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To Our Alumni and Friends,
Resilient. That is the word that best describes Neumann University during the 2019-20 academic year. In the face of a once-in-a-century pandemic that swept across the country and turned our lives upside down, Neumann exhibited resilience in myriad ways.
Our faculty and students made the transition from in-person to online classes in just four days and completed the spring semester successfully. With similar flexibility, we adapted summer sessions for remote instruction and even witnessed an increase in summer enrollment. We also used the summer months to create an innovative plan for hybrid learning this fall, allowing the campus community to “mask up and spread out” as learning continued in classrooms and online.
We should not forget, however, that Neumann’s 55th year was not solely about the university’s response to coronavirus. We marked significant achievements in scholarship growth, student recognition, and facilities expansion.
The Ed Snider Youth Hockey Foundation supported us with a check for $500,000 to provide full scholarships -- including tuition, room and board -- for freshman and transfer students who participated in Snider Hockey programming as youngsters. The National Science Foundation awarded us a five-year grant in the amount of $649,556 to recruit, retain, and graduate students in the STEM fields. A generous bequest from the estate of former Nursing professor Janet Farahmand and her husband will fund $400,000 for nursing scholarships. And a celebrity trio - Kamal Gray, Jahri Evans and Michael Harris - gave Neumann $25,000 for scholarships to support current Neumann students who need financial assistance to continue their pursuit of a degree.
Our students won a national award for best feature news reporting from College Broadcasters, Inc., scholarships from the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia, and finished in the top 100 of an international Business Strategy Game.
We expanded our facilities in the past year, too, adding a refurbished 1892 Victorian mansion as a residence for select honors students and transforming the Schmidt Multipurpose Room in Flynn Hall into the Sora Luna Lounge, a late-night coffeehouse for students. Renovations on the ground floor of Bachmann (directly below the library) created the HUB, a centralized location for students to access learning support services. And the installation of a new turf field provided a needed upgrade for our athletic facilities.
With the prayers and support of our alumni and friends, and a vision that is firmly rooted in our Franciscan RISES values (reverence, integrity, service, excellence, and stewardship), the 2019-20 academic year was one of innovation, achievement, and resilience.
Dr. Chris Everett Domes
President
Because of a generous bequest of $1.4 million from the estate of former Nursing professor Janet Farahmand and her husband, the entryway to the university library is now the Ahmad and Janet Farahmand Memorial Atrium and two nursing scholarships have been endowed. One million dollars will support library operations during the next three years, and approximately $200,000 will be designated for each scholarship.
The Schmidt Multipurpose Room in Flynn Hall has been transformed into the Sora Luna Lounge, a late-night coffeehouse for students. The space was completely overhauled to include an outside patio, kitchen, acoustic panels, student artwork on the walls, and random furniture throughout the room to create an eclectic atmosphere.
The name has Franciscan roots. Sora is Italian for sister in the Umbrian dialect, the region of Italy where St. Francis lived. Luna is moon in Italian. Sister Moon and Brother Sun are key figures in the Canticle of Creation prayer of St. Francis.
Legendary basketball coach Fran Dunphy received the 2019-20 Sport, Spirituality and Character Development award in a special Advent Evening of Reflection on December 11. The event was designed for Neumann coaches and chaplains to meet the coach and hear his insights in an intimate setting. Dunphy coached at Penn and Temple for a combined 30 years, amassing 580 wins (310 at Penn, 270 at Temple).
Fr. James Arsenault, a parish priest near Virginia Tech University in 2007, spoke on November 19 about the aftermath of the deadliest killing spree on an American college campus.
Fr. Arsenault was on hand to help mourners after the April 16, 2007, mass shooting by a Virginia Tech student who killed 32 people (27 students and five faculty members) on campus. Seventeen others were injured in the assault on the university’s campus in Blacksburg. He recalls having to tell parents that their child had been killed, conversations that shook him deeply.
The Ed Snider Youth Hockey Foundation and Goals & Assists Scholarship Fund presented a check for $500,000 to Neumann on January 30. The gift will support 100 full-scholarship years -- including tuition, room and board -- for freshman and transfer students who participated in Snider Hockey programming as youngsters.
