The Reporter, March 1983

The Reporter is a publication produced by Western Carolina University featuring news, events, and campus community updates for faculty and staff. The publication began in August of 1970 and continues digitally today. Click on the link in the “Related Materials” field to access recent issues.The A Weekly Newsletter for the Faculty and Staff of Western Carolina University Cullowhee, North Carolina March 4, 1983 ONE-ACT PLAYS TO BE PRESENTED MARCH 9-10 On Wednesday and Thursday evenings, March 9-10, six different one-act plays will be performed under student direction. Both performances will begin at 7:30 in the Little Theatre, Stillwell Building, and general admission is $1 both nights. The playbill on Wednesday includes "Sorry Wrong Number," "Hello Out There," and "Conversation at Night with a Despised Character." In Lucille Fletcher's mystery thriller, "Sorry Wrong Number," a neurotic invalid overhears plans for her own murder through a crossed wire on the telephone, her only contact with the outside world. Her fran­tic efforts to enlist help through the only means at her disposal, her growing terror, and her realization of the truth reveal a full character portrait not only of her but also of the unseen murderer. The 11 cast members are directed by senior theatre major Jimmy Smith. Loneliness is the subject of "Hello Out There," in which one man's cry brings him in touch with an equally lonely woman. Their friendship blossoms quickly, then is crushed in a small town Texas jail. Their courage inspires even in the face of their futility. Jon Poston, a theatre major, di­rects a cast of six. In Friedrich Durrenmatt's "Conversation at Night," the "despised character" breaks through the windowpane of a quiet, darkened study but does not surprise the one he in­trudes upon, for he has been long awaited. The intruder presents himself as the secret executioner of the state but it is the art of dying with which he is concerned. Kevin Hoffman directs the two-member cast in this play by a foremost German playwright. Domestic service, sexuality, and politics are the subjects of the one-acts scheduled for Thursday evening. Performing in "Happy Ending" by Douglas Ward is an all-black cast directed by se­nior theatre major Barbara Fancher. The comedy, filled with sharp, satiric thrusts, reports hilariously on the plight of two black domestics whose household graft, which has brought considerable luxury to their lives, may be cut off because their white employers are on the verge of divorce. "Noon," written by Terrence McNally and di­rected by junior theatre major June Cagle, brings together two men of different sexual constitutions and peppers the situation with a housewife-stripper. A couple of sa­dists throw in whips and ch ains to further confuse things. Errol Stewart directs Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Aria da Capo." A popular poet in early twentieth-century America, Millay lived among many of the people featured in the film Reds—most notably John Reed, who was asked to critique the one-act in pre-production. The political conscien­tiousness of these people shines through this collage of theatrical style. WORKSHOP ON METHOD ACTING SET MARCH 21 Isaac Dostis, a theatre director, actor, teacher, and producer, will conduct a free public workshop on the Stanislavski method of acting all day Monday, March 21, at WCU. Although the workshop is open to all inter­ested people, participants will be expected to have read and studied The Stronger by August Strindberg. The Stanislavski method of acting, devel­oped by Constantin Stanislavski over a -2- 40-year period at the Moscow Art Theatre, seeks to combine the psychological and phys­ical aspects of a character in a unified in­terpretation on stage. In "method11 acting, the actor completely identifies with the in­ner personality of the character. Analyz­ing the c haracter's actions carefully, the actor seeks to recreate the emotions and mo­tivations most logical, typical, and ex­pressive for the character. The workshop at WCU will begin at 9 a.m. in Hoey Auditorium with a discussion about the actor working on himself and on a charac­ter. At noon, Dostis will talk at a lun­cheon in the Mary Will Mitchell Room of Brown Cafeteria. The afternoon session will focus on the history of Russian thea­tre and S tanislavski, an analysis of "The Stronger," and