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Columns::September 29, 2003
Priority seating: University sets spring 2004 policies for transfer admissions
Arts and sciences dean will step down at end of current academic year
Plan protects trees in construction zones
Hispanic Heritage Month observance gets under way
Front Line Leaders
The perfect solution: Computer-based teaching revolutionizes freshman chemistry labs
Campus Closeup
Molecular genetics facility is renamed Integrated Biotechnology Labs
Newsmakers
Garden bargain: State Botanical Garden gets ready for its annual fall plant sale
Catching up
Campus News
Blue Key Honor Society recognizes contributions of four ‘distinguished’ citizens
By Larry B. Dendy
ldendy@uga.edu
The UGA chapter of Blue Key honor society will recognize the university’s most generous benefactors, a distinguished retired faculty member and the senior member of the University System of Georgia Board of Regents at the annual Blue Key Awards
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Bernard Ramsey
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banquet Oct. 3.
The society will present Blue Key Awards to the late Bernard B. Ramsey and his widow Doris; J. Don Edwards, emeritus professor of accounting; and Elridge W. McMillan, a veteran education leader in Georgia and former chairman of the Board of Regents.
McMillan will be the featured speaker for the banquet, which will also include presentation of the Blue Key Young Alumnus Award to Robyn A. Painter, a law student at Georgetown University. Winners of the Tucker Dorsey Memorial Scholarship and BellSouth Leadership Scholarship will also be announced. The banquet will be at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education.
Blue Key national honor fraternity was founded in 1924 and has more than 300 chapters throughout the United States. The UGA chapter, which was started in 1926 as the second chapter in the nation, presents the Blue Key Award to distinguished citizens who have made major contributions to the state and the university. The award has been given since 1964.
The late Bernard Ramsey, a retired executive with Merrill Lynch and a 1937 UGA graduate, was the most generous
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Doris Ramsey
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benefactor in university history, with total contributions of about $44 million. His gifts included an $18.8 million bequest to the Foundation Fellows program following his death in 1996--the single largest gift ever made to the university.
He earlier had donated more than $7.5 million for the Fellows program and other academic scholarships, and in 2000 the Ramsey Honors Scholarships were created for students in UGA’s Honors Program. No donor has surpassed Ramsey’s support for student scholarships.
Ramsey’s gifts also helped establish a Georgia Research Alliance professorship in the Terry College of Business, along with a center for the study of private enterprise. He also helped create GRA professorships in structural biology and microbial physiology and provided funds for a concert hall in the Performing Arts Center. He gave $2.5 million to endow operations of the student physical activities center, which is named for Ramsey and his first wife, Eugenia, who died in 1992.
Ramsey married Doris Adams, the widow of a Macon businessman, in 1993. A Worth County native who attended Mercer University, Doris Ramsey has continued her husband’s support for the Foundation Fellows
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J. Don Edwards
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program, the Honors program and other UGA programs that promote student scholastic excellence.
Three of her five children attended UGA, and she frequently visits campus for student and alumni events, especially in the Terry College of Business.
Edwards is the J.M. Tull Professor of Accounting Emeritus in the Tull School of Accounting, a unit of UGA’s Terry College of Business. Regarded as one of the nation’s leading academic accountants, he is author or co-author of 23 books and more than 100 articles and monographs on accounting and financial management and is a past president of the American Accounting Association.
After joining the business college in 1972, he helped secure the grant that established the Tull School of Accounting and later was named the first Tull Professor. He retired in 1998 after serving two years as interim dean of the Terry College, but he continues to be active in research and other professional activities.
Chosen by the editors of Accounting Today as one of the “100 Most Influential People in Accounting,” Edwards has been national vice president of the Institute of Management Accounting and is an original trustee of
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Elridge McMillan
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the Financial Accounting Foundation, the parent organization of the federal Financial Accounting Standards Bureau.
McMillan, who began his career in education as an Atlanta public school teacher in 1954, is president emeritus of the Southern Education Foundation and a Scholar in Residence at Atlanta Metropolitan College. He has served on the board of regents since his appointment in 1975 and was recently reappointed by Gov. Sonny Perdue, making him the longest-serving member of the board. He was chairman in 1986-87, the first African American to hold that position.
After teaching school for 10 years, McMillan was a supervisor in the regional U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity and chief of the education branch in the regional U.S. Office for Civil Rights before joining the Southern Education Foundation in 1968. He headed the foundation until 2001. He is a trustee of Clark Atlanta University and serves on the board of the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education. He is also on the advisory council for the Closing the Achievement Gap program sponsored by the Education Commission of the States.
Painter, who will receive the Young Alumnus Award, graduated from UGA in 1998 summa cum laude with a history degree. She will graduate next May from the Georgetown University law school, where she is a senior writing fellow for the
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Robyn Painter
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Georgetown Law Writing Center. After graduating from UGA, Painter worked with the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, was a Peace Corps volunteer in Madagascar and worked with the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition in Washington, D.C.
The Tucker Dorsey Memorial Scholarship is named for the deceased son of the late Jasper Dorsey, a Southern Bell executive and UGA graduate and alumni leader who strongly supported Blue Key. Tucker Dorsey, who died in an auto accident in 1965, was a student leader and a founder of the Blue Key banquet. The scholarship recognizes students for outstanding service and leadership. The BellSouth Leadership Scholarship is given in honor of Jasper Dorsey and recognizes a male and female student for outstanding leadership qualities and achievements.
The Blue Key banquet is open to the public. Reservations, at $25 per person, can be made with Dorothe Otemann (583-0698). |
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