The 100 scholarship years will assist a minimum of 25 students (25 freshmen x 4 years each); however, the program has the potential to help more than 25 students. For instance, it could support 20 first-year students (20 x 4 years each) and 10 transfer students (10 x 2 years each) or other variations that total 100 years at Neumann. The scholarships apply for a maximum of four years per student and only to the pursuit of an undergraduate degree.
Kamal Gray, Jahri Evans and Michael Harris gave Neumann $25,000 for scholarships on October 18. The funds will be used to support current Neumann students who need financial assistance to continue their pursuit of a degree.
Gray is the keyboard player for The Roots, a Grammy Award-winning hip-hop group and house band for The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. Michael Harris is president and CEO of Best Sports Consultants and Jahri Evans is a former NFL player and Super Bowl winner with the New Orleans Saints.
The three selected Neumann University to receive their gift because it is one of five American colleges participating in the launch of SponsoredScholar, a program that empowers college students to initiate personalized fundraising campaigns to help pay for tuition.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Neumann a five-year grant in the amount of $649,556 to recruit, retain, and graduate students in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). The bulk of the grant money will provide scholarships for students seeking degrees in biology, computer and information science, cybersecurity, data science and analytics, and mathematics. The remaining balance of the grant will fund academic support services, stipends for summer research projects, teaching assistant salaries, and travel for student/faculty conferences.
The goal of the Neumann program is for the university to recruit and enroll 24 academically talented students who will major in a STEM field and who have financial need that is not covered by federal, state and university aid. Twelve students will enroll in fall 2020 and another 12 in fall 2021.
Maya van Rossum, an outspoken environmental activist, spoke about the national Green Amendment Movement on Tuesday, December 3, in the McNichol Art Gallery. The movement, which she founded, focuses on state-level legal efforts to guarantee Americans clean air, water and food. van Rossum is the author of The Green Amendment, the leader of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, an environmental attorney, and a community organizer.
She believes that, for decades, communities have relied on federal and state laws to ensure protection of a clean environment while, in fact, our laws are designed to accommodate pollution as much as to prevent it. The impact, she argues, is that people feel powerless when it comes to preserving the quality of their water, air, public parks, and natural spaces. Her solution for achieving better protection of our environment is to turn to the ultimate authority -- our state and federal constitutions.
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U.S. News & World Report has ranked Neumann’s online bachelor’s degree as one of the country’s 2020 Best Online Programs. Our online degrees for adults placed in the top 12% of such programs in the country among more than 1,200 programs surveyed by U.S. News. It is also the 8th highest rated online bachelor’s degree in Pennsylvania.
The Brendan P. Kelly’87 Memorial Scholarship Committee and the Kelly family reached two milestones in 2019: thirty years of fundraising in Brendan’s name and $250,000 in scholarships awarded to deserving students as a result.
Brendan embraced the university so much that his nickname was “Mr. Neumann.” Sadly, just one year after graduating, he passed away from a cardiac anomaly. Ever since his death, the Kelly family, Brendan’s close friends and colleagues, various alumni, and the BPK committee gathered for beef-n-beers, basketball marathons, and golf outings to raise money for the scholarship in his name.
While isolated in their homes, Neumann communication students stayed on the air, sharing their experiences and those of others as the world battled the coronavirus pandemic. The project, titled the Coronavirus Diaries, was aired on the university radio station WNUW 98.5 FM and through its social media platforms.
The station collected hundreds of audio diaries from students and neighbors across the Delaware Valley and the world. Calls were recorded from listeners as close as Aston and as distant as Spain.
As the coronavirus pandemic turned the world upside down, the university responded to the needs of its students and the larger community by freezing tuition for 2020, going test optional for prospective high school students, reducing tuition for summer sessions, applying for CARES Act funds to distribute to its students, and donating food to Drexel Neumann Academy.
A simple act of kindness, captured on camera on Neumann’s campus, is the pivotal moment in a student-produced video that won a national award from College Broadcasters, Inc. “Jake Loburak: The Colorblind Videographer,” a 90-second video produced by communications and digital media majors Sean Spence and Jake Loburak, placed first in the country in the Best Feature News Reporting category.