participation in the play. Dostis has directed a variety of produc­tions, including opera and children's thea­tre. He started two acting companies, one in New York and one in Los Angeles, and has acted in off-Broadway shows. He has stud­ied with Sonia Moore and at the Henry Street Playhouse. Now he devotes most of his time to teaching the Stanislavski method. Dostin is appearing at Western as a visit­ing scholar, sponsored by WCU's department of speech and theatre arts. More informa­tion may be obtained by calling ext. 7491. STATE RETIREMENT SERVICE CREDIT EXPLAINED Under certain conditions, state employees may purchase credit for periods when state retirement accounts are closed. If you are a former employee of another state, a form­er North Carolina retirement member, or a military veteran, you may purchase credit for time you were not in the state system. A legislative amendment has extended the time period when you may opt to purchase from three to six years, but it's still less expensive to buy credit within the first three years after you are first eligi­ble. You are first eligible when you have com­pleted 10 years of state service. Within the first three years after this, you pay only the employee share of the state retire­ment for the years you were not in the state system, unless you are buying credit based on prior out-of-state employment, in which case you pay both employee and employer shares. In the next three years, you may still purchase credit by buying both shares (for former employees of other states, it costs a little more after the first three years because of the way it's figured). So, if you completed 10 years of state ser­vice on or after June 30, 1980, and are otherwise eligible to buy some time toward your state retirement, you've got until your anniversary date of 13 years of N.C. state service in 1983 to purchase credit without extra cost. You can still do it at the higher cost if you completed your 10 years of state service on or after June 30, 1977. For more details, call ext. 7218. ANNOUNCEMENTS WESTERN'S UNIVERSITY FORUM FOR CONTEMPORARY Affairs will present Henry Meyers from the Asheville Jewish Community Relations Council Monday, March 7, at 7 p.m. in the Natural Sciences Auditorium. Meyers will speak on "The Middle East." THE WCU NURSES' HONOR SOCIETY has resched­uled its Fe b. 16 scholarly meeting to 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 9, in Moore Hall. The guest speaker will be Dee Evers, acting dean of the College of Nursing at Clemson University. Her topic is "Social and Health Issues in China." All members are urged to attend. MARCH 4 IS HISTORY DAY AT WCU The Eighth Educational District History Day, which has produced two national winners in the last three years, will be held Friday, March 4, at WCU. Some 200 junior high and high school stu­dents, representing 13 schools in eight WNC counties, are expected to compete in cate­gories that include historical papers, indi­vidual and group projects, individual and group performances, and media. Winners from the Eighth District advance to North Carolina History Day, April 30, in Charlotte. State winners earn the right to compete at National History Day, June 16-18, in Washington, D.C. The general theme for this year's History Day competitions will be "Turning Points in History." The district competition here is sponsored by WCU's department of history -3- and Mountain Heritage Center, the Appalachian Consortium, and the Western Regional Education Center. Funding is pro­vided by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and N.C. Humanities Coramittee. HOSPICE TO BENEFIT FROM CONCERT A benefit concert for the Mountain Area Hospice featuring Howard Hanger's new American symphony will be performed Thursday, March 17, as part of the regular season for the Asheville Symphony Orchestra. "Symphony for Barbara" will be performed by the Howard Hanger Jazz Fantasy and the Asheville Symphony Orchestra. Included on the same program will be Paul Neubauer, viola, who will play Schumann's Symphony No. 1, the "Spring" Symphony, and a viola concerto. Tickets for the c oncert, to be performed in Thomas Wolfe Auditorium at the Asheville Civic Center at 8:15 p.m., may be obtained by writing to "Hospice Concert," Box 2090, Asheville, N.C. 28802; telephone 252-5611. Tickets cost $6 each. A reception sponsored by the Mountain