Auction/casino will benefit Writers in Community
The Creative Writing Program will host a charity auction/casino night to benefit its Writers in Community program from 7-10 p.m. April 15 in the Webb Center cafeteria.

The nonprofit outreach arm of the program, Writers in Community sends students to area schools and civic groups for readings and writing workshops.

Tickets are $10, which includes admission, light hors d’oeuvres and casino chips. A cash bar will be available, and bluegrass group Three Legged Back Porch Collective will perform.

For more information call 581-8231. Back to top

Who's Who: Don Runyon, Assistant Vice President for Auxiliary Services
Many on campus know him as the ringmaster of the Wacky Olympics, the bearded fellow with bullhorn announcing starting times for the three-legged races and the next dunking booth victim.

But he’s also known – at least behind the scenes – for his auxiliary services “domain,” which includes housing operations, the Mail Center, catering and concessions, Webb Center, food services, ID Center, parking services, vending, the University Bookstore and the Ted Constant Convocation Center – “anything that makes money,” he says.

Runyon is proud of the role he played in getting the Constant Center ready for business, which included the hiring of a management team and getting the facility operating at a high level.

“When we were selecting architects for the job, the firm we eventually hired claimed it would be a terrific venue for not only basketball but also concerts. I was not sure I believed them until I heard Roberta Flack and the Virginia Symphony perform at the grand opening. The acoustics are great.”

Runyon is also credited with privatizing ODU’s food service, a task he was given not long after his arrival on campus 11 years ago. “When I came, the food service operated through the state. We had sad, outdated facilities and equipment, were not considered customer friendly and, frankly, lost money year after year.”

His challenge was to offer a first-class food service operation and to protect the jobs of good state employees who would now be paid by a private company. “We didn’t want to lose their positive contributions. Of the 35 full-time employees who were here nine years, 12 are still with us.”

Among Runyon’s biggest challenges over the next few years will be meeting the parking needs of a growing campus. “You can never have too much closet space or too many parking spaces,” he jokes.

Despite the headaches that accompany a position with such wide-ranging responsibilities, Runyon likes his job. “I enjoy interacting with students, in particular. You’ve got to stay relatively young at heart to survive on a college campus.”

But if most students know Runyon primarily for his Wacky Olympics, which begins its 12th year next fall, that’s OK with him (see his self-selected epitaph below). “We just kind of made it up; I don’t even remember why we chose the name we did. But it’s gotten bigger and better each year, and the students and staff seem to enjoy it.”

– Steve Daniel

College degrees: Michigan State University, B.S. in psychology and chemistry; University of Nebraska, M.S. in education and counseling

Birth date: Sept. 16

Hometown: Midland, Mich.

Spouse: Linda Pareseghian Runyon, a kindergarten teacher in Virginia Beach

Children: Craig, 30, who lives in D.C. and is an assistant editor at The Washington Post; Brent, 26, who lives in Woods Hole, Mass., and is a freelance writer and producer for National Public Radio and author (first book to be published in September by Knopf)

Pets: Shadow, a 4-year-old hyperactive Australian shepherd

Pet peeve: Drivers who talk on their cell phones, smoke and cut you off

Favorite place on campus: Ted Constant Convocation Center

Most memorable campus experiences: Wacky Olympics I through XI and the Dave Matthews concert at “The Ted”

Most treasured possession in my office: Photo of my family on top of the mountain range at Yosemite National Park

Whom I most admire at the university: Ruby Milteer, head cashier at the Webb Center cafeteria the past 27 years. She welcomes everyone with a warm smile and such a positive attitude every day of the year.

Last book read: “Cold Mountain” by Charles Frazier

Favorite movies: “The Great Impostor, “Top Gun” and “To Kill a Mockingbird”

Favorite song: “My Girl” by the Temptations

Idea of the perfect day off: Breakfast on the oceanfront at an outdoor cafe, kayaking with dolphins, an ODU basketball game (men’s or women’s) at “The Ted,” dinner with friends or family at Tautogs at the ocean, hot tub ....

