Winter 2022

Michael Le

2022-01-25T21:44:25.345Z

By Philip Walzer

As a teenager, Michael Lê '80 made a dramatic escape from Vietnam after the Communist takeover, barely surviving a 4-week journey across the ocean.

But his early life, from childhood through his time at Old Dominion University, was also defined by major influences and other significant moments. Here are some of them:

His parents: Lê's father had been a respected teacher and scholar in North Vietnam. His students feared that, as an intellectual, he would be persecuted by the Vietnamese Communists. So the year before Michael's birth, they helped Lê's parents and older siblings escape.

His family "traveled by night and hid by day" until they arrived at Haiphong Bay. From there, they set off on a makeshift raft and were picked up by an American boat. The family ended up at a refugee camp in South Vietnam, where Michael was born.

Only a few months earlier, the family had suffered a tragedy that shadowed Michael's childhood.

Lê's mother and his next-oldest brother contracted pneumonia. His mother survived, but his brother died. "My mother said he was like an angel," he said. "He held everybody's hand before he passed away....She had a tough time. She was crying a lot when I was a little kid."

His father struggled with a peptic ulcer when Michael was growing up, requiring frequent trips to the clinic. That mired the family in debt, and they weren't sure how much longer he would survive.

"He called me to his side and said the last words quite a few times," Michael recalled. "I was always feeling I would lose my father."

His parents' challenges took an emotional toll on Michael. "Things would cause me to cry or to get angry quite easily. But emotion never carried me down."

Though surrounded by poverty, Michael compared his younger self to Tom Sawyer, finding simple ways to divert himself, like shooting marbles. "It was the only way for me to have fun," he said. He was so good at it, he became "a hired gun for other kids who begged me to shoot for them."

His father worked as an administrative secretary - or assistant principal - of a high school outside Saigon. He also pushed education at home. "He was determined that we all had to pass the second baccalaureate," the exam required to attend college, Michael said. And they all did.

His father died in 1985, after Michael had moved to the United States. His sister said only two personal items were found in his wallet: an image of the Virgin Mary and a photo of Michael.

His mother is 97 and lives in Florida with two of his sisters.

His English skills: When Lê arrived in the United States, he was skilled in English - and he wasn't.

He had learned some English from his oldest brother and in classes at a Mennonite church. He'd also taken a literature class in college in which he read such classics as "Pride and Prejudice," "Moby Dick" and "Jane Eyre" - all in English.

"I was pretty good with reading and writing, but whenever I wanted to express myself in an elegant way, I had trouble. I wasn't able to speak naturally. I sounded very much like a translation." Plus, he had trouble understanding what other people were saying.

He got his first lesson - times two - on English vernacular on his first day as a dishwasher at a Norfolk hotel.

Lê, who had grown up in poverty with meager meals, couldn't bring himself to throw the slabs of leftover steak into the trash. He began stacking them into a pile.

The chef came over and told him to dump the steak in the garbage. If he didn't do his job correctly, she warned, "They'll fire you."

Lê panicked but not over the prospect of losing his job. "You mean they'll burn me?" he asked her.

"Honey, they won't burn you," she assured him. "You just won't have the job anymore."

In that moment, Lê learned the workplace meaning of "fire." He learned another thing: In America, "honey" was not just what you called a boyfriend or girlfriend.

His "village": Lê said he couldn't have made it through his first few years in America without a network of supporters, including a waitress at the Holiday Inn restaurant who'd always give him 10 percent of her tips.

Others who helped him included:

The Hoy family - Lê met the Hoys at the restaurant, where they had brunch after church every Sunday. Luther Hoy ran his family's construction business in Norfolk. Barbara was active in their church's efforts to resettle Vietnamese refugees. She asked Lê to help act as a translator for one of the families.

The relationship with the Hoys blossomed. "One day, she told me, 'We prayed about it, and God wants us to take you in.'" He spent the next six months living with them in their home in Talbot Park.

Lê taught their three sons martial arts; they taught him how to crab. He introduced Barbara to instant noodles; she introduced him to sandwiches.

The Hoys did far more than expand his palate. Luther Hoy volunteered to be Lê's legal guardian, allowing him to qualify for in-state tuition at Old Dominion University.

When Lê made the dean's list his first semester, with four A's and one B, Barbara Hoy explained to him what that meant. "And then she called her parents; she told everybody. She was very proud of me."

