY CADE MARTIN

s Ronald A. Crutcher wraps up his tenure as president of the University of Richmond this summer, it’s worth remembering that this second presidency of his career was never part of his plans. He had finished his first one, at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, happy to have capped off a distinguished career in higher education administration and ready to go back to traveling, playing his cello, and spending more time with his wife, Betty Neal Crutcher, their daughter, Sara, and other family and friends.

But he had left the door open, just in case the right institution came calling. It would need to be a university at the right moment in its history, where the momentum it had and the progress it sought were of just the right sort that he was uniquely equipped to lead — if that happened, then he’d consider a second presidency. Six years later, the imprint of Crutcher’s leadership shows what a fruitful match he and the university made when the board of trustees entrusted him with the presidency in 2015. Under his leadership, the university has strengthened the infrastructure that promotes learning, increased its reach and reputation, and stepped closer to becoming a thriving and inclusive community for every student. The physical changes to a campus during any president’s tenure are one manifestation of his or her priorities. 2 0 2 1 SPRING/SUMMER

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Under Crutcher’s watch, UR’s facilities have evolved to better connect the academic disciplines with one another and strengthen the university’s core academic excellence. During the past six years, Richmond completed a $30 million renovation of the Modlin Center for the Arts; completed the Queally Athletics Center to enhance academic support for all student-athletes and upgrade basketball team facilities; and began the renovation and expansion of Ryland Hall into a centralized center for the humanities. Other important changes have been programmatic. The newly established faculty hub cultivates cross-disciplinary interactions among faculty for scholarly exchange and promotes professional development for faculty at all career stages. The university has also launched or is in the process of creating new academic programs in health care studies, Africana studies, and data science, and it is unrolling a campuswide program to cultivate a network of mentors for entering students. The university has also continued to focus on access and affordability to its academic programs by recently adding a no-loan program for Richmond Public Schools graduates to the extensive suite of policies and programs that make a Richmond education available to talented students of all backgrounds. A new international education program, called EnCompass, makes study-abroad opportunities more possible and inviting to the students least likely to take advantage of them.

Since he took office, UR has risen from No. 32 to No. 22 in U.S. News & World Report’s rankings of national liberal arts institutions, for example. Crutcher has also focused significant energy on making Richmond the inclusive campus community that it aspires to be and a place where all students can thrive. The Well-Being Center, which opened in January, brought together Richmond’s physical and mental health services and made a significant investment in enhancing student wellness with dedicated spaces for learning about and practicing healthy eating and mindfulness techniques such as yoga and meditation. The university has also created new administrative structures to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion throughout campus. Through a distributed leadership model, leaders across campus have responsibility for advancing this work. Crutcher has also turned the university’s attention to new areas of its own history, commissioning research to share previously untold stories and allow the campus community to better understand the institution’s development. These efforts have revealed the location of a burying ground for enslaved people, which is now being memorialized, and resulted in the publication of reports on the lives and perspectives of Robert Ryland, who essentially built what became the University of Richmond, and Douglas Southall Freeman, an alumnus and former rector. One goal of this research has been to use the university’s past to open opportunities for teaching students how to confront and navigate difficult conversations about complex subjects. As a result, UR’s history continues to be incorporated more and more into classroom discussions, course offerings, and new-student orientation. And then there is the management of the institution during the pandemic. During Crutcher’s inaugural address in 2015, he described the power of a liberal arts education as giving students the ability “to address complex new realities and unscripted problems that will inevitably develop.” Under his leadership, the institution as a whole rose to this challenge in 2020–21, responding to the crisis with quick fiscal and physical adjustments that maintained its commitment to academic excellence and positioned it to emerge strongly from the crisis while protecting the health and safety of students, faculty, and staff. After a sabbatical, during which he plans to spend time working on another book, reading, traveling, and visiting family, Crutcher will do what so many recent Richmond presidents have done: return to campus. For the first time in decades, his primary role will be as a professor teaching undergraduates. He also plans to continue mentoring, both on campus and throughout his wide network in higher education, extending his careerlong commitment to preparing the next generation of leaders.

Crutcher has addressed a conundrum that he felt when he got to Richmond: “That I really should have known the university better than I did,” as he often put it. Throughout his presidency, Crutcher has also addressed what he often describes as a conundrum that he felt when he got to Richmond: “That I really should have known the university better than I did,” as he often put it. And, more to the point, others should, too. He established the Office of Scholars and Fellowships to encourage more Richmond students to pursue highly competitive national and international awards, which had the dual effects of advancing their futures and demonstrating UR’s academic caliber. He also created a universitywide communications division, the first time in UR’s history when it had a unit focused on advancing the university’s reach and reputation. The results of these changes show up in a variety of metrics, such as the increased numbers of UR students applying for and receiving awards such as Fulbrights, Goldwaters, and others. Recent rankings also reflect UR’s rising profile. 20 M AGA Z I N E . RI C H MO N D.E DU

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Q&A WITH PRESIDENT CRUTCHER THE PHRASE “LIVES OF PURPOSE” FROM RICHMOND’S MISSION STATEMENT HAS OFTEN SHOWN UP IN YOUR SPEECHES AND WRITINGS. WHAT IS IT ABOUT THAT PHRASE THAT RESONATES WITH YOU? Your life is more than simply a sum of its many parts — your mind, your family, your job, your outside activities, and such. I feel strongly that a focus on purpose can fulfill you in ways that money, prestige, or title cannot. For me, what really fuels me is the fact that I’m having an impact on the growth, development, and, hopefully, transformation of students’ lives. Everybody doesn’t have to have the same kind of purpose, but I think it’s helpful to think about it. YOU BECAME RICHMOND’S FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT. DO PEOPLE EVER TALK ABOUT THAT WITH YOU? DO YOU THINK MUCH ABOUT IT? I remember very clearly at my inauguration, when [UMBC president] Freeman Hrabowski was introducing me. He veered off from his prepared remarks and said to the audience, “You know, we need to just take a moment to reflect on the fact that this is an historic moment. When I was a student at Hampton” — and then he looked at my daughter, Sara, who is also a Hampton University graduate — “and Sara, when you were a student, nobody would have ever thought that the University of Richmond would have a Black president.” I mean, it’s something only Freeman could do [laughs]. It was the elephant in the room, and nobody was talking about it, but he said, “Let’s talk about this,” and it was a special moment. But, honestly, I’ve been a first many, many times throughout my career, going back to when I was a doctoral student at Yale — the first cellist of any race to receive a Doctor of Musical Arts. I’m very happy that people are proud of the fact that I’m in this position, but it’s not necessarily something I think a lot about. ARE THERE AREAS WHERE YOU WISH THE UNIVERSITY HAD MADE MORE PROGRESS DURING YOUR TENURE? One is alumni participation. We have made some progress, but not nearly as much as I would have liked. People are under the impression that because we have such a large endowment, we don’t really need their annual gifts. I always make the case that we’ve made some very important, very big commitments like the Richmond’s Promise to Virginia and the Richmond Guarantee. We want to be able to pay for those 50 years from now. Another relates to our work in diversity, equity, and inclusion. If there’s one thing that I could do over in my inauguration address, it would be in the part where I challenged the community to use the rich representational diversity that we developed under [former president] Ed Ayers’ leadership. I wish I had reminded people that the kind of cultural change I was talking about — ensuring that everyone can feel as though they belong here and that everyone can thrive — doesn’t happen in five years or even 10 years. It takes a long, long time.

Another area is related to our DEI initiatives. We’re just now at the place where we have begun helping students and everybody on campus hone the necessary skills to have uncomfortable conversations in an open and honest way. I think that’s critically important for any university in today’s climate, but particularly for this university. I wish that three years ago we could have been where we are now. WHAT CHANGES ARE YOU MOST LOOKING FORWARD TO ONCE YOUR RICHMOND PRESIDENCY ENDS? Not being heavily scheduled. In that sense, this last year has been nice because while I am still heavily scheduled, I have not had to travel for the university at all. I was traveling 60 to 65% of the time. I have started resigning from or turning down any new board affiliations. The only thing I’m going to be doing is complete my term as chair of the board of the American Council of Education, which goes through next March. I’m looking forward to having more time to read what I want to read and to write. I plan to play my cello a lot more, and I think I’m going to start singing again. I’ll also be able to spend more time with family. But make no mistake: I’ve been very pleased and proud to be in this position, and I believe we’ve accomplished a great deal. 2 0 2 1 SPRING/SUMMER

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Richmond’s

11th PRESIDENT Kevin Hallock is an economist and labor market scholar. He comes to Richmond from Cornell University, where he was dean of the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. In March, the board of trustees

announced the appointment of Kevin F. Hallock as the University of Richmond’s 11th president. The announcement described Hallock as “a distinguished scholar, a gifted teacher, and an accomplished academic and institutional administrator.” He says that his focus on well-being informs his approach to leadership. “In my time as an academic leader, I have striven to create an environment where all members of our academic community feel the same sense of belonging that I have enjoyed,” he said. “The first new position we created in my first role as dean was that of assistant dean for student experience and well-being. Our decision to incorporate the focus on well-being was critical and intentional. We must create an environment where all members of our community have the opportunity to thrive.” Hallock will join the UR community at the beginning of the 2021–22 academic year. At Cornell University, he most recently served as dean of the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business and was previously dean of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations and chair of the universitywide economics department. At Richmond, he will hold an appointment as professor of economics in the Robins School of Business and affiliated faculty appointments in the Jepson School of Leadership Studies and the philosophy, politics, economics, and law program in the School of Arts and Sciences. Hallock said he became interested in UR from the first day of the recruitment process last fall, impressed by the “strong sense of community” on campus and unmistakable care for students, exemplified by the “teacher-scholar mentality among faculty.” It was obvious to him that

everyone he met “really, really cared about the well-being of students.” University presidents tend to bring something of their disciplinary backgrounds with them to the position. Hallock is an economist and labor market scholar who was most recently dean of a business school and prior to that dean of a school focused on social sciences. He notes that economics departments at most institutions are in colleges of arts and sciences and that economists study a wide variety of subjects related to how people and organizations maximize desirable outcomes with constrained resources. Sometimes that outcome is financial profits, but it could also be reading comprehension among children in a city, reducing crime, improving alumni engagement, or advancing student outcomes. “Economists think on the margin,” Hallock said. “They want to know if something changes, what is the likely change to something — or everything — else? Thinking like an economist can actually be pretty valuable when leading an organization because there are constant decisions, and we should always do our best to make the best decisions, given the constraints we face.” He plans to use his early days as president building relationships on campus, in the community, and with alumni. “I’m going to spend a lot of time trying to get to know people and understand their different perspectives,” Hallock said. “I believe strongly in being transparent, inclusive, empathic, and fair. I really look forward to working with students, staff, faculty, alumni, and friends of the University to build on the greatness of what we already have and help move us forward to an even more remarkable future.”