Hobbies: Kayaking anywhere the water flows, softball, volleyball, golf (with forgiving friends), racquetball, walking on any beach

Favorite TV shows: “American Dreams,” “West Wing,” NCAA Basketball Tournament

Vices: Hmmmm. The list is too long.

Favorite area restaurant: Chick’s on the Lynnhaven River

Last vacation: Two weeks in Alaska

Last smart thing I did: Moved to Virginia Beach on the river

Last dumb thing I did: Agreed to train to paddle my kayak across the Chesapeake Bay – 20 miles ... Yikes!

Worst job: X-ray assistant in a hospital at age 16

Profession I might like to attempt: Kayak guide in Saint Johns, Virgin Islands or Fiji Islands in winter, and Alaska in summer

Appropriate epitaph, for when the time comes: Don “Fun” Runyon: He made a lot of people smile Back to top

Faculty Senate votes on variety of issues at recent meetings
The Faculty Senate voted to approve several recommendations at its March 23 and 30 meetings, which will be forwarded to President Roseann Runte for consideration. Among the issues passed by the senate were:

• That the fall 2003 student evaluations of teaching be declared experimental and invalid due to the low response level.
• That the Office of Academic Affairs initiate procedures to ensure that completed contracts for summer teaching be received by faculty prior to May 15.
• On the issue of summer pay for lecturers, that lecturers and instructors be separated into two groups for the purpose of summer pay calculations. The senate encourages the administration to develop a procedure whereby pay increases for some faculty do not come from pay cuts from other faculty.
• That a minor in motorsports engineering be established and be available as early as the fall 2004 semester.
• That, for completion of a cluster, students must have a minimum overall cumulative grade point average of 2.0 in all courses taken toward the cluster. It was noted that the current university catalog includes no provision for a GPA requirement and that the proposed change is in alignment with the GPA requirement for a minor.
• That specified guidelines and procedures be established for converting a non-tenure-eligible position to a tenure-eligible position. Currently, no such policy is covered in the Faculty Handbook. The senate recommends that such a conversion be dependent upon there having been a national search at some time. Also, the senate recommends a change to one of the other criteria for conversion: that the individual in question be appointed as a full-time faculty member for at least one academic year in a non-tenure-eligible position, instead of for at least three years.
• That revisions be made to the Policy on Grade Appeal Procedures in the university catalog. Among the proposed revisions is the following addition to the policy: “This policy applies to the final grade for the award of academic credit and does not apply to graduate and undergraduate examinations that are administered as part of the degree progression and certification processes (such as comprehensive examinations and candidacy examinations at the graduate level).”
  
  The proposed changes to the policy also include additions and clarifications to the procedures regarding first- and second-level appeals.
• That revisions be made to the Policy on System of Grading in the university catalog. Among the recommended changes are that for students who meet the criteria for receiving a course grade of I (Incomplete), “it is the responsibility of the student to approach the instructor to request an I grade and to provide documentation, including a written statement of when the work will be completed, to support the request. The authority to award an I grade rests with the instructor whose decision is final. Students whose requests for I grades are approved must not re-register for the class until the I grade has been resolved.”

Also recommended: “An I grade may be changed to a W (Official Withdrawal) only in very unusual circumstances and when the student’s situation has changed since the I grade was awarded. In these cases, the request for a change to a W must be in writing, documented and approved by the instructor, department chair and dean. Students will not be allowed to graduate until all grades of I have been resolved.”

Additionally, the senate recommended new language be added to the policy regarding the grade of Z (No Grade Reported). As part of this recommendation, the senate suggests that students not be allowed to graduate until all grades of Z have been resolved. Back to top

Hip-hop impressario Russel Simmons coming to campus for NAACP program, “Poetry Jam”
Russell Simmons, hip-hop impresario and creator of the Tony Award-winning “Def Poetry Jam,” will receive a lifetime achievement award from the university’s NAACP chapter at its Image Awards program April 29.

A series of awards also will be presented to outstanding ODU student groups, advisers and faculty, as well as members of the community, who have contributed to the cause of civil rights. The program begins at 5:30 p.m. in the multipurpose room at the Ted Constant Convocation Center. The program is free and open to the public.

