September 2003			Venti Vidi Vici Up From Ground Zero It Was a Hundred Years Ago Today	Letters Sports E Line Books Q&A Classes Alumni Passages First-Person Huskiana
		Longtime faculty senate leader relishes his role Robert Lowndes didn’t set out to chair Northeastern’s faculty senate agenda committee. But he seems to feel an affinity. Lowndes led the faculty governing body for two years starting in 1978. Twenty years passed—the physics professor served as Arts and Sciences dean and university provost—then, back as a regular faculty member, he took the job again. Now he’s in the leadership role for the third year in a row. The position’s a crucial one. The agenda committee chair helps decide which issues the faculty body debates. The job requires many meetings as well as individual chats with dozens of faculty members and academic officials. Lowndes says he’s always found the job interesting—even if he never actually sought it. Back in 1978, as a member of the agenda committee, he wound up as chair when former math professor Robert Klein, who had just taken the position, died. The big topic at the time was retrenchment, Lowndes recalls, which wasn’t much fun to deal with. Lowndes was again on the senate in 1988, this time chairing the whole group in his role as provost, happy to be back among old friends. Then, two years ago, intending only to serve as a regular senate member, Lowndes was urged to run for agenda committee chair. “I said, ‘Yeah, why not?” he recalls. “Then, five minutes later, they closed nominations—and I was the only candidate.” Lowndes has always enjoyed his role as good-natured gadfly. When former president Kenneth Ryder announced a generous 16.9 percent merit increase for faculty in 1980–1981 shortly before he was scheduled to fly with Lowndes to China, Ryder quipped, “I wouldn’t be able to stand sitting next to Lowndes all the way across the Pacific, with him arguing for a higher merit increase.” Semester era begins It’s official: Northeastern is now on a semester calendar, after thirty-seven years on a quarter-based system. In the planning stages since 1999, the new semester calendar is expected to improve teaching and learning, enhance the co-op experience for both students and employers, prove more attractive to better-qualified applicants, help increase student retention, achieve administrative efficiencies, and promote collaborative efforts with academic, professional, and industrial partners. For full-time undergraduates and most graduate students, the new calendar consists of fifteen-week semesters in the fall and the spring, and two seven-and-a-half-week summer sessions. Fall semester runs from early September to mid-December; spring semester runs from early January to late April; and summer sessions run from early May to mid-June and from early July to mid-August. For now, University College and the School of Law will remain on the quarter system. Slew of national honors for NU Magazine It’s been another banner summer for Northeastern University Alumni Magazine, which has collected eleven more major awards for design and editorial achievement. The magazine won five Circle of Excellence awards from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). Herbert Hadad’s essay “Utter Anxiety” [January] earned a silver medal for best article; English professor Gary Goshgarian’s piece “The Days of the Dolphins” [November 2002] earned a bronze in the same category. CASE also awarded the magazine a bronze medal for best illustration—for Paine Proffitt’s work in “Utter Anxiety”—and two bronzes for best two-page spread design—for “Flying High with Steve Walker” [May 2002] and “End of an Era” [September 2002]. The Association of Educational Publishers (EdPress) awarded a gold medal for best fiction to the short story “Meyer and Silla” [January 2002], written by Peter Orner, L’96, and a gold medal for best article design to “End of an Era.” In addition, the magazine was named an EdPress finalist for best photograph and best whole publication design. The Society of Publication Designers recognized the magazine with an excellence award for best portrait photography in a spread/single page, for “End of an Era.” Finally, the opening spread for “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Bear?” [November 2002] has been chosen for inclusion in Print magazine’s 2003 regional design annual. VP hired for adult ed, two other VPs sought Northeastern has hired a new vice president to oversee University College and is continuing its search for new vice presidents in the areas of student affairs and cooperative education. Christopher Hopey, AS’88, MPA’91, former vice dean for graduate admissions and executive education at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, was appointed in July to the newly created position of vice president for adult and continuing education. He is the first vice president to oversee University College as well as other continuing education efforts at Northeastern. The job is in many ways a homecoming for Hopey—a New Jersey native who grew up in New Hampshire—who not only earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Northeastern, but also served as the university’s assistant director of continuing education from 1989 to 1991. He takes over from University College interim dean Judith Stoessel. A nineteen-year NU veteran, Stoessel left to become dean of continuing education and graduate studies and an associate professor of education at Curry College, in Milton, Massachusetts. As a Northeastern student, Hopey earned a bachelor’s in political science and a master’s in