September 29, 2014 | NPR
One Sculptor’s Answer to WWI Wounds: Plaster, Coper and Paint: Sometimes art can change how people see the world. But Anna Coleman Ladd made art that changed how the world saw people. It was World War I, and soldiers were coming home from the battlefield with devastating injuries. Those who survived were often left with disfigured faces. “The part of the soldier’s body that was most vulnerable was his face, because if he looked up over a trench, that was the part that was going to be hit,” says David Lubin, a professor of art at Wake Forest University.“These men couldn’t be seen on the street,” says Lubin. “They’d gone through multiple operations, and they were seen as so hideous people would sometimes pass out from seeing them.”
September 8, 2014 | Winston-Salem Journal
Harris-Perry returns to WFU to teach: Melissa Harris-Perry, 40, has returned to Wake Forest as faculty member the Department of Politics and International Affairs. She has been named as a Presidential Chair, an endowed position at WFU. She comes to Wake Forest after working for three years as a political-science professor at Tulane University in New Orleans. Harris-Perry said she decided to accept WFU’s offer and leave Tulane for several reasons. “This is a job that I always wanted, but I thought I wanted it in 10 years (from now),” she said. “This is the job I want to retire from.”
September 8, 2014 | News & Observer (AP)
Wake Forest launches wellbeing initiative: Wake Forest University is joining a few other campuses nationally in starting a new initiative, Thrive, dedicated to the wellbeing of students, faculty and staff that goes beyond academic performance and into physical, spiritual and other realms. Thrive includes eight markers of wellbeing: emotional, environmental, financial, intellectual, occupational, physical, social and spiritual. Wake Forest has also hired a director of wellbeing, who starts work next month.
July 10, 2014 | National, regional and local impact
During the second quarter of 2014, Jill Abramson delivered the Commencement speech for the Class of 2014, and the world mourned the passing of author, activist and Wake Forest’s professor of American Studies Maya Angelou. University experts were featured in national news outlets from the Los Angeles Times to The Washington Post to The Boston Globe to CNN and MSNBC. Wake Forest News (PDF) features national and local news clips, and campus highlights from this time period.
May 7, 2014 | USA Today
College grads grade their higher education: A recent survey, developed by Gallup and Purdue University to help schools gauge their effectiveness in preparing students for long-term success, shows there is room for improvement when it comes to overall fulfillment for college grads. Other institutions, including Wake Forest, are developing their own instruments. A study of well-being “is really an outgrowth of our goals, which is that we educate the whole student,” says Penny Rue, vice president for campus life at Wake Forest. “We just want to be able to know that we’re making difference.”
April 29, 2014 | National Geographic
A new study published in Avian Conservation and Ecology and featured in National Geographic shows the population of blue-footed boobies in the Galápagos Islands has dropped from around 20,000 in the 1960s to 6,400 today. At the same time that breeding has declined, the number of sardines has also decreased—and past research has shown that successful booby breeding occurs when the birds’ diet is made up almost completely of sardines.Now Wake Forest biologist Dave Anderson, the lead investigator in the study, says he and his research team see studying sardines as an important next step.”Understanding the population dynamics and distribution of sardines in Galápagos is a logical follow-up project—essentially nothing is known at present,” Anderson told National Geographic’s Mark Miller.
If the numbers of offspring continue to drop this will create a population of birds in about ten years “that are not so old that they up and die, but are too old to breed effectively,” Anderson said. “A lot of 70-year-old humans would be an apt analogy.”
April 16, 2014 | National, Regional and Local Impact
During the first quarter of 2014, Wake Forest University experts were featured in national news outlets from CNN to The Washington Post to Yahoo! to ABC and The New York Times. Wake Forest News (PDF) features national and local news clips, and campus highlights.
April 8, 2014 | The Wall Street Journal
Why unionizing college sports is a bad call: In an op-ed appearing in the Wall Street Journal, Nathan Hatch, president of Wake Forest and chairman of the NCAA Division I board of directors and Lou Anna Simon, president of Michigan State University and chairwoman of the NCAA executive committee express concern over the move to unionize college athletics. “We oppose the effort to bring labor unions into college sports. One group of athletes is not more hardworking, more dedicated or more driven than another. Unionization will create unequal treatment not only among student-athletes competing in different sports, but, quite possibly, even among student-athletes on the same team.…To call student-athletes employees is an affront to those players who are taking full advantage of the opportunity to get an education.”
April 7, 2014 | Bloomberg Businessweek
Bloomberg Businessweek ranked Wake Forest University’s undergraduate business program first in the nation for academic quality for the sixth consecutive year and 11th overall. “The Best Undergraduate Business Schools” ranking report was released on April 4. The Wake Forest University School of Business improved significantly in student satisfaction and recruiter sentiment to drive the ranking up 7 spots from 18th overall in 2013.“The combination of a rigorous education and hands-on internship experience prepares students to succeed in their new careers,” said Dean of Business Steve Reinemund. “We are very proud to achieve the top academic quality rank for the sixth consecutive year, and applaud our hard-working students and dedicated faculty and staff for this achievement.”
March 13, 2014 | US News and World Report Money
5 Times to Splurge and 5 Times to Save: In a personal finance article in US News and World Report Money, business professor Charles Lankau says you can’t afford to hire a bad accountant. “About 70 percent of American families have both spouses working, and middle-class and upper-middle class families don’t have time to do taxes properly. One big thing people waste money on is missed tax breaks that an accountant will be aware of. Accountant fees generally include audit protection as well.”
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