Forty years ago, in the fall of 1968, as Dr. David L. Rice, president emeritus of the University of Southern Indiana, likes to tell the story, he and Byron C. Wright, who is now vice president emeritus for Business Affairs and Treasurer, were visiting Mayor Frank McDonald in his office in downtown Evansville.

Mayor McDonald was an avid supporter of this not-yet-three-year-old campus and had a profound conviction that the University would be a tremendous benefit for the City of Evansville and the State of Indiana. He often referred to is as “an industry without a smokestack.”

Because the mayor’s support was key to the University’s success, Dr. Rice and Mr. Wright met regularly with him to discuss issues affecting higher education on the Evansville campus. At the end of this particular meeting, Mayor McDonald said, “You will need private gifts to help make that place a success. Folks around here will not want to send their hard-earned money out of town, so I suggest you establish a foundation to benefit our university.” He then opened his wallet and pulled out two $100 bills. “Here is $100 from me and $100 from my wife to begin that foundation.”

When Dr. Rice approached Indiana State University President Alan C. Rankin about creating a foundation, he received further encouragement. In seeking approval from his trustees, Dr. Rankin noted that the establishment of a foundation in Evansville was important. He emphasized Mayor McDonald’s point that Evansville area donors would give more enthusiastically to an Evansville organization. Because the Evansville campus did not have the necessary staff, Dr. Rankin also offered the assistance of the foundation in Terre Haute to help begin this effort.

That $200 gift from Mr. and Mrs. Frank F. McDonald Sr. began 40 years of giving from generous friends to benefit this great University. Frank McDonald had unusual foresight for Evansville and for the University.

This month, we commemorate the 40th anniversary of the USI Foundation, now with total assets of $68 million.

Mayor McDonald’s vision for the University and for the USI Foundation, as well as his active work on behalf of these institutions, serves as witness to what great things can be accomplished with collaboration, cooperation, and wise leadership. Frank McDonald’s efforts to ensure the establishment of the campus in 1965 have earned him the title of “founding father.”

We thank all those who have chosen to support the University over the past 40 years and those who support of the work of the University today.

POST CONTRIBUTED BY: DAVID BOWER, director of Development and president of the USI Foundation.

Every year the University of Southern Indiana is proud to run a United Way campaign in our workplace. It’s a way for our organization to do its part in helping to preserve our community’s quality of life, and to help those in need. This year’s campaign will be held October 27-31.

I recognize charitable giving is a personal decision and with a challenging economy, many of us are feeling financial pressure. In light of this, I would like to take this opportunity to briefly explain why I support United Way and how by putting our money together we can make the biggest difference in our community.

Your investment in the community will generate results that you can see - results that are creating fundamental change that help achieve the basics of a good life - education, income and health.  No other gift you give this year will have the impact of your United Way pledge. A gift of any size helps. If you give up just one $4 latte every two weeks and pledge that to United Way, you’ll provide a healthy meal each week for a child or senior in need.

There are many reasons why I support United Way of Southwestern Indiana, but most importantly, I believe that United Way of Southwestern Indiana is a leader in our community and a catalyst for change. By conducting thorough research, it determines local needs and explores best practices and innovative ways to create community solutions.

Through this research, United Way brings together expertise and resources to address our community’s most pressing health and human service issues. Instead of merely addressing the symptoms of a problem, United Way goes deeper to find the root causes and determines how it can create solutions that will profoundly and positively change the lives of thousands of people.

United Way of Southwestern Indiana holds itself accountable not just for implementing solutions, but also for the results. The organization is committed to producing measurable outcomes that it can report to the community.

And it does all of this very efficiently. In 2007, United Way’s administrative and fundraising percentage was 15 percent, which means $.85 of every dollar you give goes directly to more than 75 programs and services offered by United Way and the 33 Partner Agencies.  Your dollars work harder when you give to United Way of Southwestern Indiana.

By joining me in supporting our United Way campaign, you are having a direct impact and creating meaningful, lasting change in your own backyard. We’re looking forward to a phenomenal campaign. Please make your pledge, and thank you for choosing the way to improve our community. Together we can make a difference – Live United!

On Monday, look for additional campaign information and your pledge form in campus mail. To learn more about United Way’s work in the community, visit: www.unitedwayswi.org

POST CONTRIBUTED BY: LISA J. SCHAEFER, USI Campaign coordinator and assistant director, Alumni and Volunteer Services.

