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INSIDE MOREHOUSE, OCTOBER 2013
Rockley Family Foundation Gives New Morehouse ciimbs in
Grand Pianos to Music Department Educational Rankings
BY ADD SEYMOUR JR.
THE MOREHOUSE MUSIC Department
has become the first historically black col
lege or university - and the first in the
Southeast - to participate in The Rockley
Family Foundation’s Institutional Loan
Scholarship Program.
The Colorado-based, non-profit
organization lends pianos to colleges and
other non-profit organizations as its way of
promoting music education. The pianos
are loaned to organizations for a period of
time and then retrieved and sold. At the
same time, another batch of new pianos
are subbed out for the older pianos. The
Foundation also will donate wind instru
ments as they become available.
That means instead of having one
$125,000 Steinway grand piano, the
music department will have - free of
charge - several brand new, top-of-the-
line grand pianos.
“We are very excited,” said Music
Department chairman Uzee Brown
72. “They have brought to the College
several pianos, including a 7-foot grand
piano for the Emma and Joe Adams
Performance Hall as an alternative to
the 9-foot Steinway grand piano. That’s
about $80,000 worth of pianos we now
have that are usable to the College.
“And it significantly improves the
practice spaces for instrumentalists and
vocalists,” Brown said. “It allows us to
be able to use a wonderful alternative
instrument in the Performance Hall so
that we do not put the kind of wear and
tear on that 9-foot Steinway.” ■
Music department chairman Uzee Brown 72 plays a 7-foot grand piano that was loaned to the College by the Rocklev
Family Foundation. '
Music, Audience Interaction Mark New Crown Forum
BY ADD SEYMOUR JR.
U.S. News and World Report has named
Morehouse one of the best institutions in the
country and one of the top
historically black colleges and
universities.
In the magazine’s 2014
Best College’s issue,
Morehouse’s 12:1 student-
to-faculty ratio and 83
percent freshman retention
rate were two of the rea
sons the College improved
its ranking among the nation’s HBCUs,
from third to second this year. Spelman was the
top-ranked institution.
Morehouse also was listed among the nation's
top liberal arts colleges.
The U.S. News and World Report ranking is just
one of several for the College:
best
Meges
national mimsimT
• This summer, StateUniversity.com listed
Morehouse fifth among 264 Georgia colleges
and universities when it comes to campus
safety. Colleges and universities were ranked
based upon a scale that accounts for severity of
a crime as well as frequency of crime.
• Washington Monthly
magazine ranked
Morehouse 29th in their
list of the nation's top
liberal arts colleges,
best among the nation’s
HBCUs based on how
colleges and universi
ties serve their com-
and the country.
BY ADD SEYMOUR JR.
WITH D) TRON on the turntables mixing
Nicki Minaj’s “Moment for Life,” students
walked into the Martin Luther King Jr.
International Chapel on Thursday, Sept. 19.
“Come on in, everybody! Here we
go! Crown Forum 2013-2014,” Bryant
Marks ’94, director of the Morehouse
Research Institute, shouted into a micro
phone, emcee-style.
It’s a re-formatted Crown Forum that
students helped shape. While major Crown
Forums (such as Opening or Founder’s
Day) will continue to be more traditional,
popular music, audience interaction and
other aspects are what Crown Forums will
now be like.
“I love it,” said junior business
administration major Herberto Home Jr.
of Detroit. “I feel like it is more engaging. I
felt part of it.”
Previously, students complained that
Crown Forums often didn’t seem to relate to
them, that some speakers weren’t very inter
esting or that they just didn't like the constant
pomp and circumstance.
President John Silvanus Wilson Jr. ’79
noticed their discontent not long after he
took office in February.
“So I set up a Student Development
Committee,” he said. “We started talk
ing about all kinds of ways to take atten
dance. But I said, ‘Why don’t we render
Bryant Marks ‘94 uses an iPhone to make Crown Forum
an interactive experience.
attendance irrelevant by making what
happens here so good that they will
be breaking down the doors to get in?
Why don’t we make it so magnetic,
so compelling, that this becomes the
definition of Morehouse and where that
Morehouse spirit grows in you?”’
Wilson asked Marks to work with the
committee to come up with the kinds of
changes that wouldn’t compromise Crown
forum as a class, but would be something
students would enjoy.
What they came up with is some
thing more interactive, such as a ‘Which
Is Better?’ question (Mac or PC? Tupac
or Biggie?) and polls that students par
ticipate in by using their smart phones.
Crown Forum will include more student
participation, including a Senior Forum
where an upperclassman speaks; non-
traditional, non-podium style of TED
talks; follow-up question-and-answer
lunches with speakers; and more concrete
takeaways with handouts and residence
hall discussions. Additionally, slides used
during Crown Forum presentations will
be posted on WebCT so students can
print them out later.
‘Once we cover a particular concept
in here, we want to follow up throughout
the week in classrooms, residence halls
and so-forth,” Maries said during the first
revamped Crown Forum. “You all are a
digital generation. We need to embrace
and understand who you are today. That’s
what we re trying to do here — embrace
who you are.”
Jassiem Ifill, a junior computer sci
ence major from Queens, N.Y., was happy
to hear that.
Now it seems they are trying to con
nect to students in a different way,” he
said afterwards as Mary J. Blige’s “Happy”
played in the background as students were
leaving King Chapel. “It seems like Dr.
Marks was talking about subjects I can
relate to more easily than some of the other
previous subjects.” |H
• Morehouse ranks among the top 20 of institu
tions of 3,000 students or less in sending stu
dents to the Teach for America program in 2013
• AffQrdabliColligiiOnline.org ranked Morehouse
11th among Georgia’s colleges and universities
for return on investment. That was the highest
among all of Georgia’s HBCUs.
Ferim magazine listed
the College among the
America's Top Colleges
for 2013
Forbes
Garikai Campbell, provost
and senior vice president for
Academic Affairs, said the
latest rankings are great news for the
College, though they don’t always show the
intangibles that make Morehouse special.
“There is a tremendous amount of activity and
development going on here that can only take
place here by virtue of our unique environment,”
he said. “So, in many ways, trying to determine
how we stack up on a list just doesn’t capture the
robustness of what’s happening at Morehouse.
“On the other hand, it’s incredibly important for stu
dents to have a mechanism for understanding in which
tier an institution operates. A move up in rankings
says something different and special is going on at that
institution." Campbell added. "Such moves are impor
tant for letting prospective students, our colleagues and
the rest of higher education know that the strength of
the institution is growing stronger.” p