Drake University and the Greater Des Moines Partnership will host Charles Evans, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, for an economic update on Wednesday, Aug. 10, from 10 a.m.–11 a.m. at Drake’s Sheslow Auditorium.
Evans will provide an expert perspective on the effects of recent monetary policy on regional and U.S. economic activity. The Chicago Fed is one of 12 regional Reserve Banks across the country. These 12 banks — along with the Board of Governors in Washington, D.C. — make up our nation’s central bank. As head of the Chicago Fed, Evans oversees the work of roughly 1,400 employees in Chicago and Detroit who conduct economic research, supervise financial institutions and provide payment services to commercial banks and the U.S. government.
Evans has served as President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago since September 2007. In that capacity, he serves on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the Federal Reserve System’s monetary policymaking body. Before becoming president in September of 2007, Evans served as director of research and senior vice president, supervising the Bank’s research on monetary policy, banking, financial markets and regional economic conditions. His personal research has focused on measuring the effects of monetary policy on U.S. economic activity, inflation and financial market prices, and has been published in peer-reviewed journals.
The conversation will feature a question-and-answer session with Evans moderated by Robert Palmer with the Iowa League of Cities.
“We are excited to welcome Charles Evans for what promises to be a timely and relevant conversation on the U.S. economy,” said Andrea Woodard, Senior Vice President of Government Relations and Public Policy at The Partnership. “Charles will provide insight into the Federal Reserve’s decisions and how they will impact Greater Des Moines businesses and organizations.”
The Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS) has recognized Drake University with the 2022 CAS University Award. This honor is in acknowledgement of the exemplary ways the University’s actuarial science program prepares students for careers in the property and casualty insurance industry. The CAS cited the opportunities for Drake students to gain exposure to the sector through the program’s curriculum, research, and industry engagement as innovative.
“This award is a reflection of our focus on continuous improvement to ensure Drake remains the actuarial science program of choice for students seeking a career in this burgeoning field,” said Alejandro Hernandez, dean of the College of Business and Public Administration, which is home to Drake’s actuarial science program. “Our pursuit of this recognition was propelled by the encouragement of alum Jack Richards and the contributions of two current Drake students, Caitlyn Nielson and Benjamin Ticali, who together with our faculty generated this first-ever distinction for Drake.”
The annual CAS University Award program is designed to celebrate and honor universities who share the organization’s commitment to fostering the development of the next generation of property and casualty actuaries. According to the CAS, the 2022 selection process is extremely competitive with 43 institutions worldwide having sought recognition through this program and only four universities, including Drake, receiving the award.
The Drake University Board of Trustees has named alumnus and business executive Mark Ernst, BN’80, as its new chair. Ernst, who has served on the board since 2008 and is currently co-chair of The Ones: Drake’s Campaign for the Brave & Bold, will succeed Peggy Fisher who has served in the role since July 2019. Ernst will begin his term July 1.
“I am confident that Mark’s strong leadership, vision, and commitment to Drake will propel our great University forward,” said Drake University President Marty Martin. “Mark will continue to advance the mission and global reach of the University as he has done for more than a decade. He also will continue helping to lead our comprehensive campaign along with co-chair Suzie Glazer Burt.”
“As Mark assumes his new role as chair, I must also extend my deepest gratitude to Peggy Fisher for her steadfast leadership over the last three years,” said Martin. “Her contributions will leave a lasting impact on this great institution for many years to come.”
Ernst is managing partner of Bellevue Capital and the former executive vice president and chief operating officer at Fiserv, Inc. Prior to joining Fiserv, Ernst served as deputy commissioner at the Internal Revenue Service. Ernst previously led a transformation of tax and financial services at H&R Block, Inc., where he served as chairman, president, and chief executive officer from 2001 through 2007.
“Drake is at a pivot point in the midst of changes in the higher education landscape,” said Ernst. “Leading the board at this moment, when Drake alumni and supporters have the opportunity to strengthen our campus through The Ones campaign, is an honor. We have a bold vision for what can be at Drake, and it is up to all of us to help enable that future.”
