accoladesA P U B L I C A T I O N O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F A L A S K A A N C H O R A G E F O R A L U M N I A N D F R I E N D S

S P R I N G / S U M M E R 2 0 1 1

We are Fran FansUAA celebrates an inspiring leader

Dear UAA friends and family:

We’ve had another terrific year at UAA! As I write this, we’re gearing up

for all of our spring events, including Commencement. We’re also getting

ready to say farewell to Fran Ulmer, our chancellor for the past four years.

We’ve accomplished great things during her tenure at UAA, some of which

you’ll read about in this issue of Accolades. Though we are sad to see Fran

go, we are heartened by the promise she’s made to stay involved with UAA.

I know I’m not alone in saying that I’m proud to have served on Fran’s team

at UAA, and I’m both inspired and energized by what I’ve learned from this

incredible leader.

Our new chancellor, Tom Case, will take over on May 1, and I’m certain

once you meet him, you’ll be impressed. A former dean of the College of

Business and Public Policy at UAA, Tom has experience in higher

education, and is passionate about UAA. Many of us who’ve been at the

University for a while and have had the pleasure of working with Tom dur-

ing his time as dean, can tell you that he’s a strong, forward-thinking leader

who listens to and learns from those around him. In the coming months

you’ll hear much more from Tom on where he sees UAA going in the future,

and I hope you will take advantage of one of the upcoming opportunities to

meet him, whether it be out in the community or at an event on campus.

In honor of Fran’s retirement from UAA and the welcoming of a new chan-

cellor, we decided it would be a great time to focus an issue of Accolades

on leadership. In this issue you will read about how UAA—

a relatively young university—is leading the way in areas you may have

never guessed. And then, too, there are the young leaders-in-the-making,

something we specialize in here at UAA. You’ll meet just a few of the bright

minds that are already making a significant impact on their community.

I hope you enjoy the stories you read in the coming pages. Please share the

news of our successes with your friends, your relatives, your neighbors,

your children and others. Thank you for all you do to help make our univer-

sity better and stronger every day!

Sincerely,

Kristin DeSmith

M.F.A. ‘99

Editor

Check out Accolades online at www.uaa.alaska.edu/alumni/accolades

UAA AccoladesSpring/Summer 2011Volume 10, Number 1

Published by UAA University AdvancementEditors: Kristin DeSmith, Jessica Hamlin

Contributors: Jeff Oliver, Kathleen McCoy, Cassidy White and Amber WilkersonGraphic Design: David Freeman

All photos by Michael Dinneen unless otherwise noted.Intern: Mae Remme

.For more information about stories included in UAA Accolades,

to make a gift to UAA or to order additional copies, please contact:

University AdvancementUniversity of Alaska Anchorage

3211 Providence Drive . Anchorage, AK 99508Phone: (907) 786-4847

Toll free: 1-877-482-2238Email: development@uaa.alaska.edu

To learn more about UAA, visit www.uaa.alaska.edu.Accolades is paid for with University of Alaska funds.

F R O M T H E E D I T O R

29

Leaders in the making

24A GALA to REMEMBER

8Fran Ulmer:

A portrait of an inspiring leader2How institutionsbecome leaders12

CONTENTS

Seawolf athletes end winter season on a high note

Dear friends, A little over a year ago I announced that I would be retiring as UAA’s chancellor this spring. It’s hard for me to believe that time is right around the corner. At Commencement on May 1, Tom Case will officially and publicly assume the role of chancellor, but I will remain at UAA as a senior advisor until June 1. I love UAA and its many campuses, programs and remarkable people who I’ve had the pleasure of working with as chancellor. Things are going extremely well at UAA, and I am pleased that Tom Case will be stepping in as my successor. Tom’s love and enthusiasm for UAA will continue to move the institution forward. Thanks to the significant contributions from a community that’s passionate about UAA, we have made an incredible amount ofprogress over the last few years. In this issue of Accolades you’ll read about some of UAA’s leadership roles, and how UAA is helping to build Alaska’s next generation of leaders. You’ll also read about our diverse culture; UAA is committed to creating and maintaining an inclusive campus that promotes and embraces individual differences. If you haven’t been on campus in a while, I’d like to encourage you to come by—to see a show in the new planetarium, to cheer on one of our incredibly successful athletic teams, to see a play or hear a performance. There are so many opportunities for you to experience all the great things that are happening at UAA. Finally, I’d like to thank you for all you’ve done to help us build a greatuniversity. I will always be proud to have served on this UAA team. I will continue to be an enthusiastic advocate for UAA and a devoted Seawolf fan—I’m confident that you will, too. Sincerely, Fran Ulmer

Introducing incoming chancellor, Tom Case

Retired 3-star Air Force Lt. General Tom Case has spent more than 12 years in Alaska, including two Air Force tours of duty, five years as dean of UAA’s College of Business and Public Policy (CBPP) and three years as president and chief operating officer of a state-owned, independently operated Aerospace Corporation. A 1969 graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, Tom spent 33 years in the military. After retiring from the Air Force, Tom returned to higher education as dean of CBPP at UAA. During his time as dean, CBPP helped add several new certificate and degree programs, including a graduate certificate in Global Logistics, an occupational endorsement in Logistics, an online graduate Logistics certificate program, and a real estate focused track within the finance Bachelor of Business Administration program. Tom also played an instrumental role in the formation of CBPP’s Experimental Economics Laboratory in the fall of 2005, as well as the term extension of the distinguished Rasmuson Chair in Economics. The Alaska Center for Supply Chain Integration was also established during Tom’s tenure as dean of CBPP. The Center has been responsible for helping integrate radio frequency identification (RFID) technology applications in Alaska’s supply chain for the Department of Defense.

Married to his wife Susan for 42 years, Tom has a daughter Donna, son-in-law Daniel and a granddaughter, Anna. His interests include leadership, education, communication, general aviation, community activities and outdoor sports. Tom has a Master of Science degree in Systems Management from the University of Southern California, a Bachelor of Science from the U.S. Air Force Academy, as well as additional education from the National War College, the U.S. Army Command & General Staff College, the Air War College, and Emory University’s Advanced Management Program.

Tom takes the helm as UAA’s chancellor on May 1.

UAA AccoladesSpring/Summer 2011Volume 10, Number 1

Published by UAA University AdvancementEditors: Kristin DeSmith, Jessica Hamlin

Contributors: Jeff Oliver, Kathleen McCoy, Cassidy White and Amber WilkersonGraphic Design: David Freeman

All photos by Michael Dinneen unless otherwise noted.Intern: Mae Remme

.For more information about stories included in UAA Accolades,

to make a gift to UAA or to order additional copies, please contact:

University AdvancementUniversity of Alaska Anchorage

3211 Providence Drive . Anchorage, AK 99508Phone: (907) 786-4847

Toll free: 1-877-482-2238Email: development@uaa.alaska.edu

To learn more about UAA, visit www.uaa.alaska.edu.Accolades is paid for with University of Alaska funds.

F R O M T H E C H A N C E L L O R

a c c o l a d e s 1

CONTENTS

Tom Case and Fran Ulmer

Fran Ulmer: A portrait of an inspiring leader

By Kristin DeSmith

n May 1, Fran Ulmer is retiring as chancellor of UAA, but that doesn’t mean she’s slowing down—at least not a great deal. “I do not plan to ‘retire’ in the traditional sense. I am too driven by the need to contribute in some way, stay engaged, work on public policy,” Fran said when I asked what she was going to do in the next phase of her life. She is already planning her next public service commitments. “I am sure that I will serve on some boards and commissions, and do some part-time work. But I want the freedom to go fishing more often, go visit the grand-baby, do some traveling with my husband, to read more books and fewer reports.” During the past four years as UAA’s chancellor, Fran’s accomplished a remark-able number of things and has built a strong team of leaders who will continue to move the institution forward after she retires. “Leading is not a solo act, it’s a group activ-ity,” said Fran. “You have to empower your team to be part of a solution, to encourage them to contribute what they can, to create a shared vision that people can believe in.” Provost Mike Driscoll, UAA’s chief academic officer, said, “Fran has encouraged and enabled my success, was always open to constructive criticism, freely admitted when she was wrong and learned from mistakes, and never wanted to take credit. I think I could write a book on the leadership lessons Fran has taught me.” Fran’s also created a strong culture of openness, inclusion and transparency at UAA, which many believe has helped to transform UAA into the thriving university we have today.

The seed of leadership and service Growing up in Horicon, Wisconsin, a small town located about 50 miles northwest of Milwaukee, Fran never imagined she’d find herself in Alaska. “I wanted to be a ballerina or a professional singer when I grew up,” she said. “My mother was very musical, and she enrolled me in the Milwaukee Conservatory of Music when I was young.” Though Fran eventually went on to study political science, economics and law at the University of Wisconsin in Madison—other fields that interested her a great deal—she continued singing in musicals and operas, working summers in Wisconsin Dells, performing in a USO tour to Greenland and Iceland, and singing the National Anthem at the Kingdome to open Alaska Day at a Seattle Mariners game.

a c c o l a d e s 3

O

Fran Ulmer grew up in Horicon, Wisconsin.

“My mother’s influence extended beyond the love of music.” Though they worked long hours in the family’s business, Fran’s parents were very active in community organizations. “Mom served on the local school board, was constantly fundraising for community groups, and rushing off to one meeting or another. My road in life was very much influenced by my parents’ belief that a person could achieve anything if you worked hard and main-tained a positive attitude,” said Fran.

Fran learned early how to divide her time between school, work, family, activities and service. She helped in her parents business, served on student council, was student body president, drum major of the band and was active in her high school’s debate club. “Learning to successfully argue for or against an issue with very little preparation time helped build my self confidence as a young woman.” It likely helped her develop as an effective public speaker, as well. Though her family owned two small businesses in Horicon, she always knew she’d go to college. “It was just always part of the plan.” Her older sister earned a B.A. and Fran a J.D., making both of them first generation college graduates. “When I was young,

women had narrower career opportunities. There were very few women in law, medicine, engineering. Professional women of my age were unusual, as we wanted both careers and families, and worked hard to balance both.” Fran has been a role model for many women who watched her achieve that balance with her family and her work.

The right town, the right mentor

After graduating from UW-Madison with a bachelor’s degree in political science and economics, Fran’s goal was to work in Washington, D.C. That

summer she landed her first job in poli-tics when she was hired to work with Sen. George McGovern’s delegate re-form committee. But it wasn’t all she’d imagined it would be. “Very qualified women were assigned to type notes and get coffee. I knew that I’d need to go to law school to be taken seriously.” So she headed back to UW-Madison. After earning her J.D., Fran returned to Washington. She was hired as legal counsel at the Federal Trade Commission in D.C., but she spent a great deal of time in a basement file room sorting through briefs. “It wasn’t much fun, and I had a boyfriend who was in Juneau, AK doing all the things

I loved to do—like fishing—so I thought, I’ll give it a try.” Alaska certainly wasn’t the country’s political heartbeat, but it was a state of incredible opportunity.

It wasn’t long after arriving in Juneau that Fran found a job as legal counsel for the Alaska Legislature. “I drafted bills and did research on all kinds of topics.” Not surprisingly, Fran loved it and was a ‘natural.’ Leaders in the capitol noticed. “I wasn’t looking for another job, but one day I got a call from Gov. Jay Hammond asking if I wanted to come and work for him.” She jumped at the offer to become his legislative assistant. “Working for Gov. Hammond was a challenging and rewarding experience,” said Fran. “He taught me so much about leadership; he was a terrific role model and mentor.” In 1977, the same year she married attorney Bill Council—her husband of nearly 35 years—Gov. Hammond appointed Fran to the post of Director of Public Policy. Within four years of arriving in Alaska, Fran had already established herself as an emerging leader, and she was only 30. By the age of 36, Fran was Juneau’s mayor.

