Finding
a New Groove

WAER » At 9:08 a.m. on November 20, 2003, Syracuse University-based public radio station WAER-FM (88.3) flipped the switch to broadcast from its new home—and morning listeners probably didn’t even notice. “There was a two-second pause, but we never went off the air,” says music director Eric Cohen ’93. “Overall, the transition was smooth. All of our announcers have embraced our new studio.”

The public radio station moved from the fourth floor of Newhouse II into the newly renovated Haft Hall at the corner of Ostrom and Euclid avenues, doubling the station’s square footage. The University relocated WAER knowing the station would benefit from more space in meeting the needs of the 100 to 120 students who volunteer there each year, and that the Newhouse School could use the vacated space for offices and classrooms. As a result, the former student housing space was remodeled into a studio wired for radio broadcast.

Space is the studio’s biggest perk. The 5,000-square-foot facility features four studios, four digital editing suites, a large reception area, and office space. The studio also boasts a student lounge and offers technical advantages not afforded at the previous location, including the capability to move sound files between studios via a digital router and a computer network.

“Tradition was tied into that old building,” sportscaster Pat Riley ’04 says. “Now we’re trying to bring the tradition and spirit over here. That will require time and effort.”

Bob Costas ’74 and Mike Tirico ’88 provided financial support to the project, and the news and sports area bears their names. Individual editing suites were named for donors Cephas Bowles ’74 and Bill Roth ’87. All four got their starts at WAER. More naming opportunities exist. “Our main goal is to have students ready to go out into the workforce prepared with a decent body of work and the experience of having worked in a state-of-the-art radio station,” says Joe Lee, general manager of WAER. “Our new facility allows us to meet that goal.”

—Andrea Taylor

Leading by Design

Architecture » When Mark Robbins G’81 returns to the Hill this fall to serve as dean of the School of Architecture, he expects to feel a slight sense of déjà vu. “It’s a little like a scene from the film, It’s a Wonderful Life,” says Robbins, an architect and artist who most recently served as a visiting critic at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. “You’re viewing terrain that is very familiar, but at the same time, the perspective and reality of the place have changed.” For Robbins, who has been a curator, professor, and director of design at the National Endowment for the Arts, the deanship was a compelling opportunity. “SU has one of the strongest architecture programs in the country,” he says. “I have always been struck by the level of accomplishment I see on the part of alumni—who are very involved and interested in the future of the school—as well as by the faculty, administrators, and advisory committee, who are committed to helping the Syracuse community evolve and grow.”

In keeping with that tradition of excellence, Robbins hopes to establish programs that address architecture’s role in today’s culture, ensuring that the school continues to produce architects at the forefront of the field. “That means educating students as broadly as possible,” Robbins says. “Architecture doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is our obligation to make sure students learn the techniques of building, and also develop the critical thinking that allows them to examine architecture in relation to the larger social and cultural realms.” Bruce Fowle ’60, chairman of the school’s advisory board, says Robbins’s appointment is wonderful news for the School of Architecture and the City of Syracuse. “Robbins is internationally renowned,” Fowle says. “He will build on the school’s recognition by the Design Futures Council—which ranked SU fourth nationally and number one on the East Coast among architecture and design schools. He is also eager to collaborate on revitalizing the City of Syracuse.”

Robbins plans to publicize the success of SU architecture graduates to attract the best students and faculty. “The proof of a school’s quality is in its graduates, but also in faculty members who are known in their field,” Robbins says. “When I come on board, I will be committed to making sure faculty members have the support to do not only the best teaching, but also their own work. After all, that’s what a university is—a place of intellectual and creative growth. I firmly believe that when faculty continue their own explorations, they become even stronger teachers.”

—Kate Gaetano

Promoting
Safer Schools
Human Services & Health Professions » When Ellen deLara’s son told her that bullying occurred on a regular basis in his high school, she took action. “I wanted to find out what it was really like at schools because I felt that parents didn’t have a handle on it,” says the social work professor.

