Above: Five hundred new North Carolina Teaching Fellows gather at the foot of ECU’s clock tower during their visit to campus as part of the week long Discovery 2007 statewide tour.
Mendenhall remodeling set fter a brief lull in construction activity on the Main Campus, the bulldozers will return in February when a $38 million project gets under way to gut and rebuild Mendenhall Student Center. The building, erected in 1974, will be reconfigured to open up what now are cramped rooms lining twisting hallways. The exterior also will be redone in the Italian Renaissance style to make Mendenhall blend in with nearby historic structures like Jarvis and Cotten halls. If all goes well the new Student Center will reopen in fall 2009.
Most noticeably, the rear of Mendenhall facing 10th Street will be demolished and replaced with a ballroom capable of seating 500, said Kenneth Luker, the architect in charge of the project. A large plaza will be added there to create a striking entrance for the ballroom. The other three sides of the building also will gain entrance plazas in hopes of making Mendenhall more inviting, Luker added.
Most of the ground floor will become home to the Student Government Association as well as other offices that deliver student services. The main floor will have the new ballroom, a student lounge, dining facilities and the Hendrix Theatre. The top floor will offer meeting rooms, an art gallery and lounge as well as administrative offices.
The atrium in the center of the building will survive, as will Hendrix Theatre and the bowling alley below it in the west wing, the architect said. “The building is not very accessible now and it’s not physically inviting,” said Luker, an architect with Freelon & Associates in RTP. “The intention is to open up the interior so there is more open space and to organize the space in a much more functional way.”
The project also entails construction of a new home for the Ledonia Wright Cultural Center in a three-story, 18,000-square-foot freestanding building that will go up between Mendenhall and Joyner Library.
Student activity fees are paying for the renovation, and students participated in several group meetings to decide how best to reconfigure Mendenhall. “We are trying to turn the student center back into a center of interest on campus for students and alumni. By making it a much more inviting and functional building, it can recapture its role in campus life as one of the main hubs of activity,” Luker said. Bids for the renovation will be let in February or March; the project is expected to take 16 months or more to complete.
Grappling with growth … Several years of sustained growth have transformed the Division of Health Sciences (DHS) into one of the nation’s largest training grounds for doctors, nurses and allied health professionals. Now, officials on the medical campus are pausing to catch their breath and exploring changes necessary to support the larger numbers of students, faculty and programs. And as they restructure to accommodate the continuing surge in students, DHS leaders also are under pressure to run the bustling health care division like the huge business it has become.
The numbers are stunning. The School of Nursing has doubled in size over the past decade. Enrollment at Allied Health Sciences has jumped 34 percent in three years. The Brody School of Medicine is planning to increase its classes from 72 to 80. And on the horizon is the new School of Dentistry.
A growing challenge is placing so many students in clinical internships. Finding places where all these budding doctors, nurses and other skilled health care workers can hone their skills—already a challenge in rural eastern North Carolina—becomes harder as enrollment in these programs continues growing.
“Health sciences are a big part of East Carolina University,” says Dr. Phyllis Horns, interim vice chancellor for health sciences and acting dean of the Brody School of Medicine. “We have to make sure we are ready to provide the teaching and clinical experiences students need.”
“We have very limited sites,” says Dr. Virginia Hardy, interim senior associate dean for academic affairs. “It’s not just because of the medical school. Our regional providers are also being asked to accept students in nursing and allied health. In many cases, each school may be trying to place students in the same locations.”
… and the budget The red ink has turned black at ECU Physicians, a sign that the organizational changes implemented last November by Chancellor Steve Ballard are paying off.
In a fiscal year-end report, the Medical Faculty Practice Plan, which lost $14.1 million last year and was projected to lose $18.8 million this year, actually turned a small profit on revenues of $132 million and noncapital expenses of $131.2 million. Revenues grew 10 percent from the prior year while expenses were up just 4.5 percent.
Ballard praised the results during a July 11 meeting of the practice plan steering committee, saying turnarounds like this don’t happen often. “I just want everyone to know how huge that is,” he told the doctors.