4 a c c o l a d e s

Fran earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and economics from the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

Fran singing the National Anthem at the Kingdome to open Alaska Day at a Seattle Mariners game.

A poem written by Gov. Jay Hammond in honor of Fran’s 50th birthday.

in the 2000 presidential election. Fran was able to successfully lobby the legislature for the funds to develop a modern statewide voting system. Un-der Fran’s leadership, Alaska became the first state to use optical scanning machines on a statewide basis. Several states would then follow our lead, including California. Two other issues that Fran championed as lieutenant governor included finding a way to make tech-nology more accessible to Alaskans, and improving child safety, health and readiness to learn through the Governor’s Smart Start initiative. She fought for full funding of education, from pre-school programs to college. This experience would later make Fran a perfect advocate for the University as its chancellor. From Juneau to Cambridge to Anchorage

After Fran lost her campaign in the 2002 gubernatorial election to Sen. Frank Murkowski, she received a prestigious fellowship at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics in the Kennedy School of Government. The Fellows come from many different backgrounds in public service and political life, and spend a semester at Harvard sharing their experiences with students and exploring important public issues with a distinguished group of their peers. “I believe that education is a key to success,” said Fran. “This was a perfect opportunity for me to share what I’d learned about public service, politics and public policy with students who were about to enter those fields.” And luckily for UAA, Fran’s commitment to sharing her experiences with emerging leaders wouldn’t end with one semester in Cambridge. In spring of 2004, Fran joined UAA’s faculty as a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Pub-lic Policy, and then in 2005, she became the director of UAA’s Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER); she served in that position until 2007 when she was tapped by University of Alaska (UA) President Mark Hamilton to be UAA’s interim chancellor.

a c c o l a d e s 5

Taking the next step Before Fran launched her campaign for state office, she knew her family had to be on board with the decision. “Having a strong base—with the long hours and high stress that goes with holding public office—is essential,” she said. “Because my husband was understanding and supportive, we were able to find the right bal-ance; of course, there’s constant rebalancing involved.” Juggling family responsibilities and a “regular” full-time job is often chal-lenging for a parent, but Fran managed to have both a fulfilling pro-fessional and family life. Together, she and her husband Bill raised two children, Amy and Louis, and now have a grandson, Lucas. With her family’s full support, Fran was elected to the state’s House of Representatives in 1986; she served until 1994. During that time, she achieved several leadership positions, including chair of the Majority Caucus and the House Minority Leader. Fran spon-sored and passed dozens of bills during her time as a legislator. The Alaska Cancer Society asked her to sponsor a bill that would require health insurance companies to cover mammograms, which she did successfully. She was also involved in drafting important oil and gas legislation, and served on the Special Committee on the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Claims Settlement. This experience would later help earn Fran a seat on President Obama’s National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling in 2010. Not just a man’s job anymore

When Fran was elected as Alaska’s lieutenant governor in 1994, she became the first woman in the state’s history to hold this post. She was also the first woman to win a statewide elected office in Alaska. At that time, there

were very few women in these positions, but Fran continually challenged the assumption that these jobs were just for men. “Women lead differently,” said Fran, “but not less effectively.” In fact, many of the leadership qualities Fran now embodies she learned from her male mentor, Gov. Hammond. “He taught me to always be intellectually curious, to be open to criticism without getting defensive, to be respectful of others regard-less of position, and to think of the long-term impacts of every decision.” Breaking the glass ceiling was only the beginning of Fran’s accomplishments as the state’s first woman lieutenant governor.

“Part of leadership is about taking risks and pushing the envelope,” said Fran, and she wasn’t about to play it safe for eight years. One of the primary duties of the lieutenant governor is to oversee the state’s election process. Fran took that role very seriously. Prior to 1994, Alaska used the punch card voting system, the very same system that became the center of controversy

“Fran has encouraged and enabled my suc-cess, was always open to constructive criti-cism, freely admitted when she was wrong and learned from mis-takes, and never want-ed to take credit. I think I could write a book on the leadership lessons Fran has taught me.”

— Provost Mike Driscoll

Fran poses for a photo with Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Tony and Susan Knowles.

A new way of leading UAA

“I loved my job at ISER,” said Fran. “I was completely surprised to get the call from President Hamilton asking me to serve as interim chancellor.” Fran thought about the request and decided that though she wasn’t looking to make a move, she’d give the new job a try. “I don’t know if I’ll like it, if I’ll be good at it, or if you [the University] will like me,” Fran said at the time. But within a few months, Fran had gained the trust, support and admiration of the University community. “In unanimous decisions both the Faculty Senate and the University As-sembly requested that the President of the UA System directly appoint Chan-

cellor Ulmer to the permanent position,” said Bogdan Hoanca, then president of the Faculty Senate. “Fran Ulmer is probably a singular case in the history of the institution where a direct appointment was requested for this position.” It was obvious to both the whole university com-munity, and the UA President, that Fran was the right person for the job. “Fran has shown excep-tional and strong leadership for UAA,” Mark Hamilton said in a release announcing her permanent appointment in 2008. “She’s a skilled manager, thoughtful, thorough and a tireless advocate. I can’t think of a better person to have at the helm of UAA.” “Since Chancellor Ulmer’s appointment, she’s made a tremendous impact on the Uni-versity and how it is perceived by both the local community

and by the state of Alaska,” said Provost Driscoll. “UAA’s reputation has grown significantly in just three years; our industry and community leaders look to UAA for new partnerships; participation by engaged Alaskans in UAA’s external advisory boards has grown dramatically, and donations to the University have increased significantly under Fran’s leadership.” As they say, the proof is in the pudding, and Fran’s accomplishments on behalf of UAA are undeniable. In 2008, ConocoPhillips pledged $15M in support of UAA, making it the largest single corporate gift that the University system, including UAA, has re-ceived. Also in 2008, donors committed more than $4M to create the Herbert P. Schroeder Endowed Chair of the Alaska Native Science & Engineering Program. In 2009, UAA an-nounced an anonymous gift of $7M, given to a select few universities and colleges across the country that were led by women. In

2009-10, alumni giving increased by 42 percent, and during the first month of 2011, UAA received a $3M pledge to establish the Weidner Chair in Business Management. In addition to the increase of both individual and corporate donations to UAA during her tenure, Fran successfully led the institution through a new

accreditation process; she advo-cated for and received legislative funding to finish and open the ConocoPhillips Integrated Science Building on schedule; she helped to obtain the funding for the new Health Sciences Building, which is set to open in 2011; and led the charge to fund UAA’s new sports arena through Proposition B. An enthusiastic advocate for everything UAA, Fran is always encouraging community members to get involved, whether that means going to an athletic event, a lecture, a play or musical per-

formance, or by serving on one of UAA’s many advisory boards. “Anchorage is a college town, we just don’t know it yet,” Fran told a group of advisors in February, then asked them to help us share our success stories with the community. She always has a number of examples ready, including our

world-ranked debate team, our several University Honors College award recipients, our academic all-star athletes and our national award-winning faculty. Though she announced her upcoming retirement plan in January of 2010, Fran never slowed down. In 2010, President Barack Obama named Fran to the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. She spent six months in a dual role of com-mission member and chancellor. Fran saw this as an excellent

6 a c c o l a d e s

“I believe that educa-tion is a key to success ...this was a perfect opportunity for me to share what I’d learned about public service, politics and public policy with students who were about to enter those fields.” — Fran Ulmer

Pictured from left to right: Son Louis, husband Bill Council, Fran Ulmer, son-in-law Jonathan, daughter Amy.

Chancellor Ulmer applauds graduates at the UAA Commencement ceremony.

Chancellor Ulmer addresses the crowd at the grand opening celebration for the ConocoPhillips Integrated Science Building.

opportunity to serve as a link between the commission and University of Alaska re-searchers and area experts in oil spill response and prevention. In March 2011, President Obama asked Fran to serve in another national leadership position, this time as chair of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission. This is one of the few standing presidential commissions, and its charge is to develop national Arctic research policy and assist in establishing a program to support the goals of the policy. Fran will begin her work with the commission in earnest following her retirement from UAA this summer.

It’s more a “see you later” than “goodbye”

As the UAA community now faces the homestretch of Fran’s tenure as chancellor, many are reluctant to “let her go.” But after almost 40 years of local, state and national public service, Fran has definitely earned a little time of her own. And Fran promises to stay involved. “I will continue to support the institution financially; I will attend athletic events, concerts, lectures and will likely do some research, teaching and mentoring,” said Fran. “And, I will remain a steadfast advocate for UAA.” So, Fran’s retirement is more of a see you later than a goodbye. That’s great news for all of us.

a c c o l a d e s 7

A few of UAA’s successes under Fran Ulmer’s leadership

Facilities• Opening of ConocoPhillips Integrated Science Building and new public garage• Groundbreaking for new Health Sciences Building which opens August 2011• Opening of the Betti Cuddy Atrium in the Lucy Cuddy Hall• Passage of Prop B in the 2010 election in support of a new UAA Sports Arena

UAA awards and honors• Debate Team 11th in world, tied for second in nation, 2010• Seawolf athletic teams see great success on the national stage• UAA designated a “Military Friendly School” two years in a row• First-ever Marshall Scholar• Fourth Truman Scholar in four years

Academic and program achievements• 75 percent retention rate of first-time full-time freshmen puts UAA higher than the national average for comparable universities • Accreditation renewed under new system for which UAA served as a pilot institution

• Weidner Chair in College of Business and Public Policy established• Confucius Institute opened• Herbert P. Schroeder Endowed Chair of ANSEP established by industry partners, Native corporations and alumni in addition to Rasmuson Foundation• Graduate School created• UAA named among the 2010-11 leading producers of U.S. Fulbright Students by the Fulbright Program

Milestones• Creation of Alaska’s first and only green district with signing of the U-Med Agreement• New Strategic Plan 2017 adopted• Adopted Energy Policy and established Office of Sustainability

Gifts to UAA• $2M from Providence Alaska to fund WWAMI and medical records• $3M from Dean Weidner to endow Weidner Chair in College of Business and Public Policy• $7M from anonymous donor • $15M from ConocoPhillips for the Integrated Science Building and a research endowment• $2M from Rasmuson Foundation grant to fund endowed ANSEP chair• $1M from the Atwood Foundation for the Atwood Chair in Journalism and Public Communications• $1M from Lenore Hedla to College of Business and Public PolicyPresident Barack Obama selected Fran Ulmer to serve on the National Commission

on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.

8 a c c o l a d e s

Leaders in the making

Leaders in the making By Kathleen McCoy

ho will be Alaska’s governor in 2020? Who will find solutions to our fossil fuel dependence? Who will stand up for landscape and culture as essential, indigenous lifeblood? Who will teach our chil-dren what they need to know? Who will have the vision? Look around you. They are students in the hallways and classrooms of the University of Alaska Anchorage. They will shape our future because they are already shaping our campus. Maybe you’ve heard that the history and heritage of UAA is a campus of commuters, a time- and energy-stretched assemblage of nontraditional students. The sub-text is they are already working, going to school part time, raising kids. They don’t have time for campus engagement. Yet, it doesn’t take long to find abundant examples of involved and committed students, traditional and nontra-ditional. They bubbled easily to the surface in the natural rhythm and flow of campus and community events, or were quickly pointed out by student advisors and mentors. In the next few pages, you’ll meet a handful of fun people who will fill you with inspiration and admiration. So move over, Anchorage. Meet some members of a new generation of leaders.

