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RU Academics
Reinhardt Students Benefit from National Innovation
“It takes a village” to serve hundreds of independent, curious college students and their varied interests, with a vast, diversified curriculum. To expand its provisions and serve growing student populations, Reinhardt extends its “village” with innovative partners like RIZE and Acadeum. These two consortiums unite like-minded institutions and provide students a broad range of offerings and new educational opportunities. Participation in these two highly innovative relationships enables Reinhardt to introduce courses from partner institutions that supplement current campus offerings – not replace them – and maximize efficiencies for faculty, classroom space and technology.
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RIZE RIZE courses are taught by the “best of the best” faculty at top-tier universities and informed by input from Fortune-500 firms. Within these partnerships, institutions share courses, degree majors and minors, concentrations, and specialized certificates. Taken online, Reinhardt students earn their degrees with an added opportunity to add RIZE courses, explore topics of interest and fulfill requirements from over 95 schools.
It all began in 2017, when 19 independent colleges and universities united to create the Lower Cost Models for Independent Colleges (LCMC) Consortium. These institutional presidents knew that colleges and universities benefit from collaboration. In response to pressures like soaring operational expenses, shrinking government support and higher attendance costs facing higher education, they formed a consortium.
The goal of LCMC is to create innovative, collaborative solutions to expand educational opportunities for students while streamlining and lowering institutional costs. The first two programs grew out of pilot initiatives – a Certification in Financial Planning, and an Applied Computer Science curriculum – developed in partnership with Google.
In 2019, RIZE Education became the operational arm of LCMC at Adrian College in Michigan, expanding to 21 programs. Reinhardt students now benefit greatly from RIZE, as RIZE continues to grow. In Spring 2021, Reinhardt’s McCamish School of Business piloted three courses from different RIZE programs in areas experiencing significant career growth: Introduction to Esports Management, Social Media Marketing, and Forecasting & Logistics.
One Reinhardt student who participated in RIZE courses exclaimed, “This is one of the most positive experiences I have had with any online program,” and another saying, “The platform allows me to take more classes, from professors and with students all over the world. It is a great experience. RIZE courses compliment my courses on campus and expose me to topics in new fields, while still earning my degree from Reinhardt.”
New courses add to the Summer and Fall 2021 schedules including Email Marketing, Introduction to Games and a Computer Science Minor in Reinhardt’s School of Mathematics and Sciences.
RIZE continues to grow educational opportunities for students with more than 95 institutional partners – and Reinhardt shares in its growth and success as a partner institution, where all students thrive.
Acadeum Like RIZE, Acadeum forges collaborative strategies for higher education with a
course-sharing platform. It helps colleges and universities establish course-sharing partnerships with like-minded institutions to enhance student success, support academic strategies and boost degree completion.
Reinhardt is part of the Acadeum network, affording student opportunities as they complete their degrees. Founded in 2016, the organization brings online courses to colleges and universities so they can save on associated start-up costs, and help start new online courses and programs – availing more options for students toward degree completion. Popular foundational courses cover general education subjects like psychology and algebra.
Acadeum has more than 150 consortia, serving thousands of students across 250 schools. The network – this “village” – is vast and significant in higher education today, and Reinhardt is a part of it.
Jennifer Prine, Director of Admissions for Reinhardt, shares, “Our partnerships and involvement in these networks are significant for Reinhardt students. They present innovative opportunities to enhance and support a student’s Reinhardt experience by providing exposure to new topics, interaction with classroom peers from other states – and countries, and experience with different schools. They exemplify and further the spirit of collaboration, especially as we seek to expose our students – every day, in every way – to new ways of thinking and doing.”
RIZE and Acadeum play significant roles in the Reinhardt “village,” extending opportunities and innovative approaches to higher education, with significant benefits for students, faculty and the entire Reinhardt community. Reinhardt University’s Cauble School found sources of innovation when virtual learning became the “new normal,” with 6 feet of space and face masks separating us all. Faculty – who assumed part-time positions in emergency rooms and intensive care units – alternated in-person classes and found professional opportunities for students in the field.
