Elizabethtown College News 
Back to top 11/21/2006 Four named to board of trustees Elizabethtown College has named four new members to its board of trustees. Daniel J. Jones '97 of Washington, D.C., and Leanna Whetstone Meiser '01 of Mount Joy have been named the College’s first Young Alumni Trustees, a  nd Raymond Cameron '62 of Hershey and John Miller of York have been named to the board.Jones is an international terrorism analyst with the Counterterrorism Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C. He previously served for three years with Teach For America (TFA) in inner-city Baltimore, where he taught middle school and trained incoming TFA corps members. He has also been involved with several not-for-profit organizations, including NetAid, The New Teacher Project and WITF in central Pennsylvania. In the summer of 2006, he helped establish the not-for-profit "Baltimore City Teacher’s Trust, Inc. (BCTT)" with four other TFA alumni. Jones received the Distinguished Student Award at Elizabethtown College, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1997 with a bachelor of arts degree in political science. He received a master of arts in teaching from Johns Hopkins University and was awarded a full scholarship to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 2001, where he received a master in public policy. A sales and marketing manager at Chocolate World, The Hershey Company, Meiser joined the Company in 2002 after teaching in the Hempfield School District. She previously served on Elizabethtown College’s Alumni Council and is currently a member of the President’s GOLD Club, the young alumni President’s Club. An active student leader, she was a member of the Student Senate, Sock & Buskin, College Choir, Math Club and the math honor society Pi Mu Epsilon. She graduated from Elizabethtown in 2001 with a degree in mathematics education. Having worked for more than 40 years in the field of trust administration, Cameron retired in 2006 as vice president and trust officer with Hershey Trust Company. He will continue to serve as a consultant for the Trust, specializing in developing new business. Prior to joining Hershey Trust in 1981, he was the vice president and trust officer at CoreStates Bank. Cameron is a member of the board and past president of the Estate Planning Council of Central Pennsylvania, past president of the Keystone Area Council, Boy Scouts of America, and past chairman of the board of Family & Children’s Services. He graduated from Elizabethtown in 1962 with a bachelor’s degree in accounting. An active volunteer for the College, he received an Outstanding Alumnus Award, chairs the Planned Giving Committee, participates in the Business Alumni Reunions and class reunions, and was a Career Fair participant. Cameron is also a graduate of the Pennsylvania Bankers Trust School and Cannon Trust School. Miller is a partner in the York law firm of Miller, Poole & Lord, LLP. In his business and real estate practice, he represents small and medium-sized businesses, family farms and real estate developers in all types of matters. In his municipal law practice, he serves as solicitor of Springfield Township and Dover Borough Zoning Hearing Board. Miller is active in his community and with the Brethren Church. He serves as vice president of the Farm and Natural Lands Trust of York County and as committee member of the Anderson Fund of the York Foundation. In the past, he has served as treasurer and board of directors chair, Brethren Home Foundation; board of directors member, Southern Pennsylvania District Church of the Brethren; board of directors member and president, Children’s Aid Society; president, York United Soccer Club. Miller earned a bachelor’s degree from York College of Pennsylvania in 1973 and a juris doctorate from Ohio Northern University School of Law in 1977. He has practiced law in southcentral Pennsylvania for more than 23 years and is a member of the Pennsylvania and York County Bar Associations, American Trial Lawyers Association and Township Solicitors Association of the Pennsylvania Association of Township Supervisors. Miller’s daughter Audrey is a 2006 biology/pre-medicine graduate of Elizabethtown College. He is a member of the Jacob L. Miller Jr. family, long-time supporters of Elizabethtown College and the College’s Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies. Back to top 11/17/2006 Elizabethtown named to President's Community Service Honor Roll Elizabethtown College is one of nearly 350 colleges and universities to be named to President Bush’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll.  