W

a c c o l a d e s 9

Caroline Willis, 29KRUA station manager, graduating in May with a liberal studies degree to prepare for her future as an elementary school teacher

The last thing you’d expect to find out about Caroline Willis is that she’s a high school drop out. She was 17 and bored, she says, having tried both Service High School and SAVE (an alternative school combining academics with work), but noth-ing grabbed her. “I was not compelled to be there,” she remembers. “None of it seemed relevant. And I had the opportunity to work full time.” She cashiered at Michael’s, an arts and crafts store, and migrated up the ladder of responsibility to manage a single department. She was living on her own by the time she was 18. When she moved from sales to work at a preschool, she learned that moving up meant getting a higher education. So, at 23, she enrolled at UAA. “I realized that if I became a teacher, I would need to keep learning. I re-recognized the value of an education.” She began as a freshman, but had many prerequisites to cover before she could move along her college track. Parallel to her studies, she began volunteering at KRUA 88.1 FM, UAA’s student-operated radio station. She’d wandered past the KRUA table at a student involvement event. The staff seemed friendly, she remembers thinking; the work sounded like fun, and she was looking for something extracurricular to add to her schedule. Almost immediately, she was hooked. “First, you listen to music, lots and lots of music. I’ve always liked music. Then you get to learn how to do audio production. It was exciting. I was on the air! I could help out at shows, running the wires, taking tickets at musical events sponsored by KRUA. It was a lot of fun and I did as much of it as I could.” Her first year there, 2005, she earned Volunteer of the Year. Unlike her high school years, she found she loved learning and there was always more to grasp. The move up to program director came in 2007, when the current station manager told her, “Caroline, we think you would do well in this position. You always want to learn more; you should apply.” In her new role, she found herself training up to 60 student and community volunteers how to contribute at the

station. It was an early clue that she liked to teach. She finally took the reins of sta-tion manager in the summer of 2009. And here’s where her leadership really sparked. For the first time ever, in January 2011, KRUA broadcast the Anchorage Folk Festival’s evening events live from the Wendy William-son Auditorium. The folk festival ap-proached Caroline. Saying yes meant figuring out how to do it, and buying a few more pieces of equipment to ac-

complish the task. Caroline not only made it work, she scheduled volunteers and personally staffed the two Friday nights. In January 2011, Caroline contributed an essay to ‘Kids These Days,’ a local public radio program aired by KSKA. The program topic was bereave-

ment in childhood. Caroline lost her mother to lung cancer when Caroline was just 18. Her reaction at the time was “disapproval.” She felt only anger at her mother for abandoning her. It has taken her years to be able to talk about her mother, and now, remember her with love and warmth. “Part of loss,” says Caroline, “is growing, growing out of the anger and learning to love again.” Caroline’s very moving essay can be heard at about 53 minutes into the Jan. 11, 2011 “Kids These Days” podcast on www.kska.org. < http://kska.org/2011/01/11/kids-these-days-jan-11/> Now her future is mapped out. She’s taking a year off before tackling an intense one-year master’s in education at University of Alaska Southeast, using her radio skills to earn money while she gets paperwork and career details in order. She hopes eventually to be the teacher who keeps students engaged—so they don’t take the detour she did.

David Johnson, 48Student in Mat-Su College small business program, founder of Mat-Su Carbon Crew

Be careful when you talk to David Johnson. He’s infectious; and we mean that in the nicest way. This guy has energy to burn. David would be one of those very nontraditional students. After all, he’s 48 and already had a career in marketing. But a weakening economy washed him up in 2009; he could not find a construction job to save himself. Listening to the news of federal stimulus money to help create jobs, he recognized himself as a displaced worker who needed more education. He set out to get some. He had started college decades ago in a two-year graphic design program at Northern Michigan University. He did well his freshman year. The second year, he moved off campus and turned into a party animal. With

“I realized that if I became a teacher, I would need to keep learning. I re-recog-nized the value of an education.”– Caroline Willis

falling grades, he chose to go to work instead. And unbelievably, 25 years went by. David was able to fend for himself most of that time, though going back to school clearly represents a second chance for him. In 2009, leaving a business failure and some personal mistakes behind, he started fresh at Mat-Su College. He and other students in a Small Business Management class launched the Mat-Su Carbon Crew as a class project so they could compete in a global green-energy practices competition against nearly 1,000 universi-ties across the globe. It was called “The Great Power Race,” and the Crew ended up earning two big awards. They placed eighth overall and won “Most Collaborative Team” for all their communication and challenges to other high-achieving teams during the Sept. 1 through Nov. 12, 2010 contest. The Carbon Crew rose to the top by launching more than 40 projects that earned them points in the competition. Those included developing a carbon calculator, installing bike racks on campus, a poster campaign to save water, creating a Facebook site for community outreach and even host-ing a film series on the destructiveness of coal mining. Their efforts earned them a nomination for a Chancellor’s Award of Excellence, of which Johnson is very proud. Now “The Great Power Race” is over, but the Mat-Su Carbon Crew continues as a student club. Their next big project is revital-izing and sharing the virtually forgotten arboretum on the expansive Mat-Su College campus, at the request of the campus director, Talis Colberg. The 9,000-acre arboretum is overgrown and needs love, something the Mat-Su Carbon Crew is eager to provide, says David. Colberg says David reminds him of the energy and vision of a former governor and Secretary of the Interior. “He’s not content with being interested in ideas. He wants to get things done. In that respect, he reminds me of Wally Hickel. He’s got that same, ‘Let’s get it done!’”

Ashleigh Gaines, 20Chemistry major and president of the Black Student Union

Public service is no mystery for Ashleigh Gaines. Her mother and fa-ther’s message to her growing up was always to be of service. “They told me, be positive. Help somebody get from point A to point B, and you will succeed in life.” All through high school, she followed that advice. A student at West High, she was active in the NAACP and its youth council right from her freshman year. She was honored with a U.S. President’s Volunteer Service Award after she’d donated more than 5,000 hours to community service, including the Special Olympics and the Food Bank of Alaska. Performing some of her original poetry, she also won the NAACP Academic Cultural Technological and Scientific Olympics while still in high school. Ashleigh was primed for college, and followed her parents’ footsteps to UAA. Both had graduated from the school and recommended it to their bright daughter. Her freshman year, she pledged to the service sorority, Alpha Phi Omega. She still mentors high school students through the NAACP in violin, photography and poetry. But her rise to leadership at UAA caught her by surprise. She’d been supporting a friend’s launch of the Black Student Union (BSU) at UAA, and when her friend needed to step aside, Ashleigh was there in the wings. Carey Brown of the AHAINA program (African American, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander, International and Native American) was watching. “Without even realizing it, by supporting Maya Dale’s efforts, Ashleigh was preparing herself for this role,” he said. So when the leadership position

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was open, he asked Ashleigh to take it on. As the new BSU president, she quickly had to organize activities around the 2011 UAA Black History Month events. With Carey as her mentor, she followed through. “Ashleigh has a great personality and students really respond to her,” Brown said. At the kick-off event Feb. 1, she took the stage and introduced the new BSU to UAA. She said the group’s mission was inclusive—not only to welcome the black diaspora from Africa, but from the Caribbean and all parts of the world. But significantly, she told her audience that the BSU was not just an organization for black students. All are welcome, she said; anyone interested in learning and participating is invited to join. She has ambitions for the club, including helping to fill the learning gap she sees between high school and college. “One of the things we’d like to start talking about, as a board, is working on a homework project with high school students,” she says. She’d like to link up a high school student with an interest in math with a BSU member who is a math major. Or if a high school student is struggling to write papers,

BSU would link them up with a strong college writer. “By the time they are seniors, we want them to be confident about applying for college. We want them to know the things they are going to go through here, and what they have to know when they get here.” This sophomore plans a major in chemistry, with the possibility of a career in medicine or research. She knows she’ll work hard for it. “I understand the science concepts, but there’s a lot of math, and I had to take a lower level math class. I want students to realize that just because you have to do that doesn’t mean you are stupid. It just means you need to work on those skills. Don’t give up! Society is relying more and more on math and technology. If you want to go there, you can’t lollygag!” Carey Brown smiles when he hears that bit of wisdom. One of his mantras to the students he mentors is, “Hey, this isn’t high school anymore!” Ashleigh has taken that lesson to heart, he says.

Petla Noden, 26Sophomore in political science, co-chair of Native Student Council

Petla and I met in The Den for a late afternoon con-versation. He co-chairs the Native Student Council (NSC) and on this day he was staffing a table selling muffins as a fundraiser for the NSC. When I asked him about leadership, he leaped immediately to the Pebble Mine controversy. Pebble would place a massive mining operation at the headwaters of a world-class salmon spawning region not far from Petla’s hometown. “Pebble imposes on Native people fear of losing our land, our watershed, our salmon runs. Salmon are the foundation of our lives. Everything that makes us—comes from our land.” He can run through the list of risks that he sees inherent in the mine development and says he never passes up a chance to speak to a legislator about his concerns or to ask for mitigations. He believes a new generation of Alaska Natives, inter-ested in renewable and alternative energy,is rising up with him.

He was not always this confident. He readily admits he had a “rough background,” including a family overwhelmed by all the change modernity brought to his community. He tells of town bullies who forced him to smoke at age nine; he gagged and coughed. When one of the bullies stood up for him and made the others stop, Petla was hooked— he wanted badly to belong. In appreciation, he became their little thief, stealing cigarettes and small items for them. He’s not proud of this. Or that he dropped out of high school and lost his way more than once, struggling with alcohol and lack of direction. He is the youngest of five, and credits two older sisters with never losing faith in him. One called him every day to make sure he went to the Job Center in Dilling-ham to finish his GED. Once that was accomplished, she nagged him into college. Now, he’s glad she did, though at first he didn’t feel like he deserved a college education. “When I first got here, I walked around, just waiting for someone to make eye contact with me, and challenge me, with ‘You don’t belong here!’ “

a c c o l a d e s 11

Instead, he says he found only kind eyes and a welcoming spirit. And most importantly, his political science major has helped him analyze public policy and impending change through the lens of his Native heritage. While he’s clear on his views on Pebble Mine, he is careful about his assessment of himself as a leader. “I don’t want to place myself above anybody else,” he says. But he also sees the role of the NSC to help other Native students like himself feel welcome at the University, and to make sure relevant issues affecting Alaska Natives are raised. He’s even considering starting a campus club related to Pebble Mine—sharing information so people can make wise choices.

“When I first got here, I

walked around, just wait-

ing for someone to make

eye contact with me, and

challenge me, with ‘You

don’t belong here!’ “

– Petla Noden

By Kathleen McCoy

How institutions become leadersHow institutions become leaders

The new Health Sciences Building (red roof) opening in August 2011 is a part of the master plan that will expand UAA‘s campus and be an integral part of multidisciplinary health team training.