“The pandemic made everything even more crazy than nursing school already is,” said Brooke Breindl ’22. “Since everyone was trying to prevent the spread, our class meetings and clinicals changed in a second to keep everyone safe. It was definitely stressful for us, just like this pandemic has been for everyone.”
The added stressors thrust Breindl beyond her already-expert care, as she faced unprecedented times.
“The virus definitely added pressure going into the healthcare field because each worker carries a lot of responsibility, but it also motivated me to do my absolute best to care for others who were suffering and make them feel comfortable.”
While faculty assumed critical roles in hospitals, student nurses were experiencing “real life” in their chosen field. Student nurses gained remarkable exposure to their profession as they administered COVID-19 vaccinations and spent time at Reinhardt’s Student Health Center. During spring break, they helped administer approximately
Nursing Students Join the Frontline
“Hands-on learning” developed a whole new meaning as student nurses entered Reinhardt’s Cauble School of Nursing & Health Services amid the pandemic.
220 vaccines with the Pickens County Health Department. Kordell Palmer ’22 was one of these student volunteers.
Palmer described his student experience as a blessing. Through his church, Palmer was taught to find the positive in every situation – and his ability to do so often had an uplifting impact on his patients.
“Getting to make a nurse-topatient connection is very different right now,” said Palmer. “I got to help one patient figure out FaceTime on his phone, and as soon as we got his daughter on the call, the patient lit up like a light bulb! The patient’s mood was changed for the rest of my shift. The patient told me ‘thank you’ at least 20 times before I left for the day. Something so simple as showing him what app on his phone to use made the man’s day immensely better.”
From connecting patients with their families to finding deep inner strength, they were able to thrive as positive forces on health-care’s front line. Through the intense challenges and unknown variables, Reinhardt’s student nurses continued to lean into their experience to gain as much knowledge and skill as possible, pursuing the real work of health-care professionals.
The Future of Science
With National Science Foundation grants, Reinhardt plays a critical role in STEM education
To solve the problems of today and overcome the challenges of tomorrow, innovative scientists, mathematicians and engineers serve a critical global need. Ready to address these trials stands Reinhardt, with two National Science Foundation (NSF) grant programs providing student scholarships and programing with an applied, interdisciplinary approach to education, known as STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. The number of STEM educators and workforce professionals in many states, including Georgia, face staggering deficits, and education is key to overcoming these shortfalls.
With the help of a nearly $1 million grant from the NSF, Reinhardt University plays a critical role in STEM education. Over five years, Reinhardt is expected to receive $930,000 to fund student scholarships, teacher stipends, research and a STEM summer camp. The second NSF grant of nearly $650,000 will focus on preparing undergraduate students majoring in biology for graduate school or to contribute directly to the STEM workforce.
“I am excited about Reinhardt’s two NSF-sponsored grants to tackle these major concerns - the ‘Noyce STEM Teacher Education and Development’ Program and ‘S-STEM Supporting Pathways to Success for Biology Scholars’. The Noyce STEM Teacher grant innovatively prepares 14 highly qualified educators, and the S-STEM Pathways grant supports the preparation of 14 scientists, all for the STEM workforce,” shared Dr. Irma Santoro, Interim Dean of the School of Mathematics and Sciences.
The Noyce Stem Teacher program supports Reinhardt students and Cherokee and Pickens County School District teachers. It also opens scholarship opportunities for students with an associate degree in a related field from Chattahoochee Technical College who enroll at Reinhardt for their bachelor’s degree. The program is designed to develop high school math and science teachers and help student scholars gain teaching experience working side-by-side with certified teachers and professors.
Chas Pierce graduated from Reinhardt in 2018 having majored in general biology and secondary biology education. “It was obvious that the program’s main objective was to develop teachers who would inspire their students,” said Pierce. “Reinhardt invested in each student and challenged them to become the best educators they could be.”
