April 2007

Demetria Kalodimos, a 1981 graduate of Illinois Wesleyan University and an award-winning news anchor at WSMV Television in Nashville, Tenn., will deliver the University’s Commencement address, “Question Everything or Question Everything!” as 526 seniors will participate in the ceremony on Sunday, May 6.

The University’s graduation ceremony in its 157th year will take place at 1 p.m. on the Eckley Quadrangle. In the event of inclement weather, the ceremony will be held at the Shirk Center (302 E. Emerson St., Bloomington). The ceremony also will be Webcast live online.

Kalodimos will receive an honorary doctor of laws degree along with author and human rights activist Marjorie Agosín, a professor of Spanish at Wellesley College (Mass.).

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Illinois Wesleyan students garnered a $7 million verdict for a plaintiff in a simulated trial Wednesday based on an actual court case.

Associate Professor Robert Kearney’s business law class argued the real pending lawsuits of two families against Comcast cable company and a subcontractor in the case of the Chicago “cable murders” in the very real courtroom of the McLean County Law & Justice Center (115 E. Washington St., Bloomington).

In the actual lawsuit, which has not yet reached court in Chicago, families were seeking to hold Comcast and a subcontractor accountable for employing the man who is accused of raping and murdering two women while in their homes to install cable systems.

The jury, comprised of 12 volunteers from the community, heard arguments from students who took on the role of lawyers for the plaintiffs and defense. After deliberating an hour, the jury found only the subcontractor responsible, awarding the family of one of the victims the $7 million decision. Student plaintiff attorneys argued the subcontractor was negligent in failing to remove the cable installer from duty after the first murder. The volunteer jury found Comcast not negligent in the case.

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BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – An original play written by Illinois Wesleyan University Professor of Greek and Roman Studies Nancy Sultan has been selected to be produced at Heartland Theatre in Normal as a part of their annual 10-Minute Play Festival.

Sultan’s work, titled Pas de Deux, is one of eight finalists chosen from 165 submissions through three phases of blind judging, the last of which was judged by a published New York playwright. The theme for this year’s festival is “One Shoe.”

Pas de Deux is about the life of a homeless couple and how it is transformed into a wonderful fantasy world when the wife finds a discarded shoe. The performances of the piece will be at the festival, which will run through the weekends of May 31- June 17.

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BLOOMINGTON, Ill. - Five Illinois Wesleyan students and one faculty member have been awarded the ASIANetwork Freeman Student-Faculty Fellows grant, and will travel to China for several weeks this summer for a research project. It is the fourth time the University has received the ASIANetwork grant. Other recipients have taken students to India, Indonesia and China.

The nearly $22,000 grant will allow the group to study aspects of city planning in China that took place in the years immediately following the Chinese Revolution in 1949 by traveling to Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou.

“In the late 1940s, there was widespread hunger, a high percentage of illiteracy, homelessness, and inadequate sanitation and medical care,” said Thomas Lutze, associate professor and chair of the History Department at Illinois Wesleyan, who will lead the students in the study. The students will each take on an aspect of city planning that was implemented after the Revolution.

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BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Although the workload for an Illinois Wesleyan student can be heavy even without extracurricular activities, some opportunities are too good to pass up. For members of the School of Theatre Arts, the Phoenix Theatre offers this kind of opportunity, which allows the students to put on plays of every genre or style, to work independently of IWU professors and to put to practical use their abilities in acting, directing, design and stage management.

Founded over 20 years ago, the Phoenix Theatre houses about 20 productions each school year, about four of five times the amount of productions that took place five years ago.

Located in the “Underground” next to the coffee shop in the Memorial Center, the Phoenix Theatre is a small “black-box” theatre which seats only 50 people at the maximum, equipped with lighting instruments, a lightboard, furniture and prop pieces. Every semester, students are allowed to put in an application to the Phoenix committee, a group of eight students and faculty led by Phoenix Coordinator Charles Haugland, a senior theatre arts and English major from Aurora, Colo. If the proposal is accepted, the student will be allowed to use the theatre space for rehearsals and performances as needed and will also be provided with a small stipend upon request.

Each semester, students put on a wide variety of plays and performance pieces ranging from light-hearted musicals as in I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change to classical drama as in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Different clubs and groups have also used the Phoenix as a place to perform including the Musical Theatre Society that put on a full-length musical, Zombie Prom in the fall of 2006 and the Shenanigans theatre group who performed Death… or Something in the fall of 2003. Approximately 20 productions take place every school year, about four or five times the amount that took place just 5 years ago.

Since first-year theatre students do not perform in department plays or musicals and instead focus on production aspects of a performance, the Phoenix offers these students an outlet to act during their first year on campus. Also, the theatre gives all students the opportunity to be exposed to a large number of plays of a variety of genres at no cost.

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