Stockton University News - April 2017 - Office of the President

Dear Alumni and Friends,

Greetings from Stockton University! This month, we broke ground for our future Atlantic City Campus. The special occasion launched a new chapter in our history and reaffirmed our commitment to Atlantic City and all of South Jersey. We look forward to the new wave of opportunity that will be available to our students and the region at our new residential campus. Here are just a few highlights of what has been happening at Stockton:

Stockton Breaks Ground for Atlantic City Campus

On April 20, I joined Gov. Chris Christie, state Senate President Stephen Sweeney, Atlantic City Development Corp. (AC Devco) Chairman Jon Hanson, South Jersey Industries President and CEO Michael Renna to break ground on the $220 million Atlantic City Gateway Project, which includes Stockton’s new residential campus.

Move on over seagulls, ‘cause the Ospreys have landed!

The ceremony launched a new chapter in Atlantic City’s history and celebrated how Stockton continues to honor its original motto of ‘plant yourself where you can grow.’

Stockton held its first classes in the Mayflower Hotel on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City in 1971, and has grown from 1,000 students to nearly 9,000. Another 1,000 or more will be attending classes at the new Atlantic City campus in fall 2018.

On April 20, we took the first steps of a new journey: one that recommits our intellectual promise to the residents of Atlantic City – and all of South Jersey – by establishing a new campus on the world’s most famous boardwalk. The new campus will include a state-of-the-art academic building, student residences overlooking the beach, shops, food and parking galore.

Working together, we will raise more than steel, brick and mortar. We will raise hopes and nurture opportunities. We will ensure that a Stockton degree becomes more valuable each and every day – for our students, for the residents of this extraordinary city. And most important, we will stay true to our values and academic mission: to provide a high-quality, affordable education to anyone who aspires to plant themselves and grow.

Members of Stockton’s Board of Trustees and the University Foundation attended along with many government officials and business leaders, including Chris Paladino of AC Devco.

Stockton has been designated by the state as an anchor institution in Atlantic City. Anchor institutions bring economic impact including fixed assets that are not likely to be relocated; employment potential – jobs generator; ability to attract businesses and highly skilled individuals; purchasing power; and they become central to the city’s culture, learning and innovation. Examples in other cities include Rutgers in New Brunswick, also developed by Devco.

The $178.28 million Atlantic City campus will include a 56,000-square-foot academic building with three floors, 14 classrooms and computer labs; 17 faculty offices/work stations; a 3,000-square-foot event room, a café area including outdoor seating, and administrative offices. It will face Albany and Trenton avenues.

The residential complex will offer apartment-style living to 533 students in over 200,000 square feet. The residential building will include 15,000 square feet of retail space along the Boardwalk and on Atlantic Avenue, meeting spaces, offices, mailroom, two 50-seat flexible classrooms, a fitness center, and two outdoor courtyards.

The Gateway Project also includes a six-story office tower for South Jersey Gas, over 5,000 square feet of retail space and a parking garage with 879 spaces, for a total cost, including the campus, of $220 million. Stockton has received strong financial and other support from the state, county and city and its other partners. The University’s portion of the project cost is $18 million.

For more information about Stockton University’s plans for the Atlantic City campus, visit stockton.edu/acgateway.

Literature Major Jade Fleming Awarded Fulbright

Jade Fleming, a Stockton University student who will graduate in May with a B.A. in Literature, has earned a grant from the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, one of the academic world’s most prestigious awards.

Fleming has received a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship and will be teaching English in Malaysia for a year beginning in January 2018. The teaching location will be assigned during the two-week orientation in Kuala Lumpur.

The 21-year-old is a resident of Egg Harbor City, N.J., and has also lived in Florida, as well as Ventnor and Pleasantville in New Jersey. She is a graduate of Atlantic City High School and notes, “I moved a lot as a kid. It’s probably why I’m so eager to travel, there’s always somewhere else to be.”

“People like me, marginalized and very much overlooked in society, don’t often get opportunities to go to other countries and other continents,” she said. “This wasn’t just a chance I’ve been given, but an opportunity that I didn’t back away from. It could have been easy for me to say there’s no way that a black kid like me from Pleasantville, from North Lauderdale, from A.C. High, could be qualified for something as big a Fulbright. And yet, I went for it anyway. Now, I’m a Fulbright Scholar who gets to teach English in Malaysia.”

Fleming said several members of the Stockton community have provided support and guidance throughout her career here.