More than 500 colleges and universities applied for this honor, which recognizes and promotes outstanding community service by institutions of higher education and their students across the country. The program, begun in 2006, is cosponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, USA Freedom Corps and the President’s Council on Service and Civic Participation. Many of Elizabethtown College’s community service programs are coordinated by the Service-Learning Program of the Center for Global Citizenship. Programs such as Into the Streets, which offers several hundred students opportunities to give back to the community, and the Parents and Pupils in Educational Partnership of the Elizabethtown Area School District are some of the ways in which college students participate in service-learning projects. In addition, the College involves students in urban service-learning activities in the richly diverse neighboring communities of Lancaster and Harrisburg. Faculty members are also supported in integrating service-learning into their academic courses and in finding placements in which students can be engaged meaningfully in deeper understanding of social, political and economic issues. “I think being named to the Honor Roll is a recognition of the tremendous amount of work done by our students, staff and faculty and the enormous impact they have on the community around us,” said William Ayres, director of Elizabethtown’s Center for Global Citizenship and professor of international relations. “It’s also an acknowledgment that ‘Educate for Service’ is not simply a marketing slogan for the College, but is the way we live and operate, every day, as a learning community. Service to the people around us, popular today in higher education, has never been a fad for Elizabethtown. We were doing it long before ‘service-learning’ became a buzzword, and we’ll still be doing it long after attention has turned elsewhere.” Back to top 11/17/2006 Robotics Club makes good showing at national competition A robotic vehicle -- dubbed Wunderbot III -- developed by members of Elizabethtown College’s Robotics and Machine Intelligence Club placed well in several components of  the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (www.igvc.org), sponsored this past summer by the U.S. Department of Defense.The competition challenged students to create a fully autonomous, unmanned ground robotic vehicle that could negotiate an obstacle course under a prescribed time, while staying within the five mile-per-hour speed limit. Led by Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Joseph Wunderlich, Elizabethtown’s team – one of only a few groups comprised completely of undergraduate students – placed 18th out of 28 in the “Autonomous Challenge,” and 9th out of 17 teams in its class in the Design Competition. (Photo gallery) The team’s primary sponsor was Phoenix Contact, a leading manufacturer of electronic connection and automation technology, whose U.S. headquarters are located in Middletown, Pa. The company donated equipment to help the students develop the vehicle and hired two of the students involved in the project, Tom Yeager '06 and Justin Shade '06, as sales and engineering marketing apprentices following their graduation last spring. The two will serve as technical advisors to future Elizabethtown teams. More information on Elizabethtown College’s Wunderbot projects is available at http://users.etown.edu/w/wunderjt. The site also includes a floor plan of the Robotics and Machine Intelligence Laboratory facilities scheduled to open in 2008 in the new Master’s Center for Science, Mathematics and Engineering. Back to top 11/16/2006 Alum, doctoral student to offer piano recital A 2000 graduate of Elizabethtown College who is currently working toward a doctorate  in musical arts will present a piano recital at 7:30 p.m., Dec. 4, in Zug Recital Hall. Jacob Hines’ performance, which will feature works by Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Debussy, Bartok and Liszt, is open to the public and free of charge.Hines completed a bachelor of arts degree with an emphasis in piano performance at Elizabethtown College. The recipient of several music scholarships, he was the 1998 winner of the Music Teachers National Association (MTNA) state competition (in Pennsylvania) and went on to compete in the MTNA Eastern Division competition. Hines completed a master’s degree in piano pedagogy at The University of Texas at Austin in 2002. He was awarded a Presidential Scholarship in Fine Arts and was the 2004 winner of the Janice K. Hodges Collegiate Level Contemporary Piano Competition. He was the pianist for Rosedale Baptist and Ridgetop Baptist churches in Austin, Texas, and is currently teaching piano and working toward completion of the doctorate in musical arts from The University of Texas. Back to top 11/13/2006 Volunteers paint mural at youth detention center More than 600 alumni, campus community members and their families worked at  nearly 50 sites during the College's annual community service day, "Into the Streets." Assistant Professor of Spanish Charla Lorenzen and her husband, Justin, led a group of workers who painted a mural at the Schaffner Youth Detention Center in Harrisburg. Artist Justin Lorenzen designed the mural, the outline of which the Elizabethtown volunteers painted on a wall. Center residents colored black-and-white photocopies of the design and will choose a version, then finish by adding color to the mural. Pictured are (back row, from left) sophomore Kristi Warner of Hanover, Pa.; sophomore Abby Mowery of Lewistown, Pa.; and sophomore Allison Burket of Montclair, Va.; (front row, from left) junior Odessa Armstrong of Pasadena, Md.; first-year student Kaitlin Kaufman of Frackville, Pa.; and Charla and Justin Lorenzen. Back to top 11/9/2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning author to discuss