O N earned all-WCC academic honors (Femling with a 3.76 in accounting, Bostwick with a 3.52 in biology), and Addie Webster joined as an assistant coach; Webster, a Portland native and Jesuit High grad, played pro in Austria. Tennis Sophomores Michael Hu Kwo and Alex Ferrero lead the young Pilot men, and rookies Milagros Cubelli, Katy Krauel, and Anastasia Polyakova lead the even younger women. Tennis continues its amazing world recruiting range: there are players from Brazil, Spain, Canada, China, Macedonia, Argentina, Australia, and Russia. Summer Sports Camps start June 18: see portlandpilots.com. Rise Campaign gifts to any and all athletic efforts: see rise.up.edu.
B R I E F LY Awardees Heck of a year for communication studies professor Renee Heath, who won the University’s 2011 Teacher of the Year Award and a 2012 award for excellence from Oregon Women in Higher Education. ¶ At the White House in January: Joe Womac ’00, honored as a “champion for change…doing extraordinary things in his community.” Womac runs the Fulcrum Foundation in Seattle, which has helped more than 10,000 low-income students attend Catholic schools in Washington state; 99 percent of those students went on to college. ¶ Awarded, or sentenced, to a vice-presidency of student affairs: attorney and political science professor Father Gerry Olinger, C.S.C., who has overseen legal affairs and strategic planning since his arrival on The Bluff in 2009. A brave man, Gerry; he lives in Kenna Hall. ¶ Earning a national Graves Award for teaching: music professor Patrick Murphy. Student Feats The University’s engineering students won the Oregon computer programming title, thumping, among others, students from some school in Eugene. ¶ The University’s student history journal, Northwest Passages, won its third national title from Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honor society; Passages has been first or second nationally five years in a row. Whew. ¶ Hatched by MBA students Joaquin Ortiz and Katie Smith: the Portland Burrito Project, by which 20 University students make and deliver 100 burritos on Skid Road every few months. See portland.burritopro-
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ject.org. ¶ University students mourn their late classmate Molly Hightower ’09 every semester with a work day in the community, honoring Molly’s work ethic; she was crushed in the Haiti quake while working at an orphanage. This semester’s project: total cleanup of streets around the campus; among the previous Molly Days was one of the most successful blood drives in campus history. A Second National Title for the University’s Center for Entrepreneurship, named the best in America again by the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship, which lauded the program’s innovative energy. UP’s program, which was picked over Notre Dame and Maryland, brings students of all academic disciplines into new venture creation and technology management, among other areas; the program has also been adopted at the College of St. Benedict and St. Johns University in Minnesota and St. Mary’s University in Texas. Very cool. Gifts & Grants to the University’s roaring Rise Campaign recently: $300,000 from the Collins Foundation and $250,000 from the Meyer Memorial Trust, for the reinvention of Clark Library; the renovations are so extensive it’s essentially a total reboot of the lovely old barn. The library will be closed for the 2012-2013 academic year, and will reopen with new study labs, computer labs, a production studio, a space for music and readings, and much else; for information on the project see rise.up.edu. ¶ $10,000 from the Henry Hillman Foundation for the University’s ‘black box theater’ in Mehling Hall; see how you can make Campaign gifts to jazz whatever you want here? ¶ $100,364 from the University’s own faculty and staff toward the Campaign. More than half the faculty and staff made Campaign gifts (ranging from, entertainingly, $3 to $5000). Estimable Guests Frederik Willem de Klerk, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 for his work with Nelson Mandela to kill apartheid, spoke to a packed Buckley Center in January. ¶ The 1961 Freedom Riders were here, sort of — the University (and Roosevelt High) hosted a threeday exhibit and program of photographs and stories of the men and women who attempted to integrate buses and trains in the South, starring Portland residents. ¶ Austrian graphic novelist and comic artist Anna-Maria Jung, author of the Spring 2012 15
graphic novel Xoth! Die unaussprechliche Stadt (you read that, didn’t you?) spoke on monsters and fantastic stories… ¶ Actor Kunal Nayyar ’03, of television’s The Big Bang Theory (in which he plays an astrophysicist), spoke to a packed crowd and then, hilariously, met with prospective students for hours. Now there’s an admission office coup. Faculty Grants Among the projects funded by University research stipends this year were studies of orphans in South Africa, sacred music, child welfare in Prussia, mosque controversies in America, sun exposure, medieval Spanish synagogues, the work of Jonathan Kozol, war trauma, flaviviruses, and (words we always love to type) algebraic topology. Now, Here, On Earth, Amen University provost Brother Donald Stabrowski, C.S.C., speaking on Veterans Day: “We gather to remember veterans of all our wars, and to pray for peace. We thank the millions of brave people who fought so that we could enjoy peace. We are reminded of the words of General Douglas MacArthur: “Our soldiers, above all other people, pray for peace, for he or she must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war…” So we pray for peace, and we pray for these brave men and women who in their most productive years served their country well, and especially those who did not return to their families and friends. We pray for the families they left behind: mothers and fathers who would never see their sons and daughters again; the young spouses and children who were left without sometimes even knowing these amazing souls. We ask that you never forget them, Lord, and we ask that you bestow on us the grace to build your kingdom of peace now, here, on earth. Amen.” Wow.