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t’s not a given that a big institution like a university will rush to lead in all situations. Institutes of higher education can be massive and complex, like heavy ships crossing challenging oceans with precious cargo. They don’t turn on a dime. Part of that stability is the standards a university must keep. The institu-tion promises students a worthy education; that takes setting the intellectual bar high and managing it well. It promises faculty a place to teach and research; that takes good facilities and sound infrastructure that keep pace with all kinds of change. Further, as a state-supported school, UAA needs to deliver graduates who know and understand the work that must be done to advance Alaska. UAA is pragmatic about workforce development. So climbing up on the bleeding edge of change is something any uni-versity weighs carefully. Nothing must endanger its academic cargo and its altruistic mission – to educate and enlighten. And yet, one finds significant areas where UAA is, in fact, boldly going first, with sound reasoning and good results. We’ll examine three areas: new thinking on academic accreditation, working to discover and nurture cultural environments that lead to suc-cessful Alaska Native teachers, and tackling cross-disciplinary health care communication with a new building, a new college and a new statewide training network.

Accreditation: Getting in on the ground floor

Pale winter sun slanted through Vice Provost Tom Miller’s office on a Friday afternoon in late January. In just a week, an accrediting agency, the North-west Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU), would meet to discuss and decide whether to reaffirm UAA’s institutional accreditation. UAA has been continuously accredited by NWCCU since 1974. This regional credential recognizes performance, integrity and quality so that the community at large can have confi-dence in its university. The stakes couldn’t be higher, Miller acknowledged. This meeting was to be the culmination of a seven-year accreditation process that UAA had completed in just two years. Actually, in just 18 months, if you want to get technical. What was UAA thinking, speeding up a seven-year performance evaluation into a year-and-a-half? There were smart reasons to take on such a challenge, said Miller, who oversees accreditation and undergraduate programs and assessment. By volunteering to be one of only four institutions in the pilot class, UAA literally got in on the ground floor of a new higher-education assessment. It mindfully placed itself there to help evolve a more contemporary process for northwest colleges and universities. “We wanted to get out in front of it and help shape it,” Miller said. “If we didn’t do this now, we’d just be starting a brand-new accreditation process that we knew nothing about.” So what changed about UAA’s accreditation? Miller explained that evaluating the University shifted from proving compliance with rigid rules and standards to evaluating the institution’s ability to define and fulfill its mission. It became: What is your mission? How well are you accomplishing it? How do you know? What are you doing to improve? Instead of receiving a “report card,” UAA now participates in an evaluation process integrated with the way the University actually functions, Miller said.

So UAA’s stated mission is “to discover and disseminate knowledge through teaching, research, engagement and creative expression” and “serve the higher education needs of the state, its communities and its diverse peoples.” And UAA’s five core themes encompass that mission. They are:

• Teaching and learning• Research, scholarship and creative activity• Student success• UAA community • Public Square

Miller offered an example of how NWCCU would assess UAA under the new paradigm. UAA has General Education goals related to student learning, but realized it was not evaluating how well UAA was meeting them. When this was recognized through this new accreditation process, the faculty at UAA committed to setting up the criteria to measure that achievement. In doing so, UAA has become more accountable to its own mission. UAA may have chosen to go out on a limb with the pilot program, but it wasn’t alone. Carroll College in Helena, Montana, Wenatchee Valley College and Columbia Basin College in Washington state also signed on. But UAA, with its 20,000 students, five campuses and programs ranging from developmental education to graduate degrees, was by far the largest and most complicated in the pilot group. It was critical to have a school like UAA participate, Miller explained, to evaluate how a complex public institution could move through the new accreditation process. Which is a nice segue to how UAA did when the NWCCU met to discuss and decide its institutional accreditation. The Commission letter to UAA,

reaffirming it, was mailed Feb. 7 and arrived in Anchorage on Valentine’s Day. It speaks for itself: “The Commission commends the University for its willingness to serve as a pilot institution for the new NWCCU standards and process while recognizing both the challenge to the University and the extraordinary value to the Commission and the Northwest region. Further, the Commission finds noteworthy the University’s broad, transparent and inclusive planning process, and for the manner in which it has created forward momentum for the institution. In addition, the Commission applauds the institution for the camaraderie, mutual respect, culture of caring, and sense of community among and within its campuses, which reflect positively on its staff, faculty and administration. Lastly, the Commission commends the institution’s staff, faculty, administration, and external institutional advisory committee members for embracing and integrating the Public Square theme into the campus culture, thus providing research in the public interest, public access to University resources and facilities, and mutual benefit to the campuses and their communities.”

I

Accreditation leadership team from left: Megan Carlson, Tom Miller, Susan Kalina and Bogdan Hoanca.

This success was gratifying to the accreditation leadership team, which was led by two faculty members, Susan Kalina of Russian and International Studies and Bogdan Hoanca of Computer Information Systems, included Miller and Megan Carlson from Academic Affairs, and 13 others comprising a larger steering committee. Provost Mike Driscoll characterized UAA’s accreditation effort as “faculty-driven.” Kalina and Hoanca appreciated University administrators who were willing to let them take the lead. Together, they offered this as-sessment of the endeavor: “The new accreditation process was successful because it involved the entire UAA community. As the faculty co-chairs of the steering committee, we were empowered and supported by Provost (Mike) Driscoll and Chancel-lor (Fran) Ulmer to create a process that was highly participative, inclusive, representative, and relevant to the broader UAA community, both internal and external.” Even after this positive milestone, though, UAA’s leadership role contin-ues. Members of its accreditation leadership team are tapped regularly as guides and consultants for other northwest schools as they look up that long hill leading to a challenging new accreditation process. It’s a view that UAA got the chance to see – and shape – first.

Rural teaching challenges: Discovering cultural environments that support successful Alaska Native teachers

The dismal story is in the numbers: Alaska’s dropout rate in 2005-06 was eight percent, double the national average. Local media coverage called it “one of the worst in the country,” and documented special sessions among Alaska educators to brainstorm solutions. “This is a social issue,” Carl Rose, executive director of the Association of Alaska School Boards, told the Anchorage Daily News in November 2008. “We all need to take some responsibility.” That’s the macro view of a serious, statewide education problem. Now for the micro view of a potential solution: One school district, one school, one dearly-held dream. And the chance for UAA’s College of Educa-tion – partnering with the College of Arts and Sciences and Chevak School – to say yes to a unique leadership challenge.

The Kashunmiut School District in Chevak, located in Western Alaska near the Kashunak River, has been working for the last 12 years to under-stand the role that culture and language play in student success. This is a small community of less than 800 people who speak a dialect of Central Yup’ik, called Cup’ik (pronounced Chew-pick). They identify themselves as Cup’ik people rather than Yup’ik, and this unique designation has allowed them to form a single-site school district. Their decades-old dream? An immersion school to encompass Cup’ik language and culture as elemental foundations for their students’ success.

So far, they have managed immersion from kindergarten to second grade; they dream of providing it through high school for their 200 students. Enter a new school superintendent, Doug Conboy, now two years at Kashunmiut. Before coming to Alaska, he had served Native American communities in Minnesota and says he witnessed many government-driven education efforts fail. He knew non-Native teachers from a non-Native culture having trained in non-Native theories with non-Native goals would not work for a Native student body. The revolv-

ing door of itinerant teachers was failing Chevak; he gladly joined the quest for a Cup’ik immersion K-12. “My objective is to stop continuing to do what is not working,” he said by phone from his office in Chevak. “This is a school of 98 percent Native students. The best teacher is the teacher who looks like the student.” He saw that his school has long employed local paraprofessionals – teacher’s aides. They were mostly women from the village who worked alongside teachers and in the library, supplementing and assisting. They al-ready lived in the village, spoke the Cup’ik language and offered rich cultural continuity. Could these aides get the educational background and training to become full-fledged teachers? Conboy took his question to the College of Education at UAA.

“It was an amazing experi-ence watching my students become empowered as they began to understand how Western educational theories merged with their Cup’ik way of life — being part of the Alaska Teacher Initiative in Chevak has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career.”

— UAA education teacher Sheila Sellers

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The village of Chevak is home to almost 800 residents and 200 school children. This village has a single-site school district because of its Cup’ik cultural and lan-guage heritage. For more than 30 years, the village has hoped and worked toward a K-12 Cup’ik immersion school. Currently it offers that program for K-2.

In September 2010, representatives from the UAA College of Education arrived in Chevak for a talking circle with village elders. From left in front row they are Dr. Chris Gehrett, Nancy Boxler, Patricia Chesebro and Sheila Sellers. In the back row is Dr. Cathy Coulter and Jim Palmer.

Yes, the answer came back. But exactly how?

In a bold move, Chevak paraprofessionals and UAA education professors together embarked on a journey to develop Cup’ik immersion teachers. Called the Chevak Alaska Teacher Initiative, its goal is to bring the University to Chevak so the paraprofessionals can continue to live at home and work at school while progressing toward their bachelor’s degrees. The ultimate goal is certified teachers from Chevak teaching in Chevak, a sustainable model that might be duplicated in other rural communities struggling with troubled schools. The initiative’s start-up stages are funded by a private donor. Con-boy stepped up to pay the paraprofessionals’ college tuition with federal stimulus dollars. UAA educators signed on to travel to Chevak up to three times a semester, with distance technology linking them in between. And the paraprofessionals, long under-valued for their cultural and educational contributions, signed on as college students. As their second class began in fall 2010, Sheila Sellers, an assistant professor in counseling and special education at UAA, joined them to teach Human Growth and Development. The course encompasses both Western child development theory – from Jean Piaget to Lev Vygotsky – to Cup’ik development theory, such as long-held spiritual and cultural values. Sellers would fly out on a Thursday, and over the next few days, teach up to 10 hours of human growth and development theory. Because the goal was a relevant curriculum co-created by student and professor, she carried no textbooks. She taught the theories, then grew excited to see her students explain and relate the theories through projects and presentations. Students cited examples of oral stories passed along by elders or spontaneously broke into Cup’ik lullabies when they studied language development.

They especially embraced Vygotsky, citing deeply held Cup’ik cultural values that mirrored Vygotsky’s theory of how children learn. Sellers knew then that the curriculum for these new teachers could be their mutual co-creation. “It was an amazing experience watching my students become em-powered as they began to understand how Western educational theories merged with their Cup’ik way of life,” she wrote after her Chevak experi-ence. “Being part of the Alaska Teacher Initiative in Chevak has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career.” The Chevak students were equally enthusiastic about this collabora-tion. “Many of us have had dreams of becoming teachers,” said Jacquelyn Kashatok. “Now, this program through UAA makes that dream possible.” The mutuality of the program strongly affected Sellers. “I went to Chevak as an instructor,” she said, “but I also became the student.”

a c c o l a d e s 15

Above: Elsie Ayuluk, Priscilla Matchian and Mary Matchian working together on a project in the Human Growth and Development class. The sessions were held in the Chevak School library and together Sheila Sellers and the paraprofessional students created a curriculum that reflected Western theory and Cup’ik child development values.

Right: A list of Cup’ik values hanging in many locations around the Chevak School.

