PresRelease

UConn Professor of Photography and Head of the Department of Art and Art History, has just been elected to the Board of Directors of the College Art Association, at the Association’s annual meeting in Dallas/Fort Worth. The CAA membership includes some 2,000 university art and art history departments, museums, libraries, and professional and commercial organizations, as well as 13,000 individual members. The CAA’s annual meeting is the focus of intellectual discussions, exhibitions, and career-advancement opportunities for these departments from all across the country. It’s a noteworthy peer recognition to be elected to this Board, and it reflects the membership’s high regard for Professor Thorpe’s teaching, creative work and service. Congratulations!

Saturday night’s annual HuskyTHON dance marathon in the Fieldhouse raised $56,920 for the Connecticut Children’s Medical Center in Hartford. I stopped by after the women’s basketball game in Gampel to help the dancers get off to a good start, but discovered right away that they didn’t need any help from me in getting fired up. The place was electric. They danced until noon on Sunday – a record number of dancers – and, most importantly, they surpassed last year’s total amount by 400 percent!

What was special for me was having a chance to meet some of the kids who have been treated at our Children’s Medical Center. As part of HuskyTHON, student organizations each sponsor one of these families, and the families were on hand Saturday night to meet their students and to be part of the excitement. Here’s a picture of Nora Ives and the women of Kappa Kappa Gamma, who’ve adopted Nora and her family. Nora’s parents, Mary Anne and Nathan Ives, both work at UConn. There were several other families there with their sponsors – they were introduced to the crowd – and I got to meet many of them.

HuskyTHON is getting bigger and bigger, and I challenge all our students to make it an even more fun and successful event next year. Thanks to Bill Mattera, HuskyTHON’s advisor, the students on the HuskyTHON Board, and everyone who participated in this year’s effort. I’m very proud that UConn students are taking the initiative to give back to our own community through activities like this.

Julian, showing how it’s done

On Saturday evening, Moravia Latortue III and Ronke Oyeniya were crowned of King and Queen at the Mr. & Mrs. UConn Black Pageant in the Student Union. The judges decided on Moravia, a self-taught pianist who played a compilation of classical music on the piano for Mr. Black UConn, and selected Ronke as Ms. Black UConn after she sang a fun, audience-involved version of Toni Braxton’s “Another Sad Love Song.”

Queen Ronke Oyeniya
AACC director Willena Kimpson Price
King Moravia Latortue III

Moravia is a 3rd-semester civil engineering major, and Ronke is a 4th-semester political science major. They faced tough competition all evening. AACC director Willena Price noted that each year’s pageant is open to all UConn students, and often a diverse group of students participate. Hosts for the evening, students Christina Sutton and Ali Langston, kept the crowd entertained during wardrobe and scene changes. Christina Sutton and Daphney Joseph were coordinators for this year’s pageant.

Congratulations to Ronke and Moravia, and to everyone who made this year’s event such a success.

Two of our Political Science faculty members, Professor Mark Boyer and Associate Professor Jennifer Sterling-Folker, are the new co-editors of International Studies Review. Under a revolving arrangement where editorial responsibility moves from one institution to another, the Review will call UConn home until 2012.

The Review, a quarterly, features articles on current trends and research in the field of international studies. Scholars, educators, and policymakers consult the Review to find information about new books in international studies as well as analytic reviews of recent trends and controversies in scholarship around the world. Subject matter of articles and reviews includes international institutions and the foreign policies, international interactions, and international relationships of such political actors as national governments, subnational groups, and international governmental and nongovernmental organizations. It’s a publication read world-wide, and it’s also great recognition for UConn – and for Professors Boyer and Sterling-Folker.

I appreciate the financial support from the Department of Political Science, the Political Science Graduate Program, and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences that has made this arrangement possible. And the excellent work and experience in our Political Science department that attracted the Review to UConn.

Prof. Mark Boyer, in chambers

Prof. Jennifer Sterling-Folker – aloft

When I learned yesterday of the shootings on the campus of Northern Illinois University, I felt a rush of deep emotion as my heart went out immediately to the students and their families, and to everyone on the DeKalb campus – a place not far from Iowa City where I visited several times and knew colleagues and students who worked and studied there.I know I speak for everyone at the University of Connecticut when I express to President John Peters and to our fellow NIU students, faculty, and staff our deepest sympathy and compassion in this, perhaps their darkest hour. Our thoughts and our prayers are with the families and friends touched so suddenly and permanently by this unspeakable tragedy.

I have no explanation to offer to them that might somehow place this incident – and others equally tragic and devastating – in some coherent context. These acts of violent desperation remain inexplicable to me. They violate the core values of our universities and our society, and the beliefs that guide my own personal life.

Yet they are all too real. And because they are, I want to assure our UConn family – students and parents especially – that we are working hard and as rapidly as we can to improve our own security procedures and to take responsible, additional measures to protect those on our campuses from harm. We’ve already made significant changes since events that occurred last year at Virginia Tech. I encourage you to become familiar with the measures we’ve taken and the emergency procedures now in place on our campuses. Please visit our webpages to read about these measures at http://www.president.uconn.edu/Alert.pdf, and our University Alert Notification System, at http://alert.uconn.edu/

NIU posted memorial web pages immediately following the tragedy, with information about services, outreach to students and families, and official university announcements: http://www.niu.edu/index.shtml I’ve offered our assistance and support to NIU President John Peters, and I know that our entire UConn Husky family joins me in our sympathy and condolences to all who were touched by this tragedy. UConn staff members have already reached out to their counterparts at Northern Illinois.

Also, I want to remind you that this tragedy in DeKalb may awaken memories or feelings of despair in some of us. I encourage you to seek the help of our Counseling Services http://www.cmhs.uconn.edu if you are experiencing feelings of distress or desperation. These are normal, expectable responses when a tragedy touches us personally, and we should not hesitate to care for ourselves at a difficult time. The Service’s telephone is 860.486.4705.