President’s Report - Responsibility
It’s safe to say that over the past decade Juniata has transformed itself. We’ve moved from being a good liberal arts college capable of consistently posting educational outcomes that surprised onlookers to a great institution of higher education that people expect to produce excellent graduates in programs ranging from the humanities to social sciences to information technology to the natural sciences.
Two stories within detail different innovations we have pursued in order to attract students to Juniata who will benefit from our approach. Another describes new efforts aimed at more effective fundraising to support our students. And what is perhaps the main story deals with this community’s response to the economic challenges facing students and families.
Alongside all of that information are what have become the usual elements of this report: a timeline of the year’s milestones, an overview of our athletic successes, and—most importantly—some of the noteworthy student achievements of the past year. They are the biggest photos (taken by students!) because to us, they are a big deal. The biggest deal.
Read the full President’s Report.
Juniata…spoken around the globe
To quell the “Juanita” talk, a few of Juniata’s own perfect the pronunciation from across the globe.
Community Engagement in Puerto Rico
STUDENTS GAIN FIRST-HAND EXPERIENCE IN CIVIC, COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT PAINTING MURALS AND PLANTING GARDENS IN CAIMITO, PUERTO RICO
A program started four years ago by the Office of Community Service/Service Learning and the Office of Diversity and Inclusion took 16 students from a wide array of disciplines to Puerto Rico last semester. In addition to getting service experience, these students gained first-hand knowledge about cultural, political, social and environmental issues in Puerto Rico.
During their stay at the Christian Community Center in Caimito, Puerto Rico students spent time shadowing dental, medical, social, and psychiatric professionals, collecting trash from the streets, reorganizing the center’s untidy office, and focusing on their two main projects; planting a community garden and painting two murals.
Krystal Hope, a senior that traveled with the group, developed the mural idea and designed the two walls alongside Sharlene Daugherty, a 2009 graduate, who also organized the garden.
To encourage community participation, students taught children and teens how to care for the vegetables in the garden and allowed them to help paint the murals. The project gave them a sense of ownership and motivation to continue the work.
The students knew they met their goal when children and teens voluntarily met the group at 6 a.m. the day of departure to help with finishing touches.
Rosalie Rodriguez, the special assistant to the president for diversity and inclusion who traveled along with the students, said “of all the projects we have done I think this one was by far the most rewarding because we were able to see it from start to finish.”
As icing on the cake, the students were able to visit some very famous places like the oldest city in the United States, Old San Juan, and El Yunque, the only rainforest in the United States, as well as the University of Puerto Rico.
Molly Sollenberger, ‘10
By any measure, Juniata is one of the best colleges in the United States.
Our long history of transformational education has been celebrated for a decade in Loren Pope’s Colleges that Change Lives.
Juniata has a great environment for learning. In 2009, Juniata earned Honor Roll status in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Great Colleges to Work For” survey, and Huntingdon was named one of “America’s Coolest Small Towns” by Budget Travel.
For the investments we make in our students’ successes, U.S. News and World Report ranked Juniata 85th among liberal arts colleges in 2009—a jump of 13 spaces from the previous year.
And because of the outcomes we achieve—job and graduate school placement, earning power, quality of instruction, and time to graduation—Forbes.com ranked Juniata 75th of all 3,200+ colleges and universities in the United States.
Dozens of other listings and college guides praise our inclusiveness, academic quality, environmental sustainability, and commitment to excellence.
See What Others are Saying and leave a comment of your own!
The Transformation of Teddy Kennedy
by Richard D. Mahoney
Walking into the Russell Building in 1965 on his first day as newly-elected senator from New York, Bobby Kennedy was met by younger brother Teddy at the doorway. Gaunt and leaning heavily on a cane (the result of a near-fatal plane crash six months before), Teddy shook hands with his older brother as they grinned their toothy Kennedy grins. RFK, somewhere between teasing and deprecation, then pointed at the brother whose rocky election to the Senate in 1962 he had pretty much stage-managed and said, “You,” shaking his head.
“You,” the charming underachiever, had already completed two years in the Senate. Teddy had become an insider, an ally of the conservative southern chairmen who ran the place and who had schooled him in the Senate’s arcane practices. He seemed comfortable, anything but a fighter. Bobby took to calling Teddy “the club member” at Kennedy family gatherings. It was not a compliment.
Today, he is remembered as “the liberal lion” – the moving force behind a generation of progressive legislation — rivaling Henry Clay or Lyndon Johnson as one of the greatest Senate legislators in history.
Though surely proud, RFK would also been thoroughly surprised by the transformation. What happened? Why and when did the “club member,” skilled at courting segregationist Senate cronies, turn into a warrior rushing to every front to battle for the sick, the poor and those fighting the system? How did the boozy, bloated survivor of Chappaquiddick and ingloriously unsuccessful candidate for president in 1980 eventually become one of America’s most cherished public figures?