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Sellers said she learned about culturally appropriate teaching practices that will carry over to her college courses in Anchorage and benefit all her students. After all, she notes, UAA’s campus is very multicultural in its student make-up already. Dr. John Pingayak, H.D. has spent the last 30 years working to save culture and language in Chevak and achieve the K-12 immersion school. He received an honorary Doctor of Laws from UAA in 2006 for this work. Speaking from a school classroom in Chevak, Pingayak said the Chevak Initiative is a big step in the right direction. His own daughter, Liana Pin-gayak, joined the program. He said it fully embodies the vision village elders had 33 years ago when they saw a Cup’ik immersion school in Chevak’s future. “It was always a marriage of Cup’ik and Western,” Pingayak explained, “a face-to-face, side-by-side relationship. One is not over the other. Imagine a large body of water, and the bridge is being built from both sides.” Critical to saving Cup’ik language is having teachers who can speak the language, but also fluently write and translate it. Conboy says this is a nuance that Pingayak made clear to him. “Imagine if you or I had an extensive English vocabulary and could speak it fluently, but we could not read it or write it?” Conboy asked. “Where would we be in terms of preserving the language?” Leadership is the right word to describe UAA’s partnering role in the Chevak Initiative, Pingayak said. “Twenty or 30 years ago,” he said, “this was the type of program that would never happen. ‘It couldn’t be done!’ they said.” And now look at them. Superintendent Doug Conboy says within five years he hopes to have a teaching staff filled with resident Cup’ik teachers who read, write and translate the language. “Then one of them will go get a graduate degree, and come back as superintendent.” When that happens, being out of his job in Chevak would smell like sweet success to Doug Conboy.

Tackling cross-disciplinary health care communication with simulation training means better outcomes for Alaskans Studies show that many medical errors in health care are not caused by one person having a bad day. Rather, the serious, leading cause is communica-tion problems among multidisciplinary teams working together. UAA is the lead institution for coordinating health programs in the UA system. If you are teaching the next generation of doctors, nurses and health care professionals, this is pivotal strategic information. It changes how you organize their training to fulfill your mission. UAA is fortunate to have a confluence of opportunity and talent to address this issue right now. It includes: • an existing broad base of safe simulation education• a new Health Sciences Building opening in August 2011• a new health college launching July 1, 2011 UAA already uses simulation labs so nursing students and other medi-cal trainees can work through patient issues in a risk-free setting. Simula-tion is integrated in varying degrees throughout the entire School of Nursing curriculum, including the outreach sites of Fairbanks, Juneau, Ketchikan, Sitka, Bethel, Kotzebue, Nome, Dillingham, Mat-Su, Kodiak, Homer, Kenai and Valdez. New telecommunications technology coming online now will allow instructors in Anchorage to monitor and advise simulations in these outreach sites, but it will also allow students in these distant locations to observe and participate in Anchorage simulations. But to more fully address the issue of communication gaps among multidisciplinary medical professionals working together, UAA is prepared to make the following statement a reality: The team that works together must train together. To that end, the new Health Sciences Building will position the nursing school as well as programs training physician assistants, allied health workers, occupational therapists and WWAMI doctors to take advantage of three simulation labs to be located there. Because of this new building and its expanded simulation facilities, the team that works together can and will train together. Not only will these cross-disciplinary professions be able to practice to-gether, but the new health college will integrate their education even further. A September 2010 memo from Chancellor Fran Ulmer and Provost Mike Driscoll explains that the new health college will be configured from existing programs in the College of Health and Social Welfare, the College of Arts and Sciences and the Community and Technical College. “The new college will provide comprehensive career pathway advising for the full suite of programs from certificates to graduate degrees, and it will create a supporting environment for building the multi-disciplinary education so important to contemporary health practice.” That’s all well and good, but UAA’s leadership vision is larger still. Assuming an important statewide role, UAA plans to expand existing simula-tion training partnerships to include large and small hospitals, community health centers, clinics, telehealth networks and other providers throughout the state. Sally Mead, as director of the UA Expanding Access to Health Programs Project, heads up the effort to pull these stakeholders together to share knowledge and experience. This group is called the Clinical Simulation User’s Group. As a planning document for the new network, Simulation in Alaska, explains, “With the goal of building Alaska’s very own, robust health care

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Liana Pingayak, center, is the daughter of John Pingayak, who has worked for years to preserve the Cup’ik language and culture in Chevak. Pictured here with her children Liam, Laney and Laiton, she is one of the paraprofessionals enrolled in the Chevak Alaska Teacher Initiative, preparing her to become a teacher in her own village. Of the experience, she says: “It’s not easy when you are a mom working full time and going to school. All my struggles and time spent away from my children are worthwhile and will pay off in the end.”

workforce, clinical simulation stands out as an area where collaborative strategic planning and resource leveraging just plain make sense.” Under Mead’s leadership, the User’s Group meets quarterly to collabo-rate and share technical and facility expertise, discuss program develop-ment issues and various tools and templates. The group is currently building and will maintain a library of scenarios for a range of training topics. It plans to eventually coordinate and offer training for simulation technicians and facilitators and identify best practices for integrating simulation in facilities and programs. Another effort underway is to facilitate development of five regional clinical simulation coalitions. The Interior Clinical Simulation Coalition – focused on simulation efforts in the Interior Alaska Region – began in fall 2010. Corlis Taylor is education manager for Fairbanks Memorial Hospital. She said the beauty of the statewide User’s Group, coupled with the regional coalitions, is the ability for isolated users to stay connected with a vast network of experienced users – including universities, the military, Native health and private hospitals – while still being able to customize local simulation training that fits your region’s needs. The vastness of the state and the tremendous educational potential of simulation demanded just such a flexible but supportive web, she said. “Sally [Mead] and Katy [Branch, an education program manager at UAA] have been a huge support as we develop the process here,” Taylor said. “I could not do it without their support.”

Discussion is underway for a similar coalition in Southeast Alaska beginning in late spring. Like initiatives are planned for Southcentral, South-west, West and Northwest Alaska through 2012. The significance of creating cross-disciplinary training opportunities in shaping Alaska’s health care workforce is very important. For more than a decade, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations has invited reports on causes of “sentinel events.” These are “any unantici-pated event in a health care setting resulting in death or serious physical or psychological injury to a patient or patients, unrelated to the natural course of the patient’s illness.” Over and over, the key analytic finding is that inadequate communica-tion is by far the leading cause. Training medical professionals separately, then mixing them up in emergency room and operating room settings where they function as a team, is exactly where the problem surfaces. Providing the opportunity for that mingling to happen early and in a safer simulation setting is a strategic way for future and recertifying medical professionals to practice safely. Alaskans statewide will benefit. As the planning memo says, “it just makes sense.” If you are UAA – the lead health university in the state – the task of de-livering the next generation of doctors, nurses and medical personnel with strong and effective communication skills is job number one. UAA’s strategic leadership is making it happen.

The simulation labs are at UAA are equipped with a variety of medical manne-quins. The labs provide an environment where the users may practice proper client assessment, critical thinking, intervention skills and procedures. These labs include pan-tilt-zoom video cameras, microphones, intercoms, and a control center with advanced video systems for mannequin operation, audio/video recording, patient-student event log and live-streaming application. This setup provides a debriefing and reflection tool used by instructors for student assessment and critique.

Left: Marissa Carrillo, simulation technician (in blue) and Shannon Konkler, a student worker, pose with Sim Man, an essential tool in creating opportunities for multi-disciplinary team teaching.

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any of us came to UAA with one goal in mind—to get a degree that would provide us professional or educational opportunities to sustain or enrich our lives. We met peers in our areas of study and formed communities and collaborations around our shared common in-terests and goals. And this is where our university education really began—these interactions with others who shared our interests but who may have been quite different from us socially, physically or culturally. One doesn’t have to look hard to find examples that UAA values and encourages inclusivity and diversity. These are part of the culture here and can be seen in the classroom, in our curriculum, public forums, events programming, hiring practices and are included as public commitments in our mission statement and strategic planning documents.

Diversity in our curriculum

A quick way to understand the scope of diversity at UAA is to browse the degree offerings and academic programs. From Alaska Native Studies to Women’s Studies, UAA provides academic opportunities for students to experience and explore many perspectives. Here are just a few examples. The Alaska Native Studies program provides UAA students with an introduction to Alaska Native ways of knowing and seeing the world, experiential and theoretical exploration of Alaska Native cultures, and a series of critical perspectives on traditional and contemporary Native experiences and politics. UAA offers a minor in gerontology that examines changes in society that result from an aging population and how this knowledge affects public policies and programs. The International Studies program at UAA prepares students to be successful in our increasingly interdependent world. Many students in the program study abroad and experience first hand what it means to be a contributing member to the international community. Similarly, the Department of Languages provides students the oppor-tunity to learn Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Russian, Spanish and American Sign Language within a cultural context. Students who major in languages at UAA learn as much about cultural communica-tion as language. UAA is committed to increasing the number of Alaska Natives and American Indians graduating with degrees in nursing. The Recruitment and Retention of Alaska Natives into Nursing (RRANN) program is dedicated to encouraging personal growth within an academic setting that recognizes cultural diversity and indigenous values. Like RRANN, the federally funded Alaska Natives in Psychology (ANPsych) program focuses on the recruit-ment and retention of Native students in psychology. There’s also the Alaska Native Science and Engineering Program

(ANSEP) that places ANSEP students on career paths toward leadership positions in engineering and science professions. The Women’s Studies program fosters open and vigorous inquiry about gender, challenges curricula in which women are absent and questions cultural assumptions in light of information available to us today.

Faculty and staff commitment to an inclusive culture

“Diversity is a core value at UAA,” says Marva Watson, director of the Of-fice of Campus Diversity and Compliance. “The Chancellor and Cabinet fully embrace diversity at UAA with financial support for programs, visibility at events and their willingness to publicly speak out.” The Diversity Office at UAA was established 12 years ago to promote, support, measure and celebrate diversity at UAA. Today, the Office of Diver-sity and Compliance guides and supports diversity efforts on campus and provides personal and professional training workshops on diversity issues. Additionally, it is responsible for managing and coordinating University policies, procedures and programs regarding equal opportunity and affirmative action.

One of the institution-wide initiatives at UAA is that we are part of the National Coalition Building Institute (NCBI) program. NCBI works with institutions to build inclusive campuses and communities and eliminate prejudice. In January 2008, UAA became an NCBI Campus Affiliate. UAA faculty, staff and students were trained as facilitators and now present the NCBI Welcoming Diversity/Prejudice Reduction Workshops and serve as a campus resource for controversial equity issues. Many of the diversity efforts at UAA are maintained by committed volun-teers. The Diversity Action Council (DAC) consists of UAA faculty and staff that maintain UAA’s diversity action plan and consult with the Chancellor’s Office to address campus-wide diversity issues. The DAC is also active in promoting activities and programs throughout the campus that address issues and award actions of those that contribute to creating and maintain-ing a supportive culture on the UAA campuses like the Chancellor’s Awards for Excellence. These awards recognize extraordinary efforts of individuals and small teams who go the extra mile to create inclusive culture at UAA.

Celebrating UAA’s Diverse Culture

UAA prides itself on being a “public square”—a place for students and community to interact and exchange ideas.

M

By Jef f rey O l i ver

a c c o l a d e s 19

UAA Diversity Statement

With freedom of speech being at our core, UAA strives to create an inclusive, respectful campus community that promotes and embraces our individual differences. We unite in our belief that diversity includes under-standing and respecting differences in ideas, religion, gender, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, disability, age and socioeconomic status. We celebrate diversity in all of our educational and employment endeavors.

Like the DAC, the Faculty Senate Diversity Committee works with students, faculty, staff and administration to ensure that everyone at UAA has access to resources that facilitate the inclusion of diverse cultures, ideas and back-grounds to strengthen the overall value of education at UAA.