Simmons also will emcee a “Def Poetry Jam” performance, sponsored by ODU’s NAACP chapter, in the Constant Center arena, at 7:30 that night. The ODU show is one of only four campus performances of “Def Poetry Jam” this year. Tickets start at $20 and can be purchased at the Constant Center box office, all TicketMaster outlets, online at www.ticketmaster.com or charged by phone at -671-8100.

In the last 25 years, Simmons, 45, has brought hip-hop to virtually every facet of media and pop culture: in music with the immensely successful Def Jam Recordings; in television with HBO’s “The Def Comedy Jam” and “Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry”; on Broadway with the critically acclaimed stage production “Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway”; and in the fashion industry with the Phat Farm and Baby Phat clothing lines.

Today, the Def Jam record label continues to hold the leading spot in the market with 2002 revenues of $780 million.

Simmons founded the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network (HHSAN) in 2001 to harness the cultural relevance of hip-hop music as a catalyst for education advocacy and other societal concerns fundamental to the well-being of at-risk youth.

CLT workshops offered for faculty
The Center for Learning Technologies is offering a variety of faculty workshops this spring. Registration is required: Go to www.clt.odu.edu/facdev and click on the myDev button. For more information call Susan Boze at 683-3712.

April 13 – Brown Bag: “Effective Practices: What Are Reusable Learning Objects Anyway,” 12:30-1:30 p.m., 422 Gornto; light refreshments served

April 14 – Workshop - Part 1: “Getting Started with PowerPoint: Slideshow Presentation Tool,” 1:30-4:30 p.m., 411 Gornto

April 15 – Workshop - Part 2: “Interacting with Your Students in Blackboard,” 5:45-7:45 p.m., 411 Gornto

April 21 – Workshop - Part 2: “Using PowerPoint Effectively in Your Classroom,” 1:30-4:30 p.m., 411 Gornto

April 22 – Workshop - Part 3: “Assessing and Collecting Student Feedback in Blackboard,” 5:45-7:45 p.m., 411 Gornto

April 27 – Brown Bag: “Web Accessibility and Section 508 Guidelines,” 12:30-1:30 p.m., 422 Gornto; light refreshments served

April 28 – Workshop: “Orientation to Blackboard: Online Course Management System,” 1:30-4:30 p.m., 411 Gornto

May 6 – Workshop - Part 1: “Getting Started with Blackboard: Online Course Management System,” 1:30-4:30 p.m., 411 Gornto

May 13 – Workshop - Part 2: “Interacting with Your Students in Blackboard,” 1:30-4:30 p.m., 411 Gornto.

Briefly Noted
Gaubatz to discuss security, foreign policy on WGR
Kurt Taylor Gaubatz, director of the Graduate Program in International Studies, will be featured on an upcoming episode of the statewide radio program “With Good Reason.” The show will be broadcast at 11:30 a.m. April 13 on WHRV-FM.

Gaubatz, author of the 2002 book “Elections and War,” will discuss how foreign policy and national security are shaping up to be major campaign issues in this year’s presidential race. Elected leaders tend to be somewhat skeptical of waging war because of electoral implications, he says.

ODU’s military programs commended in review
Old Dominion recently was commended for its superior military programs by the American Council of Education’s Center for Lifelong Learning.

“ODU’s commitment to military education is admirable,” according to the review. “Further, it has created a panoply of programs which meet several specific needs of both military students and society.”

The Washington-based council’s recent Military Installation Voluntary Education Review of Hampton Roads naval installations, conducted in October, lauded ODU for:

• creating innovative military education programs that meet the needs of service members;
• its curriculum development and maintenance processes that ensure compliance with professional standards, such as the 100 percent pass rates on the PRAXIS I and II exams;
• its site representative at Norfolk Naval Station, who provides exemplary service to students, the institutions she serves and to higher education for military service members; and
• Perry Library, which provides an exceptional program of information resources and services to Navy students.
  