public administration. He also holds a PhD in higher education management from his former employer, the University of Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, Northeastern officials are continuing their search for new vice presidents to lead the operations of student affairs and cooperative education. In student affairs, the university will replace vice president Karen Rigg, who retired last month after fourteen years on the job. Rigg remains at Northeastern part-time to work on leadership development. In cooperative education, a new vice president is needed to fill the spot being vacated by Richard Porter, vice president and dean since 1998, who returns to the mathematics faculty this fall. The post is expected to be filled this month. Financial aid requests leap in sour economy Financial aid officials at Northeastern have their hands full these days as they field a deluge of financial aid requests, driven by a tough economy. According to Seamus Harreys, dean of the student financial services office, financial aid appeals have jumped 40 percent over the past two years, spurred mostly by changes in family finances. Harreys says appeals are coming from both current and prospective students for three main reasons: income cut, job loss, or decrease in asset value. “Loss in asset value is a big one,” says Harreys. “As the stock market slides, a family may still hold the same stock, but it’s worth maybe seventy-five percent or half of what it was worth two years ago.” The declining market’s effect on co-op job availability also has financial aid ramifications. Some students who can’t find jobs are opting to resume classes instead, and may need financial aid dollars to pay for them. Eight out of every nine grant-aid dollars for undergraduates come from the university; the difference is made up by federal, state, or private sources, areas that have also taken recent hits. Though the federal government recently increased financial aid availability, previous cuts have meant the actual aid amount available has stayed relatively stagnant. And Massachusetts reduced its aid by 33 percent this year. To handle the heavy volume of financial aid requests, Northeastern’s student financial services operation was just expanded. Six new office spaces and as many full-time counselors have been added. Officials craft responses to worst-case events Readying for worst-case scenarios isn’t just the domain of the federal government anymore. These days, businesses, schools, and individuals all worry about coping with possible disasters. Northeastern’s no exception. Several dozen administrators have been strategizing for the past year and a half about what to do in case of an emergency—everything from a power outage, to a chemical spill, to, in the worst case, a terrorist attack. University officials have long made efforts to prepare for various emergencies. But, as information services vice president Robert Weir puts it, the September 11 terrorist attacks “raised everybody’s awareness. Now everybody thinks about it.” And so, Northeastern has been planning. Officials have spent long hours pondering how, in an emergency, to evacuate people from buildings, allow administrators to communicate with one another as well as with other members of the university community, keep major computer systems up and running, and maintain the operation of critical business functions. Those involved with disaster planning say a terrorist attack, although uppermost in many people’s minds these days, is low on the list of likely emergencies at Northeastern. More probable is something like a power outage or an environmental issue. “Like a toilet overflows above your CPU,” says Weir. “It sounds funny, but the mundane things are much more likely.” Some of the university’s preparations: • Establishing an emergency communications site. The idea is to enable top officials to confer with each other and to have access to cell phones, the Internet, police radio, and walkie-talkies. Another top priority is making sure parents and students are able to get information during a disaster. • Imagining dozens of different disaster scenarios and planning for each. • Determining how to keep computer systems functioning during an emergency. Toward this, the university has a plan to reestablish computer capability at the Warren Center in Ashland. Officials hope they never have to make use of such plans. However, says Weir, “we have to keep incentive and momentum going [to be ready] for an improbable event.” Take a Bow! Northeastern vice president for public affairs Robert Gittens has been named chair of the Massachusetts Juvenile Justice Advisory Committee. The former Massachusetts health and human services secretary—who has also chaired the state’s parole board and worked as an assistant district attorney—was chosen for the new post by Governor Mitt Romney because of his strong background in working with minority youth. The committee will review juvenile justice policy issues, oversee funding distributions, and examine racial disparities in the juvenile justice system. President George W. Bush has appointed law professor David Hall to the board of directors of the Legal Services Corporation, a nonprofit corporation established by Congress in 1974 to ensure equal access to justice for all Americans, regardless of their ability to pay. Northeastern law school dean from 1993 to 1998 and university provost from 1998 to 2003, Hall is an expert in contract, bankruptcy, corporate-reorganization, civil rights, and consumer law, and has researched collective rights in Zimbabwe and South Africa.