Hallock will begin his term Aug. 15. He will be joined in Richmond by his wife of 30 years, Tina — the couple met when they were 4 years old and started dating as sophomores in high school — and their dogs, Mabel and Matilda.

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CURBED By Joseph Williams, R’84

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A UR digital project has become the national go-to source for understanding the modern legacy of New Deal-era housing discrimination.

t first glance, the wall-sized septych on display in Baltimore’s Peale Center gallery depicts the torso of an enormous white snake, curled and slithering across a pitchblack background, perhaps plastic. Splotches of red, green, blue, and yellow form a haphazard pattern on its uneven scales. Enlarge the photo, and a different picture emerges: Set on black industrial-grade Tyvek roofing paper, the white snake is an oversized representation of the Mississippi River as it bends and crawls past New Orleans. The randomly patterned scales are strips of the roofing paper woven like a basket between shredded, color-coded maps of Crescent City neighborhoods. The collage by artist Kim Rice then delivers its unequivocal message to the viewer: The maps are from the Home Owners’ Loan Corp., a New Deal-era government agency that produced “housing security” maps. The colors are the code used to carve up the neighborhoods of New Orleans, her former home, and the pattern is anything but random. In her septych, titled “Divide — New Orleans,” Rice has made art from maps used in “redlining,” one of the ugliest chapters of American history. In the 1930s, banks, real estate agents, and city leaders used the maps to segregate cities by race through the dream of homeownership. In the process they created templates that, over time, circumscribed the lives of Black residents in The Big Easy as well as hundreds of cities across America. Sliced, cut up, and mimicked in colorful plastic zip ties, the maps have been integral in Rice’s art, which explores white privilege and the accumulation of wealth within her own family as well as American society. “When I first read about redlining, it was an incredible ‘aha’ moment for me,” says Rice, who now calls Baltimore home. “It was as if a veil had been lifted, and I finally understood how I moved through the world and why

things were the way they were. We cannot solve problems we don’t understand.” Rice’s shows place her among a growing number of artists, researchers, community activists, and public-health policymakers who have tapped into the largest collection of digitized redlining maps in the country. And UR’s Digital Scholarship Lab assembled and digitized those maps over a decade, part of its groundbreaking work studying the insidious roots of race and inequality. Robert Nelson, director of the DSL, is the lead researcher of Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America, a research project designed to collect, preserve, digitize, and organize color-coded maps drawn in the 1930s and used to determine which neighborhoods were considered good credit risks for home loans. The DSL’s project has evolved over time from a digital archive of a race-based system intended to bolster Depression-era U.S. housing markets into a vast resource helping solve modern-day problems. By resurrecting some 200 maps created decades ago in cities from New York to Fresno, California, Mapping Inequality created an online history of urban inequality in visual form, one that has provided insights on difficult, long-standing questions: Why areas of hardcore poverty exist, how whites accumulated wealth in the U.S., and the ongoing consequences of a government policy not-so-subtly based on race. “You can look at these maps and spark a conversation about what your city looks like today and why it looks the way it looks,” Nelson says. In transforming these infamous paper maps into spatial data, explorable and downloadable on Mapping Inequality, Nelson and researchers at the DSL have created an important and widely used resource for academic research, public policy, and political discourse on issues that go beyond housing discrimination in the 20th century. 2 0 2 1 SPRING/SUMMER

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Economists have tapped into Mapping Inequality to study the wealth gap between African Americans and whites. Environmentalists use it to locate urban “hot spots” that lack trees. Bankers use it to train their loan officers on racial bias. In late March, the city of Evanston, Illinois, approved a $10 million plan to pay reparations to its African American residents, making it the first locality in the nation to offer compensation for past discriminatory practices. The basis for the payments: The city’s racist history of housing policy, much of which was based on redlining and HOLC maps, unearthed in a report by the Shorefront Collective, a Chicago-area nonprofit focused on preserving the history of Black communities around Lake Michigan.

“ YOU CAN LOOK AT THESE MAPS and spark a conversation about what your city looks like today, and why IT LOOKS THE WAY IT LOOKS.” “Shorefront referenced and used the redlining map and report from the Mapping Inequality project,” says Dino Robinson, the organization’s founder. While the site has evolved since he first visited it in 2017, he says, “I was able to download the entire written report and select a map sometime in late 2017.” A range of other organizations have also taken notice of the DSL’s work. In March, Nelson and project collaborator LaDale Winling, a history professor at Virginia Tech, delivered the inaugural lecture in a series of virtual talks about redlining at the Environmental Protection Agency, a session that drew some 12,000 registrants. A week earlier, he and Winling addressed the National Association of Chronic Disease Directors, a professional organization for public health specialists. In the past year, Nelson has spoken to everyone from the fellow historians he typically meets at conferences to real estate agents, administrators at Freddie Mac and the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, and aides to congressional representatives and senators working on racial inequality. Indeed, the project has been a key tool for public health researchers and policymakers. It has helped illuminate the roots of health disparities — including why some neighborhoods lack supermarkets and restaurants but have high obesity rates, how others became hotbeds for COVID-19 deaths and chronic diseases like asthma and other respiratory diseases, and why vast life-expectancy differences exist between census tracts in the same city. Nelson says he’s surprised by the breadth of fields that have used a project that essentially began more than a decade ago after an offhand conversation over lunch with a colleague. By putting the color-coded maps online — and allowing viewers to compare them with current city maps, along with demographic information — Nelson says Mapping Inequality offers visible evidence: The invisible hand of racism is real, it had government support, and it continues to have an impact that echoes across generations. “I’m not an environmental historian, and I’m not certainly not an environmental scientist,” Nelson says. “So to think that we would be giving a talk to the EPA that would be attended (by thousands of people), and that there’ll be a series organized around redlining — featuring environmental scientists, environmental policymakers — that was not something we anticipated.”

Nevertheless, “people are doing (important) work” with Mapping Inequality, Nelson says. “They have put it to really great use for innovative studies that we wouldn’t have imagined.” Free to anyone who can use a web browser, the Mapping Inequality website is an interactive map that’s accessible and easy to explore. Each HOLC map can be displayed over the contemporary streetscape; with one click, viewers can read a HOLC description of the corresponding neighborhood. Created as part of the New Deal, the Home Owners’ Loan Corp. had a dual purpose: Stabilize the U.S. housing market by refinancing homes that were in default, and help expand American homeownership. Backed by the federal government, the HOLC would also bring standardized rules to the home mortgage market, and the backing of the federal government

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A5 D5

D5 Neighborhood A5 in Richmond, shown today above left, was rated

HOLC map courtesy of University of Richmond/Digital Scholarship Lab “Mapping Inequalilty”; Tree Canopy Cover and Impervious Surfaces maps, courtesy Groundwork RVA “Climate Safe Neighborhoods”; photos by Katie McBride

T R EE CA NOPY COV ER

a “ﬁrst-grade”

IMPERVIO U S SU RFACES

neighborhood by HOLC in 1937. It rated D5, shown today above right, a “fourth-grade”

would help shore up confidence in banks — a bulwark against collapse. Racial segregation, however, was quickly baked into its mission. Near the close of the 1930s, the HOLC decided to codify the “residential security” of neighborhoods in all towns and cities with populations of 40,000 or more, ostensibly to identify which neighborhoods were good credit risks, a way to protect both banks and homeowners. Working with local lenders and real estate agents, the HOLC commissioned surveys of every residential area in more than 200 cities, assigning grades — creditworthiness — on a scale. Over time, color coding entered the picture: So-called “safe” credit-risk neighborhoods, ones considered most likely to repay mortgage loans, were shaded green; blue or yellow neighborhoods supposedly had a less-stellar track record of repayment. Areas with the highest perceived risk — “hazardous” neighborhoods in which banks were warned not to write any mortgages because borrowers were considered likely to default — were colored red. But risk was in the eye of the beholder. Neighborhoods with large immigrant or African American populations — or in some cases, white neighborhoods

with so much as one Black family — were automatically designated risky and shaded red on HOLC maps. The designation, called “redlining,” usually happened without evidence of higher-than-average default rates in those neighborhoods. Held just by federal agencies, the HOLC maps weren’t widely seen by the public or acknowledged by those who held them. Still, the decisions they prompted — particularly the denial of FHA mortgage insurance in redlined areas — set in motion a process that not only denied homeownership to millions of Black and immigrant families nationwide, but circumscribed the lives of millions of people of color, restricting them to certain neighborhoods, often for generations. At the same time, redlining also had a long reach: Denied money for new homes or upgrades, redlined communities were often at the back of the line when it came to public funding of schools, libraries, and police, triggering a vicious cycle. Considered substandard, those areas missed out on the economic investments that bring grocery stores, dine-in restaurants, and well-paying jobs. When civil rights organizations complained, banks, real estate agents, and city leaders justified the evaluation

or “highest-risk” neighborhood. The disparities reinforced by the HOLC maps remain visible today in two modern-day maps comparing tree cover and hard surfaces, which inﬂuence ground temperature and susceptibility to ﬂooding from heavy rains. Researchers have mapped similar correlations related to topics such as public health and economic opportunity.

