Thursday, January 26, 2012
Campus A3
The Auburn Plainsman
Online graduate programs make honor roll ranking Lane Jones CAMPUS BEAT REPORTER
REBECCA CROOMES / PHOTO EDITOR
Pinetucket Cemetery is located in the Wilson Beef Lab’s cow pasture on Wire Road. The Auburn Heritage Association has plans for a $10,000 restoration of the cemetery within the next year.
Civil War-era cemetery marked for restoration Andrew Yawn WRITER
Few are aware that, among the livestock of the Auburn Veterinary School, there lies a cemetery older than Lee County, itself. Now the Auburn Heritage Association wants to restore this landmark for future use. The Pinetucket Cemetery, a Civil War-era cemetery owned by H.D. and Mary Norman is located in the cow pasture of the Wilson Beef Lab on Wire Road. One hundred and fifty years ago, Federal Wire Road, the predecessor to its modern namesake, ran from Savannah to New Orleans. Along this road, in the fledgling town of Auburn, there sat a tabernacle and a cemetery. Federal Wire Road no longer exists, and the tabernacle is gone—in its place is the Auburn Veterinary School. The cemetery remains hidden from plain sight by groves of trees on both sides and is now visited most frequently by cows and their handlers. “They say we got ghosts over here,” H.D. said. Each year the AHA, with the help of the Alpha Pi Omega service fraternity, combats the weeds and overgrown brush. Mary, however, wants a permanent solution. “We’re going to go and clean it off again,” Mary said. “We’re going to rebuild the rock wall. We’re going to resod around it and maintain it.” The cemetery sits atop one of the highest points in Auburn and provides visitors with a sweeping view of the town. “It’s a very beautiful place,” H.D. said. “We want to make it memorable where people can walk in, sit down and have a picnic.” Despite its panoramic view,
REBECCA CROOMES / PHOTO EDITOR
Pinetucket Cemetery dates back to the Civil War. Every year it is cleaned by AHA and Alpha Pi Omega service fraternity.
the cemetery has faded from memory of many Auburn residents because of its secluded location. Joseph Warren, freshman in political science, has lived in Auburn for 10 years and had never heard of Pinetucket until recently. “They ought to restore it, if only out of respect for … the people buried there,” Warren said. The restoration is predicted to be finished within the next year and cost about $10,000, Mary said. The burial ground is estimated to contain about 50 people, including two Confederate soldiers and Lewis “L.A.” Foster, a key contributor to the rise of Auburn both as a city and an educational haven. Despite being outside city limits at the time, Foster established Pinetucket as a selfsustaining community with a store, church, school and numerous factories, including the brickworks mill that produced the materials to build Samford Hall. He is also the fourth-great uncle of Mary Norman. Dating back to the 1860s,
the Pinetucket Cemetery preceded the establishment of Lee County and was but a small slice of the 1,280-acre Pinetucket estate owned by Foster. Five hundred of the campus’ 1,900 acres were bought from the Foster family. The cemetery was one of the last plots of land sold to the University, not leaving the Foster family until 1942. The use of the site as a hog pen and the subsequent desecration of the graves eventually led Auburn to close the road and provide the Normans access. Family cemeteries usually only last about two to three generations, H.D. said. Pinetucket has lasted for eight. “Hopefully with my help and the help of the Auburn Heritage Association, which will hopefully go on long after I’m gone, it will continually be maintained,” Mary said. “I’ll probably be buried there.” Despite the long tenure of the cemetery as the family grave, the Normans stress that it has been, and always will be, both a family and a community grave.
U.S. News & World Report ranked Auburn’s online graduate programs in the publication’s first Top Online Education Program Honor Roll. “Their definition of an excellent online degree program is one where strong student services and technology are provided, the faculty have good credentials, they use teaching practices that engage students and they are selective in admissions,” said Drew Clark, director of Institutional Research and Assessment. “If you got into the top group of at least three of those four criteria, then you get an honor roll ranking.” Analyst Karen Battye said this is the first time U.S. News & World Report has ranked online programs. “This is the first year they’ve done the surveys, so there was no real methodology provided to us prior to the survey,” she said. “It was just a blank survey with lots of questions, both qualitative and quantitative.” Greg Ruff, director of engineering outreach and continuing education, said his department provided information used to help determine the ranking. “They asked us to complete a 102-question survey that was completed by this office, a couple people in engineering, communication and marketing and some folks at the University academic side, and that’s what the ratings were based
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The programs are good becaue the technology that we use help the students not feel that they are so distant from campus.” —Susan Bannon DIRECTOR, LEARNING RESOURCE CENTER
on,” Ruff said. “There were three schools that were honor schools, and Auburn was one of them.” The online graduate programs in the College of Education ranked fifth in the teaching practices and student engagement category. “The programs are highly interactive, and I think that’s one of the things that made our teaching practices be ranked so high,” said Susan Bannon, Learning Resources Center director. “Our faculty are engaged with their distance students just as they would be engaged with their face-to-face students.” The graduate programs in the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering were ranked first in admissions selectivity and fifth in student services and technology. “Most of the students getting a graduate engineering degree are already at work,” Ruff said. “So they’re taking the (online) course to enhance their job status and
personal career and, in a lot of cases, to glean information about what they’re already doing. Having it delivered to them is an obvious plus rather than them having to come to campus.” The technology behind Auburn’s online graduate programs was developed in the engineering department. “The reason it was developed here was that we tried a lot of different programs and none of them did what we wanted them to do,” Ruff said. “The main problems were the clarity of the images, the ability to see with more than one camera and the ability for anybody to pick it up on anything they had. Most of the delivery systems could not deal with Macs. Ours does.” Content is delivered through live streaming media so students can access lectures online. “Because it’s accessible with almost anybody’s system, we tested it to begin with with some soldiers in Afghanistan,” Ruff said. “We figured if it worked there, it would work anywhere.” The technology allows for easier communication between distance education students and professors. “The programs are good because the technology that we use help the students not feel that they are so distant from campus,” Bannon said. “The students can receive the information from their professor; they can view the lectures; they can view the class activities as though they are here on campus.”
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REBECCA CROOMES / PHOTO EDITOR
From right, Carol Linde, undeclared freshman, Krishane Suresh, sophomore in software engineering, and Mary Carolyn Kind, sophomore in industrial engineering and French, take a break from studying to blow bubbles on the concourse Thursday afternoon.
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