University of South Carolina
November 29, 2012
A publication for faculty, staff and friends of the university
Aiken
Beaufort
Columbia
USC Times
Lancaster
Salkehatchie
Sumter
Union
Upstate
Children’s Law Center
moves forward
By Craig
Brandhorst
A
s the branch of the USC School of Law dedicated to the legal welfare of South Carolina’s children,
the 17-year-old Children’s Law Center has plenty on its docket — but nowhere to hold court.
The center has grown over the years, said director Harry Davis, but a lack of adequate meeting,
classroom and parking space has limited its ability to serve its clients.
“It’s very simple — we are a school with no classrooms,” Davis said. “We are in an administrative
building that does not have the parking and classrooms needed for on-site training.”
Presently, the center helps train more than 10,000 attorneys, family court judges, guardians ad litem
and other child advocates each year. The center’s 35-member staff, meanwhile, works with various agencies and the state legislature to inform public policy.
“We have an incredibly high number of children who are measured in some degree of need or negative well-being, and South Carolina is a state with limited resources,” Davis said. “How we employ those
resources to help children has to be by design.”
The former director of the state’s Department of Juvenile Justice is spearheading an effort to relocate
the center’s cramped Hampton Street offices to a more accommodating address at the corner of Pickens
and Gervais streets, in the historic Whaley House.
The 120-year-old Queen Anne-style mansion will provide approximately 8,750 square feet of space
that Davis described as “ideally suited” for the center’s programming needs.
The removal of an outbuilding, which is not original to the historical site, will make way for an additional classroom space while the grounds will accommodate more parking spaces.
“If you were starting from scratch to design the Children’s Law Center, you probably wouldn’t
build the Whaley House,” said Davis. “Having said that, the Whaley House layout is perfect for the
Children’s Law Center.”
The house was donated to the Historic Columbia Foundation in 2011, pursuant to a partnership with
the university. The exterior renovation is being overseen jointly by USC and Historic Columbia and
financed with private donations. The project is expected to be completed by Dec. 21. Next USC will launch a $4 million capital campaign to fund interior renovations that will include
the refinishing of the original floors, the replacement of plumbing and wiring and the installation of an
elevator. Further into the capital campaign Historic Columbia will transfer the lease to the university.
The goal is to occupy the property in two or three years. USC will consult Historic Columbia for guidance in maintaining the house’s historic integrity. The property’s distinctive architecture and location
across from the future site of the law school will enhance the center’s profile, Davis said.
“The Whaley House is going to be more than a just an office building for us, more than just a training
center,” he said. “This will belong to the university and to the community. It will be just this incredible
facility, this busy hub of advocacy for kids.”
Jack Claypoole, ’87, used to work at the White House
building community organizations. But in July he decided to return to his alma mater to bring alumni back home.
As the executive director for My Carolina Alumni
Association, Claypoole has plenty of big ideas for the
organization that’s in the process of developing a new
center in the heart of Columbia’s Vista district.
What do you think about being back at USC?
I am loving being back home. The university is probably the healthiest, most forward thinking it’s been in
the modern era in terms of the academic success, our
athletic success on the field, our visibility, not just having to claim being the flagship for the state, but actually
showing it in all that we’re doing.
What do you want the association to be for alumni?
Q&A
With
JACK
CLAYPOOLE
What we really want the association to be is the touch
point for our students as they come into undergraduate programs so we form a relationship while they’re in
school and then we’re the lifelong touch point. We want
to be the place that they come home to for continuing
training. The fact that the university is launching online
offerings for both undergraduate and graduate-level is
really going to be helpful to us in staying connected.
How do you get alumni to come back and fully
re-engage in the life of the university?
I think part of our challenge on the alumni side is that
people think of us as the “party hosts” and not as much
about ‘what is my role as an alum?’ We really want to get
our alums to come back, understand the university as it
exists today and where the leadership wants the university to be 10 years from now, and to help us get there.
How does what the alumni association does
impact faculty and staff on campus?