Ballard has made it a top priority to restore financial strength to the Medical Faculty Practice Plan, the clinical arm of the medical school through which faculty members offer medical care and services to the community.
Known as ECU Physicians, the faculty practice operates 23 medical offices. The group piled up some red ink in recent years mainly because the doctors treat so many indigent patients. Overall, two out of three patients they see have no insurance other than Medicare or Medicaid. Malpractice insurance premiums tripled in five years to $4.5 million a year.
The financial results were buoyed by items such as a $2.3 million payment from Medicaid in May and targeted expense reductions, but without “slash and burn” cost-cutting or workforce reductions, said David Brody, an ECU trustee and chairman of the steering committee.
A poet’s work comes home Correspondence, manuscripts and artwork by acclaimed North Carolina-born poet A.R. Ammons (
above) are the centerpiece of a new literary collection housed at Joyner Library. Although he is not well known in his native state, Archie Ammons won virtually every major prize for poetry in the United States, including two National Book Awards. He died in 2001 after a distinguished career on the faculty of Cornell University.
Reid Overcash ’73 of Raleigh donated the materials, which include personal correspondence and manuscripts as well as 15 watercolor paintings by Ammons. Overcash had purchased the watercolors more than 25 years ago and obtained the written materials from British collector Dr. Stuart Wright. The Ammons materials will be housed within the new Overcash-Wright Literary Collection.
A native of Whiteville in Columbus County, Ammons began writing poetry while serving aboard a U.S. naval destroyer during World War II. After the war he graduated from Wake Forest University and received a master’s degree from University of California at Berkley. He briefly returned to North Carolina, where he was an assistant principal at Cape Hatteras. The first of his nearly 30 books of poetry was published in 1955.
Ammons joined the faculty of Cornell in 1964 and taught there until his retirement in 1998. Many of his students became established poets, including Kenneth McClane, the W.E.B. Dubois Professor of Literature at Cornell. 5 Scott Cooper
Ammons won two National Book Awards for Poetry—in 1973 for Collected Poems 1951–1971 and in 1993 for Garbage. He also won the Frost Medal for Distinguished Achievement in Poetry, the Bolligen Prize from Yale University, the National Book Critics Circle Award of Poetry; the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Lannan Foundation Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Foundation “genius award.”
“Thomas Wolfe and Archie Ammons will be known as the two great North Carolina writers,” said East Carolina English professor Alex Albright, who edited A.R. Ammons: The North Carolina Poems, published in 1994. “He took what he learned on the ditch banks of his home near Whiteville and took that with him even when he moved away. He had the ability to make the common place magical.”
“I would like to see us use this as a foundation,” said Overcash, a member of the Board of Visitors and president of Strategic Insights. “There are other opportunities out there to expand our collection with writers either from eastern North Carolina or ECU, who are developing a strong reputation in their field and who would like to have their papers in a literary collection.”
Examining the 400-year-old book are ECU professor Larry Tise, University of Oxford professor Robert Fox, Ronnie Barnes ’75, and Harvard University professor Owen Gingrich. Old book on the New World It isn’t surprising that East Carolina would buy a book containing writings by the namesake of its College of Arts and Sciences. The unusual fact is that this book is more than 400 years old.
Thomas Harriot was Sir Walter Raleigh’s cartographer on the 1585 voyage to establish the Jamestown colony in Virginia. John White, a well-known artist of the time, accompanied Harriot on the expedition. Harriot’s writings about his year living with the colonists, along with White’s watercolor illustrations, were collected in a 1590 book published by Theorore de Bry, a wealthy German promoter of New World colonization. The book is entitled A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia.
Using private funds, East Carolina acquired the volume this spring for $50,000.
The book is in excellent condition, according to Harriot College Dean Alan White. It once belonged to Foster Sondley of Asheville, a noted book collector of the early 20th century.
After his experience in the New World, Harriot studied astronomy and made several discoveries that did not become known until published after his death. He apparently discovered the phenomenon of sunspots decades before Galileo observed them.
Two years after his experiences with Harriot in Jamestown, White returned to the New World with Sir Walter Raleigh as governor of his next expedition. That 1587 voyage landed on Roanoke Island—the ill-fated Lost Colony.