Culture on campus

One of the indicators of an inclusive culture is seeing how people spend their free time. For example, Student Activities provides art and entertain-ment activities on campus and a large number of these events serve as cross-cultural awareness opportunities for the UAA community. Student Activities co-sponsors campus-wide events such as Campus Kick-Off, Ju-neteenth, Alaska Civil Rights Day and Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. They also provide funding for Women’s History Month, International Education Week and many other campus events. The Cama-i Room in Gorsuch Commons is a social gathering place for UAA students and the community. Anyone is welcomed to participate in so-cial and educational programs that focus on Alaska Native, Native American and Alaska cultures. Various UAA departments and student groups collaborate to offer monthly celebrations such as Hispanic Heritage Month, Black History Month and Women’s History Month that raise awareness and celebrate differences at UAA. The UAA Union of Students established the Board of Cultural Aware-ness to expose students to the diverse cultures, beliefs and lifestyles represented on campus and throughout the world. The board supports and co-sponsors a variety of multi-cultural events that promote diversity and address cultural issues.

Giving voice

Marva says of UAA’s diversity efforts, “we’re giving voice to people.” But not everyone connects immediately. UAA is committed to supporting all students and providing safe places on campus for students to connect and succeed. The AHAINA (African-American, Hispanic, Asian, International and Na-tive American) program provides a community of resources and academic assistance to students of diverse ethnicities. The motto of AHAINA is “Goals, Grades and Graduation.” Disability Support Services (DSS) coordinates support services for UAA students who experience accessibility issues. DSS educates and mentors the UAA community how to be aware of students’ needs and to be proactive about making our environment accessible for everyone.

Student Support Services and Native Student Services both work to help students overcome barriers on campus or in the classroom that inter-fere with their academic success. Both programs help students connect with supportive communities on campus.

Alumni and community

UAA prides itself on being a “public square”—a place for students and com-munity to interact and exchange ideas. Many events on campus are open to the public—meaning that as an alumnus of UAA, you’re welcomed to participate in the ongoing discussions and enjoy the entertainment offered on campus. And, as in other aspects of UAA, many of the public events are designed to enhance our awareness of people and cultures around us. Each year, the UAA/APU Books of the Year program selects a couple of books, usually on contemporary social issues or topics on life in Alaska, and holds public discussions throughout the year. Many faculty members incorporate ideas from these books in their syllabi as well. It’s like a book club for the whole community. UAA is also the recipient of the Ford Foundation “Difficult Dialogues” grant that encourages programs and curriculum of initiatives related to building community and Alaska Native issues. The project provides our com-munity a framework to discuss difficult topics from multiple perspectives in a safe environment. The Center for Advancing Faculty Excellence coordinates the community discussions and provides workshops for faculty to build these ideas into their courses.

Stay connected with us

As you can see, there are many ways to participate in the inclusive culture at UAA. Diversity requires each of us. “We” are UAA.

Visit www.uaa.alaska.edu/calendar to find ways to connect with UAA.

Celebrating UAA’s Diverse Culture

By Jef f rey O l i ver

PRINCE WILLIAM SOUND COMMUNITY COLLEGE

Making hands-on lab sciences accessible via distance delivery methods

PWSCC is always looking for ways to standardize the experience between on- and off-campus students, especially in lab science. While its main campus features a cutting-edge, ultra modern wet lab facility, some of the Bush communities PWSCC serves do not have that capability. But thanks to partnerships with organizations across the state, all outreach sites now have Internet access, which allows PWSCC to try something bold: virtual lab sciences. To help address the challenge of effectively teaching the hands-on nature of lab sciences through distance education, PWSCC utilized Title III funding to hire Don Bickley as its Second Life Virtual World Designer. Prior to moving to Alaska, he designed and implemented Northern Michigan University’s Speech-Language and Hearing Virtual Clinic.

Construction began on PWSCC’s virtual laboratory in 2009 and today it is among the most detail-oriented and robust educational systems using Second Life Virtual World technology. Users can work with hundreds of interactive objects across multiple labs in an environment that standardizes the lab science experience. No matter where you are in the world, as long as you have an Internet connection and a computer, you can participate in virtual labs in the areas of natural selection, biotechnology, population biology, membrane transport and cellular energy. The commitment of PWSCC to its service area throughout eastern Prince William Sound and the Copper Basin allows students, faculty and administration to stay involved in the online lab’s design process. Changes to the lab system are a result of student feedback to ensure that the technology remains sustainable as the campus moves toward immersive, interdisciplinary, synchronous and asynchronous learning for rural Alaska and beyond.

KODIAK COLLEGE

Using instinctive behavior to cultivate campus leadership

Leadership on the Kodiak College campus involves all. Because of its small size and compact footprint, it is not only fairly easy for all to become involved in leadership, but it has also become embedded in the culture, mission and vision of the organization. Faculty help plan the annual staff and faculty retreat, which takes place each fall, to make sure topics covered are relevant and timely. Small depart-ments allow each full-time faculty the opportunity to serve as chair of their department, giving them budget and strategic program planning experience fairly early in their careers. Each full-time faculty also serves on the Direc-

tor’s Leadership Cabinet, providing valuable input and shared governance on a regular basis. The leadership of the Instructional Council rotates an-nually among tenure track faculty, giving each the opportunity to serve and guide the work of the group.

Many staff serve alongside faculty in instructional decision making teams such as Instructional Council, Placement Team, Director’s Leadership Cabinet. They are also encouraged to lead and serve on committees that provide service and outreach on campus such as the Community Engagement Committee, Technology Committee,

Student Success Team, Sustainability Kodiak and on search committees for both staff and faculty.

With fewer than 1,000 students, leadership opportunities are abundant for interested students. In many cases, students can become officers in Phi Theta Kappa and Student Government as early as their first semester on campus, allowing them to have a big impact on the activities the group chooses to become involved in. Recent activities include voter registra-tion drives, canned food collections for local food banks, an all-campus barbeque, networking with high school students for a scavenger hunt and

social, international film festivals, hosting as deejays, creating themed shows for local public radio station and interacting with legislators on behalf of student interests.

Kodiak College Advisory Council members take a leadership role in advocating for the college in the local community. They often use their leadership skills to help raise funds for scholarships and to help forge part-

nerships with local government, public and social service agencies, private businesses, the U.S. Coast Guard, labor unions, among other entities.

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Fostering LeADership in communities across Alaska

Kodiak College ProfessorMark Schreiter

Kodiak College Advisory Council

MATANUSKA-SUSITNA COLLEGE

Philanthropy in action

Matanuska-Susitna College (MSC) is excited to announce the Alvin S. and Gloria M. Okeson $25,000 endowment to help non-traditional students ad-vance their education. The Okesons helped grow MSC into what it is today and are long-time supporters of the College. Alvin and Gloria Okseon played a pivotal role in the development and growth of the College. Alvin was the

director of MSC for nearly 27 years, from 1961 to late 1987. He was granted an honorary degree from the University in 1988. Then in 1989, Alvin was recognized again by having the campus’ library named in his honor for his dedicated service to the University. In August 2010, MSC

kicked off a faculty and staff giving campaign that has heightened the sense of giving around the campus and among former faculty and staff of the College. MSC sees its students struggling in trying to pursue their educa-tion without financial support. So in an effort to help its students, Mat-Su faculty and staff are now given the opportunity, through the establishment of a faculty and staff giving campaign, to expand educational opportunities for even more students.

Encouraging a smaller carbon footprint

Formed from a service learning class project in 2010, the Mat-Su Carbon Crew is now an official student club on the MSC campus. The Crew strives to raise awareness of renewable energy, and promotes reducing, reusing and recycling on the MSC campus. The group also fosters the creation of green jobs and sustainable communities. The Crew recently brought home two prestigious global awards and placed eighth in the 2010 Great Power Race, a clean energy competition among nearly 1,000 teams from colleges and universities in the U.S., China and India. Registered teams earned points for implementing innovative environ-mental solutions in their communities. Read more about the Mat-Su Carbon Crew on page 9.

MSC adds Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society Twenty-eight MSC students were inducted into the new student chapter of Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society, “Beta Sigma Epsilon,” in fall 2010. The society was created in 1918 to recognize and encourage scholarship among two-year college students. Members must complete a minimum of 12 hours of associate degree course work, earn a minimum GPA of 3.5 and must maintain this high academic standing throughout their enrollment. MSC professor Dr. Debbie Fox serves as a Faculty Scholar for Phi Theta Kappa.

KENAI PENINSULA COLLEGE

Leading the way in distance education, surging enrollment

Kenai Peninsula College (KPC) is an emerging leader in distance education for UAA, resulting in a surge in enrollment over the past year. In the fall 2009 semester, KPC saw the number of students increase by almost 15 percent compared to fall 2008; student credit hours increased by almost 21 percent. From spring 2009 to spring 2010, enrollment increased 11 percent and student credit hours increased 13 percent. After an aggressive marketing and advertising campaign, KPC has seen a healthy increase in semester credit hours (37 percent), student headcount (43 percent) and the number of degree-seeking students (124 percent—a larger increase than any other UA campus).

KPC’s Kenai River Campus Student Union hops on important issues

The Kenai River Campus (KRC) student government has provided strong leadership for fellow students over the past year. Using their voices in well-orchestrated activities and demonstrations, they have taken clear messages to their constituency, university leadership, elected officials, the media and the public regarding the support they have for their college. In September 2010, the group took a firm stand of support for HB 424 (known as Proposition B), the general obligation bond supporting a variety of educational projects across the state. KRC had two projects in the bond pack-age: a Career and Technical Center and a 96-bed student housing complex. The group utilized bright green frog suits to draw attention to their messages of “hop on Prop B.” The GO bond passed by a wide margin in the November 2 statewide election. The most current issue the group has embraced is reflected in a formal resolution unanimously passed on Feb. 16, 2011 stating opposition of proposed funding cuts to the college by the Kenai Peninsula Borough. The KRCSU rallied students and the public to protest the proposed funding cuts Feb. 15.

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C O M M U N I T Y C A M P U S E S

Alvin and Gloria Okeson with Mat-Su College Director Talis Colberg.

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Kachemak Bay Campus’s Dr. Debbie Tobin, assistant professor of biology, was awarded a $3,000 UAA service-learning mini-grant for her community-based learning projects in Biology A116, Chemistry A105L and Chemistry A103. Students partnered with the Kasitsna Bay Lab, the Pratt Museum and the Kachemak Bay Research Reserve on projects involv-ing river otters, marine debris problems and

intertidal zone organisms. As a result of Dr. Tobin’s work, the UAA Biology Department approved the addition of an emphasis area in marine biology to its B.S. degree. KBC will begin offering courses this fall.

Dr. André Rosay, director of the UAA Justice Center, received a $517,000 grant from the Alaska Council on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault to conduct victimization surveys in Anchorage, Fairbanks and rural Alaska. The survey results will inform the Gov-ernor’s Initiative to end the epidemic of domestic violence and sexual assault in Alaska.

NASA funded a $1.5M collaborative research project led by Dr. Jeff Welker, director of the Environment and Natural Resources Institute (ENRI), and Dr. Rob Campbell of the Prince William Sound Science Center to study the changing carbon cycle of the Copper River Watershed and the Gulf of Alaska. Phase 1 of the studies will take place between May 2011 and Sep-tember 2013. Postdoctoral scientist Rommel Zulueta and graduate students Laurel McFadden and Matt O’Dell were recruited to join the team, along with professors Drs. Doug Causey and Paddy Sullivan of UAA’s Biological Sciences Department and ENRI.

UAA’s College of Education was granted continued accreditation by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, and received spe-cial congratulations because no areas for improvement were identified.