We want to help recruit the best and brightest students
to the university. This year, for example, we hosted
well over 1,000 students and families for freshmen
send-off activities to welcome them into the Carolina
family. Alumni also impact the student process by
providing guest speakers and experts in the classroom. Alumni offer a broader, deeper well of support
for internships and mentor opportunities that enhance
the academic experience as a way to give students the
chance the test drive ideas and skills they are learning
in the classroom. Clearly alums provide us the best
way to connect our students.
See today’s Day Times for more of Claypoole’s interview.
University of South Carolina
2
Seeing the Show
At the arboretum
If you haven’t visited the Belser Arboretum, the next
open house is Sunday, Dec. 9, from 1 to 4 p.m. When
you do make it to USC’s urban preserve, here are a few
of the residents you may spot in the “jungle.”
Relict trillium is a mountain wildflower listed as an
endangered species in 1988.
J
ust two blocks off Devine Street, not far from Piggly Wiggly and Jiffy Lube, is one of the city of Columbia’s
diamonds in the rough —
­ the W. Gordon Belser Arboretum.
A lush, 10-acre respite from its urban surroundings, the Belser Arboretum contains 10 distinct biomes, or plant
communities, that are representative of natural biomes from around the state.
The preserve serves as an essential teaching laboratory for USC students. Students from the university taking
laboratory courses use the arboretum for field experiments.
The university’s need for a nearby biological field laboratory helped spur the restoration that created today’s
Belser Arboretum. And it needed some work — yesterday’s arboretum was a bit of a jungle.
“Before we started work here in 2006, you
couldn’t have made your way from one end
of the arboretum to the other without a machete,” said Patricia DeCoursey, a professor
By
Steven
of biology and director of the arboretum.
Powell
The property was donated to USC in 1959
by W. Gordon Belser, a local attorney who
lived in and helped develop the neighborhood now bordered by Devine Street,
Rosewood Drive and Beltline Boulevard.
He saw that Columbia’s urbanization
would soon displace natural forests throughout the city, and he designated that his 10acre donation be set aside as an arboretum.
“Belser recognized it as one of the most unique properties in Columbia, because a big river fed into the Atlantic
Ocean there a long time ago,” said DeCoursey. “You have sand dunes, a deep valley and deposition from the deep
river — a rich black soil.”
But the arboretum fell prey to neglect. Invasive non-native plants and choking vines spread throughout the area.
Hurricane Hugo in 1989 brought down a number of the largest trees on the property.
By the mid-2000s, though, USC’s need for a nearby field laboratory and DeCoursey’s recognition of the potential
within the dying woodlot came together.
“Believe it or not, I could see from the ecological patterning that we could create the 10 different sites on the 10
acres here,” DeCoursey said. “And that’s what we’ve done.”
DeCoursey and a team of volunteers have toiled since 2006 to transform the arboretum into a beautiful yet functional center for education and outreach. Hundreds of USC students use the arboretum every year now, both for
field experiments and service projects.
And with an open house once a month, community outreach is an important part of the mission as well. Have
you visited the Belser Arboretum yet?
Urban
preserve
It’s coming soon!
The Winter 2013 edition of Carolinian magazine, featuring stories about USC faculty,
students and alumni, is on the way with a
totally redesigned look and feel.
Don’t already receive Carolinian? It’s easy
to get on the mailing list for the spring, fall
and winter editions — just make a donation of $50 or more to the Family Fund at
giving.sc.edu.
Red buckeye roots contain oils that pioneers are
said to have used as soap.
Umbrella magnolia trees (below left) can reach 50
feet in height, and flowers can be as large as 10 inches
in diameter.
Morels (below right) – a rare, edible mushroom with
truffle-like status among gourmands – were briefly
spotted on the property.
Photos courtesy of Patricia DeCoursey
USC Aiken
gets an app
Attention iPhone and Android
users: in addition to Angry
Birds and Words With Friends,
you can now also keep busy
on your smartphone with the
University of South Carolina
Aiken app.
