A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff
Studio art faculty at the University of Mary Washington are passionate about teaching, but they are also talented and dedicated artists themselves. Selected works from faculty artists are on display through Oct. 8, 2023, at the duPont Gallery on campus.
Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Wednesdays through Sundays, and admission is free. There will be an artists’ lecture at 5 p.m. Oct. 5, 2023, at the duPont Gallery. Read more.
Despite soggy weather, 121 student volunteers – including the entire swim team – turned out for COAR’s annual Into the Streets service event on Saturday, Sept. 23. Each volunteer earned three service hours.
Many projects were moved indoors or cancelled due to the rain, but the students’ volunteer spirit shone through.
“All the preparation we did for weeks was redone in the last couple of days before the event,” said UMW student Sarah Hybl. “It was not easy, but the dedication and passion of our staff, members and volunteers really shined.”
Mostly indoor projects made up the day. Participants helped Operation Gratitude, making cards and paracord lanyards for deployed troops. They created cards for seniors in nursing homes, decorated tote bags for care packages for children in Fredericksburg City Schools, and made no-sew fleece blankets to donate to children in Fredericksburg City Schools. Volunteers also made bookmarks and friendship bracelets, as well as holiday ornaments for an Old Dominion Humane Society fundraiser.
Other projects included
“Into The Streets was a major success. With 120 volunteering students, we made a huge impact in the Fredericksburg community,” said Mary Washington student Knox McKinley. Despite the rainy conditions, community engagement at UMW has never looked better!”
Virginians are nearly evenly divided in their preferences for the upcoming legislative elections, with 40 percent favoring Democratic Party majorities in the House of Delegates and the Senate of Virginia next year, while 37 percent said they wanted Republican legislative majorities, according to a new statewide survey from the Center for Leadership and Media Studies at the University of Mary Washington. Among the subset of likely voters, 42 percent said they would like to see the Democrats in charge and 42 percent said they favor Republican control. Read more.
Read this year's first survey results story: Statewide Survey Shows Largely Positive Mars for Virginia's Public Schools
A photographer will be on campus on Tuesday, Oct. 17, and Wednesday, Oct. 18, to take professional headshots of faculty and staff for use in University publications, on the UMW website and more. No appointments are needed for the free photo sessions, which will take place on the Woodard Patio, from 1 to 5 p.m. on Oct. 17, and from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Oct. 18.
All faculty and staff who need a new or updated professional photo are encouraged to take advantage of this annual opportunity!
Call or email Christie Pugh at ext. 1055 or cpugh@umw.edu with questions.
Dr. David T. Mitchell is a founder of Disability Studies in the Humanities. His work along with his partner, Sharon Snyder, serves as a cornerstone of what has come to be known as cripqueer studies. Cripqueer studies foregrounds not only disability as an identity seeking inclusion and rights, but as an active verb exposing the necessity of structural critiques of normativity. Without disability we cannot fully know how marginalized bodyminds understand it, navigate it, critique it, and expose the cracks that define normativity as forms of docility instrumental to belonging. His academic and creative filmwork pursues alternative pathways on which the designation of incapacity often turns into an unexpected capacity. Thus, the marginalization, exclusion, erasure, and destruction of cripqueer lives results in fissures of our cultural knowledge base that must be crossed by intimacies that only disability experience, theory, and the arts can provide. In their first film, “Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back” (1995), Mitchell and Snyder unveiled the alternative interdependencies that inform what they call, crip culture, and deployed those non-normative practices as a critique of the Western myth of independence that is central to liberal humanist formulations of the Human. The film also demonstrated how disability queers all forms of being. Join Dr. David T. Mitchell on October 12th at 6:30 in the Digital Auditorium for a chance to hear him elaborate on these topics and be a part of the conversation.
Once again, UMW
Once again, UMW is getting great recognition in rankings publications.
The University of Mary Washington is once again among the top 100 schools, earning regional accolades, recognition for its liberal arts and sciences mission, and top marks from students via annual surveys.
