Year: 2009

Sophomore Curt Casali kept the competition off guard at first base as in this win against Western Kentucky. Commodores Finish 2009 Baseball Season with Strong Showing The Commodores found their bats and dug in defensively in postseason play to advance to the championship game of the SEC Tournament and the… Read More

Wirth “Welcome to Germany. Just three weeks until you’ll be in Bosnia,” I was told by my battalion’s personnel sergeant upon my 1993 arrival in Frankfurt. I never imagined then how my longing to experience the adventures of transformational Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) would lead me through the dense… Read More

“How are you holding up?” “What about the loud music?” “Do students knock on your door at midnight?” “Do parents call you?” Reflecting on my first year as a faculty head of house in The Commons for first-year students, these are a reasonably representative sample of the questions I’ve fielded… Read More

I started writing stories because I was lonely. I wish there were more artistic and noble reasons that I put pen to paper, but the truth of the matter is that I wanted people to kiss me and I had the unfounded notion that, if I wrote a good enough… Read More

Several years ago I had the chance to hear popular Vanderbilt philosophy professor John Lachs deliver a talk titled “The Human Race: Both Better Off and Better” to a small suburban group of perhaps 20 people. Lachs opened his presentation by telling the group that he hoped the evening would… Read More

Health Care, Society and Personal Responsibility I very much enjoyed reading “Invisible Nation” by Dr. John Sergent, BA’63, MD’66 [Spring 2009 issue, VJournal]. The doctor argues that “decent health care is a right of citizenship” and compares, as moral equivalents, segregation based on race with denial of… Read More

Wayne Coyne, frontman for The Flaming Lips, works the crowd from inside his signature plastic bubble during the psychedelic rock band’s headliner performance at Rites of Spring. “I did not feel like I was standing on Alumni Lawn sandwiched between Alumni and Tolman halls. Rather, I felt like I was… Read More

Mark Loomis, BA’89 “When I was making my 3,000th copy on the second day of my first job, I realized the one course they didn’t teach at Vanderbilt was how to fix the copier,” says Mark Loomis. That first job, with ABC Sports, saw Loomis running errands, making lots of… Read More

Jasbina Ahluwalia, BA’91, MA’92 Making time for personal relationships while juggling the demands of a busy professional life led attorney Jasbina Ahluwalia down a new career path several years ago. The second-generation Indian American is founder of Intersections Matchmaking, which caters to single South Asian professionals nationwide. “Finding time for… Read More

Kevin Wilson Kevin Wilson, BA’00, is author of the collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories (2009, ECCO/Harper Perennial). His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, One Story, Cincinnati Review and elsewhere, and twice has been included in the New Stories from the South: The Year’s… Read More

Editor GayNelle Doll Art Director and Designer Donna DeVore Pritchett Editorial Associate Editor and Advertising Manager Phillip B. Tucker Arts & Culture Editor Bonnie Arant Ertelt, BS’81 Class Notes and Sports Editor Nelson Bryan, BA’73 Photography and Imaging Assistant Director,… Read More

At any moment during the eight-hour surgery, 14 or more personnel were working around the babies. Three-month-old conjoined twins Keylee Ann and Zoey Marie Miller were separated April 7 during a complex eight-hour operation at the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt. The surgery, carried out by… Read More

As Vanderbilt Magazine was going to press, we received word of the death of Vanderbilt’s beloved fifth chancellor, Alexander Heard, who led Vanderbilt from 1963 until 1982. Much admired by students and faculty alike, he was adviser to three U.S. presidents and chancellor at Vanderbilt during a time of enormous… Read More

Strong evidence was found in the 2004 and 2008 AmericasBarometer surveys carried out by the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) that Honduras was unusually vulnerable to political instability, says Vanderbilt political scientist Mitchell Seligson. He is the co-author of "Predicting Coups? Democratic Vulnerabilities, The AmericasBarometer and The 2009 Honduran Crisis," part of the Insights Series published by LAPOP. Read More

VUCast for July 31, 2009: From big bucks to bankruptcy...new lottery pitfalls. (3:47) Read More

The controversy over President Obama's birth certificate will not go away as long as he refuses to release sealed records, including the original birth certificate, according to Carol Swain, professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University. Read More

Great Performances at Vanderbilt celebrates its 35th anniversary in 2009-2010 with four free shows by Australia's Strange Fruit company at Centennial Park and Vanderbilt. Other events include a radio documentary performance by L.A. Theatre Works and music by Grupo Cultural AfroReggae. Read More

Watch video of Chancellor Alexander Heard\'s July 29 memorial service at Benton Chapel. Read More

Special arrangements have been made for those attending the 3 p.m. memorial service July 29 at Benton Chapel for Chancellor Emeritus Alexander Heard, who died July 24. Read More