ECU Notes: Founders Day ceremonies recognize faculty, staff

ECU News Bureau

Sunday, March 29, 2009

During the Founders Day celebration at East Carolina University on Thursday, faculty and staff were honored for their efforts at the university and in the community. The university’s Centennial Awards for Excellence received 65 nominations with winners in four categories: leadership, service, spirit and ambition.

This year’s recipients are:

Service: Dr. Lee West (Brody School of Medicine); Jane Manning (Business Services Office); Ruth Clifton (Dowdy Student Stores).

Leadership: Mark Weitzel (College of Business); Carolyn Erwin (ECU Physicians); Maurice York (Joyner Library)

Ambition: Dr. Jayne Geissler (Academic Advising and Support Center); Members of the Emergency Communications Assessment Team: Lucia Brannon, Charles Peele and Brad Ritchie (Student Affairs); Erica Plouffe Lazure, Christine Neff and Jeannine Manning Hutson (News Services); Rita Bilbro, Rob Hudson, Billy Long and Petra Rouse (Information Technology & Computing Services and Health Sciences Campus Communications); ECU Police; Mary Schiller (Administration and Finance); Paul Carson (Campus Operations).

Spirit: Willie Warren (Administration and Finance); Jonathan Wallace (Administration and Finance).

Members of the ECU faculty, staff and student body, who embody the spirit of the university’s motto, Servire, or to serve, were also honored for their volunteer efforts.

There were 63 faculty and staff members inducted into the Servire Society – which recognizes those who have performed 100 or more hours of volunteer service. Forty-five students were inducted as well.

This year’s Servire Society faculty and staff first-year inductees are: Harry Adams, Robin Armstrong, Margaret Arnd-Caddigan, William Bogey, Christine Bouck, Elizabeth Carroll, William Clark, Kathleen Cox, Tarrick Cox, Leslie Craigle, Jessica Davenport, Tommy Ellis, Charles Gee, Sandra Hickey, Mary Jackson, Angela Lamson, Mandee Lancaster, Marylee Lannan, Charles Lesko Jr., Susan McCammon, Barbara Memory, Scott Methe, Shawn Moore, Nick Pantelidis, Roman Pawlak, Mary Pollock, Roytesa Savage, N. Yaprak Savut, Kirk St. Amant, Ashley Suggs, Rebecca Sweet, Linda Teel, Robert Thompson, Lathan Turner, Lynn Tuthill, Katherine Warsco, Beverly Wright and Robert Zinko.

Faculty and staff members who earned Servire Society induction for a second year are: Mark Angolia, David Batie, Paul Bolin, Susan Copeland, F. Leonard Darby, Penny Doughtie, William Edwards, Margie Gallagher, Kathryn Griffin, Nancy Harris, Amanda Hodges, Aaron Lucier, James McAtee, Danny L. Morton, Vivian Mott, Amanda Pantelidis, Karen Parker, Annette Peery, Nancy Ray, Ronald Sessoms St., Chris Stallings, Bryan Wheeler, Tina Williams and Wanda Wynne.

Harriot’s use of the telescope celebrated

Engaged in one of the world’s first international space races, Thomas Harriot, whose name adorns the ECU College of Arts and Sciences, was among the first citizens of our planet to pick up a telescope in 1609 and study the planets, stars and moons.

Now, 400 years later, Harriot’s pioneering explorations will be commemorated in a four-day conference, Wednesday-Saturday, sponsored by the Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences.

The Thomas Harriot Quadricentennial Conference is free and open to the public with conference sessions at venues from Chapel Hill to Manteo.

The conference will consist of workshops on map-making and archaeological excavations, as well as a variety of public lectures, featuring 24 researchers and historians.

For more information, visit www.ecu.edu/harriot400 or contact Tise at tisel@ecu.edu.

Film accepted to documentary festival

A film by two ECU faculty members has been accepted into the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, a premier international film event that will be held Thursday through Sunday in Durham.

“Bunny Saunders: The Mayor Who Stood Up,” a 10-minute documentary produced by Erick Yates Green and Bernard Timberg, colleagues in ECU’s School of Communication, shows a rural North Carolina mayor’s fight against the Navy’s proposed Outlying Landing Field.

The idea for the film came from a public hearing about the controversial proposal to install a concrete landing strip for military planes, filmmakers said. At the hearing, filmmakers discovered an “amazing personality” in an outspoken resident who opposed the project, Estelle “Bunny” Saunders, mayor of Roper.

The filmmakers received a $6,957 ECU College of Fine Arts and Communication Research and Creative Activity grant to complete the film. Editors Hsiao Chu, an assistant professor in the School of Communication, and James Gould, ECU graduate, assisted with the project.

Green and Timberg will join a panel discussion at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. “Bunny Saunders: The Mayor Who Stood Up” will première at the festival April 5. The film will be screened at ECU’s College of Fine Arts and Communication convocation April 28.

Student magazine receives gold award

Rebel 50, a student-centered magazine produced for and by ECU students, recently received a 2009 Gold Crown Award from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association. The announcement was made at the CSPA awards convocation during the Spring College Media Convention in New York City.

The Crown Award is the highest recognition given by the CSPA to a student print or online medium for overall excellence. Out of the 1,795 magazines that were eligible for the award, only 10 college magazines received this honor, according to Paul Isom, director of student media at ECU.

A panel of judges included professional journalists, experienced former advisers to student media and other professionals, they considered all aspects of value to the reader or viewer: content, design, coverage, photography as well as writing and editing.

The editor of Rebel 50 was Lacey Siva of Gastonia, who graduated from ECU in December 2008 with bachelor’s degrees in Art (graphic design concentration) and English.

In addition to Rebel, other collegiate Gold Crown magazine winners from North Carolina were Sanskrit, University of North Carolina-Charlotte, and Windhover, N.C. State University.

Business college to host global planning expert

The College of Business at ECU will host Erik R. Peterson as its sixth speaker in the Cunanan Leadership Speaker Series on Thursday.

Peterson currently serves as senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Washington, D.C.-based bipartisan and non-profit think tank on foreign policy and national security issues. He also serves as director of the Global Strategy Institute – a “think tank within a think tank” he established at CSIS in 2003 to assess long-range trends.

Peterson’s presentation, “Seven Revolutions: The Promise and the Peril of the Future,” is free and open to the public. It will be held at the Hilton Greenville at 3:30 p.m., Thursday.

Lecture to focus on creative writing

Two ECU alumni, Dwain Teague and Judd Crumpler, were so impacted by one of their former English professors that they established the Patrick Bizzaro Creative Writing Lecture Series Fund in his honor.

Now in its inaugural year, the Teague/Crumpler Lecture will be held at 7:30 p.m. Thursday in Room 1031, Bate Building. Dr. Art Young, Robert S. Campbell Chair in Technical Communication at Clemson University, will lead the free, public lecture on “Creativity Across the Curriculum.”

Bizzaro joined the faculty at Indiana University of Pennsylvania as a professor of English in 2008, after spending 25 years as a professor of English at ECU. He founded ECU’s Writing Across the Curriculum Program and served as the director of the University Writing Program.

Also on Thursday, the ECU University Writing Program will host a workshop to address the issues of responding to and evaluating student writing. Young and Bizzaro will lead “Response and Evaluation” at 4 p.m. in Bate 1028. For more information, contact the University Writing Program at 328-2922.

See www.ecu.edu/cs-ecu/calendar.cfm for times, places and information on ECU upcoming activities.