Washington Monthly, known for guiding students and families toward institutions that contribute to the common good, included Mary Washington in rankings released this month, September 2023. UMW ranks 78th of 199 institutions in the Best Liberal Arts Colleges listing, which rates schools on contributions to social mobility, research and providing opportunities for public service. Read more.
Joshua Cole (D) and Lee Peters III (R) for Virginia’s 65th District House of Delegates. Tara Durant (R), Monica Gary (I), and Joel Griffin (D) for the District 27 Virginia State Senate.
The University of Mary Washington will host two public debates next month between candidates for local elected office.
Tara Durant (R), Monica Gary (I), and Joel Griffin (D) will vie for the District 27 Virginia State Senate seat on Wednesday, Sept. 27. The debate will take place at 7 p.m. in George Washington Hall’s Dodd Auditorium. On Wednesday, Sept. 13, in the Weatherly Wing of UMW’s Seacobeck Hall, Joshua Cole (D) faced off against Lee Peters III (R) for Virginia’s 65th District House of Delegates seat.
“I am delighted that the local candidates have agreed to participate in this important community service,” said Professor of Political Science and Center for Leadership and Media Studies Director Stephen Farnsworth, who will moderate the hourlong debates. “Candidates standing side by side to discuss current policy challenges provides vital opportunities for voters to compare the alternatives offered on the ballot.” Read more.
UMW President Troy Paino
Virginia Business magazine has announced the Virginia 500: The 2023-24 Power List, naming University of Mary Washington President Troy Paino among the commonwealth’s most powerful and influential leaders in business, government, politics and education this year.
“When I give my elevator speech about the Virginia 500, it usually starts this way: It’s like the Fortune 500, but instead of companies, it’s about people,” Virginia Business Editor Richard Foster said in his opening letter. “There is an aspirational joy to reading about the career journeys of the leaders in these pages.”
Paino’s career journey has included the presidential role at two of the nation’s top public liberal arts and sciences universities. He joined the University of Mary Washington in 2016 after serving as president of Truman State University in Missouri. This year proved to be a “big year for Paino and the public liberal arts university he oversees,” once again earning recognition by Virginia Business. Read more.
Tamara Garrett ’23, an alum and AmeriCorps member, stocks shelves in the Gwen Hale Resource Center.
Tamara Garrett ’23 arranges boxed macaroni and cheese, cans of soup and packaged snacks on shelves. With the fall semester underway at the University of Mary Washington, she wants to ensure that the Gwen Hale Resource Center (GHRC) is fully stocked.
“Most people don’t like to ask for help, but we want students to know that no matter what they need, Mary Washington has resources available for them,” said Garrett, who graduated in May. Now working on the UMW campus as part of AmeriCorps, she’s focused on alleviating food insecurity among college students.
Years in the making, GHRC began on a much smaller scale to address that very issue, thanks to a caring UMW administrator who noticed students who didn’t have enough to eat. Members of the Mary Washington community banded together, donating funds totaling $9,000 to open and operate a two-room food pantry in the attic of Lee Hall in 2019, joining other public and private colleges and universities across Virginia that have developed similar programs. Committed to carrying out Gwen Hale’s legacy, the University renamed the space in her honor after she passed away in 2021. Read more.
First-year student Matt Serafin adjusts to his new room while dad Bob Serafin works on setting up a bunk bed. (Suzanne Carr Rossi photo.)
It was only 5 a.m. when Matt Serafin and his parents drove away from their home in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, headed for Matt’s first year at the University of Mary Washington.
If Tamara and Bob Serafin felt any anxiety about taking the older of their two children to college, Matt wouldn’t have known. Once settled in the car with a semester’s worth of possessions, he went right back to sleep.
When the Serafin family arrived at UMW, they and hundreds more students, parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents and other helpers found the unloading process running smoothly.
This year’s entering class numbers 770, with another 260 transfer students. But several student groups had arrived on campus days early to participate in pre-semester activities, and returning upperclass students will move in this weekend. So first-year move-in day – Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2023 – was chill both figuratively and literally. Read more.