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“Not Even Past: Social Vulnerability and the Legacy of Redlining,” another DSL project, compares HOLC grades to neighborhoods’ current CDC Social Vulnerabilty Index scores. The paths above connect Dallas neighborhood ratings to current VI measurements, demonstrating the long-lasting impact of racial segregation and redlining in shaping the enduring contours of marked inequality in American cities.

system, insisting it was necessary to ensure “residential security,” protecting neighborhoods from instability due to risky bank loans. But Nelson says the motive was to ensure that white neighborhoods remained white. Indeed, the descriptions written about the neighborhoods are shocking in their frankness. Assessors in the Albina area in Portland, Oregon, for example, determined it had a significant racial hazard due to “a large percent of foreign-born” residents, including “oriental families and many Russians and Finns.” A New Haven, Connecticut, neighborhood was downgraded because “this area is entirely Jewish.” And a white area in Richmond, Virginia, missed a higher rating because “their people are far too close to Negro area D2.” “There is no dog whistle in these HOLC materials,” Nelson wrote in an essay published late last year. “The racism is loud and clear.” Government-sanctioned and government-advanced redlining in mortgages and community investment persisted for decades until fair-housing laws outlawed it beginning in the 1960s. By then, experts say, the damage had been done: Decades of underinvestment fueled by racism all but embedded poverty in communities nationwide, and three out of every four redlined communities still struggle. Few of the maps were accessible, stored in boxes in the National Archives, until Nelson had lunch in 2008 with John Moeser, a senior fellow at the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement.

“John actually pitched me on doing a project on redlining in Richmond,” Nelson says. “I knew a little bit about redlining, but not that much. And I had never really looked at the documents. It sounded interesting. “The thing I liked about the project was that it potentially sparked conversations about race and wealth, inequalities and their relationship — particularly the state sponsors of racist policies. They are pretty direct about it.” In 2008, Nelson and his DSL colleagues developed a digital history project, Redlining Richmond, that made the 1937 redlining map and area descriptions for the city available online. He soon connected with other scholars — Winling at Virginia Tech and Richard Marciano, an information scientist at University of Maryland — to begin a comprehensive project for the redlining maps. Mapping Inequality officially launched in 2016 and has been updated and refined since then. One map at a time, the collection grew beyond redlining in Richmond. Over time, and with the help of more than two dozen student interns at the DSL, the team referenced hundreds of map images to digital grids and organized thousands of area descriptions as data. “It was kind of a back-burner project,” he says, noting that he and his colleagues — and a small army of student researchers — would squeeze in work on it between other research projects. “Our collaborator Richard’s students were traveling to the National Archives (in Washington)

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Map courtesy of University of Richmond/Digital Scholarship Lab “Not Even Past: Social Vulnerability and the Legacy of Redilning”

and scanning these materials, and we just kind of really plugged away at it.” As the years passed and the collection grew, “we kind of reached a critical mass of data that had been organized,” Nelson says. “We’ve moved it from the back-burner project to a front-burner project — it became and has remained one of our priorities.” Nelson says the maps help explain why some mostly minority communities in major metropolitan areas continue to struggle with seemingly intractable poverty and how decisions made in a racist system can have wide-ranging effects beyond who qualifies for a home loan. Decades later, experts say, the effects of redlining still linger in neighborhoods with failing schools, chronic health problems like asthma and depression, crime, joblessness, and environmental problems related to climate change, including air and water pollution. While Nelson says there is no simple cause-and-effect relationship between redlining, poverty, and sociological and public health effects, the close association they have with one another is impossible to ignore. “We knew that these [communities] were poor historically, and we knew that they had some relationship to wealth and racial inequalities today,” and redlining is an important factor, Nelson says. The growing magnitude of Mapping Inequality, he says, has contributed to research that has gone far beyond a simple project to preserve artifacts from an ugly but significant era in U.S. history. When he digitized his first HOLC map, “I don’t think we fully appreciated how impactful they would be beyond people interested in housing and history,” he says. After it went online in 2017, interest in the project steadily grew, but it skyrocketed in 2020 when twin tragedies catapulted social determinants of health and racial inequality to the top of the national agenda. “We have this response partly because of COVID,” which has had a disproportionate impact on poor communities of color, Nelson says. Then, he says, “George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests last summer kicked it into another level and drew a lot of attention to the issues of systemic racism. And [Mapping Inequality] is a really powerful example of that.” Almost overnight, journalists, researchers, and public health advocates began using the data. For example, a study from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition released in September found that communities with the highest rates of infections have lower life expectancies as well as higher prevalence of chronic diseases, such as diabetes and obesity, that are risk factors for poor outcomes for people who become infected with COVID-19. Behind the conclusion, however, researchers noticed a pattern: A majority of the areas most at risk were ones that the HOLC had redlined back in the 1930s. The disparities in coronavirus infections and COVID19 severity result from “widespread social and economic inequities produced by structural racism,” including redlining, study co-author Helen Meier, assistant pro-

“ I DON’T THINK WE FULLY APPRECIATED how impactful [the maps] would be.” fessor of epidemiology at the University of WisconsinMilwaukee, said in a statement. The practice “was associated with greater neighborhood prevalence of COVID-19 risk factors, such as socioeconomic disadvantage and chronic health conditions,” she said. “Health inequities will persist until we address the legacy of racism in the housing market.” While Nelson says he’s pleased that Mapping Inequality has helped shed light on disparities from wealth to health hidden in plain sight, he is surprised the project has inspired art like Rice’s study of redlining in New Orleans. “I’m blown away by it,” Nelson says. “The spatial analyses that historians, economists, social scientists, environmental scientists, health researchers, and the like have done are incredible. They reveal a lot about structures and structural racism. But they don’t lend themselves to the human dimension of this history and its legacy.” Art, on the other hand, “is better at evoking emotion and empathy about the trauma of racism and redlining,” he says. Artists from Deborah Santoro, who used the maps of Brockton, Massachusetts, to make color-coded needlepoint, to Celestia Morgan, a Birmingham artist who took photos and created small sculptures based on the data, have drawn inspiration from Mapping Inequality. Rice, the artist from New Orleans, concurs: Mapping Inequality is “critical” to her work exploring the origins and patterns of racial segregation in housing. “I use the maps in various ways,” says Rice, adding that some of her art weaves in images of “white magazine ﬂesh or money” in highly rated green areas, while other works use shadows cast when redlined areas are cut away. “Every piece of art is a statement, an understanding. If we want ‘liberty and justice for all,’ we must first understand our history.” Though she works in a physical medium, Rice says she gets the larger meaning and context behind both the HOLC maps and Nelson’s drive to document them online. To understand the present, she says, acknowledging the past is critical — even if it’s ugly and disturbing. “We cannot solve the problems of today like food insecurity, joblessness, the wealth gap, the digital divide, inequities in the public school system, the prison industrial complex, etc., if we are not addressing the policies and procedures that got us here in the first place,” she says. “I do not know if the people who see my art will go on to do anti-racist work,” Rice says. “However, I do know that for many people experiencing my art, this is the first time they have ever heard about redlining. For me this is a success.” 2 0 2 1 SPRING/SUMMER

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The stories within us Last fall, Chris Smith, ’98, took a DNA test to help him piece together his genealogy. It reshaped everything he thought he knew about his roots, his family, and his connection to UR.

By Kim Catley Photographs by Stephen Voss

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n a photo accompanying a Feb. 4, 1998, article in New England’s Valley News, Edwin M. Knights Jr. holds a palm-sized white plastic container. He prepares to insert a vial containing a sample of freeze-dried blood. A retired pathologist, Knights had recently founded Life Science Inc. and its GeneSaver division with a business partner. For less than $100, consumers could order a blood sample kit, collect a few drops in a vial, and return it to Knights. He would then freeze-dry the sample in his basement lab and return the vial in an engraved keepsake box. Knights believed everyone should preserve a sample for future genetic analysis. He argued that the sample could be used to determine the source of diseases, help genealogists conduct research, or — in the case of adoption or egg or sperm donation — allow a child to track down their biological parents and genetic history. In the article, Knights acknowledged that he and his business partner were perhaps ahead of the curve. Direct-to-consumer DNA testing kits wouldn’t hit the marketplace for another two years. They faced an uphill battle convincing people of the value and safety of collecting and preserving their genetic code. Among the people he did convince was his son, Edwin B. Knights, who provided a few drops of blood for his father’s burgeoning business. As the years passed and at-home DNA testing grew in popularity, more and more people’s genetic material eventually made its way into the growing databases where users could discover their traits and ethnicities and connect with longlost family members. That’s where Chris Smith, ’98, discovered the biological family he never knew he had — and an unexpected new connection to the University of Richmond.

Last year, Smith started researching his family history on ancestry.com. The search was partly to fill in the gaps left behind from his birth father’s early death and partly simple curiosity: Maybe there is a president or historical figure or other famous person in his family tree, he thought. It was easy enough for Smith to trace his parents and grandparents, but more distant generations proved trickier to confirm. “It gives you suggestions based on research that exists in the database,” he says. “I wasn’t sure that all of the data and records were accurate. Some people put information in, but you don’t know if that person really knows that. I thought maybe if I did my DNA, it would help me figure out the family tree. I could figure out my ethnicity and make sure I’m on the right track with who I thought was my sixth great-grandfather.” So he spit into a tube and sent the sample to a company for analysis. Based on his known family members, Smith thought the test would show he descended from people in the British Isles — mostly English, Irish, and Scottish. The results largely confirmed his suspicions, but a few details were unexpected; the test also showed Smith was 8% German and 10% Jewish. “There were no German names [in my family tree] that I was aware of,” he says. “And I wasn’t aware of any Jewish relatives.” Even more surprising, the results showed a strong, very close genetic link to a doctor in Spain he’d never heard of. Smith sent the man, named Daniel Hayes, a Facebook message. “Could we be half-brothers?” he asked.