genocide Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Harvard professor Samantha Power will present “The Age of Genocide” at 11 a.m., Nov. 15, in  Elizabethtown College’s Leffler Chapel and Performance Center. The event, part of the fall colloquium series “The World in Focus,” is open to the public free of charge.Power is a professor of human rights practice at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Her book “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide” was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award for general non-fiction and the Council on Foreign Relations’ Arthur Ross Prize for the best book in U.S. foreign policy. “A Problem From Hell” is a scholarly analysis of America’s policy toward genocide in the 20th century that asks the haunting question: Why do American leaders who vow “never again” repeatedly fail to stop genocide? In a compelling and engaging narrative, Power draws upon exclusive interviews with Washington’s top policy makers, access to newly declassified documents and her own reporting from the modern killing fields to trace the United States’ policy toward genocide: the Turk’s slaughter of the Armenians in 1915, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds, the ethnic cleansings of Yugoslavia and the Hutus genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda. Power’s New Yorker article on the horrors in Darfur, Sudan won the 2005 National Magazine Award for best reporting. Power was the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. From 1993-1996, she covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia as a reporter for U.S. News and World Report, The Boston Globe and The Economist. Power is the editor, with Graham Allison, of “Realizing Human Rights: Moving from Inspiration to Impact.” A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, she moved to the United States from Ireland at the age of nine. She spent 2005-06 working in the office of Sen. Barack Obama and is currently writing a political biography of the United Nation’s Sergio Vieira de Mello. Back to top 11/9/2006 Grammy Award winning guitar prof, oboist present concert David Cullen, a Grammy Award winner who teaches guitar at Elizabethtown College,  will present a concert, along with oboist Jill Haley, at 7:30 p.m., Nov. 13, in Leffler Chapel and Performance Center. The event is open to the public free of charge.Cullen is an artist-in-residence at Elizabethtown College. His playing has been hailed by The New York Times as “Folk, Blues, Jazz Superstructures.” More information is available at www.cullenguitar.com. Haley is both a classical and jazz improvising oboist who has been featured in concerts presented by the International Double Reed Society. She also performs with the York Symphony Orchestra. The concert program will feature the “6th Cello Suite” by J.S. Bach, “The Mountain Songs” by Robert Beaser, and original compositions by Haley and Cullen. Back to top 11/3/2006 Five named conference coach of the year Five Elizabethtown College fall sport head coaches have won their  conferences’ respective Coach of the Year Awards: Chris Straub (Middle Atlantic Conference) in men’s cross country, Sharon Sweger (Commonwealth Conference) in field hockey, Barry Dohner (Commonwealth) in women’s soccer, Matt Helsel (Commonwealth) in women’s tennis and Randall Kreider (Commonwealth) in volleyball.
The awards have come as a fall 2006 season of unprecedented across-the-board success for Elizabethtown College winds down. Six of the seven fall sports teams were either their conference’s champion or their conference’s runner-up. The only one that did not finish as a conference champion or runner-up, field hockey, advanced to the second round of the NCAA Division III tournament and is nationally ranked. Back to top 11/3/2006 History prof's book entered for Pulitzer Prize A book by Assistant Professor of History David Brown is the University of Chicago Press' 2007 entry for the Pulitzer Prize in Letters.  "Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography" has received notable attention, including reviews in The Wall Street Journal, MSNBC.com, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times and The Washington Times.Brown’s book was called “an incisive interpretive profile” by The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Carlin Romano. And Sam Tanenhaus of The New York Times called it “intelligent and stimulating.” Brown’s biography of Hofstadter -- a Columbia University historian and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who was one of the most prominent liberal intellectuals of recent time -- explores his remarkable life story in the context of the rise and fall of American liberalism. According to Brown, Hofstadter saw that America’s transformation from a Protestant and provincial culture into a more urban and multiethnic one would inspire in rural America an anti-intellectualism and hostility toward cosmopolitanism that was perilous in a mass democracy.  