Spring2024 13 PRESIDENT Q + A PERSPECTIVES true. But these are courses taught by our colleges, by our professors. So the students are very much in the curriculum. In that sense, they’re not separate. Of course, there are differences. Frequently, Ecampus students are working. They’ve got families. They’re sometimes older than the average 18-year-olds we typically bring into our undergraduate programs. There are, I think, a distinct set of pressures on Ecampus students. One of the things that I’m excited about in this whole expansion is creating a new way of looking at these students to help them build communityand connection to OSU.We also need to look at success metrics for Ecampus students. I mean, our 80% graduation rate is really focused on first-time freshmen undergraduate students. That kind of rate typically can’t be met by people who are taking a couple of classes at a time, who have a full-time job, who have a family. So there are questions about what defines success for that group. How do you run an online operation that delivers high-quality degrees and ensures success? How do you promote a sense of camaraderie and a connection? How do you keep those connections going after you graduate? These are questions we are going to have to answer. The future has a big online component to it. So answering these questions, developing these new modalities, is going to be really important. This issue comes out the week after PRAx opens. As a scientist and an artist, do you think having an arts center might make us a better research university? PRAx is about creativity. I think Pat [Reser’s] vision and ours is really creativity for everybody. It’s centrally to bring artists, performers and daring new thinkers to campus, getting people excited and opening up minds. That’s certainly what art does for me. We need our students to be able to see what that kind of high excellence looks like, what high creativity looks like. UNFORGETTABLE ART Q: WHAT’S ONE OF THE MOST MEMORABLE WORKS OF ART YOU’VE ENCOUNTERED, AND WHY DO YOU THINK IT’S STUCK WITH YOU? PETER BETJEMANN Associate Professor of English; Patricia Valian Reser Executive Director at PRAx Matthew Mazzotta’s Storefront Theater in Lyons, Nebraska (population 811), is a modified storefront wall that literally unfolds into a community theater space. This captures what art really is: an intervention in everyday life. For some, that intervention might be virtuosic skill on a piano. For others, it’s a giant sculpture of a spoon on a lawn. For Mazzotta, it’s the pushbutton unfolding of a theater in a remote town. Art creates difference — whatever the medium or scale. PATRICIA VALIAN RESER, ’60, ’19 (HON. PH.D.) PRAx namesake donor As an OSU student, I saw van Gogh’s Starry Night in a traveling exhibition in Portland. I was blown away by the energy, the colors, the passion. It just shivered my timbers; it was so powerful. Years later, following my experience with cancer, I took painting classes. I wanted to be not just a survivor but a thriver. The arts gave me a way to express what I felt and were central to my healing process. JERRI BARTHOLOMEW, M.S. ’85, PH.D. ’89 Director, John L. Fryer Aquatic Animal Health Laboratory; leader of OSU’s Art-Sci program I encountered Eduard Charlemont’s Moorish Chief on my first visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Although the setting is exotic and the chief exudes grace and power, what drew me was the whiteness of his robes and the complexity of the wrinkles, shadows and folds of the cloth. There are more famous paintings that have impacted me, but for some reason my mind returns to the impossibility of The Moorish Chief. PETER SWENDSEN Patricia Valian Reser Chair and Director of the School of Visual, Performing and Design Arts To see a student create something they consider their own — a piece of music or sculpture or writing or design — is to see them express something about themselves and their community. It is far more than a “lightbulb” moment; it is an explosion of promise and potential, an embodiment of trust that a creative act can reach others and even change the world. That’s what sticks with me.
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