Interim Chief of Diversity Looks for Path Forward at U. of Missouri

High Expectations

When Chuck Henson learned that the University of Missouri at Columbia — roiled by recent protests and racial tensions — was looking for an interim vice chancellor for inclusion, diversity, and equity, to start as soon as possible, he immediately volunteered.

Mr. Henson, who started in the role on November 10, saw his new job as an opportunity to serve the university after a series of racially charged incidents touched off a wave of anger among minority students and their supporters. The university’s two top administrators had resigned the previous day after protests and a hunger strike intensified calls for them to step down.

The new position, however, had “been in the works for months,” Mr. Henson said, in a conference call with reporters two days after he assumed his new post. He is taking a temporary leave from his position as a professor and associate dean for academic affairs and trial practice in Missouri’s School of Law.

It would be difficult, he said, to balance his top priority — taking time to listen to the concerns of the campus community — with satisfying student protesters’ demands for rapid reforms on the campus. Students who say “we want change and we want change now — I respect completely the passion behind that statement and the frustration within that statement and, frankly, the pain that is embedded within that statement,” Mr. Henson said.

He said he met with a number of students soon after his appointment and told them, “With the title of interim vice chancellor for inclusion, diversity, and equity, I was not endowed with a magic wand.”

Still, he emphasized that he was committed to bridging the rifts that had permeated the institution, while upholding free-speech rights. “This is a university,” he said. “Ideas, even ones that are disfavored, have their space, and we recognize that that is the case.”

He mentioned two specific goals: improving communication across the campus after any threat of violence, and working with professors to accommodate students who had been affected by the traumatic events this fall and would soon be facing final exams.

Would he be interested in assuming the role permanently? He wasn’t sure. “I can already see that the expenditure of physical and emotional energy is going to be massive,” he said. For now, his eye is not on the future.

“I was walking back to my truck this morning,” Mr. Henson said. He paused. “I could feel my heart breaking from the pain and suffering that everyone in our community is going through. My plan is to spend myself completely in building relationships and seeing that we move forward together.” — Sarah Brown

A Gain in Visibility

When Richard L. Phillips, an assistant professor of classics at Virginia Tech, tells students he’s studying invisibility in ancient texts, they all have the same question: Does it work?

“Sometimes students get confused and say, ‘Well, Dr. Phillips, you practice magic,’ " he says. “I remember trying to convince one first-year class that I wasn’t Dumbledore.”

Experiencing a magical moment of his own recently, Mr. Phillips became one of 16 new faculty members appointed this fall in Virginia Tech’s College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. He had taught at the university as an instructor or visiting assistant professor for 11 years, after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2002.

On Mr. Phillips’s road to tenure, he applied for tenure-track positions two other times and repeatedly filled short-term roles at Virginia Tech and other universities. He says he was lucky to have colleagues who did not “exploit” him as an instructor, but rather gave him space to do the scholarship necessary to become a competitive candidate, including writing a book, In Pursuit of Invisibility: Ritual Texts From Late Roman Egypt.

“You’re not evaluated in publishing as an instructor, but if something opens up and you don’t have publications, you’re dead in the water,” he says. The university’s support for instructors entails “even things like conference funds,” he says, “which was a whole difference-maker. Without that, I couldn’t compete at the same level.”

As unorthodox as “magic” or “invisibility” may sound, Mr. Phillips’s scholarship is part of a growing field. Articles on classic texts dealing with magic — including topics like love potions or rituals related to divination — have increased in the past 20 years since key texts were translated into English, Mr. Phillips says.

Andrew S. Becker, an associate professor of classics who was on the hiring committee, says Mr. Phillips was able to turn “what could be a really arcane subject” into something that could spark the interest of students and the public.

As a teacher of mythology, Greek, and Latin, Mr. Phillips has found that studying rituals allows him to frame the ancient world in a modern way. Through such practices, “you have people trying to get control of the events around their lives,” he says. “There’s a side to that that students relate to because they have the same anxieties.”

At the same time, he says, studying magic and invisibility “opens up the world of imagination.” — Jenny Rogers

Caddying for Success

The country club was 20 minutes away from the homeless shelter.

Jacob Mosley, who grew up in an assortment of apartments and friends’ houses and homeless shelters in Michigan, was interested in taking up golf caddying. He was 14, and he figured it could be a good way to make some money.

Soon after he started caddying, he heard about the Chick Evans Caddie Scholarship, a full-tuition award for caddies with high grades, a good caddying record, and demonstrated financial need. That was how he would pay for college, he decided.

Mr. Mosley’s mother, a single parent, “showed so much resilience and perseverance through our situation, and that just rubbed off onto me,” he says. “I wanted to take the burden off her.”

For more than two years, he carried the caddie manual in his back pocket. He studied at lunch and at football practice.

He applied for the scholarship during his senior year of high school. In the spring, his application was rejected. “I was about a 3.1, 3.2 student. They were looking for the 3.5s,” he says. “I was devastated.”

He enrolled in Michigan State University using student loans, made the dean’s list, and reapplied for the scholarship during his freshman year. This time he succeeded.

Now he lives in the Michigan State Evans Scholarship House, along with 75 other scholarship recipients. The house is owned by the Western Golf Association’s Evans Scholars Foundation, which sponsors the scholarship.

The association awards scholarships to students who attend certain universities, mainly in the Midwest and Northwest. Fourteen universities have Scholarship Houses. On campuses without them, the students live together in a residence hall. This year 870 recipients are enrolled at 19 colleges.

James Torres, president of the Scholarship House at Michigan State, makes sure new arrivals feel welcome on campus, and holds a celebration when they get through their first semester. As students move into professional jobs later, the feeling of community remains.

“There are so many times you go to an interview and they say, Oh, you’re an Evans Scholar. So-and-so in another department is an Evans Scholar, too,” Mr. Torres says. “That opens up a lot of doors.”

Mr. Mosley, now a senior studying marketing, hopes to pursue a career at a marketing agency and eventually wants to help provide houses for homeless families. — Ellen Wexler

Medical Dean to Resign

Jeffrey S. Flier, dean of Harvard Medical School since 2007, says he will step down on July 31. He plans to return to the faculty after a year’s sabbatical.

During his tenure, Dr. Flier, an endocrinologist, oversaw the redesign of the curriculum, shut down the school’s New England Primate Research Center after reports of unnecessary deaths of monkeys, strengthened industry support for research, and began a $750-million capital campaign.

Obituary: Past Creighton Chief Dies

The Rev. John P. Schlegel, who led two Jesuit universities, died in Omaha on November 15, after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He was 72.

From 1991 to 2000, he was president of the University of San Francisco. He then led Creighton University, in Omaha, for 11 years.

He is credited with increasing enrollment and undertaking successful fund-raising campaigns at the two universities.

This year, in recognition of his commitment to helping the homeless, Creighton renamed a campus program the John P. Schlegel, SJ, Center for Service and Justice.

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