DeLara began researching school violence, bullying, and safety issues from students’ perspectives about 10 years ago. She conducted hundreds of surveys, focus groups, and interviews with teenagers nationwide to learn how safe they felt at school. “Many children did not feel safe and bullying happened every day,” she says. “Most surprising was that adolescents were asking for more adult supervision in cafeterias, hallways, and classrooms.” DeLara published her findings in And Words Can Hurt Forever: How to Protect Adolescents from Bullying, Harassment, and Emotional Violence (Free Press, 2002), which she co-wrote with Cornell University professor James Garbarino. The book proposes several solutions to help eliminate bullying, including the need for adults to be more responsible. “Adults need to change the mentality of ‘kids will be kids,’” she says. “If bullying occurred in the workplace, it wouldn’t be tolerated. So why should adults overlook it in our schools?”

DeLara and Garbarino continued their work in a second book, School-Based Intervention Programs (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), which explores ways to train new teachers about school safety. “I am invested in positive change,” she says. “I am always researching school violence to understand and help eliminate it.”

At the request of the Pupil Transportation Safety Institute, a nonprofit school bus safety organization, deLara helped produce a video that includes interviews with bus drivers about behavioral problems they encounter. She is currently developing a national curriculum to train school bus drivers to recognize and interrupt bullying. DeLara has also begun a project to determine if student-athletes are more likely to engage in—and get away with—bullying than other student populations.

The extensive research on school violence and bullying has enhanced deLara’s classes at SU. “Students are interested in the subject, and they want to know how to help,” she says. “It is not enough to just be informed—you have to act.”

—Rachel Boll

Religious Crossroads

Newhouse » With so many of today’s headlines focused on religious issues—gay marriages, separation of church and state, sex scandals involving clergy—newspapers of all sizes are beginning to invest more in religion coverage. Political candidates are also becoming more vocal about their religious views, and even corporate America is starting to employ religious language in confronting problems relating to business ethics. “Religion stories are no longer being confined to the Saturday morning religion page,” says former New York Times reporter Gustav Niebuhr, a leading writer about American religion and the newly appointed religion and media professor in the College of Arts and Sciences and the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. “Religion is an important facet of bigger political, economic, cultural, and international stories. It intersects with so many other areas.”

Niebuhr is one of more than 35 faculty members from across campus who teach in the new interdisciplinary Religion and Society Program that focuses on the role of religion in contemporary society. “We believe that some knowledge of religious traditions would be very valuable to people in a variety of professions, including education, journalism, business, law, medicine, and government,” says religion professor James Watts, director of the program. “It was designed to provide students with a broad background from which to address the variety of ways that religion affects professional and personal lives.”

Niebuhr’s appointment fits with journalism students’ increasing interest in religion, says Newhouse professor Steve Davis. “I have noticed in just the past five years more students suggesting stories that have to do with religion,” says Davis, chair of the Newspaper Program. “Gustav’s appointment is a way for us to respond to what we’re picking up on here, whether it is outright demand for a religion reporting class or simply what we’re hearing and seeing in the classroom. He is one of the top religion reporters in the land, yes, but he’s a very good reporter, too.”

Niebuhr, a descendant of two prominent 20th-century theologians, is excited to teach journalism courses and to be part of the interdisciplinary religion program. “The program will raise the profile of religion as a very important dimension of human life and the human experience,” he says. “Having faculty and students from different academic backgrounds will provide opportunities to learn from each other’s unique perspectives.”