UAA’s new Bachelor of Science in Dietetics program received accreditation by the Commission on Accreditation for Dietetics in November 2010. The program will begin admitting students in fall 2011.

Barbara Bolson, director of Kodiak College, is the winner of the Alaska Association of Career and Technical Education Leadership Award. Barbara was recognized for her leadership and support toward the growth of career and technical education in Kodiak.

UAA’s accreditation was reaffirmed by the Northwest Commission on Col-lege and Universities (NWCCU). NWCCU commended UAA for its willingness to serve as a pilot institution for its new standards and process. NWCCU found noteworthy the University’s broad, transparent and inclusive planning process, and for the manner in which it has created forward momentum in the institution.

Ronald Spatz, dean of the University Honors College and editor of Alaska Quarterly Review, is a recipient of a 2010 Gover-nor’s Award for the Arts and Humanities. This annual series of awards honors the contribution of individuals and groups that enrich the civic, intellectual and cultural life of all Alaskans through the wisdom and techniques of the humanities.

MSC mathematics professor Dr. Ping-Tung “PT” Chang is the recipient of 2010 Council for Advancement and Support of Education U.S. Professor of the Year Award. Chang, who has taught at MSC for 22 years, accepted the award in Washington D.C. in November 2010. The Profes-sors of the Year program salutes the most outstanding instructors in the country—those who excel in teach-ing and positively influence the lives and careers of students.

In 2009, Dr. Chang was awarded the CASE Professor of the Year for Alaska. Among his many accomplishments, Dr. Chang has developed effective teaching methods for students who are “afraid” of math or who have previously been unsuccess-ful in learning the subject matter.

Three of UAA’s staff and faculty were honored with 2011 Alaska Journal of Commerce “Top Forty Under 40” awards. Congratulations to Robert Capuozzo, UAA College of Education; Monica Kane, UAA Academic Affairs; and André Rosay, UAA Justice Center. Alaska’s Top Forty Under 40 program recognizes the state’s top professionals younger than age 40. Recipients are honored for demonstrated professional excellence and a commitment to their community.

FACULTY, STAFF & PROGRAM ACCOLADES

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Faculty and graduate students from the UAA Environment and Natural Resources Institute and the Biological Sciences Department presented their scientific discoveries at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco in December 2010. Master’s students Beth Sharpe, Andy Anderson, Lisa Ebbs and Ashley Stanek; Ph.D. student Ken Tape; and post-doctoral fellows Adam Cszank and Jessica Cable, shared their findings from Alaska and other regions of the Arctic.

The Fulbright Program, the U.S. government’s flagship international educa-tional exchange program, named UAA among the 2010-2011 leading produc-ers of U.S. Fulbright students. Four UAA students—Amy Voss, Robin Ford, Charles Beattie and Melanie Clairmont Parrett—won awards, placing UAA among the leaders of all universities and colleges that offer undergraduate and master’s degree programs.

University Honors College students Meagan Byrne (biological sciences), Mallory Givens (history) and Alexandra West (civil engineering) each received a scholarship grant of $10,000 for the 2010-11 academic year from the National Consortium for Measurement and Signature Intelligence Research, disbursed by the National Science Foundation. This is the second year in a row that three UAA students received awards. All three students were selected in part because of their significant undergraduate research experiences at UAA.

The Seawolf Debate Team continued to garner international attention at the 2011 World Universities Debating Championship, held at the University of Botswana. The Seawolves ended the tournament with the top seeded team from the U.S., the top-ranked individual speaker from America and accumu-lated more points as a squad than any UAA contingent ever to attend the tournament. This year’s tournament featured 320 student teams representing 160 universities from more than 40 countries.

“Upon the Green,” directed by Journalism and Public Communications senior Woodruff Laputka, won the 2010 Royal Television Society Award for Best Undergraduate Factual in Scotland. The documentary is about a small community of aging athletes struggling to preserve their legacy in Central Scotland. Shot over four months with a six-person crew, “Upon the Green” has been called, “an outstanding piece of work” and described as “a mov-ing observational documentary...”

Aviation technology student Stacy Jeffery is the recipient of a $5,000 Delta Air Lines Aviation Maintenance/Aviation Business Management Scholar-ship. As part of the scholarship, Stacy traveled to Reno, Nevada in February 2011 for the 22nd Annual International Women in Aviation Conference.

A group of UAA construction management students placed first in the Region 6 Commercial Category at the Associated Schools of Construction Competition. UAA competed against 11 other universities. Team members include: Jed Shandy, Will Moran, Jason Richards, Sean Rafter, Rachael Chamberlain, Jamie Smith and Mack Pennington.

Kachemak Bay Campus’ LeAndra Macauly and Kenai River Campus’ John Stenglein were named as recipients of Student Diversity Awards given in December by UAA’s Diversity Action Council. The awards are given to stu-dents who have significantly enhanced diversity on a UAA campus by doing one or more of the following: increasing visibility of diverse people, cultures and/or perspectives, creating a welcoming environment or representing diverse student voices through advocacy and participation in UAA student organizations.

STUDENT ACCOLADES

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By Cassidy White

orking toward its mission to connect, advocate and support the University, the UAA Alumni Association works closely with the University and its Alumni Relations department to achieve its mission. At the Association’s fall 2009 board of directors meeting, board member Jim Hemsath, M.S. ‘01 pitched an idea that jump-started a UAA tradition that’s sure to be around for many years to come: The Green and Gold Gala. Recognizing the challenge of achieving a college degree, the Associa-tion awards six annual scholarships of $1,000, but for Jim, it wasn’t enough. “We can do more,” he said. And with just four words, the board embarked on reaching a higher goal—to raise more scholarship support for UAA and to increase awareness of alumni in the community as engaged citizens, ac-complished businesspeople and leaders. To reach this goal, the board hosted the inaugural black tie Green and Gold Gala on Saturday, Oct. 9, 2010, kicking off UAA’s Homecoming week. More than 200 alumni, board members, friends and community members filled the ballroom at the Anchorage Marriott Downtown, dressed in their green and gold best, to celebrate their Seawolf pride. The Gala featured a live auction, including an original oil painting, din-ner with the mayor, exquisite jewelry, a private UAA parking spot for a year, and much more. Between the live auction, corporate sponsorships and table donations, the Gala raised more than $28,000 to support scholarships to be awarded in 2011. “Our table alone raised enough money for a scholarship in five minutes,” said Jim, chair of the Gala committee. “That was the vibe of the

night—getting great things accomplished for students through giving and celebrating UAA’s successes.” The event also served to increase awareness and visibility of UAA’s 40,000 alumni. The Association recognized three “Alumni of Distinction.” Read more about these outstanding alumni on the following pages. Laurie Bruce, B.B.A. ‘81 board member and gala committee member, said the Gala actualized the core of the Association’s mission by connecting, advocating and supporting UAA. “We brought together alumni, friends and the community through the Gala,” she said. “The entire room was energized knowing we can make a difference to UAA and its students through its alumni and our successes. People had the ‘Let’s do more to support our university’ attitude that filled the room, showing the immense amount of support for UAA.” With the date set for Oct. 1, 2011, the Association’s expectations are even higher for the second annual Green and Gold Gala. “Through our success with the Gala, we’re able to help current students succeed in their future. And that’s really something,” said Laurie. Jim added, “The Gala will start to be a real significant catalyst for change. It will be a physical way to get back to the roots of the Association’s mission. We lead by doing, and will continue to do so in the future.” The Association knows even modest scholarships make a difference, yet its goal is to grow the number of scholarships given to impact more students every year. Events, such as the Gala, are a way to meet these goals and implement the Association’s mission. “It was truly a stellar night,” Jim said. “I can’t wait for next year.”

A Gala to RememberUAA Alumni Association’s inaugural Green and Gold Gala raises more than $28,000 in scholarships

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“Hard work went into putting together such a suc-cessful event. It is gratifying to realize the material results of a greatly enhanced Alumni Scholarship Program for the benefit of UAA students right away this spring. On top of that, it was a fun night of sharing in our pride and success as members of the UAA community. We are so grateful to all our spon-sors, volunteers, and the Association members who helped make this happen. Join us as a member of the Association, and join the party this October 1!”

Jeff Roe, UAA Alumni Association PresidentM.B.A. ‘85

UAA Alumni Scholarship— “Making education available to all”• Began in 1985 • The endowment is valued at more than $140,000• 129 awards have been given, totaling more than $100,000• Ranks in the top 10 of endowed scholarships at UAA• $34,000 in awards will be given this year because of the success of the 2010 Green and Gold Gala

For more information on available UAA scholarships, contact the Financial Aid Office at (907) 786-1586 or visit http://www.uaa.alaska.edu/scholarships/.

2010 Green & Gold Gala Sponsors

Gold LevelDavis Constructors and Engineers Inc.GCI Communication CorporationShell Exploration & Production CompanyCarl Swanson B.B.A. ’86 and Annette Swanson

Green LevelCook Inlet Tribal CouncilATS Alaska

Seawolf LevelBlue Skies Solutions LLCConocoPhillips Alaska Inc.Dowl HKMGinger RestaurantGrizzly Express LLCMikunda Cottrell & Co. Inc.R & M Consultants Inc.USKH Inc.Lorali Carter, B.A. ’97, M.P.A. ‘07Cathleen S. Hahn, CMA, CPA, B.B.A. ‘85

ContributorsNorthrim BankDr. Peter B. Adams, B.S. ’85, M.D.Eleanor Andrews, Honorary Degree Recipient ’07 and Dennis ComeauDr. Steven L. Floerchinger, M.D.Richard Judd, B.S. ’79 and Lee Ann Gardner, B.S. ‘78

Table SponsorsBP AlaskaCarlile TransportationConocoPhillips AlaskaCook Inlet Tribal Council Inc.GCI Communication CorporationMotznik Information ServicesNerland Agency Worldwide PartnersR & M Consultants Inc.Shell Exploration & Production CompanySleep Comfort by NerlandUAA College of Arts and SciencesLaurie Bruce, B.B.A. ’81 and Kevin Bruce B.A. ‘80Lorali Carter, B.A. ’97, M.P.A. ‘07Jim Hemsath, M.S. ’01 and Nancy HemsathSkye McRoberts, B.A. ‘05Dr. Norm Wilder, M.B.A. ’02 and Kathy Wilder

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Join us on Oct. 1 for the 2011 Green and Gold Gala!

The 2010 Nominating Committee for the Alumni of Distinction awards includes: Jim Hemsath, M.S. ‘01, Chair, 2010 Green and Gold Gala and Alumni Association Board of Directors; Laurie Bruce, B.B.A. ‘81, Alumni Association Board of Direc-tors; Mike Driscoll, Provost, University of Alaska Anchorage; Kirk Wickersham, B.A. ‘66, University of Alaska Board of Regents; Jo Michalski, University of Alaska Foundation, Board of Trustees; and Julia Martinez, Senior Director of Alumni Relations and Annual Giving, University of Alaska Anchorage.

The Association is looking forward to the 2011 Alumni of Distinction awards. If you have candidates, submit them to the Office of Alumni Relations at anjm5@uaa.alaska.edu. The nomination process begins this spring.

Alumni of Achievement Award

Dana Stabenow M.F.A. ’85, Author

Awarded to an alumnus who has attained prominence in his or her industry or profession, and that has had a demonstrated impact on their community and enhanced the reputation and image of UAA.