A native of Bellevue, Iowa, Ernst earned his bachelor’s degree in finance and accounting from Drake in 1980, an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and he is a Certified Public Accountant.
Ernst and his wife LeighAnn Davis have and continue to support Drake through several important philanthropic efforts, including a $3 million unrestricted gift to The Ones campaign, as well as significant gifts to the Robert D. and Billie Ray Promenade, Cowles Library renovation, and annual support of the Drake Fund.
In addition to Ernst’s ascension to board chair, the Drake University Board of Trustees welcomes three new members:
Martha Capps, JO’78, of Eden Prairie, Minn., principal at Capps Marketing
Kathleen Fehrman, of Des Moines, Iowa, managing partner of Fehrman Investments, L.L.C. and community advocate
Amy Ohde, BN’98, of Atlanta, executive director of launch support at Chick-fil-A and Drake’s 2013 Young Alumni Achievement award winner
Drake University today announced it has awarded Rocco B. Commisso, the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Mediacom Communications Corporation, an honorary Doctor of Business Administration degree.
“While other broadband providers exited Iowa, Mediacom—under Mr. Commisso’s leadership—invested in infrastructure critical to the economic vitality of our state,” said Drake University President Marty Martin. “Mediacom has demonstrated its shared commitment to Drake University’s inspiration statement: to strengthen the communities we serve.”
In 2017, Mediacom made 1-gigabit internet service available to more than 300 communities in Iowa as part of a three-year, $1 billion capital investment plan. In 2020, Mediacom chose Iowa as the location for the first ever field trial showcasing the multi-gigabit speeds of the cable industry’s new 10G platform.
“Rocco jumped at the opportunity to make a major investment in Iowa’s telecommunications infrastructure,” said Tom Vilsack, United States Agriculture Secretary and former Iowa governor, in a recommendation letter to the Drake University Honorary Degree Committee. “From the very beginning, Rocco promised to bring Iowans the same or better services as the residents of America’s largest metropolitan areas, and he has done so for over two decades.”
Commisso founded Mediacom in 1995 after serving as an executive for Cablevision Industries until the company’s merger with Time Warner. Since that time, Commisso has grown Mediacom into one of the largest cable television providers in the United States. After a successful initial public offering in 2000, Commisso took Mediacom private in 2011, and he and his family continue to own the company today.
“Home to nearly 1,600 of our dedicated employees and a third of our loyal customer base, Iowa has long been the crown jewel of Mediacom’s 22 state network operations,” said Commisso. “It is a tremendous privilege to receive an honorary degree from Drake, a distinguished university that sits in the heart of Iowa’s capital and whose administration, faculty and graduates have made immeasurable contributions to the state’s economic, educational and cultural advancement.”
Commisso is a native of Calabria, Italy, and immigrated to the U.S. at the age of 12. He attended Columbia University on a full undergraduate scholarship where he earned both a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering and an MBA degree from the Graduate Business School. Commisso was co-captain of the soccer team during his time at Columbia. Today, he owns world-renowned ACF Fiorentina which competes in Serie A, the top division of Italian soccer. Commisso is a resident of New Jersey.
The honorary doctorate is the highest honor that the University bestows. Honorary degree recipients are selected by the Honorary Degree Committee and approved by the Faculty Senate and Drake University Board of Trustees.
About Drake University Drake University is recognized as one of the finest national liberal arts universities. A distinctive and distinguished private university in Des Moines, Iowa, Drake enrolls nearly 3,000 undergraduate and more than 1,800 graduate students. Students choose from more than 70 majors, minors, and concentrations and 20 graduate degrees offered through seven colleges and schools. In addition, Drake offers a range of continuing education programs serving working professionals, community members, and area businesses. Drake recognizes the importance of its location in Iowa’s capital city and seeks to connect its teaching and learning to the wealth of cultural, recreational, and business resources it provides. At the same time, it integrates global thinking and intercultural learning into everything it does, preparing students to lead in an increasingly interconnected world.
