The idea for a building for alumnae emerged in 1920 as President Samuel Page Duke considered the needs of a growing campus. He became president in August 1919, as the first World War and global pandemic were still winding down and disruptions persisted. The Harrisonburg Normal School (formerly the State Normal and Industrial School for Women at Harrisonburg), which had closed temporarily during the pandemic, was bursting again with new students. The young women came from all over Virginia, eager to gain the kinds of skills and knowledge needed to join the workforce, which desperately sought women workers to replace men in all kinds of fields. Duke need funds for everything: dormitories, classrooms, offices, and even the social spaces so necessary for student life. The Alumnae Association quickly stepped in to help raise money.
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Notes on Leadership
What kind of leader are you? I recently chaired a search committee for an administrative position and it was one of the things we asked candidates—for obvious reasons. Really, what committees want to know with this question is, How will you motivate people, manage them, get them to do stuff? Nearly every candidate used the word ‘collaborative.’ I hear that word used so often these days, thrown around in meetings and casual conversation, that it has become a cliché. So I set out to do a little reading on leadership styles to see where ‘collaborative’ came from, what it meant, and what it meant for me as a leader, if anything.
What’s in a Name? The JMU Quad as a Lesson Plan
I’m republishing this August 2019 post today 6/20/20 with a disclaimer: it contains references to historic ideas, words, and images that today are considered racist. I temporarily removed it because petitions linking to it were circulating on mass media and social media, and portions of it were taken out of context.
If you understand that a college campus is a commemorative landscape, that its named buildings, statuary, roadways, plazas, and so forth all comprise a text that can be read for insights into the institution’s cultural values, then you’ll appreciate it when I say that JMU’s Quad is a kind of lesson plan. Conceived by Dr. John Wayland, first professor of history at the State Normal and Industrial School for Women at Harrisonburg and head of the department of Social Studies until 1931, the plan relies on the associative properties of monuments, which call forth the great deeds and virtues of the person or Continue reading
5 #AcWri Tips for Administrators
Now that my latest book is out, people want to know how I found the time to write it. When your days are full of meetings, plus you teach every semester, plus you have a family that includes a tween and a teen, well, you need a plan. I admit that the way I went about producing Race, Place, and Memory differed significantly from the strategy I used for my previous publications, written when I was a tenure-track assistant professor. In fact, my advice won’t work for everyone who holds an administrative role, Continue reading
Will the Real Dolley & Jimmy Please Stand up?
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The Madisons are big on this campus. There are two cats, for example, that hang out on the Quad and the students have named them . . . yup, Dolley and Jimmy. Images of James Madison are especially prominent: there are two statues, Big Jimmy (on east campus) and Little Jimmy (near my building). There are stylized Jimmy heads on our website, on the doors of official university vehicles, on t-shirts, Powerpoint templates, stationary, posters, and so on.We even had our own first-person interpreter, an undergraduate who dressed the part and delighted the community as she (yes she) walked around campus in tricorn and breeches. Most of these representations, interestingly, portray Madison as the father of the Constitution, a vigorous man in his prime. Dolley is far less visible, but no less beloved. I recently learned that there is an award named for her: students nominate each other for Dolley Leadership Awards in categories like Outstanding Student Organization and Outstanding Program/Event. Continue reading