The app, developed by
Straxis Technology, provides several useful
features – from an active directory of faculty and
staff to a list of upcoming events and news releases
to a campus map and tour. The app also has an
Athletics tab, offering you the latest in Pacer sports
that includes schedules, news and even a link you can access to
view live basketball games.
USC Times
November 29, 2012
By Craig
Brandhorst
3
Return to sender
Historian compiles literary letters
A
sk USC’s R. Blakeslee Gilpin how he ended
up editing “The Selected Letters of William
Styron,” and he will explain how graduate
school encourages the mind to wander.
In Gilpin’s case, he was three-quarters of the way
through a dissertation on 20th-century attitudes
toward 19th-century abolitionist John Brown when
he chanced upon a trove
of letters from Styron to fellow novelist Robert Penn
Warren concerning Styron’s controversial 1967 novel
“The Confessions of Nat Turner.”
“That stuff got me very interested very quickly,”
Gilpin says. “John Brown was great — I’d been working on that a long time — but I was on fire for this.”
Partly he was drawn to Styron’s letters because they
dovetailed with the research he was already doing.
But he was equally interested in Styron the man — his
creative processes, his battle with depression, his interactions with the most influential
figures of the 20th century.
Gilpin, an assistant history professor, had also once spent two summers in college running
a small post office near William and Rose Styron’s home on Martha’s Vineyard and had occasionally assisted the author.
“He was one of the most noted personalities on the island, and I wanted to be a writer
when I was 19,” Gilpin says. “I’d put stamps on packages to Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel Garcia
Marquez for him.”
Little did Gilpin know he’d eventually read much of that same correspondence — including
a postcard he himself had processed — but that’s precisely what happened after he contacted
Rose Styron wanting to write a biography. She invited him instead to help compile her late
husband’s letters (the book is due out next month from Random House).
“I sort of had my eye on a different project,” Gilpin says with a laugh. “I couldn’t turn it
down, but I also had no idea what was really involved.”
Gilpin ultimately turned his John Brown dissertation into the book “John Brown Still
Lives!,” which was a finalist for the 2012 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, but it’s been Styron
that’s continued to dog his imagination.
In fact, he is already working on two other books on the late author — a biography,
plus “a more academic book” about the reception of “The Confessions of Nat Turner”
in 1960s America.
“The letters are like the research base for everything else,” says Gilpin. “I now really
know this stuff. I know this guy’s story, and it’s fascinating.”
By Frenche Brewer
The art of doing good
T
UnLayered: Girls Taking Back
Jan. 14 - May 8 / McKissick Museum
The exhibit will feature two video projects, an animation
project, T-shirts with printed logos and poetry.
he girls of a Lexington County juvenile
arbitration program come from the poorest
of backgrounds and are one strike away from
juvenile jail. They have committed offenses such
as shoplifting, fighting and, drug use.
But, Olga Ivashkevich, a University of South
Carolina art education professor and women’s and
gender studies program affiliate, has devoted her
time to giving these young girls reasons to hold
their heads high.
Ivashkevich began a series of feminist art workshops to engage teenage girls in a dialogue about
gender and social justice through art production.
The girls started with conventional media, constructing collages about their life roadblocks, but
couldn’t use their own images because of privacy
restrictions. Ivashkevich realized the girls needed
a medium in which they could be more visible.
“I really believe that for this population of girls,
visibility and voice are major issues,” Ivashkevich
said. “Working with animation and video provides
them with an important opportunity to talk back
to the media representations of ‘bad’ girls and
reframe their own image.”
The girls created three video projects with the
help of independent filmmaker Rebecca Boyd, who
now teaches media arts at the university. They wrote
the scripts and filmed short infomercials on the topics of drug use, drunk driving and body image.
Recently, Ivashkevich collaborated with
Courtnie Wolfgang, an art education faculty
member, on a video project taking girls’ visibility
further. They filmed themselves reading poems
about problems in their lives but this time without
wearing masks.
The arbitration program, is meant to focus on
positive outcomes as opposed to stigmatizing and
identifying girls as “bad” and untrustworthy.