About Mediacom Communications Mediacom Communications Corporation is the 5th largest cable operator in the United States and the leading gigabit broadband provider to smaller markets primarily in the Midwest and Southeast. Through its fiber-rich network, Mediacom provides high-speed data, video and phone services to over 1.5 million households and businesses across 22 states. The company delivers scalable broadband solutions to commercial and public-sector customers of all sizes through Mediacom Business, and sells advertising and production services under the OnMedia brand. More information about Mediacom is available at mediacomcable.com.
Drake University Law School is pleased to announce that Iowa Supreme Court Justice Brent Appel will join the full-time faculty upon his retirement from the Court at the end of July. He will teach Professional Responsibility and State Constitutional Law, in addition to seminars and other courses.
“We are so honored to welcome Justice Appel to our faculty,” said Drake Law Dean Jerry Anderson. “He has been a brilliant jurist and will draw on a wealth of experience both on the bench and in the courtroom. In addition to his impressive resume, Justice Appel has served as an adjunct professor and as supervisor and mentor for our Supreme Court interns. We’re thrilled that he has such a passion for teaching and helping to train future generations of lawyers.”
“I look forward to the exciting opportunity to be part of the Drake Law community and to this new chapter in my professional career.” said Appel.
Justice Appel was appointed to the Iowa Supreme Court in 2006. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Stanford University, and his JD from the University of California, Berkeley, where he served on the board of editors of the California Law Review. During his time at Berkeley Law, he won the McBaine Moot Court competition and the Jamieson Award for Outstanding Scholarship and Advocacy. After graduation, Appel clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He then served as first assistant attorney general and then as deputy attorney general of Iowa from 1979 to 1986. During this time, he argued and briefed four cases before the United States Supreme Court. At the time of his appointment to the Iowa Supreme Court in 2006, he was a partner at Wandro, Baer & Appel in Des Moines, where his practice focused on commercial litigation, employment law and personal injury.
In 2010, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts appointed Appel to the Federal Advisory Committee on the Rules of Evidence, where he served until 2016. In 2022, Appel received The Iowa State Bar Association’s Rolland E. Grefe Pro Bono Publico Award for his leadership in advocating for access to justice for all Iowans throughout his career, and for his outstanding work as the chair of the Iowa Supreme Court’s Access to Justice Commission since it was formed in 2016.
Drake professor Lee Jolliffe, with colleagues Katrina Quinn (Slippery Rock University, PA) and Mary Cronin (New Mexico State University), have received the 2022 Browne Award for Best Edited Collection in Popular and American Culture for Adventure Journalism in the Gilded Age: Essays from the Arctic to the Orient (McFarland Books).
The prize was awarded April 14, 2022, at the Popular Culture and American Culture Associations’ annual joint meeting.
Collaborators Jolliffe, Quinn, and Cronin contributed chapters to the book as well as editing the volume. Colleagues to write additional chapters were recruited from the Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression, hosted annually at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga by Prof. David Sachsman. All these writers created chapters that take readers along on 19th-century travels of reporters who pushed the edges of safety and civilization, sending home regular press correspondence that went beyond the tamer travelogues also common in this era. Adventure reporters stepped into the action and reported on their own experiences in far-away, exotic places.
Katrina Quinn shows readers the American West via newly cut trails and early railroads, following reporters up mountains and down into mineshafts. During their rough-and-tumble travels, journalists would suffer mishaps of the trail–-stagecoach rollovers, buffalo hunts, occasional battles with Native Americans, and “hotel rooms” that turned out to be blankets strung across ropes, like pup tents, sleeping four or five.
Mary Cronin shows more luxurious rail travel from New York City to San Francisco with magazine publisher Frank Leslie and an entourage of reporters and illustrators, who filled up his complimentary Pullman Palace car and dined on fresh oysters and strawberries. Leslie’s accounts show his business acumen, as he identified opportunities for US expansion but also show his sense of Anglo-American superiority.