Future mathematics and science educators like Pierce can now study at Reinhardt with financial support. With high demand for STEM educators, Reinhardt supports students to complete their degrees. Noyce scholars receive funding up to $20,000 per year during their last two years at Reinhardt. Now with appreciation and experience as an educator, Pierce shares, “Reinhardt recognized the best in me. Professors helped me to identify my strengths and find my own identity as an educator.”
Scholarships are distributed to eligible Reinhardt juniors and seniors who major in STEM biology or math and secondary education. Sharing their knowledge and experience, graduates then teach for at least two years at a Title I public school in Cherokee, Pickens or surrounding counties.
The S-STEM Pathways program supports high achieving biology majors at Reinhardt with demonstrated financial need. It provides 4-year academic scholarships and programing to support student retention in the sciences with ongoing research experiences throughout their four years at Reinhardt, informing their identity as scientists.
Salvador Castillo, a biology major planning to graduate in 2023, shares, “As an S-STEM scholar, I’ve learned so much from Dr. Felix and Professor Ray. I’m particularly excited about our research with salamanders and their microbiomes. I wouldn’t have been able to do without the S-STEM program.”
DR. IRMA SANTORO, PH.D.
Interim Dean of the School of Mathematics and Sciences
REINHARDT LEGACY SERIES
On the following three pages meet James T. Jordan, Mary Jane Reinhardt Sharp and Dorothy Rogers Tilly, important figures in the history of Reinhardt University.
James T. “Jay” Jordan: Reinhardt’s First African-American student
Many young people entering college for the first time are anxious. In 1966, though, Jay Jordan had more reason than most to be worried about becoming a college freshman –he was about to be an African-American student at a college that had never had a black student. Amidst the civil rights movement, with growing pressure on Reinhardt from the federal government, Reinhardt’s president, Rowland Burgess, approached the principal of the black school in nearby Canton. Who would be a good student to come to Reinhardt? Principal Bell recommended Jay Jordan.
Jordan grew up in Canton with a father who worked as a cotton mill employee and Baptist minister, and a mother who did domestic work. His final two years of high school he attended a private black school in North Carolina, Palmer Memorial Institute, because his parents worried that he could not get the preparation locally he needed to go to college. Jay initially applied solely to historically black colleges, yet after talking to Principal Bell, his parents and President Burgess, Jay enrolled at Reinhardt.
A half century later Jay remembered vividly what happened when he came to campus to take classes. “The first person that I met was Mima Carruthers.” At the snack bar on campus, where many students hung out between classes, “Mima came up to me, and she says, ‘Hi,’ and I said, ‘Hi.’ She said,
‘Do you mind if I join you?’ and I said, ‘No.’” Jay and Mima began talking and were soon laughing together. A crack formed in the wall of social segregation.
Jordan started playing flag football and basketball. He joined other campus organizations that invited him, including a literary society and a fraternity. Jay lived at home, but after he became friends with several people living in the dormitories, “we’d talk, I’d come over at night, and we’d study together.” Jay discovered common interests in music: “They would tell me, ‘I got this new record, so and so, this new album.’ We’d sit over there and play music and stuff all night and study.”
Jay Jordan has happy memories of his time at Reinhardt. We should never forget, though, that what he did was no small thing. “To tell you the truth,” Jordan later recalled, “I was scared.” Yes, and also brave. And persistent. Being first is rarely easy. Jordan persevered, got the education he came for and changed Reinhardt in the process.
Jay Jordan’s willingness to enroll at an all-white campus was a pivotal moment in the history of Reinhardt University. He reshaped Reinhardt, its historical trajectory and the student experience. A racially segregated college became integrated, and Jordan opened the door to more black students in subsequent years. White students did not just have black classmates; they sang in interracial choirs, read editorials by black students in the campus newspaper, got in trouble together and ate together. These activities reshaped campus life and the relationships of the student body, with lasting effects. Reinhardt became a school that increasingly valued racial diversity and the benefits of learning with students from a wide variety of backgrounds.