Loburak was diagnosed with Strong Deutan Color Blindness as a young child. This type of color blindness makes red, yellow, green and brown appear similar. His classmates researched the affliction and chipped in to buy him EnChroma Color Blind glasses, which enable people with color blindness to see colors. Loburak donned the glasses on the air, and his reaction to seeing colors for the first time was the central moment in the winning entry.
Jake Loburak and Ria Troilo, communication and digital media majors, have been selected to receive $1,000 scholarships from the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia. They are two of only 20 college students in the Delaware Valley chosen for the 2020 Broadcast Pioneers awards.
The scholarships are given to current college sophomores and juniors who have demonstrated academic excellence and professional potential. To qualify, students must be studying radio, TV, film production, or associated fields and have a cumulative GPA of 3.0 or higher.
Two teams of business students cracked the top 100 in an international Business Strategy Game that involved 5,649 teams from 269 colleges. The management skill of the teams, based on the performance of fictitious footwear companies that they operated, placed them in the top two percent of teams that entered the competition.
The Business Strategy Game (BSG) casts students in the role of company managers, who are responsible for decisions regarding production, shipping and inventory, corporate social responsibility, pricing and marketing, financing, worker compensation, and other aspect of business management. Teams from Europe, Africa, North America, Asia and Latin America entered the 2020 competition.
Adam Bryant, a best-selling author and former columnist with The New York Times, delivered the fourth annual Rocco Abessinio Lecture in Management and Entrepreneurship on October 22. He told a group of Neumann University business students and faculty that high-performing teams have a culture that drives innovation and produces results.
Among the characteristics of a positive culture, Bryant listed a simple plan with a clear method of measuring success, understandable rules of the road (behavior that will be rewarded), basic respect for employees, and distinct accountability to the team (“do what you say you are going to do”).
On October 2, the university presented the 20th Bock Book Award to author Kelly DiPucchio and illustrator Stephanie Graegin. The duo won the 2019 award for their book Super Manny Cleans Up!
In the book, Super Manny and his pal Gertie, inspired by finding a plastic six-pack ring around a real turtle’s neck, team up to fight littering. During the ceremony, Graegin read the book to youngsters from the campus Child Development Center.
An 1892 Victorian home in Aston, which morphed into a bed and breakfast and then an apartment house, has been purchased and restored as a residence hall. The former Rhodes Mansion, now Chiara Honors House, boasts wood floors, high ceilings, an impressive wooden staircase, a vintage oval window, and a pair of sliding pocket doors. It opened as a residence for 18 honors students in August 2020.
Jeannette Walls, author of the best-selling memoir, The Glass Castle, captivated a crowd of more than 100 on December 7, with her insight, wit and honesty. In the book, published in 2005, Walls shares her moving story – growing up in extreme poverty with dysfunctional parents (“My father was an alcoholic, and my mother is just loopy”) and overcoming her circumstances.
She rose to become part of New York's media elite, writing for New York and Esquire magazines, but she kept her background secret -- that her parents had followed her to New York and had become members of the city's homeless population. Named by Amazon as one of the top 10 books of the decade, The Glass Castle has sold more than four million copies and been translated into more than 30 languages.
Renovations on the ground floor of Bachmann (directly below the library) have created the HUB, a centralized location for students to access learning support services. These include the John C. Ford Academic Resource Center, advising center, disability services, tutoring, the writing center, and career and personal development.
Funding for the HUB renovations came from a $2.1 million Title III grant. Along with physical renovations, the grant provides funding for additional staff positions at the HUB, including a writing center coordinator and academic coaches.
It’s official. The days of academic divisions at Neumann are a thing of the past. The Board of Trustees has approved renaming the divisions as schools. Academic units are now the School of Arts and Sciences, the School of Business, the School of Education and Human Services, and the School of Nursing and Health Sciences.
Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society (PTK) has named Neumann University to its 2020 Transfer Honor Roll. The society recognizes the highest-rated 25 percent of colleges for creating systems and processes that support transfer students.
The 2020 honor roll includes 122 colleges. Only eight are in Pennsylvania. Colleges were selected based on their transfer friendliness rating, which includes cost, scholarships, admissions practices, and peer reviews.
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