“I thought maybe if I did my DNA, it would help me figure out the family tree. I could figure out my ethnicity and make sure I’m on the right track with who I thought was my sixth great-grandfather.”

CHRIS

Between the time Smith was born in 1977 and when he graduated high school, he lost two fathers. His father at birth, who was 66 at the time, died while Smith was still an infant. His mother remarried several years later, but his stepfather died before he graduated high school. Children from both fathers’ earlier marriages were largely grown, and some would occasionally come to stay for stretches of time, but for most of Smith’s early life, it was just he and his mother. “We became very close and still are,” Shirley West says. “We discuss everything.”

DANIEL

Hayes was born just a few weeks after Smith in Baltimore, Maryland. And like Smith, he had been researching his own family using DNA databases. Hayes’ curiosity was sparked by the birth of his first child seven years earlier. He wanted to learn if he carried any potential for transmitting genetic conditions — information that was difficult to trace since Hayes was conceived through the use of a sperm donor. Over the years, he made several attempts to track down his paternal relatives but always came up empty. “I kind of accepted that I would probably never find out because [the donor] was anonymous,” Hayes says. “And it didn’t seem that important to me because I had a dad that was very present in my life.” Hayes had decided to live with the mystery of his biologi-

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cal father until he learned that the number of people ordering at-home DNA tests had grown dramatically, and more people were finding new relatives. Last fall, he uploaded his DNA results to several websites and databases. Smith’s Facebook question arrived two weeks later. Around the same time, Smith learned the truth of his own conception when he asked his mother several times if she knew who Hayes might be. Maybe, he wondered, his father had another child from outside their marriage. Shirley West was hesitant, but she knew the time to explain had come. Smith’s dad, the man he thought was his biological father, had five children with his previous wife and then underwent a vasectomy. After West and Smith’s dad married, they used a sperm donor from Johns Hopkins University to conceive the child who became baby Chris. West says she didn’t intend to hide the story of his birth, but she never found the right moment to share it, either. When Smith was born, DNA testing was very new, and it seemed unlikely that he would ever be able to trace his biological father. Revealing the truth to her son “was very emotional,” West says. “At the same time, it was somewhat of a relief to know that he finally knew the whole story.” Smith doesn’t blame his mother for keeping the secret. In fact, he says it would have been harder to hear when he was younger, with little chance of learning more about his biological father. He says he would have spent years wondering whether he would ever meet him. However, the conversation still felt like having a rug pulled out from underneath him. “It changed my world,” he says. “It didn’t change who I am or how I grew up or who my dad was. But it changed a little bit of my identity to know that, biologically, I have a different background than I thought I had. “I was also [thinking], the person that was my dad, he died and I never knew him. Now there’s another person who is my biological father. Is he alive?” Smith had all of these questions when he reached out to Hayes, who confirmed that it was very possible the two were half-brothers. They connected and shared stories about their lives. “It was a very emotional moment,” Hayes says, “just crying and laughing all evening. For Chris, it changed his whole conception of who he was. For me, it had an impact, but it was more clarity about a mystery that I knew about.” The two also compared notes about their genetic research thus far. Just as Hayes was helping Smith unlock a mystery about his past, Smith was doing the same for Hayes. Hayes had conducted a Y-DNA search, which traces the Y chromosome that passes almost unchanged from father to son. He and his mother got chromosomal DNA tests, which provided a clearer distinction between his two genetic lines and allowed him to more easily identify maternal relatives. His mother had also contacted Johns Hopkins University but learned any paperwork about the donation had long

been destroyed. Every step had yielded no results, until Smith reached out. Working together, Smith and Hayes zeroed in on their biological father’s identity. On Ancestry, Smith looked at his DNA matches to identify people he shared with Hayes and eliminated those who matched with his mother. From there, he homed in on closely related cousins, searching for commonalities and differences. That allowed him to pinpoint his biological grandparents and follow the line to their children. At one point, Smith thought he had identified his biological father, but it turned out to be a stepson of his grandmother’s sister. That left only his true grandmother and one possible male descendant: Edwin B. Knights. “It all added up,” Smith says. “He was a doctor, and I looked him up. He went to Hopkins, and Daniel — his donation came from Hopkins. Everything fit together.” After the earlier mix-up, Smith and Hayes wanted to be certain they had identified the right person before making contact. Hayes had previously worked with a DNA angel to assist with his research, but she was sick with COVID-19 and not immediately available. Impatient, Smith sought out the assistance of Laura Leslie-Olmsted, executive director of the nonprofit DNAngels. DNAngels works with adoptees, people who were conceived through donors, and people who discover through DNA testing that their parent is not their biological parent — people, in other words, just like Smith and Hayes. It combines DNA mapping with ancestral research and interpretation — typically an expensive service — at no cost. Within hours, DNAngels confirmed what Smith and Hayes suspected: Knights is their biological father. They could easily see online that Knights is a primary care physician in Massachusetts, and his contact infor-

In April, Smith met his biological half-brother Daniel Hayes, left, in person for the first time.

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Daniel Hayes

Chris Smith, ’98

biological half-brother

Dan Knights Elizabeth Knights biological half-brother and half-sister

Ed Knights

biological father

Ed Knights’ mother biological grandmother

K. Brooke Anderson, R1916

biological great-grandfather

mation was readily available. Smith tried emailing and calling but didn’t get a response. They thought Hayes, who is a doctor of tropical medicine and epidemiology, might be able to get through by reaching out as a fellow doctor. “I managed to get through to him at the hospital at a moment when he didn’t have any patients,” Hayes says. “I introduced myself as Dr. Hayes from UCLA and said, ‘I have some questions around genealogical research.’ Then he said, ‘Oh, you mean that I might be your biological father.’”

Shortly after speaking with Hayes, Knights picked up the phone and called Smith. “I don’t know that I had any expectations,” Smith says. “But if you’re doing this [research] and invested in it, you hope that your biological family will want to connect with you, get to know you, and develop a relationship.” Knights and Smith spent more than an hour talking. Their conversation helped Smith put more pieces of his history into place. In the mid-1970s, Knights was a medical student at Johns Hopkins University. The first successful pregnancy using frozen sperm had been reported two decades earlier, and the first birth from in vitro fertilization was just a couple years away. Sperm banking was beginning to take hold as a commercial industry, and medical students at Johns Hopkins were encouraged to donate. “We did it because we thought it was the right thing to do to help people conceive who couldn’t otherwise,” Knights says. “It wasn’t that I felt like I wanted to create a lot of people like me. It was more like donating blood. “It was done in a way that we thought there would be no way to be traced. I put my initials inside a paper bag and left it.” Still, Knights told Smith he had always wondered whether he had any biological children in the world. “It wasn’t to an extent that I signed up for [consumer DNA testing service]

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23andMe,” Knights says. “I wasn’t trying to find someone. I just realized that it might be the case that there were people out there.” Knights and Smith also shared details about their families. Smith talked about his wife, who’s from Korea, and their two young children, ages 2 and 4. He also learned about Knights’ grown children. Through Ed, Chris has another half-brother, also named Dan, and a half-sister named Elizabeth, who owns and performs with a New England circus company featuring fire dancers, LED performers, stilt walkers, acrobats, and more. They also discovered an unexpected link: Knights’ grandfather — and Smith’s great-grandfather — attended the University of Richmond, and Knights had more family stories to share with Smith.

K. BROOKE

K. Brooke Anderson, R1916, was born in Goochland County, a few miles outside of Richmond, in 1892. He grew up tagging along with his father, James Anderson, a salesman for Remington and an advance agent booking shows and venues for Annie Oakley. “[Brooke] was shocked,” Knights says, “because she was the first woman he’d ever seen in short skirts — meaning they were above the ankle.” Anderson dropped out of high school and enrolled conditionally at what was then Richmond College. To pay his way, he joined a musical group that included Black and white performers — something unusual in its day — that helped sell patent medicines out of the back of a wagon. After graduating in 1916, Anderson attended graduate school at Cornell for one year before enlisting and serving for two years during World War I. He worked with the French Army Ambulance Service and was awarded the Silver Star, but the experience made him a lifelong pacifist. It makes sense, Smith says, that Anderson would attend Richmond; he was local to the area, and Richmond was a regional school at the time. The choice was less obvious for Smith, who says that the Jepson School — and the chance for slightly warmer weather — were what caught his attention. But he can’t help but wonder, was their shared decision nothing more than coincidence? Or is there something deeper at play? “The University of Richmond is not like going to University of Maryland or Penn State or some huge school,” Smith says. “And I’m sure when Brooke went there, it was smaller. Now we’re related, and I had no idea about him when I made the decision. I’m from Maryland, four hours away. It’s just an odd coincidence.” Perhaps. Looking at the progression from Anderson to the Knights to Hayes and Smith, there are multiple links that make one pause. There are several doctors — Hayes, Knights, and Knights’ father — and a clear calling to heal others. Smith is a lawyer, but his practice focuses on pharmacy law, drug distribution, and pharmaceutical supply