This idea makes Brown’s biography particularly timely, considering the United States’ current culture of blue vs. red state. Claude Marx of The Washington Times writes that Brown’s examination of Hofstadter’s work “sheds some light on contemporary politics. That’s why [the book] is especially timely in view of the problems facing those on the left side of the ideological divide.” And Christopher Shea of The Boston Globe writes, “As it happens, some of [Hofstadter’s] themes seem presciently in tune with our times, too – tension between rural and urban America, grass-roots distrust of expert and intellectuals, democracy’s vulnerability to demagoguery. All of which make Brown’s biography, the first of Hofstadter, especially timely.” Brown received his Ph.D. in American history at the University of Toledo and has been teaching at Elizabethtown College for nine years. “Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography” is his second book. He is currently working on a study of the University of Wisconsin’s contribution to historical writing in the 20th century. Back to top 11/1/2006 Religious studies prof publishes book on Billy Graham, MLK In his recently published book, an Elizabethtown College religious studies professor  argues that Billy Graham opposed Martin Luther King Jr.’s dreams for an integrated America and his tactics of civil disobedience.Michael Long’s “Billy Graham and the Beloved Community: America’s Evangelist and the Dream of Martin Luther King Jr.” is the first detailed analysis of Graham’s social thought during one of the most volatile periods of American history, the King years (1955-1968). The book is published by New York’s Palgrave Macmillan (www.palgrave-usa.com). Using previously unpublished documents, Long argues that although the popular evangelist occasionally supported King’s mission to save America, he largely opposed King’s vision of “the beloved community” and his tactics of civil disobedience. The book also offers the controversial claim that because Graham allowed his political allegiances to trump his biblical Christianity, he never dreamed of nor worked for a world marked by lasting racial reconciliation, economic justice and peace.  Long is assistant professor of religious studies and peace and conflict studies at Elizabethtown College. He is the author or editor of “God and Country: Diverse Perspectives on Christianity and Patriotism” (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming), “Was Billy Graham Right? Progressives in Dissent” (Westminster John Knox Press, forthcoming), “Against Us, But for Us: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the State” (Mercer University Press, 2002) and “Creative Living: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Good Life” (Chalice Press, 2004). Back to top 11/1/2006 Kraybill and co-author to discuss book on Wenger Mennonites Elizabethtown College’s Donald B. Kraybill and co-author James P. Hurd of Minnesota’s Bethel University will discuss their recently published book,  “Horse-and-Buggy Mennonites: Hoofbeats of Humility in a Postmodern World,” at 7:30 p.m., Nov. 9, at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies. The talk is open to the public free of charge.Kraybill and Hurd will discuss their field research in various Wenger communities, some of the key findings from their book and the ways that Wenger people differ from other Old Order communities. Copies of “Horse-and-Buggy Mennonites,” which was published by Pennsylvania State University Press, will be available for sale and signing. Kraybill is interim director and senior fellow at the Young Center. Hurd is professor of anthropology at Bethel University. The Wenger Mennonites, named for their first bishop Joseph Wenger, formed in Lancaster County in 1927 when the Old Order Mennonite community divided over the ownership of automobiles. Although many Mennonite groups in North America have assimilated into mainstream culture, the Wenger Mennonites still use horse-and-buggy transportation and speak the Pennsylvania German dialect of their ancestors. In “Horse-and-Buggy Mennonites,” Kraybill and Hurd use cultural analysis to interpret the Wengers. They systematically compare the Wengers with other Mennonite groups as well as with the Amish, showing how relationships with these other groups have had a powerful impact on shaping the identity of the Wenger Mennonites in the Anabaptist world. The Wenger Mennonites have grown to some 18,000 members living in nine states. A birth rate of 8.3 children per family and a retention rate of 90 percent has produced an annual growth rate of 3.7 percent. At this rate, the group will number 31,000 by 2021. Kraybill and Hurd attribute the growth and success of this group in the midst of modern high tech culture to several factors: high fertility rate and retention of youth, strong private education, control of technology, emphasis on family values and hard work, regulation of social interaction with the outside world and use of a Pennsylvania Dutch dialect. The researchers found that these factors provide a strong sense of meaning, belonging and identity that has bolstered the vitality of the group. As Kraybill and Hurd show, the Wengers have learned that it is impossible to maintain a truly static culture, and so examining the ways in which the Wengers cautiously and incrementally adapt to the ever-changing world around them is an invaluable case study of the gradual evolution of religious ritual in the face of modernity. |
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