Area Hospice will be held immediately after the concert in the A sheville Art Museum, also located in the Civic Center. Tickets for the reception at $10 each, approximately half of which will be tax-deductible, may be obtained by writing Mountain Area Hospice, 40 Church Street, Asheville, N.C. 28801; telephone 255-0231. Mountain Area Hospice is a non-profit, largely volunteer organization dedicated to improving the quality of life for the vic­tims of terminal disease. It seeks to al­low patients to live and, if necessary, to die free of pain, as free as possible of distressing symptoms and surrounded by fa­miliar and beloved people and surroundings. MHC TO SPONSOR MINI-FESTIVALS Western's Mountain Heritage Center has re­ceived a $12,700 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts/Folk Arts Program to sponsor three "mini-festivals" in area schools this spring. These small folklife festivals will feature local musicians as well as people who practice arts and s kills traditional to western North Carolina. The schools involved and tentative festival dates are Blue Ridge School (Jackson County), May 20; Nantahala School (Macon County), April 22; and Unaka School (Cherokee County), May 27. Each festival will be planned by the school's principal, interested teachers and community members, and the folklorist for the Mountain Heritage Center, Michael Ann Williams. Meant to be a celebration for and of the community, each festival will feature folk artists from the school's immediate area. All will be free of charge and open to the public. A similar series of festivals held in 1981 featured woodcarvers, basket and broom makers, blacksmiths, fiddlers, banjo play­ers, and many other musicians and crafts­people who learned their arts in the commu­nities where they were raised. HUT AND CABIN BEING BUILT FOR MHC EXHIBIT The Mountain Heritage Center is offering an unusual opportunity, from now until the first of May, to watch the construction of traditional structures like those built by eighteenth-century Appalachian settlers and by their forebears in Northern Ireland. Wood chips fly as 50-year-old R.O. Wilson hews a 12-foot log with a double-bit ax in front of the log cabin he is building at the center. Another craftsman, 30-year-old Richard Pace of Saluda, is building an Irish stone hut at the opposite end of the center. Both demonstrations are open to the public, but the craftsmen are not working every day and it is best to contact the center (ext. 7129) to arrange the best time for a visit. Wilson and Pace are building the twelve-by-six- foot structures for the largest exhibit ever attempted by the Mountain Heritage Cen­ter. The exhibit, which is supported by a $30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, is titled "Migration of Scotch-Irish People." It is scheduled to open in time for Mountain Heritage Day on Sept. 24. "These two structures at s eparate ends of the gallery tend to anchor the two ends of the actual migration route of the Scotch- Irish, from Ulster to the southern Appalachian mountains," says center curator Sam Gray. "In between are those places, -4- cultures, and events that shaped the Scotch-Irish experience.M Gray says the Scotch-Irish often maintained the size and basic disposition of their homes throughout the migration but were forced to alter their construction materi­als and techniques along the way. "This idea of continuity and change captures the theme of the whole migration," says Gray. "You see it developed over and over from social patterns to material artifacts." The stone hut will resemble those built around 1750 in Ulster, or Northern Ireland. It will feature a double-walled construc­tion in which two parallel stone walls are built with a core of rubble and mud packed in between for stability. The log cabin will emulate an early pioneer cabin built of poplar logs that ha ve been hewn, notched, fitted, and chinked with mud. Wilson is using a half dove-tailed notch, preferred for its ability to interlock tightly and shed water. With few exceptions, he is building the entire structure with simple hand tools. FACULTY PUBLICATIONS John M. Sinclair (visiting professor, Accounting). "An Analysis of Cash Flows," in The Engraver's Journal, 8 (Sept./Oct. 1982), 20. John M. Sinclair. "Budgets: A Way to Improve Your Profits - Part One," in The Engraver's Journal, 8 (Jan./Feb. 1983), 