Susquehanna University received a $40,000 grant from the NCUR/Lancy Initiative, a collaborative program between the National Conferences on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) and the Alice and Leslie E. Lancy Foundation to provide exceptional undergraduates with opportunities to do original work in close collaboration with faculty mentors.

The grant was used to support and expand Susquehanna’s Centralia project. Located in the heart of the anthracite coal region in central Pennsylvania, Centralia is a virtual ghost town sitting atop an active mine fire that began when burning trash ignited a near-surface coal seam in 1962.

“We are thrilled to have received this NCUR/Lancy grant, especially since it is one of two grants awarded in a national competition. It has allowed us to further advance one of our key strategic initiatives focused on student-faculty collaboration and support the work of several outstanding students and faculty,” said Linda McMillin, provost and dean of the faculty.

– Victoria Kidd, News and Editorial Manager

		top left: Slavishak and McGrail in the field; top right: Tobin-Janzen speaks to Steve Jones, a geologist and mine fire expert; bottom: Buckled and overgrown, a closed portion of Route 61 shows the fire’s impact. Stills from video footage captured by J. Patrick McGrail and Jesse McGovern ’06.

Transitions
Teaching continues for retired professor

Harrison was conferred professor emeritus status in absentia during convocation in May 2005. She is pictured (second row, center) with a group of students at Tumaini University College.

Most retiring professors spend their last semester saying goodbye to old friends and places, and teaching their last few classes. But Carol Harrison spent hers teaching in Tanzania and, although she is retiring, she will not be done teaching any time soon.

For her last semester, the assistant professor of mathematics was on sabbatical at Tumaini University College. In Tanzania, only 10 percent of children attend high school, Harrison says. To help open more high schools, volunteers like her instruct Tanzanian middle-school teachers in higher-level topics like calculus II and abstract algebra.

Harrison returned to the United States in August, but, “My students pleaded with me to please come back. That is really hard to resist!” the professor says. After spending the remainder of the summer with her husband, retired Professor of Biology Rany Harrison, and their family, Harrison returned to Tanzania in late September.

Tanzania is not Harrison’s first African experience. In 1984, she served as the on-site director of Susquehanna’s Semester in Liberia program, which was offered from 1980 to 1989. “I had never even thought of going to Africa,” she says, before her friend, the head of the program, talked her into going. She later returned to Liberia as a Fulbright instructor.

Harrison has been a proponent of “another cultural experience” for all Susquehanna students. “I can see how living abroad in a different culture drastically changed my children’s view of life,” Harrison says. “We very much need to leave our culture long enough to see how others approach life. The world is too small not to have some understanding of just how much of what we think is obvious is culturally biased.”

“When I gave my youngest daughter her African outfit, she held it to her face and said, ‘I smell Africa!’ with a smile on her face. Africa has a smell and a rhythm which is hard to explain, but once you have experienced it fully, you always want more,” Harrison says.

“I will do this as long as there is money to pay for my plane ticket and my family can spare me,” Harrison says. “I don’t feel as if I have retired.”

— Erin Markel ’07

Selected Publications

Last reviewed Paul Novack, Office of Communications ©2005 Susquehanna University, Selinsgrove, PA 17870-1164 Telephone: 570-372-4119 Fax: 570-372-4048