chain regulations — a callback to Anderson’s stint selling patent medicines. Hayes eventually left academia and epidemiology behind to focus on workshops inspired by contact improv and build an eco-village in Barcelona. There are subtle overlaps between his movement-based pursuits and Elizabeth’s work in the circus arts. One can also draw a line from Elizabeth’s artistry and Ed Knights’ side interests in acting and tap dancing to Anderson, the raconteur. “When I entered this,” Smith says, “I never thought my biological family would be as interesting as they turned out to be.” Those connections don’t even address the physical. Smith, Hayes, and Knights only have photos to go on, but Smith can see similarities in the facial features of his biological father and half-brother. Hayes also wonders which gestures and phrases are from growing up with his father and which might derive roots from the genetic level. “When I meet them — assuming that I meet them — then it will be like, ‘Oh, wow, that’s actually something that runs in the family,’” Hayes says. “The question about nurture versus nature is super interesting. I’m curious to get to see these people who carry this biological material.” Smith hopes they’ll have that chance once the pandemic is behind them. “We have to spend time with each other, I think, to really pick up on things,” he says. “The first time I meet any of them in person, I’m sure we’re going to be staring at each other, looking for mannerisms, looking for similarities. DNA does matter. It does inﬂuence how we think, who we are, how we act, how we behave, what we like and don’t like. I don’t think anyone can deny that it has some impact.” Before this genetic discovery, Smith described himself as an only child with nine siblings — his stepbrothers and stepsisters from his two fathers’ prior marriages. Now, he can add three half-siblings — Hayes, plus Knights’ two children — to the family calculus. And who knows what else might lie ahead, just a DNA test or a click on the genetic map away? “It doesn’t change my relationship with my stepsiblings and the ones I thought were half-siblings,” he says. “It doesn’t change my relationship with my mother or anything about how I view my childhood. It doesn’t change that side of the equation. It’s the other side that’s just developing and growing.” It’s the contact with Knights, though, that carries the most emotional weight. “I’ve gone through life knowing I’ll never meet my father or have a conversation with him,” Smith says. “And then one day, somebody says, ‘Your biological father is alive, and you can talk to him. You can interact with him.’ I’m not even sure I can put into words what that means.”

ME MO RY K E E P E R K. Brooke Anderson donated an extensive scrapbook to the University of Richmond. To see his notes to classmates, journal entries, news clippings, class schedule, and photos from his time as assistant manager of the football team, visit centuries. richmond.edu/ collections.

Kim Catley is a writer based in Richmond, Virginia.

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…and there was

Battlefields around the world are finding NEW PURPOSE AS PARKS AND REFUGES. 36 M AGA Z I N E . RI C H MO N D.E DU

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a great calm.

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lives lost, homes destroyed, entire communities forced to flee. Yet as time passes, places that once were sites of death and destruction can become peaceful natural refuges. One of the deadliest battles fought on U.S. soil, for example, was the Battle of Gettysburg. Tens of thousands of men were killed or wounded in three days of fighting. More than 150 years later, millions of visitors have toured Gettysburg Battlefield. Across the U.S., 25 national battlefield and military parks have been established to protect battlefield landscapes and memorialize the past. Increasingly, visitors to these sites are attracted as much by their natural beauty as their historical legacy. Our book, Collateral Values: The Natural Capital Created by Landscapes of War, describes the benefits to society when healthy natural habitats develop on former battlefields and other military landscapes such as bases and security zones. Environmental scientist Gary Machlis coined the phrase “collateral values” — a spin on the military expression “collateral damage” — to describe the largely unintended and positive consequences of protecting these lands.

and Native Americans. They also include coastal defense forts built in the first half of the 1800s along the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards. While some battlefield parks are quite large, others are small sites in urban settings. Internationally, the United Kingdom has an active program to preserve its battlefields, some centuries old. Other Western European countries have preserved World War I and World War II battlefields. For example, one of the most brutal battles of WWI was fought in Verdun, France. That trench warfare site is now 25,000 acres of regenerated forest that attracts more than a quarter-million visitors annually. It protects a biologically rich landscape, including wetlands, orchids, birds, bats, newts, frogs, toads, insects, mushrooms, and “survivor trees” that still bear scars of war. BORDERS: THE IRON CURTAIN The largest, most ambitious plan in Europe for transforming a military border centers on the Iron Curtain — a line of guard towers, walls, minefields, and fences that stretched for thousands of miles, from Norway’s border with the Soviet Union above the Arctic Circle down to the Mediterranean coastal border between Greece and Albania. Communist Russia and its allies claimed they had to build a system of military barriers to defend against the NATO alliance of Western European countries and the U.S. But keeping their own citizens in was equally as important. Hundreds died trying to escape. The collapse of the USSR in 1991 ended the Cold War and the utility of the Iron Curtain and associated military facilities. With the fall of the Berlin Wall that divided the city into halves, a reunified Germany began to develop its section of the Iron Curtain into a system of conservation areas and nature trails known as the European Green Belt initiative. One great challenge of this project was balancing the values of conserving nature while preserving the tragic historical legacy of conflict. Most efforts to build collateral values on former landscapes must grapple with this trade-off. Other militarized borders around the globe are also becoming conservation sites. For example, the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea has been strictly off-limits for people for decades, allowing it to grow into the most important, albeit unofficial, biodiversity reserve on the Korean peninsula. Similarly, forests have grown up in the extensive minefield created along the Iran-Iraq border during those nations’ war in the 1980s. These forests support Asian leopards and other rare wildlife species. There are proposals to formally protect them as nature reserves.

“A reunified Germany began to develop its section of the Iron Curtain INTO A SYSTEM

Photographs clockwise from top left: iStockphoto.com/ Exploder1, iStockphoto.com/ Janoka82, Manassas National Park

THE HORRORS OF WAR ARE ALL TOO FAMILIAR:

OF CONSERVATION AREAS AND NATURE TRAILS.” These benefits include opportunities for picnicking, hiking, and bird watching. More importantly, former military lands can support wildlife conservation, reduce water and air pollution, enhance pollination of natural and agricultural areas, and help regulate a warming climate. FROM BATTLEFIELDS TO PARKS In addition to federally protected sites, hundreds of battlefields in the U.S. are preserved by states, local governments, and nonprofits like the American Battlefield Trust. Collectively, these sites represent an important contribution to the nation’s public lands. Preserved battlefields include old fort sites, like the 33 that have been designated public lands in Oklahoma and Texas, marking wars fought between European settlers 38 M AGA Z I N E . RI C H MO N D.E DU

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HOPE AFTER TRAGEDY The ecosystems of protected areas, such as parks and preserves, provide vital benefits for humans and nature. Unfortunately, the world is in danger of losing at least one-third of its protected areas to development and other threats. Recognizing the collateral values that have developed on protected former battlefields and border zones may help reduce degradation and loss of these lands. One recent study estimates that nearly 1 million square miles — 5% of the Earth’s dry land surface — is currently designated as military training areas. These zones could be protected with relatively little investment when combined with social, cultural and political goals, such as memorializing historical events, and could become ecologically valuable places. No one should forget the brutality of the conflicts that gave rise to these landscapes. However, given the scale of threats to natural habitats around the world, conservationists cannot ignore opportunities to cultivate and preserve natural places — even those that arise from the horrors of war.

Natural beauty has reclaimed sites shaped by former conflict. Clockwise, from top left: Antietam battlefield in Maryland, the site of the bloodiest one-day batle during the Civil War; Triglav National Park in Slovenia, part of the European Green Belt, a corridor of habitats that marks the dividing line of the Cold War-era Iron Curtain; and Manassas

Lookingbill is associate professor of geography, the environment, and

Battlefield National Park in Virginia, the

biology. Smallwood is associate professor of biology and environmen-

site of two significant Civil War battles over a

tal studies. This story originally appeared on TheConversation.com.

13-month period.

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CAREERS

NOTEWORTHY

The right note

Q-camp, a professional skills development program for business students, went virtual in 2021.

Spiders reach out ➤ INSPIRATION Q-Camp became the prototype for similar camps in Richmond’s other undergraduate schools. Each year, the School of Arts and Sciences hosts A&S Next, and the Jepson School of Leadership Studies oﬀers the Jepson Edge Institute. All invite alumni participation. Contact the respective schools for more information.

The pandemic didn’t stop Robins School of Business students from learning professional skills at the 13th annual Q-camp, a professional conference designed to teach new business students how to network. Dozens of alumni are part of it each year, meeting with the students and answering their questions about the real world. This year, David Ong, R’87, led a virtual session for students titled “The Inner View to the Interview.” “It gives me the opportunity to give something back to the school which helped me to find my professional calling,” Ong said. “Students greatly benefit from the invaluable connections that they can create with alumni.” The 2021 program pivoted seamlessly to the virtual format, ensuring students had opportunities to learn more about professional development opportunities through the Robins School.

“We want students to learn and practice effective virtual skills,” said Shelley Burns, director of career programs, who relied on the vibrant Spider alumni network to participate. This year, Spiders from 1975 to 2020 tuned in. Jess Bailey, ’11, campus recruiting manager at PwC, was among those who jumped in to help. She recruited volunteers from PwC to meet with students and discuss professional development and other soft skills. “Connecting virtually is the new normal, and it’s great that students got the opportunity to experience that in a low-risk environment,” Bailey said. Students like Daria Torrenti, ’23, also participated in mock interviews and speed networking. “I am extremely grateful for these opportunities and am excited to put these skills into action in the future,” Torrenti said. —Nicole Hansen

Maybe 150 or so artists had turned down a song by Tom Paden, R’79, when he got a call from a cousin in Georgia. A friend of hers wanted to know if she could record it. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?” That friend turned out to be Olivia Newton-John, bringing Paden an unexpected star partnership in a Nashville songwriting and producing career that has given him steady work for decades. Paden originally wrote the song “Window in the Wall” as a relationship song for a Croatian Eurovision contestant about four years ago, but it was never recorded. In the summer of 2020, in response to social justice protests following the death of George Floyd, Paden tweaked some of its lines to reflect the historical moment. The song’s central theme — “It’s time for us to start/Looking for a window in the wall” — resonated with Newton-John enough that she recorded it as a duet with her daughter, Chloe Lattanzi. It peaked at No. 65 on the iTunes chart in January. “It’s not often that a song of yours gets a legend out of retirement,” he said.