“It’s my belief that art making, performance and
writing is just a different way of saying something
that they might not have the words for or feel like
they have a voice for,” Wolfgang said.
The objective of these art workshops is to make
youth more aware of their life struggles, realize
their strengths and get back on track, Wolfgang
said. Juvenile arbitration program Director
Kathryn Barton said it’s working because most
girls do not recommit offenses after going through
this program.
“We have learned from the evaluations, which
the girls complete at the end of the sessions, that
the groups have had a positive impact on them,”
she said. “Giving them education about choices,
having meaningful conversations about drug and
alcohol abuse, and making them realize they have
many possibilities for their future, careers and college opportunities.”
USC Times
November 29, 2012
4
From the
Barre
to the
streets
Jason Ayer’s Palmetto Pointe Project puts
dancers amid Columbia’s landmarks
By Rebecca Krumel
“I love that the Palmetto Pointe Project takes the art of dance outside the studio, away
from the barres and mirrors and the stage, and extends that to familiar surroundings in the
Columbia area. The spaces I’ve been photographed in are all beautiful places — sometimes
nooks and crannies, sometimes recognizable Columbia landmarks — and the approach is to
think about how I can utilize that space and enhance it, not detract from its natural beauty.”
— Kathryn Miles, USC political science student
U
SC’s Jason Ayer has been photographing dancers since
his high school years. But lately, Ayer, a media resource
specialist in distance education at the university, has
been bringing dance to the streets.
In 2010, Ayer began the Palmetto Pointe Project, a
freelance project that focuses its lens on Columbia and
USC dancers, capturing their creative outlet against the
backdrop of the capital city.
Ayer’s project resembles New York City’s “Ballerina
Project,” documenting traditional dance in nontraditional
locales such as subways, and street corners. However, Ayer
says his project does not mimic New York’s project that illustrates urban cityscapes with dancers as part of the backdrop.
Ayer focuses on showcasing the dancers as individuals
amid a setting that draws out their personality or contrasts
it. He doesn’t want to downplay the role of the dancers,
many of whom perform with the USC Dance Company or
the USC Dance Conservatory.
“I may be the eye of this particular storm, but they are the
wind and rain and thunder and lightning, and without them
this project is not much of anything,” he says.
USC TIMES
Vol. 23, No. 18 | November 29, 2012
USC Times is published 20 times a year
for the faculty and staff of the University
of South Carolina by the Division of
Communications.
Managing editor: Liz McCarthy
Designer: Linda Dodge
Contributors: Peggy Binette, Craig
Brandhorst, Frenché Brewer, Glenn
Hare, Thom Harman, Chris Horn,
Page Ivey, Steven Powell, Megan
Sexton, Jeff Stensland and Marshall
Swanson
Photographers: Kim Truett
To reach us: 803-777-2848
or lizmccarthy@sc.edu
Campus correspondents:
Patti McGrath, Aiken
Candace Brasseur, Beaufort
Shana Dry, Lancaster
Jane Brewer, Salkehatchie
Rebecca Krumel, ’11, works part-time for the USC Dance
Program. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in dance
and English, she stayed on with the dance program to help with
accreditation, coordinating the SC Festival of Dance and working
for the SC Summer Dance Conservatory.
Becky Bean, Sumter
Tammy Whaley, Upstate
Annie Houston, Union
“The Palmetto Pointe Project has transformed the way I look at Columbia. I find
myself paying more attention to the architecture of the city and in nature. Most of
the places I have been photographed are places I often overlooked or didn’t know
about at all, so now I have a much broader idea of what Columbia is. In each shoot
I found something interesting and unique about that location and tried to use my
positioning to accentuate that. I think one of the most beautiful things about this
project is the ability to simultaneously uproot ballet from the studio and draw
attention to this great city that we live in.”
— Katie Callahan, USC dance student
The University of South Carolina does not
discriminate in educational or employment
opportunities or decisions for qualified persons on the basis of race, color, religion, sex,
national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual
orientation or veteran status.