September 2000: Vol. 79, No. 4

WRITE US!
Kent Hannon
Stegeman Coliseum/301A
UGA, Athens, GA 30602

E-MAIL US!
khannon@uga.edu

Dalai Lama story keeps old friends in touch

My friends are aware of the impact that a trip to Tibet in 1988 had on the course of my life. Thus, I found it very thoughtful when, after quite a lapse in time since I'd corresponded with some of these friends, they remembered me and my trip to Tibet and forwarded me a copy of the June issue of Georgia Magazine.

What a treat to see fellow dharma practitioner Steve Dancz on the cover with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama! It is refreshing to discover that as the world gets smaller and we become an increasingly global economy, the University of Georgia is tracking and sharing the unique accomplishments of alumni around the world through Georgia Magazine.

Thank you for a fabulous article, keep up the good work, and keep me in mind if you ever decide to hire any travel writers!

LORING RESLER (BA '85, MA '00)
Atlanta

Sunday afternoon reader unhappy

I find your priorities difficult to accept. Seven pages on the Dalai Lama . . . seven more pages on a rock band. . . and six pages on Central Park!

And your emphasis throughout indicates you have just discovered segregation, along with the need to integrate students and faculty and participants of all races!

Where have you BEEN? Or, perhaps more importantly, where are you going with all this?

I sat down on this Sunday afternoon to read about my alma mater, and after nineteen pages began to wonder about the other happenings in Athens with UGA as we were thrust into India, Central Park, and the life and times of a rock band . . . kin to but hopefully not the greatest product of UGA.

These are more than adequately covered in National Geographic, New York Magazine, and Rolling Stone.

Get it? Good.

PRATT SECREST (ABJ '47)
Thomasville

Applause for alumni, editorial diversity

The Dalai Lama issue, June 2000, put Georgia Magazine at the top of our coffee table pile of magazines once and for all. The diversity of features and the attention to subjects that don't fall into the common realm of academia provided a window of enlightenment into the achievements of fellow graduates.

On the most basic of levels, a university should incorporate all aspects of life: arts, spirituality, the pursuit of knowledge—and, in this day and age, a look beyond the borders of our country and ourselves.

When you mix those elements with Kent Hannon's wonderful piece about landscape architecture professor Marianne Cramer's work in Central Park, is it any wonder that we make reading GM from cover to cover a priority?

On a more personal note, as longtime fans and hippies at heart, Alex Crevar's coverage of Widespread Panic was a delight—and long overdue accolade. Keep the machine rolling and the stories coming!

GRANT CASHIN (BA '92)
JAMI CASHIN (MA '99)
Athens

University's duty is to prepare its students

Alex Crevar's feature story on the Foundation Fellows' visit to Cuba (of which I was a part) neatly illustrates the importance of good international travel-study programs.

UGA's students are going to live and work in an increasingly global society. By traveling and studying in other countries, they gain the wherewithal—experience, confidence, and knowledge—to create and seize personal opportunities and even contribute to greater understanding and peace in this global society.

Our challenge, at the University of Georgia, is to expand and make international education programs available to as many students as possible. In doing so, we provide them with the tools to survive, prosper, and contribute in the global millennium.

STEVE ELLIOTT-GOWER (MA '86, PhD '89)
Associate Director, UGA Foundation Fellows program
Athens

Shining a light on landscape architecture

Thank you very much for your feature on Marianne Cramer ("Friend of Central Park," June '00). She is a talented teacher and an experienced practitioner, and we couldn't welcome a more unique alum and faculty member back to the University of Georgia to teach in the School of Landscape Architecture.

Articles such as yours help give exposure to a profession that is grossly misunderstood, even as it matures and becomes central to problem-solving in the tough theater of urban development.

Planners have, in large part, left city design to concentrate on the defenses of development policies and regulations. Architects concentrate more on the growing complexities of building design and technologies and less on their contexts and relationships to larger pictures.

Landscape architects—much maligned as "landscapers" or the "people who put plants in your front yard"—are, in fact, experts who spend five years in undergraduate school learning to synthesize design aesthetics with human and natural systems sciences to design the built environments.

Those environments are immensely complicated parks, such as Central Park; they are the grounds of homes, they are neighborhoods and institutional campuses, they are cities and countrysides.

The University of Georgia has the largest school of landscape architecture in the country—and perhaps the world. It certainly ranks in the top ten in terms of reputation and excellence. Faculty like Marianne Cramer and her students—working in such storied Georgia locales as the historic parks of Savannah—spread both the reputation and the utility of UGA's landscape architecture school across the state and region.

Our light has been under the basket long enough, and people like Marianne Cramer are letting it out.

JOHN F. CROWLEY
Dean, UGA School of Environmental Design
Athens

Sad farewells to Abram, Sohn

I was pleased to see the deserved tributes to Morris Abram and Louis Sohn in the June '00 issue of Georgia Magazine.

Morris was the class ahead of me, Louis the next one behind me, and I knew and greatly admired both of them.

EUGENE PHILLIPS (ABJ '39)
Retired Brigadier General
Royston