STORIES
Stories
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Wrighton
FSU GRADS BECOME UNIVERSITY PRESIDENTS
Life on campus was so appealing to some of FSU's graduates that they made their careers in higher education, and at least 57 have reached the top - the presidency of a college or university.
Their institutions stretch from the southernmost tip of Florida to the West Coast, across the Pacific to the Philippines and across the Atlantic to Finland in northern Europe.
Though the field of study varies, many of those former FSU students love the demanding, varied tasks required by their jobs. They also treasure memories of their time in Tallahassee and the people they met.
Urban Bush Women
DANCERS CAPTURE AND CHANGE AN AUDIENCE
The stage is dark, silent. Without warning, a single hot spotlight dramatically outlines a woman, strong and erect in white dance tights - a flaring candle on a moonless night.
She begins a lamentation in the gospel style of call and response. Her words, with their emphasis on alliteration and repetition, challenge audience members to examine their own attitudes toward HIV and AIDS.
As the piece climbs in intensity, a cutting anger rises in the dancer's voice. "Why?" she asks, slamming her fist into an open palm, "why must words be so bitter?" The woman's once graceful movements shift to hard, sharp and pained ones.
TWO PERSONALITIES IN THE SERVICE MISSION
He's a lawyer, a regent and a tough-kid crusader
In the late 1950s, when blacks were required to ride in the back of the bus, Steve Uhlfelder, a 12-year-old white boy, found his backbone. He refused to watch old black ladies stand on the buses rolling through West Palm Beach, where he grew up, when there were plenty of seats left in the "white" section. So he sat in the "black" section, to show people he didn't agree with segregation.
A man in the system shows us how to use it for
justice
Bill Moeller laughs at himself when he tells you that though he's a fourth generation American, he still calls himself a German.
But he's serious. The German parts of him, combined with his Catholicism and Jesuit education, might explain why he is devoted to responsibility, duty and service.
What if he'd been in Germany in the late '30s and early '40s, when the country was governed by evil?
THE DEATH PENALTY: SHOULD WE USE IT OR NOT?
A Florida State grad says YES
American justice warrants the death penalty. Such justice treats criminals as responsible members of a moral society, a society in which the innocent life of our fellow man is sacrosanct. Indeed, our neighbors' lives are so sacred that we are willing to hold the most grievous murderers accountable with their lives. In such instances, morality demands that we elevate the victim's life above the murderer's by exacting the ultimate punishment: the forfeiture of the right to live.
A Florida State grad says NO
In 1995, New York State reenacted the death penalty for first-degree murder. The return of capital punishment after a 21-year absence brings a tremendous challenge not only to the legal community, but also to social workers. The death penalty is the ultimate statement about the worthlessness of human life. When it is imposed, the conclusion is made that this person's life no longer has value, sense or purpose - an idea antithetical to social work and unthinkable to me as a human being.
FSU GRAD GIVES US A TIMES SQUARE MIRACLE
If you love going to the theatre in New York, you might love Richard Basini, a 1964 Florida State graduate who gave 25 years to cleaning up Times Square, and succeeded.
In the 1970s and '80s, it was frightening to visit the center of neon billboards, theater marquees and New Year's Eve crowds. On the sidewalk level, the scene was dominated by crime and pornography.
But it's once again exciting and fun to walk across the square to a theater or movie, or just to soak up New York.
You can thank Basini, president of a public relations firm in Manhattan and Connecticut - and president of the Broadway Association for 21 years.