Shortly after Teresa Sullivan's reinstatement as president of the University of Virginia on June 26, donations to UVA increased significantly, according to The Washington Post. UVA's Board of Trustees previously dismissed Sullivan from her post after she served just two years of her five-year contract. Two anonymous donors each contributed $1 million in addition to another $500,000 in major gifts and $218,911 from 657 online donations after the Board of Trustees reversed its decision. Many online donations were accompanied by comments expressing the donors' appreciation of Sullivan and her reinstatement, according to The Post. Of the online donations, 115 were directed toward the President's Fund for Excellence, a discretionary fund that is used for student life programs and other initiatives. The fund has been previously used to persuade university professors who were offered more lucrative offers from other schools to stay at school, The Post reported.
Columbia University Medical Center will build a new medical and graduate education building in Washington Heights, according to The New York Times. Diller Scofidio and Renfro, the architecture firm working on the building, designed a 14-story tower that was described by firm principal Elizabeth Diller as a "vertical landscape." Construction will begin in 2013 and is projected to conclude by 2016, The Times reported. The building will include event spaces, student lounge areas, cafes, outdoor terraces and an auditorium. In an orthodox design choice, the building's form aims to support a unique collaborative approach to education, according to architects at the firm. Construction of the new building was made possible in part by a September 2010 gift from P. Roy Vagelos, a Columbia Medical School alumnus, and his wife Diana Vagelos, according to The Times. The building will house Columbia's nursing, dental and public health schools, the biomedical departments of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and students studying toward completion of doctoral and medical degrees.
A decision by The Oklahoma Daily, Oklahoma University's student newspaper, to halt production in July in order to focus on improving their online arm was reversed after the university's student affairs division donated $4,000 to the Student Media Department, according to NewsOK. The money will go toward a yearlong study evaluating areas in which the paper can improve. The Daily's editor Chris Lusk said the initial decision to stop production was intended to allow the paper's reporters to work on a consistent news cycle and improve their writing and said he disagreed with the department's decision to continue production, NewsOK reported. Lusk said the paper would have not only benefited from the summer production break, but would also have profited from the opportunity to gauge community response to online journalism, according to NewsOK.
