Feature

One hundred million dollars in gifts for scholarships. That’s the ambitious goal of Opportunity Vanderbilt, the university’s commitment to replace need-based undergraduate student loans with grants and scholarships. The good news: To date, Vanderbilt has raised $81 million in gifts for scholarship endowment. The not-so-good news: Vanderbilt’s… Read More

For a university that claims just one national championship to its name, Vanderbilt certainly has a national stage when it comes to alumni sports writers. ESPN, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, The Washington Post, and the sports website FanHouse all feature writers who honed their craft at Vanderbilt. Read More

As a Republican leader during a time when partisanship rocks the nation’s Capitol, Lamar Alexander walks a thin line. Read More

Vanderbilt takes on the childhood obesity epidemic, one family at a time. Read More

The mantra for 21st-century Greek organizations: Work hard, play hard, be smart, be safe, be responsible. Read More

Opening doors in Tinseltown takes smarts, guts and, if you’re very lucky, alumni on the inside. Read More

It is a tenet of the self-help faith: Follow your passion, and it will lead you down the road to professional success, personal fulfillment and financial reward. The alumni profiled in this issue turn this self-help cliché on its head. They have followed their passions, yes, but down an alternate… Read More

Tisha Holloway was exhausted. She had been laboring in a North Carolina hospital for almost 26 hours to give birth to her first child, but the baby just wouldn’t come. “I tried to do everything right during my pregnancy,” the 27-year-old woman says. “I ate right, exercised, kept my… Read More

(Photo: Herb Peck) “I have sometimes said that during the half dozen or so years from 1967 to 1973, I never relaxed once,” Vanderbilt’s fifth chancellor, Alexander Heard, once remarked. “That’s not technically true, of course, but I was constantly aware of the local and national matters that affected Vanderbilt’s… Read More

A competitive spirit burns in every Vanderbilt student. They wouldn’t be on campus without that drive to succeed at the highest levels of academia. But some students take that spirit even further. They have, in essence, two full-time jobs—student and athlete. Vanderbilt consistently ranks first in athlete graduation rates in… Read More

Jeanne Moses didn’t have a history of cancer in her family. She didn’t have symptoms—just backache and a bit of weight loss. Nothing unusual for a 45-year-old mother working two jobs. So she was stunned when her doctor delivered the news: Jeanne Moses—technical writer, theatrical costumer, daughter of the director,… Read More

Rodes Hart (left) and Orrin Ingram Rodes Hart and Orrin Ingram believe in Vanderbilt. As alumni, trustees, philanthropists and visionaries, they reflect on the opportunities—and challenges—of eliminating need-based loans and increasing scholarship endowment. Rodes Hart, who graduated from the College of Arts and Science in 1954 and now… Read More

The Vanderbilt Aid Society elected Elizabeth Boddie Elliston (above) as its first president and Mary Barbour Wallace (left) as its first secretary/treasurer. The “simple fare” served at their organizational meeting included chicken salad, scalloped oysters, beaten biscuits, sandwiches, individual ices and cakes, almonds, and pink and white mints. It began… Read More

Glacial melting. Amphibian and honeybee populations in precipitous decline. Ocean dead zones. Rain forests burned to make way for agricultural fields. Some days it’s hard to know which we should worry about first. Fortunately for the rest of us, the alumni you’ll meet here aren’t wringing their hands waiting for… Read More

I knew Neil Brake was a remarkably gifted photographer as soon as I saw his portfolio. From the day he came to work at Vanderbilt eight years ago, he dogged the campus like it was his beat and as if he were competing for a front-page hot spot. Years of… Read More

At 1:16 p.m. on an unseasonably warm Middle Tennessee Saturday in late December, the page goes out to the crew of LifeFlight 1, which is based in Lebanon, Tenn.: “ADULT LVL ONE: SCENE: Vanderbilt LifeFlight 1: ETA 10: 18 yom c/c MVA, pt is ett’d poss head inj. BP109/57: HR110:… Read More

illustration by liz asher/www.lizasher.com Clarksville, Tenn., a city of 125,000 on the Tennessee–Kentucky border, is best known for its proximity to the sprawling Fort Campbell Army Base. The town takes pride in attracting new industry and bills itself as the “Gateway to the New South.” But Clarksville is also a… Read More

The largest open dump in Latin America, La Chureca was named one of the “20 Horrors of the Modern World” in a contest sponsored by the Spanish magazine Interviu. For outright squalor and heartbreak, the city dump of Managua, Nicaragua, where 1,500 people live daily on rotting scraps, could serve… Read More

[Smiley Pool/MCT] It seems every time we turn on the news, a disaster has occurred. With all our knowledge, skill and technology, why can’t we do something to prevent them, or at least keep them from causing such devastation? Watch video of Mark Abkowitz discussing risk management Several years… Read More

“Welcome to the greatest university in the world,” proclaimed Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos to first-year students as they arrived on campus in late August with duffle bags, twin-size bed linens and teary-eyed moms in tow. They are the first entering Vanderbilt class to live and learn in The Commons, in… Read More