Volunteers sought on 13th for Lafayette River clean-up
Members of the campus community are invited to take part in a clean-up of the Lafayette River from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. April 13. The university has adopted, through the commonwealth of Virginia’s Adopt-A-Stream Program, the portion of the Lafayette River shoreline that lies behind Rogers Hall and along 49th Street.

Staff members should obtain authorization from their supervisor to attend. They may use community service leave to participate in the project, according to Rachel DeMunda, director of environmental health and safety. For more information or to register contact her at rdemunda@odu.edu or 683-4495.
Volunteers should dress appropriately for the project; gloves and disposable shoe covers will be provided. A pizza party will follow the event. Back to top

Semester at Sea: “Innocents Abroad, 2002”
BY MICHAEL PEARSON
Director of Creative Writing

One must travel to learn.”
– Mark Twain, “Innocents Abroad”

You can almost guess from the map that Japan is a country of calculated spaces and deep reserve. It is about the size and shape of California, if that state were shaken free from the mainland by an earthquake and left to drift lonely in the Pacific Ocean. But unlike California, which seems overcrowded by most normal standards, Japan is a country so densely populated that manners seem a key to survival rather than the extracurricular activity that they often appear to be in the United States. Our course across the misnamed Pacific Ocean from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Kobe, Japan, was 4,500 miles and took two weeks. Other than a glimpse of the Aleutian Islands, we saw no land at all for those 14 days.

The sea was our home, and each morning we propped ourselves against the ship’s rails, the salt spray misting against our skin. Over time, perhaps, the sea has grown more pungent with the salt of the continents. In my mouth it left the taste of another world. After a few days, the vastness of the ocean made us long for the familiar distractions of the land just as the land had once made us yearn for the uncluttered sea. The second day out, at noon, we sighted a whale’s spout and the curve of black back breaking the smooth surface of the water. We watched and waited. The ocean compels such attention, a humility, or at least a looking beyond self. On land, usually, we look to filter out and distinguish among the individual images that crowd our consciousness, but on the ocean we strain to see the specific amidst the seeming sameness. Our first day aboard the ship, Captain Ryan said in lilting Irish tones, “We’re just a sliver of steel in this wide, wide ocean.” And we were – just a thought flickering against the conflagration of experience.

Off the starboard bow the next morning, a rainbow – pale green, yellow and rust – streamed from a dark cloud. What must have lost sailors made of such signs? That they were omens or tricks of fate? Behind me the sun bled through a carpet of clouds, and the sea was immeasurably beautiful. It was the last calm day we would have for a while.

The ocean can make you feel as old as time itself. For the ancient Greeks the sea was an endless river that circled the planet, a stream between the end of the earth and the beginning of heaven. The Pacific is not only the largest ocean but the deepest and, maybe, the most misapprehended. First, of course, it was misunderstood by the man who struggled with it on his way around the world in the sixteenth century – Ferdinand Magellan. As Daniel Boorstin explains in “The Discoverers”: “During the whole three months and 20 days during which they sailed about 12,000 miles through open ocean, they had not a single storm. Misled by this one experience, they named it Pacific.”

I was thinking of Magellan when we awoke to seven-foot swells, spumes of spray dancing along the ridgeline of whitecaps that stretched to the horizon. It could have been romantic, an Impressionistic sky, the sea a quilt of light blue and steel gray, but most of the voyagers were too sick to appreciate it. Half the faces I saw around the ship were pasty yellow or pale green. During my first class, at least half a dozen students walked out of the room, narrow-eyed, jaw muscles popping, as if they despised me. But as the ship rose and fell with the waves and I caught sight of the horizon line bobbing up and down with a sickening regularity in the picture window on the left side of the classroom, I realized that I wasn’t the worst teacher in the world – as I had at first suspected – but that my wit was no match for nausea. At least, I decided, my teaching didn’t cause nausea. And given the fact that I had to hold tight to the podium to stand upright and was feeling queasy myself, I was perfectly satisfied with that meager achievement.