After he graduated from college, Jordan enlisted in the United States Navy, became a naval officer and commanded ships in a career spent on the oceans of the world. Reinhardt University is grateful to have been part of his life path and for the huge contribution Jordan made by turning Reinhardt into a better place because he enrolled.
Drawn and adapted from the award-winning article “Black Student Experiences in the Racial Integration of Reinhardt College, 1966-1972,” co-authored by Reinhardt University professor Kenneth H. Wheeler and several of his students in the Georgia Historical Quarterly (2019).
REINHARDT LEGACY SERIES
Sometimes in life things are not as they first appear. We have only one account of the meeting that led to the founding of Reinhardt University. It comes from Ramsey C. Sharp, who explained that as a boy in 1883, his uncle, Augustus Reinhardt, came to Waleska from Atlanta, as an attorney and real estate investor. Ramsey’s father, John J. A. Sharp, wanted to build a better school than currently existed. Augustus Reinhardt was interested, and Ramsey “listened with eagerness while they discussed and planned...they talked until late in the night and planned to go to work at once.” John Sharp began construction, while Augustus Reinhardt approached the Methodist conference about supplying a teacher, whose salary he would guarantee.
Ramsey Sharp’s tale can give the impression that it was just John Sharp and Augustus Reinhardt sitting at the table, oil lamps being lit as night descended, with young Ramsey listening in. And for a long time, they were the only people recognized as founders. But what if the “they” included more people around the table that night? Augustus Reinhardt’s sister Mary Jane’s marriage to John Sharp in 1868 connected the two men, as brothers-in-law. Mary Jane was two years older than Augustus. They grew up together with their parents Lewis and Jane Reinhardt and several siblings. Where does one think Mary Jane would have been, with her little brother visiting from Atlanta? Almost certainly she was there at the house, eager to talk with her brother.
Other evidence also leads us to think Mary Jane cared about the topic that night. It was not only that she had six children of her own and nieces and nephews in the neighborhood who were rapidly coming to the end of the curriculum offered at limited one-room schoolhouses. In 1880, when the census taker appeared at the Sharp farm in Waleska, he listed 39-year-old Mary
Jane’s occupation as “teaching school.” Mary Jane worked as a schoolteacher; she cared about education, which is not surprising. The Reinhardt family she had been born into had a generations-long commitment to education, having played a key role in sustaining the Lincolnton Female Academy in North Carolina decades earlier. The records of the Academy in the 1820s and early 1830s show that three of Mary Jane and Augustus’s great-uncles – David, Michael and Charles Emmanuel – all helped direct or had contracts with the Academy. One Mrs. Reinhardt worked there as a tutress. The children at the Lincolnton Female Academy with the last name of Reinhardt included Emiline, Jane, Amelia, Harriet C., Adeline, Rosanna and Catherine. These students were presumably the cousins of Lewis Reinhardt, or his sisters. So, the immediate and extended family of Mary Jane and Augustus contained numerous people who could have told the tale of how the family was instrumental in creating a school when one was necessary. We have no direct evidence that Mary Jane was at the table in 1883, planning for the school that became Reinhardt University, named after her father. But where else would she have been on such an important night?
The school built in Waleska was a family enterprise. Mary Jane’s husband, her brother Augustus and her brotherin-law Joseph M. Sharp were all trustees. In 1887, Mary Jane served as one of the three judges of a public debate among the students over the question of “whether the teacher exercises a greater influence in shaping the moral destiny of man than the parent.” In the earliest catalog we have, for the 1893-1894 school year, the most prominent name among the most advanced students was Sharp – three of the four alumni of the college were Sharps, as were three of the eight seniors and two of the three juniors. Other Sharp children were in classes, along with more of Mary Jane’s nieces and nephews with the last names of Blanton and Rhyne. People today sometimes refer to the “Reinhardt family,” but it is not nearly so literally true as in its origins.