—Margaret Costello

Mother
Nature’s Lessons

Bryan Leister

Engineering & Computer Science » If a tree falls in a forest and there are no fungi to break it down, will it still decompose? Sure, if a human comes along. To produce paper, manufacturers have found ways to remove a tree’s lignin (the complex chemical structure that provides strength to wood fibers) by intensive physical grinding or by using harsh chemicals to eat it away. However, these two methods are much more polluting and wasteful than Mother Nature’s solution—three enzymes excreted by fungi. Two chemical engineering professors hope to use the same enzymes to develop a more environmentally friendly paper-manufacturing process. “The enzymes go outside of the fungi cell and eat away the lignin compounds,” says chemical engineering and material science professor Christine Kelly. “If they didn’t, the tree trunks that fall would be in the forest forever. So, we hope to use these enzymes in pulping to reduce some of the pollution and energy consumption. Our problem is this fungi isn’t really good at growing in the big quantities necessary to be commercially viable.”

Kelly and Curtis Lajoie, her research partner and husband, secured a three-year, $213,000 grant from the National Science Foundation and a $40,000 grant from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority to investigate which methods will optimize the growth of two of the three enzymes. The researchers and students in Kelly’s lab have cloned one enzyme’s DNA and inserted it into fast-growing yeast. “Yeast grows really well in commercial applications,” Kelly says. “We’ve been successful in getting the yeast to make this enzyme, but now we need to get the yeast to make higher concentrations of the enzyme to be economically viable.”

Once that’s accomplished, the SU team will begin testing the enzymes in pulping processes with the help of researchers at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Fei Jiang, a doctoral student working with Kelly, says the project has helped reinforce lessons he learned in lectures, and has strengthened his ability to identify a research problem and develop a process to solve it. “Doing research is not an easy task,” Jiang says. “We face uncertainty, especially when multiple factors affect the process and we have to determine which one leads to the error. However, the research could have significant environmental benefits.”

—Margaret Costello

Democracy
in Action
Education » Three years ago, Professor Gil Harootunian of the reading and language arts department in the School of Education visited Armenia as a senior Fulbright Scholar. While teaching and researching at Yerevan State Linguistic University (YSLU) in Armenia, Harootunian noticed that debilitating elements of the former Soviet Union’s oral culture still lingered in the newly independent state. Students memorized lecture information and then regurgitated it in oral quizzes with little analysis of what was being taught. “The oral culture undermines the new and fragile democracy,” she says. “Students need to engage in sustained and reflective thought, research, and writing to create advanced public arguments and analyses as citizens in a democratic nation.”

Harootunian saw this as an opportunity to help reform higher education in Armenia. By introducing such democratic practices as written teacher and peer reviews and writing-intensive courses that focus on argumentation and analysis at YSLU, Harootunian believes the students will develop the skills needed to thrive as active citizens in a country in the midst of political change. To that end, Harootunian received a U.S. Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs Freedom Support grant to develop Writing for a Democracy, an educational exchange program between Syracuse University and YSLU. “The grant rests upon a deep belief in the power of education—that it can effect profound change and produce a new generation of scholars, teachers, and leaders in Armenia,” Harootunian says. This spring, she brought a team of YSLU teachers to Syracuse, and next year, a group of SU graduate students expects to travel to Armenia to develop, then pilot, the new curriculum.

The two teams of educators are actively exchanging ideas and creating courses that encourage students to participate in their government and look critically at the world. “Through the courses, we will incorporate politics into a writing-intensive curriculum, so students will become better analysts and be better equipped to argue their points,” says Nelli Sargsyan, one of four YSLU teachers who visited Syracuse to observe the role of writing in the curriculum.

The grant also funds the purchase of thousands of English language textbooks and a computer cluster for YSLU. The computers will be used to teach students data management and publication, complementing the new writing-intensive curriculum. The project will serve as a model of reform for YSLU and strengthen SU’s leadership role in international education. “Syracuse University has a great tradition of excellence and dedication to global citizenship, and those are the very roots of the Armenian project,” says School of Education Dean Louise C. Wilkinson.

In the fall, three SU graduate students will journey to YSLU to co-teach with the Armenian educators. Together, they will develop syllabi and assess the program’s progress. “It’s important that this grant provides SU’s future leaders with international experience,” Harootunian says.

—Rachel Boll