Ciara Barrick, a 2015 alumna, who earned a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Cyprus in 2015 and went on to set up a new cultural exchange program with European University Cyprus (EUC) for Stockton students, critiqued Fleming’s essay for the Fulbright application.

When she first came to Stockton, Fleming said Gail Rosenthal, director of the Sara and Sam
Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center, “took me under her wing and helped me out. Gail connected me to the right people to help with financial issues and was one of the biggest supporters in my transition from high school to college.” Alongside Rosenthal, Susan Lang, a family friend and coincidentally a close friend of Gail’s, also was a major supporter during that transition, she said.

Judy Copeland, associate professor of Writing, alerted her to the Fulbright program and then David Roessel, professor of Greek Language and Literature, explained the process and “convinced me that I could do it.”

“Emari DiGiorgio [associate professor of Writing and an award-winning poet] inspired me to try poetry,” she said, and Cynthia King, associate professor of Creative Writing, basically told me, “you have talent and you should work on your writing.”

Since coming to Stockton, she has been able to travel to Italy and Greece with Roessel through a School of Arts and Humanities program, and she has visited Grenada, where her parents were born.

“I am a first-generation American and the first college student in my family,” she said.

Fleming joins two other previous Stockton graduates who won Fulbrights in addition to Barrick: Kaidesha Pinkney, a 2015 alumna who also taught English in Malaysia in 2015, and Barbara Fisher, a 2013 alumna who taught English in the Czech Republic in 2014.

Scholarship Benefit Gala Raises Over $400,000

Guests at Stockton University’s 37th Annual Scholarship Benefit Gala held at Stockton Seaview Hotel & Golf Club on April 22 raised more than $400,000, with net proceeds going to the Benefit Gala Scholarship Endowment Fund.

Earnings from this fund are used to provide annual scholarship awards to Stockton students. Since 2007 the Benefit Gala has added more than $3 million to the endowment in support of student scholarships. This year more than $110,000 has been awarded to 113 students.

These scholarships make a huge difference in the lives of our students. Our incredibly successful alumni are illustrative of the dream coming true.

Among those alumni present were Tom Ballance, ’82, president and COO of the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa; Richard Dovey, ’75, president of the Atlantic County Utilities Authority and chair of the University Foundation; and Madeleine Deininger, ’80, chair of the Board of Trustees and founder and president of the Sonoma, California-based Kismet Wines, Inc.

Several student scholarship recipients volunteered at the event. Testimonials from other scholarship recipients were featured on a slideshow on large screens.

New Gala format The Gala featured an innovative format that allowed guests to circulate and enjoy live entertainment and special menus in each of four spaces throughout the historic Stockton Seaview.

The silent auction floated above the indoor pool, which was covered in translucent white flooring and lit from beneath, in a dramatic black and white presentation. The auction included a large variety of high-end items such as getaways, jewelry, golf, wine baskets, sweet treats and much more. Tito’s Handmade Vodka, a partner for this year’s event, agreed to match the first $10,000 raised through the auction.

Entertainment included Carnivale, a 12-piece big band that covers almost every genre of music; Fleur Seule, which plays 1940s style jazz and swing music; the Megan Knight Duo, offering modern and classic sounds from various genres; Chad Juros and Mike Palladino, performing strolling magic and some celebrity impersonators.

Dolce Hotels and Resorts and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 351 were the Chairs’ Circle sponsors of the Gala.

Other top sponsors included: ASAPP Healthcare Inc. & Amethyst Personal Growth, the Cooper Levenson law firm, Dr. Howard and Gayle Gross, SOSH Architects, Avalon Flooring, the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa, Chartwells, Follett Higher Education Group, Northeast Carpenters and Carpenters Local 255, the Saul Ewing LLP law firm, AC Devco and NewBrunswick Development Corporation, the Atlantic County Utilities Authority, AtlantiCare, Bricklayers & Allied Craftworkers, the Fox Rothschild LLP law firm; Fulton Bank of New Jersey, Glenn Insurance, Kramer Beverage Co. and Kramer Family Foundation, Marathon Engineering and Environmental Services, Inc, Pennoni, Pennsylvania Trust, Pepsi Beverage Company, Quantum Capital Management L.L.C., Resorts Casino Hotel, the Rothman Institute, Shore Medical Center, South Jersey Industries, Steve & Cookie’s By the Bay, The Press of Atlantic City, Townsquare Media, U.A. Local Union 322 and Walt’s Original Primo Pizza.

