P.O.V.

'The River Will Be a Part of Us' by Justus Wayne Thomas, BA'80, chronicles the journey of a group of young people from the U.S. and Germany who launched a homemade raft on the Missouri River near Kansas City, determined to float to St. Louis and from there all the way down the Mississippi to New Orleans. Read More

Alumni remember K.C. Potter, emeritus dean of residential and judicial affairs, in their own words Read More

Right now, these native “flowers” are blooming in Nashville—at least, until they melt, which is typically right after they form. Frost flowers are winter ephemerals. They happen when air temperature drops below freezing and warm groundwater rises to extrude itself through the conduit of a real flower stem, especially if that stem is a white crownbeard (Verbesina virginica). “Ice segregation” is the process at work. Water and vapor freeze on contact with air, and waves from within push older crystals forward and out. Read More

Religious liberty is one of the earliest civic values associated with the United States, yet defining and defending it has proved a centurieslong process. When divided opinions by the court claim to be speaking for religious liberty, it's because religious liberty under the Constitution contains both a right to freely exercise religion and a right not to be coerced via the state into accepting someone else’s religious practices. Read More

The topic of burial is never easy, but for alumna Mallory McDuff, BS'88, the sudden deaths of her parents led her to realign her final wishes with climate change, community and family in mind. Read More

Jon Parrish Peede, BS’91, former director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, reflects on his respect for the late Vereen Bell. Read More

As I retire from my position as dean of Vanderbilt’s School of Nursing in July, with plans to return to the faculty, I am eager to use the painful lessons of the past year to help train a new generation of nurses who will reshape the health care profession for the better. Read More

Confronted by the strangeness of the French language as a first-year student, an alumnus draws solace decades later from what he learned at Vanderbilt Read More

Fifty years later, finally it may be time to give this novel another chance. Deliverance offers too much relevance to contemporary American culture to let it slip past us, out of print. Read More

Racial injustice is a different sort of virus infecting our country and requires a comprehensive treatment, writes Dr. André L. Churchwell, BS’75, vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion and chief diversity officer for Vanderbilt University. Read More

Goldsmith, now an associate professor of marketing at Vanderbilt, explains what behavioral research has taught us about how scarcity affects our thinking and our actions. Read More

While threats to food production are varied and region-specific, a single story connects them: Climate change is becoming something we can taste. This is now a kitchen-table issue, literally and otherwise. Read More

Because knuckleballers want no spin at all, they don’t engage the same muscles as conventional pitchers. If a robot could pitch, it would throw like a knuckleballer, like one mechanical piece instead of a flexible acrobat stressing multiple leverage points to impart spin. The physical dangers of repeated throws at maximum effort do not apply for these craftsmen. Theirs is the safest pitch of all, but the trade-off is severe: It is also the hardest to master, and to trust. Read More

When I come out to my students and colleagues as from the working class, I want to expand the idea of who or what a professor is, and I especially hope to give upwardly mobile students—those incarnations of my younger self—the example and language to find one another. Read More

Milner writes that what black students need more than anything else is less schooling and more education. Read More

A little more than two months after he spoke to nearly 11,000 people at Vanderbilt’s 1968 student-led Impact Symposium, presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy was assassinated in California. Frye Gaillard writes about serveing as Impact’s chairman and Kennedy’s host at Vanderbilt. Read More

Before we go further and send humans to Mars, we need to know if doing so could trigger the extinction of existing life on the planet, writes Professor of Astronomy David Weintraub. Read More

JONATHAN TICHLER, METROPOLITAN OPERA   By Dr. John Sergent, BA’63, MD’66 In 1972 I moved to New York City with my wife, Carole, BA’63, and our two young daughters to do a fellowship in rheumatology. A few months after we moved, we met Francis Robinson, a fellow… Read More

Lorena Infante Lara writes about her plans to use her Ph.D. to pursue a career in the media. Read More

Brian Jones, BA’02, writes about how traveling the world has changed his life. Read More