Dana Stabenow is an Alaska author who has produced literary works in the science fiction, mystery and sus-pense/thriller genres. Many of Stabenow’s books are set

in her home state of Alaska, where she was raised on a 75-foot fish ten-der in the Gulf of Alaska. Stabenow received a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Alaska in 1973 and graduated in 1985 from UAA’s M.F.A. program. She published her first novel, “Second Star,” in 1990. Her first Kate Shugak book, “A Cold Day for Murder,” won the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original in 1993 and her 27th novel, “Though Not Dead,” was published in February 2011. Her proudest achievement is imple-menting two successful Authors to the Bush programs in 2001 and 2007, which sent a hundred published authors to communities from Unalaska to Anaktuvuk Pass to talk to kids in the Bush about reading and writing.

“It’s humbling, for sure, to be the first recipient of the Alumni of Achievement Award. It’s great that the Association is becoming more active with showcase events like the Gala. UAA is turning out graduates who are building us a better community, and singling them out for recognition is a way to blow their horn and the university’s at the same time.”

UAA Alumni Association honors three Alumniof Distinction

The UAA Alumni Association honored three outstand-ing Alumni of Distinction at its inaugural Green and Gold Gala on Saturday, Oct. 9, 2010 at the Anchorage Marriott Downtown. The Gala brought together alumni, friends and the community in support of UAA. The elegant evening kicked off Homecoming Week at UAA and celebrated achievements of alumni, showcased University success and raised support for student scholarships.

UAA Alumni Association Board Member and Chair of the Gala committee, Jim Hemsath (left), and UAA Alumni Association President, Jeff Roe (right), present Gloria O’Neill, Linda Leary and Dana Stabenow (not pictured) with the Alumni of Distinction awards at the 2010 Gala.

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Alumni Humanitarian Award

Gloria O’Neill B.A. ’96, President/CEO, Cook Inlet Tribal Council

Awarded to an alumnus who has contributed to their com-munity and who has strived to make a difference in the life of others. This could be through voluntary service or their profession.

Gloria O’Neill is president and CEO of Cook Inlet Tribal Council (CITC), a position she has held since 1998. Under her leadership, CITC’s budget has increased from $8M to $46M, and its staff

has expanded from 70 to 300 employees. Today, CITC provides social, educational and employment services to 12,000 Alaska Natives and Native Americans annually, and is widely recognized for its innovative and effective approaches. Beyond her work at CITC, O’Neill has made significant contributions locally, regionally and nationally. She currently serves as chair of the Anchorage Museum Association Board of Direc-tors, and is a board member of the Anchorage Community Land Trust, Cook Inlet Housing Authority, Chanlyut Inc. and Alaska Federation of Natives. O’Neill is originally from Soldotna, Alaska and is of Yupik and Irish descent. She graduated from UAA in 1996 with a B.A. in Sociology, and a minor in Business Administration, and later earned an M.B.A. from Alaska Pacific University.

Alumni Emerging Leader Award Linda Leary M.S. ’04, President, Carlile Transportation Systems

Awarded to an alumnus who has made a significant impact in their industry or profession or contributed to the community and has strived to make a difference in the lives of others. The nominee must have received their degree within the past 10 years.

Linda Leary is the president of Carlile Transportation Sys-tems, a company she’s been with since the mid-1980s.

Founded in 1980, Carlile has grown from two tractors to one of Alaska’s largest trucking companies. Today, Carlile’s wholly owned terminals serve Alaska from Anchorage, Fairbanks, Kenai, Kodiak, Prudhoe Bay and Seward, as well as Seattle, WA, Houston, TX, Blaine, MN, and Edmonton, Alberta. As president, Linda has recently added several value-added aspects, such as logistics services for its customers, and additional shipping and forwarding service to Hawaii. She received her M.S. in Global Supply Chain Management from UAA in 2004.

“It is an honor to be a UAA graduate and to represent the University as an Emerging Leader in Alaska. The state of Alaska is truly a land of opportunity and it is what you make of it. UAA helps students to develop both a strong base to begin their careers and an opportunity to return to school for additional learning to build on their careers. UAA is the example of the true Alaska spirit, creating opportunity for learning for all.”

“I am deeply honored to receive the Alumni Humanitarian Award. As an alumnus, it remains critically important for me to stay connected to my UAA family. The University is a focal point for our community and for our state; a place where our thought leaders come together with vibrant new ideas and develop solutions to advance our state. I am committed to ensuring a strong, vital UAA system that nurtures today’s youth and cultivates tomorrow’s leaders.”

Alumni of Distinction Awards

There are many reasons to become an active UAA Alumni Association member! Members receive an array of benefits while also supporting UAA and continuing their lifelong affiliation with their alma mater.

o I’d like to join the UAA Alumni Association. Enclosed is my check for $35, payable to the UAA Alumni Association.

o Sign me up for the alumni newsletter. The monthly alumni newsletter provides you with UAA alumni-specific news and events.

o Please subscribe me to the Seawolf Weekly, a weekly email newsletter featuring news about UAA.

o Please send Accolades to me electronically.

Return form to: UAA Office of Alumni Relations 3211 Providence Dr., ADM 236 Anchorage, AK 99508

JOIN THE ASSOCIATION – UPDATE YOUR INFORMATION!Have you moved? Have you had a career of family change? Please tell us what’s going on in your life. Update your information by filling out this short and easy form.

Join online at www.uaaalumni.org!

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Member benefitsEnjoy these many benefits as an official member of the UAA Alumni Association:

• Invitations to networking opportunities and campus events• Subscription to a monthly alumni newsletter• Alumni Association Member Card, providing the following: • 20 percent discount at the UAA Campus Bookstore, good on clothing, gifts and most books • A special 40 percent discount coupon for one-time-use at the UAA Campus Bookstore • Privileges at the UAA/APU Consortium Library • Outdoor equipment rental from the Student Union • Discounts on admission to athletic events at the Wells Fargo Sports Complex and Sullivan Arena, and reduced rates for recreational facilities of the Wells Fargo Sports Complex• Hotel and rental car discounts• Special benefits at Denali Alaskan Federal Credit Union (including free Seawolf checks, membership fee waiver and much more)• Voting privileges on Association business for alumni dues-paying members

All benefits are subject to change and may vary.

The UAA Alumni Association is a 501c3 nonprofit organization working toward its mission to Connect, Advocate and Sup-

port the UAA. It is a separate entity operating independently of UAA.

Membership dues are $35 per year.

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owered by a late-season surge, the Alaska Anchorage hockey team posted its best season under sixth-year head coach Dave Shyiak and perhaps its top campaign since joining the Western Collegiate Hockey Association in the early 1990s. After battling for home-ice advantage in the WCHA playoffs until the final weeks of the regular season, the Seawolves finished in a tie for eighth-place in the 12-team league with a 12-14-2 record. That set up UAA for a trip to traditional power Minnesota, which had never lost in 12 previous home series in the league’s best-of-three, first-round format. The Seawolves, however, were up to the challenge, sweeping the Golden Gophers with 4-3 and 2-0 wins in Minneapolis, March 11-12, and earning their second-ever trip to the WCHA Final Five. UAA lost its Final Five quarterfinal game against 13th-ranked Colorado College, 4-2, but still finished with a solid 16-18-3 record, posting the most overall victories since becoming a full-time league member in 1993-94. Shyiak’s club used a combination of experience and youth to improve throughout the season. Senior winger Tommy Grant scored team-highs of 16 goals and 32 points, and classmate Craig Parkinson added eight goals and 21 points, but two of the team’s top four scorers were freshmen, too, as Jordan Kwas notched a team-high 20 assists and Matt Bailey finished with 10 goals and 10 assists in 30 games. Between the pipes, the Seawolves are in good shape for the future as well, with freshman goaltenders Chris Kamal and Rob Gunderson combining for a quality .890 saves percentage. Kamal ended the year strong, earning two WCHA Player of the Week awards and a pair of shutouts against Minnesota.

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S E A W O L F S P O R T S

Seawolf athletes end winter season on a high note

Freshman goaltender Chris Kamal finished with a 9-5-1 record and back-stopped the Seawolves to a five-game winning streak in February and March.

Senior forward Tommy Grant finished his four-year career on a high note, leading the Seawolves with 16 goals and helping UAA to its second-ever berth in the WCHA Final Five tournament.

East Anchorage High School graduate Jaime Bronga (pictured) captured the second and third All-America honors of her career with a pair of top-10 finishes – including third place in the 5-K classical race – at the 2011 NCAA Ski Championships. Freshman Erik Bjornsen was runner-up in the men’s classical race, while women’s Nordic standout Laura Rombach also captured All-America honors. On the slopes, junior Alex Parker captured the fourth All-America award of her career with a third-place podium finish in the giant slalom. The Seawolves finished seventh nationally in the team competition.

Team captain Kelsey Fullerton became just the third Seawolf to earn multiple individual league titles when she won the floor exer-cise at the Mountain Pacific Sports Federa-tion Championships on March 19. Coach Paul Stoklos’ team finished the season with four straight 190-plus scores, boosted by Fullerton and fellow seniors Maria Puricelli and Kristy Boswell.

The Seawolf women’s basketball team celebrates at Sam Carver Gymnasium on March 5 after beat-ing Western Washington 68-67 in the inaugural Great Northwest Athletic Conference championship game. UAA went on to beat WWU again, 55-48, in the following week’s NCAA Tournament First-Round matchup, before falling to eventual regional champion Cal Poly Pomona. Coach Tim Moser’s squad finished 27-7 overall and captured its fifth straight NCAA berth.

Junior center Taylor Rohde was a First-Team All-Great Northwest Ath-letic Conference honoree in his first season after transferring from Arizona State. Rohde and the Seawolves returned to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2008, advancing to the second round with an opening upset of nationally sixth-ranked Hum-boldt State. Coach Rusty Osborne’s team finished 24-10 overall – equaling the second-most victories in program history – and finished runner-up in both the GNAC’s regular season and postseason tournament.

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Dean Weidner, founder and owner of Weidner Property Management, has pledged $3M to establish an endowed chair in UAA’s College of Business and Public Policy (CBPP). The first appointee to the new Weidner Chair in Business Management will be a professor of real estate and property management, which will allow the College to expand its related programs and become a leader in real estate and property management education. Created in response to local business needs, the Weidner Chair will work hand-in-hand with the Alaska community and will engage in important research relevant to Alaska’s real estate and property management industries. The Chair will also develop an expanded curriculum to include courses in key concepts of residential and commercial property management, affordable housing, military and senior housing, and other issues relevant to Alaska. These specialized courses will give students a competitive edge in today’s job market. Dean Weidner is committed to developing excellence in business education at UAA. In 2006, he made a $1M gift to UAA to create an emphasis in real estate and property management within the Bachelor of Business Administration finance degree.

“Our mission is to build and improve the communities in which we live,” said Dean Weidner. “Certainly, education is the foundation for all community enrichment. UAA serves our entire Alaska community offering a multitude of educational opportunities. Through a new real estate emphasis, we can support UAA’s career offer-ings in one of the largest industries in the world – real estate. Because Alaska has more real estate than any other state, it offers greater and more

diverse real estate opportunities than any other state. We are pleased to partner with UAA to offer more study programs to expand these opportunities for all Alaskans.” The Weidner Chair in Business Management marks UAA’s third endowed chair, and CBPP’s second. Others include the Rasmuson Chair in Economics and the Herbert P. Schroeder Chair of the Alaska Native Science and Engineering Program.

A lasting legacyDean Weidner gives $3M to endow business management chair

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