For a Campus That Balked at a Plunge Into Online Learning, a New Chief

Renaissance President

A university whose last president plunged it into online learning, and met with some reluctance, will be led next by an administrator who is a scholar of English Renaissance literature. Mary A. Papazian, who has led Southern Connecticut State University since 2012, will become president of San Jose State University on July 1.

While she was content at Southern Connecticut, Ms. Papazian says, the position in San Jose appealed to her for professional and personal reasons. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she went to the University of California in that city for baccalaureate through doctoral degrees. “I had hoped,” she said in late February, “to get back there before anything happened to my parents, but unfortunately I lost my mother two weeks ago, so it’s all a little bittersweet.”

In Connecticut, Ms. Papazian has won praise for projects involving student success, town-gown relations, and expansion of educational offerings, especially in such technical areas as cybersecurity. Her new campus, in Silicon Valley, serves about 33,000 undergraduate and graduate students, and is the oldest public institution of higher education in California.

She succeeds an interim president, Susan W. Martin, who in August replaced Mohammad H. Qayoumi. Now an infrastructure and technology adviser to the president of Afghanistan, Mr. Qayoumi antagonized faculty members by pushing faster than they liked on such changes as increased online delivery of courses.

Ms. Papazian is the editor of two books, the first about the poet John Donne, who navigated the treacherous waters of religious factionalism during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I of England. She says she often cites to colleagues Donne’s sermon on advice found in the Gospel of Matthew: “Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”

“It’s very apt,” she says. “We should be in this work for all the right reasons — it’s a great mission, it can be transformative — but we also recognize that we do live in a political environment, and you have to be thoughtful about that. Higher education has a particular culture around shared governance that requires patience to ensure inclusion, while at the same time you hope to move forward the broader campus community and the external partners.” — Peter Monaghan

Telling Refugees’ Stories

Mary D’Ambrosio, who teaches journalism at Rutgers University, spent her summer interviewing Syrian refugees in Turkey and Italy. Her intent was to go beyond the headlines about the mass migration and tell the stories of ordinary people living in extraordinary circumstances.

This semester, her students will get the chance to do something similar, but closer to home. Ms. D’Ambrosio, an assistant professor of professional practice in the department of journalism and media studies, will match 10 students in her “Writing About Social Issues” class with five Syrian refugee families living in New Jersey. Working in pairs, the students will tell the refugees’ stories.

The project is designed to give students experience interviewing people face to face, a skill lacking in today’s students, who may be more comfortable doing interviews by email or text, says Ms. D’Ambrosio, a longtime journalist who has taught at several universities.

“Going out to talk to people is the crux of journalism,” she says. Reporters must be able to ask strangers hard questions about difficult circumstances, including war, and do it with sensitivity.

Students may have to negotiate how they will identify people who are afraid to have their names published. In November, after the terrorist attacks against civilians in Paris, Chris Christie, New Jersey’s Republican governor, said he wanted to stop Syrian refugees from settling in the state.

Ms. D’Ambrosio began her career in the 1980s by reporting on the civil war in Nicaragua, then moved to Venezuela during a time of political and economic upheaval. But she says she would not recommend that her students move to a dangerous area and freelance today. Journalists in some conflict areas are now considered targets for kidnapping or killing, and freelancers do not receive the same security or hostile-environment training that journalists with major news outlets do, she says.

The international journalism program she has run in Istanbul for the Institute for Education in International Media for five years will be suspended this summer because of increased concerns about ISIS.

She advises students instead to start their careers by specializing in a topic or world region.

As one of her next projects, she plans to explore how universities could play a role in supporting foreign reporting as a public good. Many newspapers have reduced or eliminated their international coverage, and Ms. D’Ambrosio, whose summer reporting was supported by a grant from Rutgers, wants to ensure that foreign reporting does not disappear. — Kathryn Masterson

Like Father, Like Son

Few university presidencies pass from father to son. But one just did, at the United States Sports Academy, in Daphne, Ala. Thomas P. Rosandich, who founded the academy in 1972 as one of the first institutions of its kind, anywhere, had a natural successor in his son.

In November, the nonprofit institution’s Board of Trustees appointed Thomas J. Rosandich to succeed his father, and named the elder Mr. Rosandich president emeritus. The younger Mr. Rosandich had served more than 34 years at the academy in a succession of supporting roles, most recently as vice president and chief operating officer.

“I came on full time in 1982, and I had to get promoted to work in the mail room,” he says. As he climbed in the organization, he also earned master’s and doctoral degrees from the academy.

The institution, which is regionally accredited, has more than 900 students enrolled over the course of a year, almost all of them online. Degrees are offered from upper-level baccalaureate through doctoral levels, and pave the way to careers in sports management, marketing, science, and facility design and operation.

Thomas J. Rosandich says, “While we are working in a mature market in this country, there are many places in the world that are looking for expertise such as what we have to share.”

Tapping into overseas markets early on, says the elder Mr. Rosandich, has proved key to operating the institution in the black, even now that hundreds of American institutions offer graduate programs in sports management.

In the 1950s, while an officer in the United States Marine Corps, Thomas P. Rosandich began coaching track. When the U.S. State Department appointed him an ambassador of sport, he called on Marine colleagues who had achieved international recognition in athletics to work with him in many countries, and over the years they have helped form the core of the academy’s resident and adjunct faculties.

He set up national sports programs in Bahrain, Laos, Malaya (now Malaysia), and elsewhere, always aiming to equip administrators to run their own national programs.

His big break — one that allowed him to pay cash for the academy’s campus and underwrite its American enrollments — came in 1980 with an $80-million contract to establish sports-science and -training programs in Saudi Arabia, he says.

For nine years the manager of the Saudi programs was his son, who refers to those years as “learning sports management the hard way.” — Peter Monaghan

A Fresh Recognition

Christopher Emdin, an associate professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, who has used hip-hop to teach science, has won the American Educational Research Association’s 2016 Early Career Award.

His award was announced in March, just a week before the publication of his latest book, on new approaches for unleashing the talents of urban youth, For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood … and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education. — Ruth Hammond

Obituaries: 2 Past Deans

Ben Bagdikian, the mass-media critic and a former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, died on March 11. He was 96.

Mr. Bagdikian joined Berkeley’s faculty in 1976 and became dean in 1985. He retired from the university in 1990. Earlier he was an editor at The Washington Post, where he played a crucial role in the publication of the Pentagon Papers.

His seminal book, The Media Monopoly, first published in 1983, warned of the danger of conglomerate ownership of the news media.

A former dean of the Graduate School at Vanderbilt University also died recently. Russell Hamilton, who died on February 27, was 81.

In 1984 Mr. Hamilton became Vanderbilt’s first African-American dean. He led the graduate school for 16 years, then continued as a professor of Spanish and Portuguese until he was awarded emeritus status in 2002. Before joining Vanderbilt, he was on the faculty of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities for 20 years.— Anais Strickland

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