Cronin also writes about a more treacherous expedition, this time into “an almost undiscovered country,” Alaska in 1890. Five men—all with exploration and reporting experience—set out adventuring through Alaska’s wilderness, by snowshoe, sled, and birchbark canoe. Leslie’s Magazine featured exciting stories about Alaska’s terrain, resources, and inhabitants, always with ice floes, bears, and literal cliff-hangers to entice readers. Lack of telegraph lines to transmit fresh stories from exploreres also led to news headlines fearing the team was lost in the wilderness or dead. In truth, the expedition was a success in sending home two years’ worth of exciting photographs, engravings, and stories from “Seward’s Icebox.”
These elements – the rough-cut, unforgiving new landscapes and the sense of ownership and entrepreneurship – emerge in the book as themes of Gilded Age adventure reporting overall.
Other chapters feature familiar names like Mark Twain and Nelly Bly on what may be adventures unfamiliar to readers – Twain, for instance, traveling to Hawaii and Bly to Mexico. These familiar figures are joined by less well-known but equally engaging Gilded Age adventurer-reporters like Henry Morton Stanley crossing Africa to find Dr. Livingstone, Thomas Knox reporting from China with almost sociological precision, and Eliza Scidmore mountain climbing in Japan to write and photograph for the young National Geographic. Scidmore, incidentally, brought back a gift of cherry trees to Washington, DC, from the people of Japan—trees that are now blooming in our capital city.
Lee Jolliffe closes out the book by showing these writers’ impact on prevailing American narratives that framed US expansion as heroic pioneers conquering a Wild West, with rodeos, cowboys, cattle drives, sod-busters, and settlement. The adventure genre, Jolliffe writes, would become so commonplace that one Gilded Age writer lamented that even in the most rural parts of the world, one might trip over other adventure journalists.
“It was true,” Jolliffe notes. “In 1882, two New York Herald writers, George Melville and William Gilder, met up by sheer accident in eastern Siberia as both men raced to report the fate of the lost Polar expedition ship, the Jeanette,” its doomed voyage financed by the Herald as a publicity stunt.
The Adventure Journalism collection as a whole makes for a fun read full of daring adventures, but also highlights how these reporters played roles in the United States’ post-Civil-War expansion, its claim to a manifest destiny, and the exponential growth in inventions, travel, and population, as well as the young country’s rising position on the world stage.
Adventure Journalism in the Gilded Age was “a unanimous selection” by the Browne Award judges, who called it an “excellent volume all the way around. Important topic, excellent documented research, and tremendous and engaging readability.” ¬
Current-day adventure journalist and film-maker Jon Bowermaster says of the book, “Having reported on modern-day adventurers and my own explorations from ninety countries, to both Poles, and across the planet’s one giant ocean, I wish I’d had a copy of Adventure Journalism in the Gilded Age in my backpack during my own travels – it would have fattened my experiences, both here at home and to the most remote corners of the globe. Bravo!!” Bowermaster is a 6-time grantee of the National Geographic Expeditions Council, and author of Crossing Antarctica and Descending the Dragon: My Journey Down the Coast of Vietnam.
Lee Jolliffe has taught in Drake’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication since 1995. Previously, she taught at the Missouri School of Journalism and led the Writing and Editing Section at Battelle Institute in Columbus, Ohio. She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on nineteenth century media, specializing in reporting on self-emancipated slaves with occasional forays into adventure journalism studies.
Drake Law School recognized two outstanding faculty members for their contributions to the Law School’s teaching, scholarship, and research during the 2021–2022 academic year.
Allan Vestal, Dwight D. Opperman Distinguished Professor of Law, was recognized as the 2022 Stevens Faculty Scholar of the Year. The Stevens Faculty Scholar of the Year award honors the faculty member who made the most significant contribution to academic scholarship during the previous year. Professor Vestal published seven articles in the last three years on topics ranging from religious freedom to legal history. In addition, he completed an innovative new course book for Contract Drafting that promises to see wide adoption nationwide.