Alumni relations programming snags an award The Council for Advancement and Support of Education’s District III awarded UR a 2021 award recognizing the best in advancement across the Southeast. UR received bronze in the Alumni Relations Pivot category for “For Alumni by Alumni: Pivoting in a Pandemic.” The program highlights the ways the alumni relations team flexed to meet the needs of alumni at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in more than 75 new virtual programs, 1,400 unique alumni engagements, and 40 new virtual volunteers.

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BOOKS

HIGHER ED

NEW APPOINTMENT University of Iowa appointed Amy Kristof-Brown, W’92, dean of its Tippie College of Business. Iowa’s business school ranks among the nation’s top 25 at public universities, according to U.S. News & World Report. Kristof-Brown is an expert in team dynamics, organizational fit, and management. She joined Tippie’s faculty in 1997 and has led Tippie College through the pandemic as interim dean. FIVE FEET FROM GREATNESS JENSEN SUTTA, ’99 Jensen Sutta — whose Haiti photos appeared in the Autumn 2018 issue — showcases celebrity photography in his first book, a longplanned project that came together during pandemic downtime. Subjects include Viola Davis, Taylor Swift, and Rob Lowe.

Illustration by Mike Domina

LEADERSHIP

FINDING TRUE NORTH MOLLY RETTIG, ’04 Alaska reporter Rettig explores the state’s change from a land of subsistence to a gold and oil paradise. It’s also an exploration of what we value about wild places, how we want to live, and the people who change us in unexpected ways.

Walgreens executive Ed Kaleta, ’95, is playing a major role in the national vaccination rollout.

A very busy year When much of the country began shutting down in March 2020, Ed Kaleta, ’95, had the opposite experience. He was at the beginning of the busiest year of his professional life. Kaleta, a political science and leadership studies grad, heads up federal lobbying and public policy activities for Walgreens, and he most recently led efforts to open testing sites and administer vaccinations. He talked about the experience during a spring Zoom event hosted by Sandra Peart, dean of the Jepson School of Leadership Studies. Because of their prior experience operating large-scale flu vaccine clinics, pharmacy giants Walgreens and CVS had the capacity to play a major role in COVID-19 testing and vaccination rollouts, he said. By March, when he spoke, Walgreens had administered 4.8 million COVID-19

tests and shortly after was receiving a million doses of vaccine every week. “If you peel away the political layers, what you have is a lot of folks trying to make a difference in short order,” he said. “It’s been a wild ride. This has taken on monumental proportions for all of us. It’s not just opening another drugstore. You are doing something that is so important for the entire country.” Despite the intensity of the last year and a lot of missed time with his family, Kaleta said he appreciates the opportunity to serve his neighbors and the nation. “I am fortunate to be able to utilize skills from UR and the leadership school,” he said, “and over the last 12 months to work with incredible individuals on my team and the rest of the company to respond to the pandemic.”

WORK-LIFE IMBALANCE During his talk, Kaleta called the past year “tremendously fulfilling and terribly, terribly hard.” Still, he’s grateful for the opportunity to be at the forefront of the fight to end the pandemic. “Sometimes you work your entire career for a moment in time like this,” he said.

DEFINITELY DOMINGUITA TERRY CATASÚS JENNINGS, W’71 This new chapter book series features the adventures of a determined and resourceful Cuban American girl who brings to life her abuela’s favorite books, such as Don Quijote, above, the errant knight who does good deeds. “Reads as if lifted from a superhero comic book,” one reviewer writes.

BELIEVE DARE BECOME FRED GATTY, C’16 With homespun and heartfelt wisdom, Gatty challenges the assumption that what we become in life is predetermined. The book includes firsthand accounts of people describing how they overcame obstacles of various kinds to find their purpose in life.

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PORTRAIT FOR STARTERS For the K-pop-curious, Anderson offers three recommendations of tracks to start with: “View” by SHINee: “A groovy rhythm, multiple vocals, overall catchiness.” “Can’t Stop Loving You” by Brown Eyed Soul: “Driving rhythm, blaring horns, and vocal harmonies encapsulate a 1960s soul aesthetic.” “Rosario” by Epik High (ft. CL and Zico): For its “eclectic musical choices, vocal dexterity, and flow.”

Crystal Anderson was barely exhaling after the publication of her first book when her mentor sprang an unexpected question: What’s your second book going to be about? “What second book?” Anderson replied. “That’s it. I’m a one-book person.” Well, Anderson was wrong, and her mentor was right. But who can blame her? Like hundreds of millions of fans, Anderson just couldn’t resist the power of K-pop. Anderson, who is affiliate faculty in Korean studies at George Mason University, is a scholar of East Asian culture. Her first book was about cultural and political exchanges between African Americans, Asian Americans, and Asians in recent decades. She’s also a pop culture consumer. K-pop — as the mega-industry of Korean pop music is familiarly known — came into her life via a Netflix algorithm. It introduced her to a Korean drama, and a friend of a friend happened to mention that one of its lead actors was a K-pop star. That off-

hand comment sent her down a rabbit hole from which she still hasn’t emerged. K-pop acts range from soul balladeers to rappers, their songs performed largely in Korean and exploring the teenage angst and love pangs of its artists and audiences of every age. Tightly choreographed boy and girl pop groups dominate the scene — think BTS, who have crossed over to the U.S. in recent years. The inspiration that K-pop draws from African American pop forms like R&B, funk, soul, and hip-hop suffuses the genre, from its vocals and instrumentation to its choreography and its artists’ sense of style. So when Anderson saw K-pop superstar Psy segue from his global hit "Gangnam Style” into a duet of “U Can’t Touch This” alongside American rapper MC Hammer at the 2012 American Music Awards, it made perfect sense to her. What surprised her was that no one in academic circles seemed to have noticed the cultural crossover. K-pop fans certainly had. Social media and websites were full of their chatter about various American influences from Michael Jackson to Aretha Franklin and Usher. Eventually, Anderson

couldn’t take the knowledge gap, so she did what she said she wouldn’t. She wrote her second book — the one she had been waiting for someone else to write. The result is Soul in Seoul, which examines how K-pop and Korean hip-hop draw on and expand African American pop music influences. She also provides a history of K-pop. For Americans, it might seem like the genre just dropped from the sky a few years ago with the arrival of BTS, but “BTS was 20-plus years in the making,” she said. One of the things she left out — it’s a sense she has, not a fully formed academic argument — has to do with why African American music resonates with Koreans. She believes it stems from the country’s history of colonization by regional powers, the omnipresent influence of American foreign policy, and Koreans’ experiences in America, particularly during times such as the L.A. riot in 1992. “There are a lot of similarities between the way Korean people feel and the emotional meaning you get out of a lot of R&B,” she said. Korean artists “draw on elements of Black popular culture but use them to address their own realities.”

Photo illustration (top) by Katie McBride, BTS photo CC by 4.0/Wikimedia Commons user Toomuch940912, television photo by iStockphoto.com/pxel66.

CRYSTAL ANDERSON, W’92 By Matthew Dewald

S E O U L T R A I N The global music phenomenon that is K-pop caught the eye of Crystal Anderson, W’92, an expert on Afro-Asian cultural interaction.

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QUOTATION

BOOKS

“Everyone’s technically an influencer.” KATIE SANDS, ’15, in a interview with Forbes encouraging others to align their professional collaborations with their values. Her Instagram account, @HonestlyKate, has 285,000 followers.

REFLECTIONS ON THE MAKING OF THE MODERN LAW OF THE SEA KRISTINE DALAKER, W’92 AND L'97 Dalaker, a Norwaybased expert on ocean governance issues, co-wrote the story of the development of the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas. Principal author Satyan Nandan was the ambassador of Fiji and one of the key personalities behind the agreement.

MEDIA

THE FIRST YEAR IT SLEEPS BRENDA GIBRALL, W’65 In this coming-ofage novel set in the Richmond region in the 1950s, Gibrall tells the story of two girls who defy the segregation of their day during a racially charged investigation into the mystery of a missing child.

Karen Loftus, ’06, reported on the hometown team at this year’s Super Bowl.

A very big gig Talk about good timing. When sports anchor Karen Loftus, ’06, moved to Florida’s Gulf Coast for a new reporting job in early 2020, Tampa Bay’s historically so-so professional teams started winning. Within a year, the former UR journalism major was covering the hometown team at the Super Bowl, firing questions at Tom Brady and doing live pregame and postgame coverage at the stadium. “Tampa sports have been slightly subpar, and then I happened to arrive, and they just took off,” she said. “The Lightning won the Stanley Cup, the Rays made it to the World Series, the Rowdies won the USL Eastern Conference Championship, and then the Bucs won the Super Bowl. Everyone’s calling it Champa Bay. It’s kind of cheesy, but I’m here for it.”

Tampa is the newest stop in her broadcasting career. She worked in Hagerstown, Maryland, and then Roanoke, Virginia, before making the jump to New Orleans, the nation’s 50th-largest television market, in 2016. After four years, she made the move to Tampa-St. Petersburg, the nation’s 13th-largest market, reporting for WFLA, the NBC affiliate. Her Super Bowl assignment put her on-site for a historic first — an NFL team winning a championship on its home field. “To be a part of history is unbelievable,” she said. “To see what Tampa Bay was able to do this season and to be a part of it every step of the way is the best part.”

OVERCOMING BARRIERS Despite some breakthroughs, sports reporting is still a male-dominated field, and Loftus still sometimes finds herself the only woman at major press conferences or in the locker room. “I pride myself on working harder than anyone else to be the most prepared [person] in the room,” she said.

WORKPLACE SECRETS REVEALED ALAN OPPENHEIMER, B’75 In what the author calls a “nonfiction fast read of 136 pages,” Oppenheimer offers lessons that seasoned business leaders have learned the hard way to ease the path for new professionals.

TALKING TO HERSELF MELISSA POWELL GAY, B’79 In this time-travel tale, a woman mourning her husband’s death is thrown back in time 50 years. When she arrives, she relives Christmas 1999, meets the younger version of her future husband, and must decide whether to stay in the past or return to 2049 and live without her one true love.