Pappas Visiting Scholar Series Brings Anna Deavere Smith to Stockton

Anna Deavere Smith brought the audience of over 800 people to their feet in the Sports Center on April 6 with her portrayals of people from all across America in “Snapshots: Portraits of a World in Transition,” at Stockton University.

Smith’s appearance was the second in the Dean C. and Zoë Pappas Visiting Scholar series, which was endowed in 2012 by Dean Pappas, a University trustee who died in 2016, and his wife, Zoë.

Smith, a nationally known actress, playwright and educator, recreated moments from conversations she has had with 250 people, sparking a variety of emotions and points of view on timely issues.

She portrayed Allen Bullock, a teenager who got six months in jail for taking out his frustration over Freddie Gray’s death in Baltimore police custody by smashing a traffic cone through a police car’s windshield.

Her portrayals also ranged from a Jewish woman after the Crown Heights riots in Brooklyn in 1991, to a Korean shopkeeper after the Los Angeles riots in 1992, to Congressman John Lewis, who heard an ex-Klansman apologize decades later for beating him in 1961, to the late, former Texas Gov. Ann Richards and a woman operating a South African orphanage/hospice for children with AIDS.

In response to a question after her performance about whether art can influence public policy, Smith said, “This isn’t really a show, it’s a call to you.”

Smith is currently the artist-in-residence at the Center for American Progress, a progressive policy research and advocacy organization in Washington, D.C. In 2015, she was named the Jefferson Lecturer by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which termed the lecture “the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.”

Over the past three decades, she has been the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, a Guggenheim fellowship and a professorship at Stanford University.

“Trying to become America word-for-word does not pay the rent,” Smith told the audience, alluding to her television work on such shows as The West Wing, Nurse Jackie, Black-ish and Madam Secretary.

Stockton Participates in University Trips During Spring Break

Faculty, staff and students participated in a variety of University-led trips in the U.S. and abroad during Stockton’s spring break in March.

The Office of Event Services & Campus Center Operations, in collaboration with many other offices, sponsored nine staff members and 43 students for the Habitat for Humanity Alternative Spring Break. The Stockton group worked with Cabarrus County Habitat for Humanity in Concord, N.C. and Mon County Habitat for Humanity in Morgantown, W.V. to work on homes for families in need during Spring Break 2017.

Another group chose to volunteer at Give Kids the World Village in Orlando, Fla. for Alternative Spring Break 2017. Joshua Duntley, associate professor of Criminal Justice, Christine Tartaro, professor of Criminal Justice, and Christopher DeSantis, adjunct faculty in the Criminal Justice program, accompanied Stockton students to volunteer at the nonprofit “storybook” resort, where children with life-threatening illnesses and their families are treated to weeklong, cost-free vacations.

Stockton faculty staff and students, and three Holocaust survivors witnessed the history of World War I and World War II in France and the Netherlands during a study tour led by Michael Hayse, associate professor of Historical Studies, and Gail Rosenthal, director of the Sara & Sam Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center.

Site visits included the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam; the hidden village in Vierhouten, Gelderland; the Jewish cemetery in Elburg; the Utah and Omaha beaches of D-Day in Normandy; and the Shoah Memorial in Paris. The tour walked the Second Line Trench at the Battle of the Somme in Beaumont-Hamel; stood inside a German bunker at the Caen Normandy Memorial Museum; and placed flags in front of graves at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial.

Eighteen student veterans from Stockton followed in the footsteps of the legendary Greek king Odysseus when they traveled to Greece for a specialized seminar with a travel component that is uniquely relevant to the veteran experience. “To Ithaca: A Soldier’s Journey Home,” is a groundbreaking pilot program that provides military veterans adjusting to civilian life with a portion of much-needed recovery in an uncommon learning environment.

David Roessel, professor of Greek Language and Literature; Karen Matsinger, assistant director of Counseling, and Jason Babin, assistant director of Student Rights & Responsibilities, accompanied the students on their journey.

Victoria Schindler, professor of Occupational Therapy, led an interdisciplinary group of 40 Stockton faculty and students to Bogotá, Colombia to provide educational and humanitarian benefits for the third consecutive year.

The group met with administrators, faculty and students of health science and Spanish language programs at Universidad del Rosario and Escuela Columbiana de Rehabilitación to continue to establish the collaborative relationship. They also visited the Foundation for the Adoption of Abandoned Children, an orphanage in Bogotá, to deliver donations for the children in the orphanage and to learn occupational therapy (OT), physical therapy (PT), and speech interventions for social and economic challenges.