Matt Doré, Richard M. and Anita Calkins Distinguished Professor of Law, received the Student Bar Association’s (SBA) Leland Forrest Outstanding Professor Award. The Outstanding Professor award recognizes a faculty member for their contributions to the quality of legal education both in and out of the classroom. The recipient is chosen by vote of the third-year students and will lead the class in the graduation procession in May. Students selected Professor Doré for his extensive knowledge, passion for the subject matter, and willingness to go above and beyond to serve students and the Drake Law community. He has served on many crucial faculty committees including the promotion and tenure, and admission committees. He has coached Drake’s Client Counseling Team for 30 years, advancing to the national finals several times. “But most importantly,” noted Riley Noble, 2021-2022 SBA president, “Professor Doré is always there for his students. He is careful to make sure they are supported and that they always have the resources they need to succeed.”
Award winners were announced during the Drake Law Supreme Court Celebration in April. For a list of previous faculty award winners and this year’s Supreme Court Celebration student award winners, visit the Supreme Court Celebration website.
Trevon Smith, HR generalist at Drake, is one of 12 College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR) members selected to participate in the 2022–2023 CUPA-HR Wildfire Program, a 12-month leadership development experience designed for early-career higher education human resources professionals.
Participants were selected based on their HR strengths and areas for development identified on the program application as well as their interest in and commitment to the program. Throughout the year-long experience, Trevon and the other program participants will have the opportunity to develop their professional skills through tailored learning experiences including mentorship, learning events and courses, and the completion of a year-end project highlighting the insights they gain throughout the year.
“We are very excited to begin working with our ninth Wildfire cohort,” says CUPA-HR President and Chief Executive Officer Andy Brantley. “This program is an outstanding leadership development opportunity for these early-career professionals, and it’s also a great opportunity for our higher ed HR leaders to give back and help prepare the next generation of higher ed leaders.”
CUPA-HR’s Wildfire program is led by outstanding current and past CUPA-HR national board leaders and national office staff and made possible in part thanks to support from HigherEdJobs.
About CUPA-HR CUPA-HR is higher ed HR. We serve higher education by providing the knowledge, resources, advocacy and connections to achieve organizational and workforce excellence. Headquartered in Knoxville, Tennessee, and serving over 33,000 HR professionals and other campus leaders at nearly 2,000 member institutions and organizations around the country and abroad, the association offers learning and professional development programs, higher education salary and benefits data, extensive online resources and just-in-time regulatory and legislative information.
The College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences held its annual Recognition and Pinning Ceremony on Thursday, May 5, 2022. The Ceremony marks students’ transition to final year internships, fieldwork, and rotations for third-year undergraduate health sciences students, first-year master of athletic training students, second-year occupational therapy doctoral students, and third-year doctor of pharmacy students.
During the ceremony, Assistant Dean Michael Nelson announced the recipients of several prestigious awards:
Delaney Goertzen (HSCI-JR) – Oustanding Health Sciences Student Award
Connor Oetzmann (HSCI-JR) – Health Sciences Student Leadership Award
Corby Roush (A1) – Athletic Training Emerging Clinician Award
Rachel Stafford (O2) – Occupational Therapy Scholastic Achievement Award
Jenna Lynn Willer (O2) – Occupational Therapy Leadership & Professional Development Award
Molly Nelson (P3) – Iowa Pharmacy Association Jerry M. Karbeling Leadership Award
Megan Hartle (P3) – Lon N. Larson Engaged Practitioner Award
Congratulations to Sally Haack (PharmD), Stacy Gnacinski (Health Science), Inbal Mazar (Spanish), & Anisa Hansen (PharmD), on their recent publication in the International Journal of Research on Service-Learning & Community Engagement! Their article titled, Evaluating Reliability of the PRELOAD Rubric: Assessment of Service-Learning Course Syllabi, builds off the previous work of Haack and former Drake colleague Laura Kieren who developed and published the PRELOAD rubric (Kieran & Haack, 2018).