28ff. (This is the first of a series of three articles.) Theda Perdue. "Cherokee Planters, Black Slaves, and African Colonization," in Chronicles of Oklahoma, 60 (Fall 1982), 322-31. Joseph A. Meigs. "Choosing Your Baby's Sex—Now and in the Sixteenth Century," in Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin (Winter 1982), 111-116. Finn-Aage Esbensen. "Interviewer-Related Measurement Error and Self-Reported Delin­quency: An Examination of Interviewer Bias in National Youth Surveys," to appear in Methodological Issues in Criminological Research, forthcoming from the Sage Research Progress Series in Criminology, Sage Publications. NAMES IN THE NEWS Conducting a Reading Conference for 161 ad­ministrators and teachers in Raleigh February 10-11 were VIRGIE McINTYRE, RICHARD CRADDOCK, CLARENCE DelFORGE, KATHLEEN FLYNN, RICHARD GENTRY, LESTER LAMINACK, ELEANOR LOFQUIST, CAROLYN MEIGS, THOMAS WARREN, LILLIAN ZACHARY (Elementary Education and Reading), BETTY KIRWAN (Admin­istration, Curriculum, and Instruction), and CYNTHIA SHAY (Continuing Education). The topic was "Listening, Writing, and Read­ing: Communication in Action." GURNEY CHAMBERS (dean, Education and Psychology), dinner speaker for the conference, spoke on ways to be a grea t teacher. Three WCU grad­uate students—NANCY CREECH, RUTH McCREARY, and DENISE PALAS—also presented workshop sessions at the conference. HAL FARWELL, KARL NICHOLAS, and JIM NICHOLL (English) represented the WCU department at the 18th Ann ual Southeastern Conference on English in the Two-Year College in Atlanta February 17-19. Drs. Farwell and Nicholas spoke on "Black and Appalachian Dialect In­terference," and Dr. Nicholl spoke on "Crea­tive Writing and the Microcomputer Revolu­tion." DALE CARPENTER and LARRY GRANTHAM (Human Services) presented a paper to an interna­tional conference of the Association for Children with Learning Disabilities in Washington, D.C., February 18, Their paper was titled "Grading Mainstreamed LD Stu­dents." On February 11, Dr. Grantham made a report to the University of North Carolina Board of Governors concerning the activities of the North Carolina Cooperative Planning Consortium on Special Education, which he chairs. UNC President William F. Friday requested the report. Eight psychology faculty members and 14 stu­dents will attend the annual meeting of the Southeastern Psychological Association in Atlanta, Ga., March 24-26. STEVEN GOLD, CHARLES BOWEN, SCOTT MINOR, CHRISTOPHER LEONE, EUGENE McDOWELL, JOEL MILNER, and JUDITH STILLION will present a total of eight research papers at the meeting. TAYLOR HUSKINS will attend as faculty advis­or for the Psychology Club, which is spon­soring the students' trip. ROBIN DAUER (Music) performed Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" as assistant principal horn with the Atlanta Symphony Feb. 10-12. The A Weekly Newsletter for the Faculty and Staff of Western Carolina University Cullowhee, North Carolina March 11, 1983 TRUSTEES APPROVE APPOINTMENTS, AGREE WNC ENGINEERING SCHOOL SHOULD BE BASED HERE On March 3 Western's trustees endorsed a conditional proposal to establish a manufac­turing engineering degree program in the School of Technology and Appli ed Science. The proposal, submitted January 10 to the UNC general administration, asks that the WCU request be considered if the UNC Board of Governors decides to authorize engineer­ing degrees at units of the UNC system other than the three now offering engineer­ing programs. The three are N.C. State, A&T State, and UNC-Charlotte, all of which have schools of engineering. Chancellor H.F. Robinson told the board Western is not pushing for creation of a new engineering program, because the state's economic situation does not favor it and because the board supports a June 1982 report on a statewide study of engi­neering education, commissioned by the Board of Governors. That report states, he said, that "the prob­lems facing engineering education would be made more difficult by the creation of any new engineering schools at this time. The university should concentrate its efforts on the further development of the existing schools." Robinson said the development of the manu­facturing engineering technology program already at Western into a manufacturing en­gineering program would be lo gical if addi­tional engineering programs are authorized. He emphasized to the