With its Georgian façade and Corinthian pillars, the Du Pont Hall addition adds elegance and flair to The Green between Delaware Avenue and Memorial Hall.
The three-story, $27 million addition completes the original plan for this central part of campus. Named for P.S. du Pont, one of UD's most generous and influential benefactors, Du Pont Hall is home to the College of Engineering. A rededication ceremony set for Sept. 22 marks the end of approximately two years of construction. With a large entranceway that faces Gore Hall, the addition features an office for the dean, faculty offices and state-of-the-art laboratories, including a clean room for electrical and computer engineering, a cold room, a dark room and autoclave for materials science, and a bridge design laboratory for civil and environmental engineering. Both Du Pont Hall and Gore Hall were designed by renowned architect Allan Greenberg.
Alumni can send electronic postcards that boast beautiful images of the campus and can be accompanied by an audio or video file of the University's alma mater, Fight! Song or the ringing of the carillon. To send a card, visit [www.udel.edu/postcards] and select the desired image and song.
Code of the Web
Using a humorous frontier approach, the University is introducing students to the Code of the Web--making the campus community aware of the problem of bandwidth abuse and copyright infringement.
The campaign features UD's mascot YoUDee
as an old-time Western sheriff and includes catch phrases from the era to make serious points. In the University's Handbook for Responsible Computing, students are told "Don't ride with the outlaws."
The "Rules of commu-net-y" outlined include:
Penalties for misuse of the web are stiff, making students who violate UD policies subject to full disciplinary action. For more information, visit the web site at [http://www.udel.edu/codeoftheweb].
A best value
The University of Delaware is rated a "best value" university--judged to provide the best quality of education for the tuition dollar--in both the October issue of Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine and the 2003 edition of Kaplan's The Unofficial Unbiased Insider's Guide to the 320 Most Interesting Colleges.
Kiplinger ranked the University 14th among its 100 best values in public colleges. The move is 10 points higher on the Kiplinger scale than UD's ranking two years ago.
The magazine lauds UD's ability to hold down costs at a time when state colleges and universities across the country are raising rates in response to the sluggish economy, the faltering stock market and increased costs in energy and health care.
"I think I'm getting a steal," the magazine quotes Brandon Williams, 22, a journalism major from Bear, Del., as saying.
"Knowing how to sniff out a good deal is just one sign of how sharp the students heading to these campuses are," the magazine says.
The magazine continues, "The University of Delaware is no slouch, either. The school has produced four Rhodes Scholars in the past 10 years."
In another category of the Kiplinger report, UD is listed 10th among schools offering small class size and a student/teacher ratio of 13 or less.
Kiplinger's exclusive survey includes more than 500 U.S. public colleges and universities. After whittling the list to 200 by applying the magazine's own formulas to data supplied by the schools themselves, from the Wintergreen-Orchard House and the U.S. Department of Education, the magazine considers additional measures of quality, including freshmen return rate, four- and six-year graduation rates, student-faculty ratios, instruction and library costs. The final 100 are ranked on a combination of quality and cost.
UD also was named one of 42 Kaplan's best value universities, an exclusive group that also includes Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Duke, North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Michigan, Penn State, UCLA and Virginia Tech.
New focus on early childhood
After renovating the former Girls Inc. building on Wyoming Road in Newark, the University will open its Early Learning Center, which will offer year-round, full-day child care for about 150 infants and children up to age 5.
In addition, before- and after-school care for about 50 children ages 5-12 will be available along with various support services for families, including parenting education and nutrition programs.
"The community will receive model services in early childhood care and education, families will receive the support services they need and, at the same time, our undergraduate and graduate students in a variety of disciplines will have experiental learning opportunities in a very high-quality clinical setting," said Michael Gamel-McCormick, associate professor of individual and family studies and director of UD's Center for Disabilities Studies, which will administer the new center.
Children and families using the center will be from the surrounding community, as well as families of University staff, faculty and students, he said.
Faculty and student involvement in the Early Learning Center is expected to be from a variety of colleges and disciplines at the University, including early childhood education, nursing, psychology, family studies, physical therapy and nutrition. The primary staff will be full-time professional educators and caregivers.
The new center represents a partnership with the state's Department of Education and Department of Services for Children, Youth and Their Families, and with the Christina School District and community organizations.
Beyond Wilde
More than 65 works from a major private collection of Victorian literature and art will be on display at the University Gallery in Old College through Nov. 10.
"Beyond Oscar Wilde: Portraits of Late Victorian Writers and Artists from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection" includes drawings, lithographs, watercolors, oils, photographs, books and illustrated letters that span the period from 1870-1901. One of the highlights of this exhibition will be a previously unknown caricature of Wilde by Max Beerbohm.
The collector, will be on hand Oct. 30 to discuss the works on view. A visiting scholar at the University Library, Lasner is the author of "A Selective Checklist of the Published Work of Aubrey Beardsley" and has organized exhibitions at Harvard University, Georgetown University and the University of Virginia.
Gallery hours are 11 a.m.-4 p.m., Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays; 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Wednesdays; and 1-4 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays.
New DELCAT online and on time
After a UD task force visited five other college libraries, exchanged 1,598 e-mails, held 117 meetings, set up 207 training sessions and conducted multiple testings, the new web-based DELCAT catalog at the University Library was implemented July 1--right on schedule.
"The future has arrived and it was right on schedule," Susan Brynteson, May Morris Director of Libraries, said, noting that the implementation task force for the more user-friendly catalog was created in August 2001. The original DELCAT, which was set up in 1986, had changed over the last 16 years, going from card catalogs to a completely online system and providing access
to thousands of electronic journals.
The new web version of DELCAT is accessible at [http://www.lib.udel.edu] or directly at [http://delcat.udel.edu]. Microsoft Internet Explorer version 5.5 or Netscape 6.0 are the web browsers that work most effectively with the new DELCAT.
According to Sandra Millard, assistant director for library public services, the new DELCAT includes links to electronic journals and cataloged Internet resources and will provide new features such as online book renewal and new ways of searching. "Library users will be able to search DELCAT directly from the library website," she said.
The new DELCAT is based on Ex Libris software, which also was recently installed at the libraries of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.
'Summer of Service'
For the middle-school youngsters attending a new camp at UD this summer, it wasn't a typical vacation.
Sure, there were trips to area parks, midmorning snacks of chocolate chip cookies, sing-alongs, books and board games. But, in this program, visiting a park meant clearing brush from trails and picking up trash. The cookies were baked by the kids themselves, with most of the batch set aside for families of sick children. And, the youngsters shared those songs, stories and games, not for their own amusement, but as entertainment for residents of nursing homes and child-care centers.
It's all part of the 4-H "Summer of Service," a program that gives youngsters experience with volunteer work in a variety of settings. The program is operated through the Delaware Cooperative Extension Service, part of UD's College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, with a grant from the Delaware Community Service Commission.??
"This is more than community service," Mark Manno, statewide 4-H agent for Delaware Cooperative Extension, said. "It's guided volunteer work, with opportunities for them to talk about what they're going to be doing and, afterward, what they learned and how they felt about it."
Three sessions were held during the summer, and the camp will be offered again in 2003 and 2004.