Did he change or did we change? He clearly changed, and what was written into his blood by Bobby’s death – to base power on the poor and people of color in order to renew ourselves – is now the transformative fact of American political life.
Teddy changed the way Jack and Bobby had – idealizing in death the life of the one before. Jack, who would not talk about his beloved older brother Joe (killed in a World War II bombing mission), instead idealized him in a reverential family memoir. Bobby, after JFK’s murder, would practically come apart at the seams if anyone reminisced in his presence about Jack, a person who he insisted could only be referred to as “the President”, except in his own final seconds of consciousness. Lying on the gummy kitchen floor in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, blood rapidly pooling around his head from a gunshot wound, a friend saw Bobby’s lips moving and leaned down to hear him say, “Jack. Jack.”
Teddy himself, before falling largely silent about Bobby, would pronounce, broken-voiced, those three lapidary phrases at his brother’s funeral, the ones that would define the balance of his public life: “He saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.”
Applying the credo to himself, the surviving brother was now an idealization of them all, left behind not just to touch the painful edges of what might have been, but to measure himself against those three towering figures in the Kennedy pantheon. The ‘club member’ had become a crusader.
Even in personal and political disgrace in the 1980s, across the generation during which the Silent Majority became the Moral Majority, Teddy Kennedy never changed his dedication to his brothers’ mission except in one way — reaching out to bonded conservatives like Senators Barry Goldwater, Orrin Hatch, and John McCain, all in the cause of finding new and necessary ways to enable government serve people. The Senate’s historic liberal remained its preeminent club member.
I remember Teddy coming out to the Kennedy Library in 1988 for a ceremony to recognize several foreign journalists being honored for risking their lives to write the truth. “The fullness of life,” he said to them, “is in the hazards of life.” The line, of course, was Bobby’s.
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Richard D. Mahoney was the first John F. Kennedy Scholar at the JFK Library and author of two books on the Kennedy experience – “JFK: Ordeal in Africa” and “Sons and Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy”. Mahoney is currently the director of the Baker Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pa.
Ryan Johnson’s Convocation Speech
Good afternoon class of 2013. Before I begin my speech I would first like to introduce the four other members of the Student Government Executive Board. Serving as vice president we have senior Erin Stein. Your Secretary will be senior Laura Rupprecht, Treasurer is Manal Daher-Mansour and finally, your officer of technology, Travis Raup. I would like to thank them for the work they have done so far in preparing for this year and I would also like to thank them in advance for the hard work they will continue to do throughout the school year.
A few weeks ago, after receiving the memo that I would be here today giving a speech to the incoming freshman class, I decided I was going to reflect on a very important question, “Why Juniata?” Besides the fact that Juniata students are the smartest and coolest students in the world, there must have been some other reasons why you would want to spend the next 4 years of your life in rural central Pennsylvania at a small liberal arts college. Well, we all have different reasons, and some reasons are more common than others. So after spending three years and now entering my senior year at Juniata, I feel that I can make a reasonable list of the top 5 reasons why students continue to walk through our doors year after year. So here we go, the Ryan Johnson…not David Letterman, top 5 reasons why students come to Juniata College:
5. We are a competitive college not only at the academic level but also at the athletic level. With over 100 All-Americans and 8 Division 3 national championships, we are not a school to be taken lightly. Our athletes continue to excel in the field and also in the classroom. Academically, with a well educated faculty and amazing facilities, each student gets the chance to obtain one of the best liberal-arts educations in the nation. Basically what it boils down to is that Juniata students can be best described as athletic nerds.
4. What other school will allow students to take a day off from classes and go picnic in the woods with the staff and faculty? Where else will you find a freshmen class whose only goal in the beginning of the year is to break through the Arch only to have their goals stomped on by the men and women’s rugby teams. Finally where will you find a student body crazy enough to sleep outside in late November for an entire week just to get tickets to a fancy dinner? Well you will find all of that stuff here at Juniata and we are proud of it.
3. Although small at first glance, Huntingdon and the Juniata Community continue to be a big factor in Juniata’s success. Either it is volunteering at JC Blair Memorial Hospital, working on your business proposal at JCEL or displaying your artworks at the local coffee shops, Juniata students continue to thrive off of the numerous opportunities this town has to offer. Also, students love to eat at Mimi’s, Boxers and Standing Stone. We also love spending a day down at Lake Raystown, catching a movie at the Clifton 5, or just walking the isles of one of our favorite stores…Wal-Mart.
