THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 30, 1994 TAG: 9410300065
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PATRICK K. LACKEY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ON VIRGINIA'S EASTERN SHORE LENGTH: Long : 117 lines
Old Dominion University President James V. Koch began a dinner talk to the Exmore Rotary Club this past week with a joke.
God tells an accountant to improve his appearance because he's been chosen to convert the folks. The accountant lifts weights, buys new clothes, gets a new hairstyle. He walks outside and is struck dead by lightning. At the pearly gates, he asks what happened. ``I'm sorry,'' God says, ``I didn't recognize you.''
Koch said he feared ODU is not as recognized as it deserves to be. He gave the 40-some Rotarians half an hour's worth of reasons to recognize and appreciate the university, and he praised the Eastern Shore.
``We regard the Eastern Shore,'' he said, ``as a precious resource for Virginia, one of the last unspoiled ecostructures in the United States, if not the world."
His talk kicked off what ODU staff members call ``The Bus Tour.'' Koch started the annual tours in 1990, his first year as president. The tours last three or four days and have hit most areas of the commonwealth, but never the Eastern Shore - the rural sliver of Virginia jutting down from Maryland.
``The 1994 Tour'' lasted all day Friday and into the night, with 13 professors teaching courses at five Eastern Shore high schools. Koch and other administrators described ODU to high school seniors, high school counselors, ODU alumni and local movers and shakers. More than 50 ODU employees and students took part in the tour.
Many of their talks emphasized ODU's contributions or planned contributions to the Eastern Shore, including:
The Virginia Coast Institute in Nassawadox, a new joint venture of ODU and The Nature Convservancy to nurture environmentally friendly economic growth.
A plan to have students with two-year degrees take the last two years of an ODU bachelor's degree in a classroom at Eastern Shore Community College. If legislative funding is obtained this year, the students, beginning next fall, could take junior and senior ODU courses by a television setup that allows students and instructors to talk. Students could graduate from ODU without ever visiting the campus.
Since 1987, 35 nurses have received bachelor's degrees after taking interactive televised ODU courses at Northampton Accomac Memorial Hospital on the Eastern Shore. Already this year, 1,200 students are taking upper-level televised ODU courses at 13 of the state's 23 community colleges. ODU hopes to have 12,000 distance-learning students by the year 2000. That would equal the number of students now on the school's Norfolk campus.
Continuing efforts by The College of Engineering and Technology to develop Wallops Island as a launch site for commercial space ventures.
A service by the College of Health Sciences at the Delmarva Rural Ministries Health Clinic, which provides medical care for migrant farm workers.
One of Friday's tour members was ODU junior Leigh Anne Dix, who was reared in Modest Town on the Eastern Shore. She described the university to students and school advisers: ``It has the friendliness of a high school and the freedom of a college.''
One of the deans on the tour was J. Taylor Sims of the College of Business and Public Administration. He told students of ODU's new pledge to guarantee every student ``real-life experiences'' with work tied to their academic specialties. Up to three semester hours of credit are being awarded for part-time jobs, full-time summer jobs or internships, as businesses cooperate with ODU to provide work.
At Chincoteague High School, ODU sociology Professor Lucien Lombardo, a former teacher in a maximum-security prison, taught two classes on criminal justice. He kept 19 seniors' attention through a discussion of the Bill of Rights, which he said was really a Bill of Limitations. The Bill of Rights, he explained, limits what the federal government can do. ``We had just gone through a revolution to get a government off our backs,'' he said. ``We knew how government could get after people.''
At Broadwater Academy, a private school at Exmore, Ronald E. Johnson, associate professor of oceanography, showed slides of destructive tsunamis, those huge, fast waves generated by earthquakes. They're not tidal waves, he emphasized, because they have nothing to do with tides.
At Arcadia High School in Oak Hall, Koch gave his rousing ``Life after High School'' speech. As usual, he threw a Hershey bar to each student who got one of his questions right.
He held up a page showing two lines that started near each other on the left side. One rose sharply, the other slowly. A student won a candy bar for saying the top line represented a college graduate's earnings over time; the lower line, a high school graduate's earnings.
``Technology,'' Koch said, ``creates and destroys jobs.'' In the face of constant change and increasing international competition, he said, students need to prepare themselves with a college education.
Friday evening, ODU sponsored a ``Get To Know Us'' reception at the Eastern Shore Yacht and Country Club at Melfa.
Of the Eastern Shore's 43,000 residents, only about 375 are ODU alumni, partly because of the scarcity of jobs to return to after school. By extending the range of invitations north to Salisbury, Md., ODU was able to invite 570 alumni, with the hope of eventually forming an Eastern Shore alumni chapter.
Several hundred people attended the reception, including many local mayors and members of city councils and school boards.
Tables were set up for each of ODU's six colleges, with deans or associate deans seated behind them, waiting to answer questions from potential students or the parents.
Michele Bryson, a Smithfield High School senior, drove 2 1/2 hours to meet the administrators and faculty.
``I got a lot of information,'' she said. ``I talked to the woman in charge of nursing.'' Bryson said she plans to attend ODU. ILLUSTRATION: Photos
TAMARA VONINSKI/Staff
Patty Cavender, ODU director of admissions, addresses a group of
Eastern Shore high school guidance counselors and faculty on Friday.
Cavender and other ODU officials and faculty members were
promoting ODU to students and civic groups.
Eshance Bishop, a junior at Arcadia High School in Oak Hall, Va.,
listens as ODU faculty members tell Eastern Shore high schools
students about the benefits of attending ODU.
by CNB