The Shield alumni will gather in Carter Hall on Saturday to reflect on 40 years of a free press at the University of Southern Indiana.

As I meet the former editors, writers, photographers, copy editors, advertising managers, and advisors, I plan to thank them for their involvement with the student press and for contributing to the lofty mission of this young university.

After sifting through The Shield archive, I can testify to their dedication to providing an outlet for information and opinions relevant and valuable to students.

Throughout the pages of The Shield’s 854 issues the students reflected the campus’ social and political landscape, traced the university’s growth in enrollment and building construction, and reported on campus conflicts and controversies.

The editors didn’t realize it at the time, but the product of their late nights in The Shield office would become a record of the university’s history.

But the student newspaper is more than a historical record – it is a training ground for student journalists.

Although The Shield is not directly affiliated with the journalism program (we are funded through advertising dollars and student services), it is a laboratory for our journalism students – a very public laboratory.

When a chemistry student breaks a test tube or miscalculates a formula, only the lab instructor and a few classmates bear witness. When an editor at The Shield makes a mistake, the error is magnified – it appears in the 2,500 copies of the newspaper distributed across campus for anyone to see.

I’m often asked why, as the advisor, I don’t try to prevent those errors by copy editing or approving the paper before it goes to press.

When given the opportunity (such as this one), I explain that student journalists at public universities are protected by law from prior review from administrators and – to the surprise of many – from the publication advisor.

This point was underscored in 2005, when President Hoops signed a statement declaring The Shield a designated public forum. The move was a response to the Hosty vs. Carter decision by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, which opened the door for university administrators to exert more editorial control over student publications.

As a journalism instructor I teach students how to report, write, and copy edit; how to make news decisions that are both legal and ethical; and how to respond to criticism of their work.

As the newspaper advisor, I stand on the sidelines, coaching, encouraging, and making suggestions, but ultimately leaving every decision up to them. When they do something well, they get the credit, and when they do something wrong they take the responsibility.

So if you see something you like, or something you don’t, let them know. The Shield is your public forum. You can write a letter to the editor, leave a comment on the web site (www.usishield.com), or, if you’re a student, you can get involved.

As The Shield celebrates its 40th anniversary, I celebrate my first anniversary as its advisor. I could not be more proud of the talent, intelligence and courage of USI’s student journalists.

Thanks for reading The Shield.

POST CONTRIBUTED BY: ERIN GIBSON, instructor in journalism and advisor to The Shield.

I believe in taking time to discover myself. Instead of wasting my life pursuing someone else’s idea of happiness, what I really need to do – what I’m really here to do – is to know myself. Because in knowing myself, I find the freedom to pursue my own dreams, not the dreams shaped for me by others.

As a teenager and young adult, I had a very definite idea of who I was “supposed to be.” This “someone” was partly influenced by the media; my definitions of beauty (size zero), love (passion), and success (money) conformed to what I saw in magazines and movies. This “someone” was also influenced by personal agents, like parents who insisted on my best efforts and teachers who recognized my potential. Still, even these well-meaning individuals contributed to my unwillingness to discover who I really was or what I really wanted to do with my life, because my desire to “make good” on the promise they claimed to see in me made me terrified of disappointing anyone. I expended all my energy on being the perfect student, the perfect daughter, the perfect everything.

We now have a catch-phrase to describe girls like this: supergirls. Girls who play every sport, serve on every committee, hold every office; girls with 4.0 GPAs; girls whose beauty, wit, intelligence and creativity are supposed to land them in top colleges and high-paying careers. And we’re finding that eating disorders, depression, self-mutilation and suicide are often the price of being a supergirl.

When I graduated from high school in 1997, the term “supergirl” hadn’t yet come into vogue, although plenty of us existed. Like today’s supergirls, although on the outside I seemed to have everything together, I eventually had to fight the demons that result from trying to be “perfect.” It took a life-threatening illness, an infinitely patient family, a wonderful husband, and a spiritual reawakening for me to finally accept that I didn’t need to be a supergirl to be happy. Only then was I free to start figuring out what my purpose in life really is.

Today, I’m not the gorgeous glamazon career girl my seventeen-year-old self imagined; I’m not the world-renowned scholar I pictured when I entered my PhD program at twenty-four. I live in a small town, teach at a small university, lead a quiet – and by Hollywood’s standards, a boring – life. But I’m healthy, even though I’ve traded in my size zero jeans for a curvier size six; I’m fulfilled by what I do for a living, even though it’ll never make me rich or famous; I’m in love with a terrific man, even though he doesn’t fit the leading man archetype.