2. By the time you’re a sophomore and you ask your old friends from high school what their “POE” is, I can guarantee you that you will get a very confused look as an answer. There are not too many colleges where you can get a degree in Chemistry and Museum Studies at the same time…but with the flexibility of a POE, you can. Not only will your advisors and professors encourage you to be adventurous in your academic endeavors, but they may also invite you to their house to discuss your POE over a nice home cooked meal.
And the number one reason why students make the trip to Huntingdon Pennsylvania to attend Juniata College year after year is…because you will never find another place like it. Thank you!
Juniata History Professor Digs into “Horticulture” During Convocation
In Tribute
Often our most cherished memories of college are personal recollections of classmates and events. If you would like to offer a remembrance of a classmate or colleague who recently passed away, please feel free to post a tribute here.
Opera Singers to Quilters: Juniata College’s Class of 2013
( written by Grace Canfield ‘09 )
Juniata College is preparing to welcome the new freshman class-the Class of 2013. This group, which has an average grade point average of 3.74 on a 4.0 scale and an average SAT score of 1,186 (math and critical reading), is comprised of individuals who are not only ready to meet the challenge of college, but whose interests range from figure skating to working at an animal rescue league.
The Class of ‘13 is also geographically diverse: students hail from Ghana, India, Jamaica, Japan, China, Taiwan, and the United Arab Emirates. In addition, California, Florida, and Kansas are just a few of the 26 states that students call home. Sixty-two percent of the Class of 2013 are Pennsylvania natives. Both domestic and international diversity represent 12.5 percent of the class.
“This year, yet again, I will be welcoming an enormously talented and motivated group of students,” says Thomas Kepple, president of Juniata. “They selected us because they know Juniata will both challenge them and will also benefit from their considerable talent as they prepare to become leaders in the 21st Century.”
The Stats
The statistics reveal the overall makeup of the Class of 2013, but the members of the class come to Huntingdon with a variety of stories:
- One student took three mission trips to the most poverty-stricken regions of Peru. “The people of Peru have taught me that service is not all about setting out to change the world,” he explains, “sometimes it is about simply having a willing heart and allowing the world to change me.”
- One student is an accomplished figure skater and was born in Russia.
- One student was selected as the Most Outstanding Speaker at the Junior Statesman of America Summer School program at Stanford University.
- One student started her own charity to help impact the lives of children around the world by giving clothing to those in need.
- One student has spent the last eight summers at the Intensive Spanish Summer Immersion Programs with the Concordia Language Village in Minnesota.
- One student was a member of the Metropolitan Opera Children’s Chorus for six years. He performed on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in productions including “La Boheme,” “Carmen,” “Tosca,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and “Queen of Spades,” to name a few. He can also read, write, and speak Polish.
- One student makes quilts and completed a triathlon.
- One student graduated high school in 2008 and spent her “gap year” working at the Animal Rescue League of Boston, doing service work in northern India for three months, and interning at a wolf park in Indiana–where she discovered that the director is a Juniata grad.
- One student attends Jakarta International School in Indonesia, and first found Juniata because her parents work in the U.S. Embassy with a Juniata graduate. The student has also lived in Barbados, Singapore, France, and Virginia. She has done extensive volunteer work for Yayasan, an organization that assists disabled Indonesian children, and has helped to develop a program called “Operation Backpack,” a service to match sponsoring families with needy children to provide educational scholarships and supplies. Additionally, she plays tennis and models for Indonesian fashion catalogs.
Each year, Juniata asks individuals why they chose to attend the College. The answers tend to be remarkably similar, with students citing the College’s community atmosphere, the student-centered nature of the campus, and the strength of its academic programs. Members of the Class of 2013 continued in that vein:
“I chose Juniata because of its great science department and because it offers many levels of support that will help me succeed academically in a welcoming, diverse community.” -Alex Pasqua
“I chose Juniata because it has a wonderful education program. I want to become a great teacher and I know Juniata will help me accomplish this dream.” -Melissa Zilch
“I chose Juniata because it was a perfect size–big enough that I could meet new people and not get bored, and small enough that I don’t feel like a number.” -Megan Hourigan
“I chose Juniata College because of its outstanding science program and my program of emphasis (Biochemistry), which will allow me to fulfill my dream of going into the field of medical research.” -Ellen Swanson
“I chose Juniata because to them I’m not a number in a file. I am a person.” -Darcy Stock
“I chose Juniata College because of the comfortable environment that feels like home; also because with my POE I can direct my interest in biology towards pre-med.” -Emma Ruggery
Juniata is already beginning work on the Class of 2014. Interested students and their parents should contact Michelle Bartol, Dean of Enrollment (814) 641-3432 or visit our Admission site.
We Hid This So Well, Even We Were Stumped
For those of you who were wondering about the asterisk accompanying the Pole Poll in the print version of the magazine, we forgot to add in the answer. The Consensus Answer is that the mystery pole is an antique pole vault pole.
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