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We welcome your news. Send information to your class secretary or directly to the magazine at classnotes @richmond.edu. Or you may mail it to the magazine at Puryear Hall • 118 UR Drive • University of Richmond, VA 23173. Please include your class year and the name you were known by as a student, if different than today. For your children, please include birth dates rather than ages. Photographs of alumni are welcome and encouraged. Please note that the magazine does not publish news of engagements or pregnancies. Information may take up to two issues to publish. Class notes do not appear on the magazine’s website. The magazine uses undergraduate degree designations for graduates through 1992, and law, graduate, and honorary degree designations for all years. B Robins School of Business C School of Professional and Continuing Studies G Graduate School of Arts and Sciences GB Richard S. Reynolds Graduate School of Business GC Graduate School of Professional and Continuing Studies H Honorary Degree L School of Law R Richmond College W Westhampton College attd. Attended

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Class notes are available only in the print edition. To submit your news and photos, contact your class secretary or email us at classnotes@richmond.edu.

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For information about photos, see: 1. Gayle Williams, W’61, and Ebb Williams, R’61 and L’64 2. Bill Howell, B’64 3. Esther Jane Hardenbergh, W’82 4. Drew Robinson, R’82 5. Paul Duffy, R’83

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ing id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

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“I am the only one in my birth family who attended college.” —Mary DeVilbiss Barton, W’51 duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip

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Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te

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feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum.

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IN MEMORIAM

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ANNE MARIE ALBANO, W’83

Easing children’s anxiety Even before COVID-19 emerged, mental health concerns such as anxiety and depression were increasing in children ages 6 to 17, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The social isolation and drastic upheavals imposed by the pandemic have only heightened those concerns. Anne Marie Albano, W’83, understands how these children are feeling. Author of You and Your Anxious Child and founder of the Columbia University Clinic for Anxiety and Related Disorders, Albano is a psychologist whose research over the past four decades has focused on children and anxiety. During the pandemic, her expertise has been sought out by professional organizations and such high-profile media outlets as The Washington Post and The Atlantic. Her advice? “Folks need to be flexible in the way they think about things,” she says. “Schools need to be as creative as possible in making opportunities and resources available to families. Parents and children need to be flexible in how we live together and cooperate with one another in a more harmonious way. That includes recognizing when we might need space and quiet time and that kids need their own privacy, too.” Albano herself suffered anxiety as a child. She sees how social media and pressure to perform contribute to her young patients’ distress. But she is encouraged by treatment advances, particularly in cognitive behavioral therapy and the use of artificial intelligence and virtual therapy games. “We know what works to help overcome anxiety,” she says. “If we can use technology to reach more kids who are suffering, we can help them develop the skills they need to soar into adulthood in a much healthier way.” —Kristin Baird Rattini

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SUSAN SCHAFFER, W’88

‘An eternal optimist’ Reflecting on her career, Dr. Susan Schaffer’s thoughts range from sadness and tragedy to happiness and cure. “I have seen many new drugs and therapies over my 20 years,” said Schaffer, W’88. “Medical oncology is a complicated field now with immunotherapy and targeted therapies along with traditional chemo. In this highly sophisticated environment, I always try to focus on the good and positive parts of any situation.” Schaffer has been a medical oncologist at St. Mary’s Hospital in Richmond for 15 years, largely treating patients with breast cancer and brain tumors. She’s had a unique approach to medicine since she was a Westhampton student double-majoring in religion and biology. This double major was “the best blend of training” she said. She’s known for how well she handles difficult conversations with her patients and their families. “I am an eternal optimist that is a practical realist, so I balance these two things every day,” she said. “There’s always hope … and there is reality, which is you may have thought you were going to live 20 years and now you are going to live less than a year.” She has incorporated a more holistic approach in recent years because of the many patients who began asking about diet, nutrition, supplements, and complementary therapies. To find the answers, she completed a two-year fellowship in integrative medicine at the University of Arizona. When she returned, she expanded the offerings at the cancer center to include massage, yoga, meditation, and an on-site nutritionist. “It’s not just, ‘Here is your drug therapy,’ but rather, ‘How can we help, and how can we take care of your mind and body?’” she said. “I’m proud of this integrative way of practicing medicine.” —Cheyenne Varner, ’13

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delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum.

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Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum.

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IN MEMORIAM

“Can you believe our next reunion in 2022 will be our 70th? Let's plan on it!” —Lu Angell Soukup, W’52 in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit

in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum.

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ing id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum.

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commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat.

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BACK THEN

A $20,000 football? Nearly a year after the attack at Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Treasury Department launched what one senator called “the greatest single piece of ﬁnancing ever undertaken by any government in the world’s history,” a $9 billion war bonds drive. A game-used football provided UR an opportunity to do its part. Conference championship with the win. Of the two autographs on the ball, one — that of W&M’s star left tackle Marvin Bass — would have been salt in the wound when Wheeler saw it. Bass was a team captain and a favorite of his coaches. During the 1942 season, a Richmond Times-Dispatch sports reporter asked the W&M coach to describe his ideal team. The coach replied by pointing at his star tackle. “I’d like to have a squad of Basses,” he said. Wheeler’s feelings about Bass likely changed significantly in the 1943 season because in that year, he became a star for

CIVIC DUTY By Matthew Dewald

During an auction in November 1942, UR treasurer Charles Wheeler won a football on the university’s behalf for the tidy sum of $20,000. The ball had been used the day before in a game between UR and William and Mary, but its true value lay in the cause that the purchase supported. The sale of this ball and another from the same game raised $40,000 for war bonds to support the United States in the early years of World War II as the nation ramped up the production of arms, tanks, planes, and ships. Wheeler cannot have been particularly happy with this specific ball. During the game where it was used the day before, William and Mary shut out the Spiders 10-0 at City Stadium. It was the final blow in a forgettable season in which they won only one game in conference and three overall. William and Mary, meanwhile, secured its first Southern

UR. He enrolled at Richmond in Fall 1943 through a Navy program called V-12 and played for the Spiders, helping lead the team to a 6-1 season and the state championship. Bass was one of a handful of football talents that came to UR thanks to the V-12 program, which brought nearly 800 men to campus between July 1943 and the fall of 1945 to train as naval officers. Richmond was one of 131 universities involved in the effort, which trained more than 125,000 officers nationwide. The V-12 players’ participation in university athletics stirred some controversy. Bass and students like him were playing under a wartime exemption to eligibility rules that allowed them to play additional seasons. College football would likely have been suspended by schools across the country had the exemption not been in place to provide players. Still, midway through the 1943 campaign, Virginia Military Institute threatened to cancel its game against the Spiders if they fielded Bass. UR relented, sitting him, but managed to beat VMI handily anyway with a final score of 27-0. Bass didn’t last the season. The Navy transferred him in mid-October with two games to go. He served two years in a war funded in part by the proceeds of the sale of a football he signed and Wheeler bought.

POSTWAR YEARS Bass got right back into football when he came home from the war. He coached at the college and professional levels for 60 years, including as assistant coach at Richmond during the 1973 season. On the professional level, he was an assistant coach for the Buffalo Bills and the Denver Broncos. He was also part of the Atlanta Falcons front-office staff when the team went to the Super Bowl in 1999. He died in 2010.

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trud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincid-

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unt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum.

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“I replaced my 40-yearold kitchen, and it looks so good I hate to mess it up by cooking!” —Lola Varney Williams, W’54 Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincid-

’66

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illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum.

’67

IN MEMORIAM

“Speaking of the refectory, all remember the mystery meat, changed only by different sauces and gravies.” —Archie Yeatts, R’64 and L’67 Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi.

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’69

KEVIN LAMARR JONES, ’94

A dancer’s life Ask Kevin LaMarr Jones, ’94, how he feels when he is dancing, and he’ll start unrolling ideas about human conceptions of time. He recalls a theory he heard that says the mind can be in only two temporal places at once — in the present thinking about the past or in the present thinking about the future. “I think dance, especially dance from an African perspective, enables you to be in all three places,” he says. By day, Jones is a senior art director for the 300,000-plus-member Virginia Credit Union. On nights and weekends, he immerses himself in his passion project as the founder and artistic director of Claves Unidos (@clavesunidos on Instagram), a Richmond-based dance company. Its mission is “uniting the African diaspora through dance.” In normal times, he teaches weekly dance classes at Dogtown Dance Theatre and performs at galleries, festivals, and other venues. His company also offers community workshops, and he collaborates regularly with UR dance faculty and students. His dance training has been lifelong, including seven years as a dancer with the Latin Ballet of Virginia. He traces its beginnings to the Saturdays he spent at Meljo’s Restaurant, his parents’ nightclub in Freeman, Virginia, when he was growing up. “I wasn’t thinking about having a dance career then, but I knew I loved it,” he says. “I would just make up dances and explore movement on my own, which has been a plus for me as a choreographer.” His interests today range as widely as the African diaspora and its innovations — from hip-hop and jazz in the U.S. to dances from Spain, Columbia, Peru, Mexico, the Caribbean, and throughout Latin America. He frequently fuses one or more of them together. “I decided to start referring to it as reunion,” he says. “It felt like there was a shared experience in the development of these forms, one that came out of resilience and struggle but has ended up giving us a lot of beauty in the world.” —Matthew Dewald

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MATTHEW DESARNO, ’95

Special agent Spider Matthew DeSarno, ’95, was named special agent in charge of the FBI Dallas Field Office in May 2019. It was his next step in a career with an organization that he admired long before he joined it. “I always knew I wanted to be in the FBI,” DeSarno said. “I had a familiarity with it. My father was an FBI agent, and I really looked up to him.” DeSarno first applied to the bureau as a U.S. Army infantry officer stationed at Fort Hood, Texas. A hiring freeze led him to short stints in the private sector after his service obligation. In June 2002, he joined the FBI Academy. “It typically takes some semblance of a successful career in order to get into the FBI,” he said. “I tried to make myself successful, build the skills that I thought I would need, and learn how to lead and operate in a professional environment. When it was time to come into the FBI, I jumped on it.” DeSarno’s FBI work has focused on violent gang activity and counterterrorism, and he contributed to the arrest and prosecution of a high-ranking Mexican mafia member in San Diego and one of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives in Texas, among others. For the first half of 2021, he and his team have been working to identify and apprehend suspects in the Jan. 6 Capitol siege. After 19 years with the FBI, DeSarno said the “privilege of leadership” and the ability to work with “some of the most talented people against some of the most depraved” continues to motivate him. “My goal is to provide the type of leadership that I think my people deserve and, in some way, contribute to the success of the agents and analysts here in this office,” he said. “Sometimes that means removing obstacles. Sometimes that means trying new resources. Sometimes it means staying out of the way and letting them run.” —Cheryl Spain

esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum.