A few weeks ago, I sat down with a group of first-year students at USI’s Bonding Through Books Brunch to discuss how personal beliefs shape our lives. I was seated at a table with six young women whom, though certainly unique individuals, was each her own type of supergirl. I told them what I wished someone had told me at eighteen: We can live life blindly buffeted by the pressures from society, family, media and friends, being pushed in directions we aren’t sure we want to go, or we can take the opportunity to figure out who we are and who we want to become. I believe college offers just that opportunity if we’ll take it, if we’ll allow the people we encounter and the lessons we learn (in the classroom and out) to make us examine our beliefs, to understand how those beliefs shape our worldviews, to use that understanding to shape ourselves into who we want to be. Then we can define for ourselves what will make us happy, even if that turns out not to be what everyone told us was a perfect life.

POST CONTRIBUTED BY: Dr. R. EVON HAWKINS, assistant professor of English.

If you had money to spend on your teaching, what would you do with it? I’ve been thinking about that ever since applications for the Teaching Enhancement Awards were announced. I’ve been wondering what transformed my teaching – or what transformed me as a teacher. I’d like to hear your story; send it as a comment to this blog or as a proposal for a Teaching Enhancement Award. Did I mention that the deadline is Friday, October 10?

I had a wonderful education in teaching at SUNY/Buffalo with a full year of coursework on composition and rhetoric pedagogy, mentors who were passionate about teaching undergraduates, and students – many of whom had just been laid off as a result of the crash of Bethlehem Steel – who knew they needed to know what I was there to teach. I was equally fortunate in my first job, a rare tenure track position in literary theory (this was 1987 – not a good year) at Hamline University, a small, private, liberal arts university in St. Paul, Minnesota. As a southerner, I’m here to tell you that Minnesota winter is better than Buffalo winter. But not by much. Still, Hamline had an amazing general education curriculum designed in large part by the dean who hired me, Jerry Gaff. So I was in on the ground floor of the faculty seminars and workshops created to support the new curriculum. From that moment on I became a faculty development junkie.

All of these experiences turned me into a teacher and transformed my teaching. My colleagues and our conversations were my most profound influences. But as I became busier and busier with committee work, students, and family (yes, I was trying to have a life as well as finish writing a book) my conversations about teaching became fewer and far between. I started to miss the very thing that made me excited about the work I had chosen to do. How can we change that? (Hint: This is where Faculty Development comes in.)

Can we throw money at this problem? Yes we can. We don’t have trillions for a bailout, but as educators, we well know that a little goes a long way. But where should it go?

This takes me back to my original question: if you had money to spend on your teaching, what would you do with it?

Here’s my list of ways I have spent money that has transformed my teaching:

• Travel has led me to the places that mattered most to writers I teach:
  • London to trace Virginia Woolf’s steps through Bloomsbury to find the shop where she used to buy her pens
  • Southeast England to wander through Vita Sackville-West’s gardens – the magnificent one she created at the ruined castle, Sissinghurst, and the one at her childhood home, Knole – the largest house in England, given to her ancestor in compensation for delivering the death sentence to Mary of Scotland
  • The Lake District of northwest England to experience Wordsworth’s sublime for myself as I rode a train into Windemere in a January snow storm
  • Nottingham and the English midlands to find the house D. H. Lawrence grew up in and the realization that this gritty coal town was surrounded by lush farmland

• Interdisciplinary conferences on teaching have given me a broader perspective on the curriculum:
  • The Association of General and Liberal Studies
  • The Association of Integrated Studies
  • The Association of American Colleges & Universities
  • The Professional and Organizational Development Network for Higher Education

• Reading groups on teaching that given me a chance to talk about teaching with my colleagues: There are great books out there we could read together.

• Workshops on pedagogy have continued to change the way I teach and design courses: constructivism, writing across the curriculum, speaking-intensive classes, designing innovative courses, learning centered teaching, engaging students - the list goes on and on.

In the past, folks at USI have used Teaching Enhancement Awards in these and many other ways – including the International Studies Colloquium. Apply for one.

POST CONTRIBUTED BY: DR. KARYN SPROLES, director of Faculty Development.