Unlike Magellan, those first few days out, I didn’t have to deal with mutinies or starvation, just an audience that rose and fell and changed hue before my eyes. Once I got used to the fact that nausea produced a look on someone’s face that could easily be mistaken for apathy or even hatred, then I was better able to control my instinct to hide in my cabin.

In that first week, shortly before we landed in Japan, the staff captain, Harry Sylvester, a tall, gray-bearded man with ironic eyes and a smile that could silence a room of 700-people, offered the students some warnings.

“If you have to abandon ship, women and children first applies,” he said, eyeing the college men in the first few rows.

“Doors are heavy. Close them. If they’re open and you have your finger on them, they could close, leaving you with a smarting, broken or severed finger.” He eyed the children in the room.

“If there’s a fire and you happen to be trained in firefighting, well by all means grab a fire extinguisher and be a hero. If not, call someone and get out of the way.” He seemed to look directly at me for this one.

He told us about “Mr. Skylight” and “Code Blue” (medical emergency codes for the crew) and then he paused for “Mr. Mob.”

“That’s ‘Man overboard,’” he said, “and God help you if you slip into the sea. The chances are not good that we’re getting you back. A few years ago aboard Semester at Sea, a young man took it into his mind that he wanted to rappel from the deck of the ship and touch the water. It was midnight. He had had enough wine, I suppose, to make this seem to be a fine idea. Or maybe he was naturally stupid. He fell into the sea. The ship performed a figure-eight maneuver and, miraculously, we found him a few hours later. He was sent home at the next port. We don’t want to search for you in the dark sea and we don’t want to call your parents to say you were lost overboard – so if any idea seems stupid to you, it is. Don’t do it.”

Harry Sylvester had offered convincing warnings, and we lost no one at sea. We were all prepared, though, for some encounter with suffering in Japan. We even expected it. Kobe, our destination port, was only two hours from Hiroshima by bullet train and a few more by bus. And as Kenzuboro Oe wrote, “Hiroshima is like a nakedly exposed wound inflicted on all mankind.” Was there a more appropriate place to understand the reality of suffering than a country founded on the first noble truth of Buddhism?

Located at the confluence of the Ota and Motoyasu rivers, the city has been rebuilt in the concrete, steel and glass image of everything else we saw in Japan, but at its heart stands the A-Bomb Dome, a haunting reminder of Aug. 6, 1945, and all that remains of the old city. The twisted girders and skeleton of a building have been preserved by UNESCO as a reminder. We walked to the Cenotaph, erected in memory of the victims of the bomb, and we marched solemnly through the museum, forcing ourselves to look at the photographs of the rubble and the charred bodies. Two things stay with me from that day. It was the first time I had been in a museum in which the history was not written by Americans or friends of America. I felt shame for my own country.

Outside the Dome, we met a man who was 7 years old when the bomb dropped. He looked older than most 64-year-old Americans might have, wizened and missing a few front teeth. But as he spoke with us, translated by a young woman on the street, he made me realize that he was History, that he was what the bomb was about, the individual standing against the faceless flash of a technology sparking out of control. Somehow, he had survived the destruction, and somehow Hiroshima and Japan had, as well, rebuilding their cities and countries with a quiet courage and reserve and determination.

In Kobe that night we drank beers in an Irish pub that didn’t serve Guinness but that did have two Irish-Americans on acoustic guitars singing Beatles songs. When we left the bar, Kobe was ablaze in colored lights. Down the street, outside an upscale noodle restaurant, a dozen men were laughing and shouting. It seems only drunk men or baseball fans make loud noises in Japan. The men were tossing a compatriot into the air, singing some phrase as they did it, and laughing like schoolboys when they caught him again. The man turned to us, “This is the happiest day of my life!” He had just retired and his co-workers were launching him into a new world. They let me participate in tossing the man, and we joined together like campers on the shores of Long Lake in Maine during one of those summers from my boyhood.

Michael Pearson, director of creative writing, taught three courses for the University of Pittsburgh’s Semester at Sea program from August to December 2002. This commentary is excerpted from his essay “Innocents Abroad, 2002,” which appears in the spring 2004 issue of Creative Nonfiction. Back to top