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dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum.

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volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipisc-

ing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum.

“Ed and I were pleased to have been selected [for the vaccine] but sure wish they had used the term ‘senior’ rather than ‘elderly.’” —Harriet Mann Tomlinson, W’66

’72

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giat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum.

’73

Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta

nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum.

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For information about photos, see: 6. Geoff McDonald, L’89 7. Patrick Roberts, R’92 8. Robb Moore, ’94 9. Heather Simpson Lallis, ’02, and Kim Hribar de Tessan, ’02 10. Pryor Green, ’06 and Bryan Defino, B’07

7 Kristen Murray Photography

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’75

duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel

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’78

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse

molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum.

“2020 really was a horrid year on so many levels. But there was joy to be found ... my taste buds remained intact, so the wine still tastes good.” —Kerry Ward, W’68

’79

Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum.

’80

IN MEMORIAM

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’81

IN MEMORIAM

praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum.

’82

“We may be hard to find at home once vaccinated. Travel plans are imminent!” —Laura Hanbury Hodges, W’69 dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincid-

’83

’84

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DANIELLE TORAIN, ’06 sis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum.

’85

IN MEMORIAM

’86

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi

enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum.

’88

IN MEMORIAM

Advocacy in Baltimore Danielle Torain, ’06, began leading the only field office of one of the world’s largest philanthropic organizations just three months before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In January 2020, she became director of the Open Society Institute–Baltimore, which focuses on criminal justice reform, education, youth development, and advocacy on addiction and health equity. Since the pandemic hit, her work has been hyperfocused to meet the specific crisis at hand. With the Rockefeller Foundation, the mayor’s office, and other partners, OSI released an equitable vaccine distribution campaign. It provides education to increase confidence in the vaccine and expand peoples’ ability to access it, targeting those disproportionately impacted by the illness, particularly low-income communities of color. OSI has also provided $400 emergency relief stipends, particularly to people less likely to have received federal relief in 2020 — “immigrant families, individuals with criminal history, young people in some cases impacted by housing and stability issues,” Torain said. OSI went one step further, connecting clients to job placement and case management services, emergency housing, and more. Torain is particularly fit for a time such as this, with a decade of award-winning experience in local government, community-based work, philanthropic spaces, and foundation and agency consulting with a passion for social justice going all the way back to her days at the Jepson School of Leadership. “I’ve seen a full range of perspectives on what it takes to build and sustain movement,” she reflected. The fit is all the more perfect because she is a Baltimore native herself. “I see it as a tremendous honor and privilege to be able to do such meaningful work from a position where you can give back to the place that’s given to you.” —Cheyenne Varner, ’13

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HENRY SIEMON, ’07

A CEO’s homecoming Henry Siemon’s first day as president and CEO of the family-owned Siemon Co. on Jan. 1 didn’t go as planned. He came into the office to record a video message for the 800-person company to kick off the new year. Shortly after, he learned a close contact had been exposed to the coronavirus, so he quickly left the factory to begin working remotely. He had been on the job for all of two hours. Then again, not much about his path to that moment was straightforward either. Although he takes over as a fifth-generation leader of the company — which designs and builds the structural cabling used in office buildings, universities, hospitals, data centers, and more — no one in his generation set out to head up the family business. “There wasn't a ‘Hey, if you'd like to join the company out of college, you're welcome to,’” he said. “That was actually discouraged. There was just this inherent expectation that you should be able to learn and grow outside of the company.” Siemon followed other pathways after graduation. He consulted in Washington, D.C., earned an MBA at MIT, and then joined Apple’s global supply team. After a few years, he started to realize what he could bring back to the family company. “I remember talking to one of my uncles who’s our VP of operations about the challenges that he was dealing with at the Siemon Co., and this lightbulb moment happened,” he said. “I realized that they were experiencing the same challenges that we were working on and solving at Apple.” Just as the Siemon name has been a constant in the company’s 120-year history, so too has it always kept primary manufacturing in Connecticut, even as Siemon has expanded into 45 countries. “We’re proud of our ability to keep manufacturing in the U.S. even as we’ve expanded our global footprint and capabilities,” he said. “Ultimately, our mission is to help connect the world.” —Matthew Dewald

’89

’90

IN MEMORIAM

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’91

IN MEMORIAM

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’92

’94

’95

’97

tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum.

’98

’99

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consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum.

’00

’01

feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum.

’02

’04

dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum.

’05

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For information about photos, see: 11. Carson Raymond, ’08 12. Mark White, ’08 13. Christopher Towery, L’11 14. Chris Musalo, ’12, and Jennifer Tedrick, ’13 15. Holly Cerasano, ’13

Rachel Galluzzo Photography

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AMBER NICHOLS, ’14 illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum.

’06 Fast break Amber Nichols moves quickly. As a four-year player on the Spider women’s basketball team, Nichols, ’14, was known as a speedy guard off the bench. Since graduation, she’s kept up a remarkably fast pace in the professional sports world. In January of 2021, Nichols was promoted to general manager of the Capital City Go-Go, the Washington Wizards’ NBA G League affiliate, becoming the second female general manager in league history. The G League is the official minor league organization for professional men’s basketball, previously known as the NBA Developmental League. As Go-Go general manager, Nichols is responsible for overseeing all aspects of the team at the relatively young age of 28. Nichols started with an entry-level ticket sales job with the Sacramento Kings in 2015, just to get a foot in the NBA door. From there she moved through a series of internships and positions around the league. She was promoted to director of basketball operations for the Go-Go in 2019 and appointed GM this year. If that seems like an awfully quick rise to the top, that’s because it really, really is. “It is definitely quicker than what I had imagined or anticipated, but I’m very grateful for the opportunity,” Nichols said. “And it’s something I don’t take lightly, for sure.” Nichols’ first season as GM was a wild one, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. Along with the rest of the league, she spent 53 days in the NBA’s famous “bubble” in Orlando, Florida. “Going through that experience — mentally, physically, and emotionally — with that group of people actually made it special,” Nichols said. “It was a time to be, like, fully immersed in basketball.” —Glenn McDonald

’07

’08

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ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum.

’09

“Like the good B-schooler I am, I saw an opening in the market and seized the opportunity.” —Shelley Evans, ’14 Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum.

’11

’12

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ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum.

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et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum.

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iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip

How’ve you been? Spiders’ notes have been in the magazine since 1936. Be part of the tradition. Random Spider encounters • Births and deaths • New degrees and jobs — retirements, too • Fabulous vacations • Weekend getaways • Classmate reunions • Community service • Weddings and moves • Job losses, setbacks, and fresh starts of all kinds • Revelations, revelry, and reflections • Good reads • Photos, photos, and more photos • Simple notes to say hello

CLASSNOTES@RICHMOND.EDU

70 M AGA Z I N E . RI C H MO N D.E DU

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U N I V E R S I T Y of R I C H M O N D N O T E S

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IN MEMORIAM

2 0 2 1 SPRING/SUMMER

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You may have noticed that Richmond’s U.S. News & World Report ranking has risen significantly in recent years. Colleges and universities generally have a love-hate relationship with the annual rankings. They’re happy to boast a good ranking but are skeptical about the overall project. With that caveat aside, why has Richmond seen such dramatic improvement?

No. 22 No. 23 No. 23 No. 25

By Matthew Dewald

RANKINGS

POSTSCRIPT

Rapid rise

No. 27

No. 32 2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

2021

These are three of the biggest influences:

PERSISTENCE FACTORS

Richmond has invested in innovative programs in recent years that increase the likelihood that students who enroll will stay and graduate. The effectiveness of these programs is increasingly showing up in rising retention rates, graduation rates, and other measures. USNWR uses many of these same measures in its calculations.

FACULTY EXCELLENCE

Close student-faculty relationships and mentoring are hallmarks of a Richmond education. Richmond has continued to invest in faculty excellence with competitive salaries and a long-standing commitment to small classes.

REPUTATION GAINS

Each year, USNWR asks presidents, chief academic officers, and chief enrollment officers at national liberal arts universities to rank their peers. Shifts in long-held impressions are notoriously rare, and even incremental change is significant. UR has seen such change, improving its average peer assessment score by 5% since 2016.

PUT ANOTHER WAY: FUNDAMENTALS. While USNWR’s endless methodological tinkering often bumps schools around a little, Richmond’s steady rise has come from investing in programs that benefit students and the faculty who teach them, and from growing recognition of Richmond’s excellence by its peers.

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This Spider is a biologist.

AND ALSO A DANCER. At the University of Richmond, Spiders combine their many

interests to create real-world results. After all, life is complex — and we enjoy blurring the lines. When we fold artistic expression into our scientific endeavors, we break from the crowd and show the world that there is true art to science.

It starts within us. See how Richmond brings it together. RICHMOND.EDU

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Non-Profit Org. U.S. Postage Paid University of Richmond

410 Westhampton Way University of Richmond, VA 23173

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University of Richmond Magazine, Spring/Summer 2021

Articles inside

Curbed appeal