June 1999: Vol. 78, No. 3June 1999: Vol. 78, No. 3Conroy first recipient of Lindberg Award
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 Author Pat Conroy (R) accepts the inaugural Stanley W. Lindberg Award from author Terry Kay. Created to honor Lindberg, long-time editor of the Georgia Review, the award will be given every other year.
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"One of the things that Pat Conroy and Stan Lindberg have in common is that they both have a passion for this thing with words," said novelist Terry Kay.
With that, Kay set a double agenda for the black-tie gala event April 24 at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education honoring the literary contributions to Georgia of two men: longtime Georgia Review editor Stan Lindberg, and celebrated novelist Pat Conroy.
Created by admirers of Lindberg and the Georgia Review, the Stanley W. Lindberg Award will be given bi-annually to a person who has contributed substantially to the literature of Georgia through a lifetime body of work in writing, editing, publishing, or teaching. Conroy is the inaugural honoree.
Kay, novelists Philip Lee Williams and Jim Kilgo, and Eric Lindberg, son of Stan Lindberg, entertained the bejeweled and be-tuxed audience with anecdotes about the two men. Due to illness, Stan Lindberg could not attend the event, but the ceremony was videotaped for him, and his presence loomed large in the stories told. Kilgo, professor of English, said Lindberg is best known for his mantra as an editor: take good work and make it a little better.
"Perhaps no one in the history of the South has shepherded more good writing than Stan Lindberg," said Williams, public relations coordinator for UGA's College of Arts and Sciences. Lindberg recently received the 1999 PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing. He was also named a University Professor, recognized for his efforts in organizing the "Roots in Georgia" symposium and "The Nobel Laureates of Literature: An Olympic Gathering."
Said Kay: "No one in the last 25 or 30 years has made a greater contribution to letters in the state of Georgia, the South, or the United States, than Pat Conroy."
Conroy, an Atlanta native and author of the Prince of Tides and The Great Santini among other books, began his acceptance speech by noting a key irony:
Stan Lindberg has never published any of his work in the Georgia Review.
Conroy's remarks also included some amusing anecdotes about an elderly Georgia Bulldog fan and her love for Vidalia onions.
On a slightly more serious note, Conroy recounted his childhood literary experiences. "My mother told me she was Scarlett O'Hara," he said. "Then she named all the people in our family and what characters they were in Gone With the Wind. I want to thank my mother, who gave me my love for literature."
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 TEST DRIVERS ENJOY "NO POLLUTE COMMUTE"  John Duffett has been test driving a pickup that costs just 3.5 cents per mile to operate. "It was a Ford Ranger EV—as in electric vehicle," says Duffett, who makes 50 stops a day as UGA's vending services supervisor. Georgia Power asked several UGA staffers to test its "No pollute commute" fleet, which created such a stir on campus that professor John Law's ag engineering students convinced Georgia Power to give them a one-hour seminar on EVs. Test drivers say they had no trouble getting up to highway speeds on the bypass, but they did find a few bugs. If one of the 39 lead-cell batteries underneath the chassis goes out, the vehicle is as dead as a string of old Christmas tree lights. "Another drawback—if you can call it that—is they're too quiet," says Duffett. "When I'm leaving a parking deck, the attendant can't hear me coming. These things would be great for the FBI to use to sneak up on people!" |
There's no MIS-taking it—UGA's Terry College has the most productive researchers in one of the hottest careers in business: management information systems.
Two Purdue University professors reviewed articles in two leading journals from 1993-97, and UGA's management faculty came out on top. Thirty universities were ranked; trailing UGA were UC-Irvine, MIT, Georgia State, and U. of British Columbia.
MIS emphasizes the management of computer information systems used in business, as opposed to computer programming or technical support.
Professors Richard Watson and Alan Dennis were singled out in a companion ranking of the 30 most productive researchers in the two journals. Watson was the sixth most prolific researcher; Dennis was 23rd.
Pres. Adams will lead nat'l education council
UGA president Michael F. Adams has moved into the number-two position of the American Council on Education, and next year will lead the national advocacy group for higher education.
for higher education.
Professors get poetic
Law professor Alex Scherr and business professor Dawn Bennett-Alexander are two of 12 Georgians whose readings of their favorite poems will be archived in the Library of Congress, thanks to the "Favorite Poems Project" sponsored by Robert Pinsky, poet laureate of the United States.
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Exerpt from "At the Fishhouses" by Elizabeth Bishop |
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Scherr, director of the law school's civil clinics, picked Elizabeth Bishop's "At the Fishhouses." "I read this poem aloud to whoever I can reach with it," wrote Scherr, "and would love the notion that I could introduce more to the pleasure of hearing both the poem and Bishop."
Bennett-Alexander, who teaches law in the business school, told Pinsky that she begins each class by reading a poem to her students: "I read them everything from Shakespeare to Maya Angelou; from Keats to Alice Walker; from Robert Frost to Paul Laurence Dunbar."
Bennett-Alexander read Dunbar's "In the Morning," explaining that, "one of the reasons I love Dunbar's dialect poems is because they are incredibly effective at capturing the very elusive, little-known world of blacks in the country making their way after they were freed from slavery. They paint a picture that is real, but not pathetic; strong, but not overbearing; rich in spirituality, but not preachy; and replete with the tiny little details of what life was like after such a dramatic change."