Being at a meeting, though, does not make someone a founder. In a time when society expected men to take initiative, it was John Sharp and Augustus Reinhardt who organized the builders and negotiated with the Methodists. Yet Augustus Reinhardt lost his real estate fortune during the economic panic of 1893; John Sharp died in 1896. The school building they created survived, but years later Mary Jane Reinhardt Sharp, the former schoolteacher, donated her family farm so that a school she loved and that her son Ramsey had become president of would have a campus dedicated to education. A momentous gift, it helped turn a school into a college. The core of Reinhardt’s campus was once the Sharp farm. Mary Jane, almost certainly at the key meeting that spurred the creation of a school in Waleska, and donor of her farm that significantly expanded the campus, was more than the wife and sister of the founders. Mary Jane Reinhardt Sharp was a founder of Reinhardt University.
Dorothy Rogers Tilly: Reinhardt Graduate and Civil Rights Activist
AReinhardt education can lead in unexpected directions. In 1899, when Dorothy Rogers graduated from In 1949, Tilly founded a new organization in Georgia, one she ran almost singlehandedly, called the Fellowship of the Reinhardt with honors, she completed her Concerned (FOC). The FOC, with thousands baccalaureate degree, married and birthed a of members, launched a variety of initiatives son. Once her boy was beyond his early years, and hosted interracial conferences, foreseeing though, Dorothy was a well-educated woman with a racially integrated future that many people energy and time on her hands. What would she do? could still scarcely imagine. The late 1950s and 1960s
Dorothy initially became involved in the Women’s brought mass-action protest to the fore in the search Missionary Society of the Methodist Church and in for racial equality. In 1963, the year Tilly turned 80, 1918 began running its Children’s Work for North President John F. Kennedy appointed her to the Georgia program. During the 1930s, she expanded National Women’s Committee for Civil Rights. Tilly, her engagement with social causes, joining first the ever vigorous, carried on with the Fellowship of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation and later the Concerned almost until her death in 1970. Association of Southern Women for the Prevention Overall, the life of Dorothy Tilly shows how she of Lynching. Still highly involved with Methodism, fused her education and church involvement into a Dorothy’s work for civil rights led her to organize persistent commitment to tackle a massive social Georgia churchwomen in boycotts of businesses owned problem. Tilly connected Christian social work and by Ku Klux Klan members and she fought against poll social reform of the early 20th century to the taxes across the South. beginnings of the modern civil rights movement.
Because of work Tilly did in Washington, D.C. in the She is a powerful example of the importance of 1930s she became friends with Eleanor Roosevelt. women’s roles in changing social views, and her Roosevelt wrote that she admired Tilly’s courage involvement in Methodist women’s groups was because “I was told that whenever a lynching occurred, central to her ideas about how to bring dignity to she went alone or with a friend, as soon as she heard and improve people’s lives. Reinhardt had an ethos of it, to investigate the circumstances.” Perhaps a supportive of that work of Christian uplift. recommendation from Eleanor Roosevelt led to the Tilly was an inspirational person, and her life gives us White House invitation in 1946 for Tilly to join President clues about the kind of training and mentality that Harry S. Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights. The some Reinhardt graduates of that time carried with committee produced a famous and influential report, “To them as they left Waleska for the wider world. Where Secure These Rights,” which called for an immediate end will your Reinhardt education take you? to racial segregation.
Tilly and her work aroused opposition. The Ku Klux Klan threatened to bomb her home, and she received many harassing calls. Tilly, undaunted, talked back to her callers, but eventually she placed a record player by her telephone stand. When a caller could not be engaged in reasonable conversation, she dropped the needle on a recording of the Lord’s Prayer, which played into the phone’s mouthpiece as Dorothy walked away. Tilly, seen here with her friend, Eleanor Roosevelt.