board that the WCU pro­posal is not intended to be in competition with any other proposal presently under con­sideration, but rather, he said, "to emphasize and continue to promote the devel­opments in this area that have been occur­ring at Western Carolina University over the last several years." He said Western has the advanced science programs in mathematics, physics, and chem­istry, in addition to its va rious technol­ogy programs, that would be required to sup­port an e ngineering program. It also has four faculty members with engineering degrees and several of the basic laborato­ries and units of equipment required for en­gineering, he said. Robinson noted that Western has had a pre-engineering program for many years, devel­oped in cooperation with N.C. State and other institutions offering the four-year engineering degree. The WCU proposal earlier was endorsed by the university's faculty senate. The trust­ees' motion to endorse the administrative actions was made by Blake Brown, student body president and a board member. In a related matter, Robinson told the board the 1983-85 budget outlook is bleak. If Western has to cut its budget further, he said, "we are going to lose jobs because we don't have anything else to cut." Robinson said rather than raise the ratio of students to faculty, which would mean eliminating faculty positions, he would rather continue the present salary freeze affecting all state employees, a position he said the chancellors of the state's 16 universities have taken. In a series of personnel actions, the board approved the promotion from associate to full professor of James Karl Nicholas, 2- A. Gregory Starling, and Judy Dowell, and from assistant to associate professor of Ralph Willis and Richard Gentry; and the reappointment of James Addison, George Dixon, Joyce Farwell, Earl Hobgood, Robert Holquist, Frank Prochaska, Joseph Scagnoli, Virginia Sweet, Virginia Wittekind, William Brunsen, James Car land, Terry Kinnear, Diane McDonald, James O'Connor, John Overbey, Elizabeth Overton, Hanson Smith, Michael Thomas, William Van Buskirk, Francis Webster, Deanne Winiarski, Charles Bowen, C. Dale Carpenter, Larry Grantham, Bruce Henderson, Edward Kesgen, Christopher Leone, Scott Minor, Dorothy Tatum, Howard Wilson, Joseph Beck, Mary Brewer, Franklin Carver, Martha Chovan, Norma Cook, Jean McGuire, Carolyn Poynter, Davia Allen, Aaron Ball, Finn-Aage Esbensen, William Hyatt, Noelle Kehrberg, William Medaris, William Miller, Louise Creed, James Lloyd, and Jeffrey Sauer. New appointments approved include Jack F. Holgate, radio and television; William H. Brunsen, economics and finance; Cynthia K. Messer, accounting and information systems; Franklin B. Carver, environmental health; James Robert Cooper, associate director for the economic development division of the Center for Improving Mountain Living; Roger H. Lumb, acting head through mid-May of the department of biology; and Michael Douglas Smith, acting director through June 30 of the Speech and Hearing Center. In other actions, the board: —Approved establishment of a "trustee emer­itus" status for former trustees. —Was told that with installation of two VAC 11/780 main-frame computers, the univer­sity now has 128 terminals that can operate simultaneously and another 81 microcompu­ters. Meanwhile, a new VAC 11/730 computer provided by the National Science Foundation was delivered Wednesday, and Robinson said WCU is moving toward its goal of making every student it enrolls "computer literate." —Toured the Mountain Heritage Center and heard detailed plans for an exhibit depict­ing the migration of the Scotch-Irish to Western North Carolina. The exhibit, based on the transatlantic historical research of associate professors Tyler Blethen and Curtis Wood, is scheduled to open next fall. ORIENTAL ART ON SALE MARCH 30 Marson Ltd. of Baltimore, Md., will conduct a special exhibition and sale of original oriental art on Wednesday, March 30, from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. in the lobby of Belk Building on campus. A representative will be on hand to answer questions about the etchings, woodcuts, lithographs, seri-graphs, and paintings. PRERETIREMENT HELP OFFERED MARCH 23-31 All university employees are invited to at­tend a Preretirement Planning Workshop spon­sored by the Personnel Office. A panel of resource persons drawn from the