Jeannine Hammond: Jeannine Hammond: The manager of ODU's accounting department befriended Lê from the start.

"She assigned a student to take me around to classes," Lê said. Most important, she arranged a tuition deferment for Lê so he could begin courses while he waited for his Basic Educational Opportunity Grant, or BEOG. Hammond even introduced him to a car dealer, who sold Lê a used Plymouth Duster.

"She truly tried to help me start going to ODU as soon as possible, and that timing was very important to me," Lê said.

Steve Atiyah: The faculty member who made the most lasting impact wasn't in Lê's department. Lê majored in computer science, but he became close to Steve Atiyah after he took one of his math classes.

"Steve knew about my situation, the fact that I had to work so hard," Lê said. "He realized that my life was difficult, that it was tough for a kid with nobody around."

Near the end of Lê's college career, he had three incompletes. Lê said Atiyah went out of his way to persuade the faculty members in those courses to permit him to take the finals. Lê got two B's and one C in those classes.

"He didn't have to do that," Lê said. "I'm sure I would have been able to graduate, but I'd have to live with those F's if it wasn't for Steve."

Atiyah, Lê said, "was very happy for me when I finally got enough semester credits to graduate. He said, 'I'll buy you a drink.'"

To honor Atiyah, Lê and his wife, KT, dedicated the element platinum to him in the Elements of Giving periodic table in the lobby of the Chemistry Building. The inscription reads: "A truly dedicated teacher and mentor."

Atiyah, an assistant professor emeritus of mathematics and statistics, said: "I really liked him from the day I met him. He was a good kid that you couldn't get angry with, and he was anxious to get his degree. Michael always projected an aura of happiness."

Atiyah said Lê is in regular contact with him. "I feel he's almost a son," Atiyah said. "Michael is an exceptional human being. You can't help but admire him for his tenacity and perseverance and hard work to become what he is now."

Fish, Li win state award

2022-01-03T16:50:48.036Z

By Philip Walzer

Here's more on Old Dominion University's two recipients of the 2021 Outstanding Faculty Awards, presented by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia:

Jennifer Fish, a professor of sociology and chair of the Department of Women's Studies, has taught at ODU for 15 years.

She has received the Humanitarian Award from the Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities, a research grant from Canada's national Social Science and Humanities Research Council, and the ODU Provost's Award for Leadership in International Education. Fish also has been recognized by the American Sociological Association for outstanding contribution to scholarship.

Fish's research in labor and human rights has been cited by agencies including the United Nations' International Labour Organization. She has participated in the proceedings of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and was chosen to offer a tribute to Nobel Peace Prize recipient Desmond Tutu in 2018.

In his letter nominating Fish for the state faculty award, Kent Sandstrom, former dean of the College of Arts and Letters, described her as "an intellectual trailblazer who is creative, engaging and theoretically astute."

These are excerpts from a recent interview:

Your most recent book, "Domestic Workers of the World Unite," portrays how housekeepers and nannies mobilized to expand rights and protections across the globe. What lessons does that movement provide in 2021?

It's like the pandemic has exploded these issues we have been seeking to address. Huge proportions of the population don't have the capacity to work virtually. This labor extends from hospitals to homes, where social and economic rights are much more difficult to reinforce. But we are seeing an entirely new awareness and action plan to integrate these workers in the wider domain of human rights protections.

You've witnessed a lot of hope and despair across the world. Are you more or less optimistic about our future than you were starting out?

I've always leaned toward optimism. I don't think it's ever been more challenging than it is right now, given the barriers to human rights and our huge losses, with their disproportionate impact. But I believe after this pandemic, we will reconfigure our lives and our capacity to celebrate. I've seen that firsthand in places like Rwanda that have survived apartheid or war. I believe we will recommit to a better form of humanity.

Ling Li, Eminent Scholar, University Professor and chair of the Department of Information Technology and Decision Sciences, helped establish ODU's graduate and undergraduate programs in maritime and supply chain management.

Li has written three books and published more than 140 journal articles. She has received more than $4 million in research grants from institutions including the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation. Li's work has been cited more than 10,000 times.

She has received the University's Broderick Diversity Champion Award and A. Rufus Tonelson Faculty Award, the Strome Business College's Outstanding Teaching, Research and Service Awards, and the Provost's Award for Leadership in International Education. A student called her "a phenomenal professor and role model" whose "breadth of knowledge is unparalleled."

Li also has served as president of the ODU Asian Caucus and a member of the President's Task Force on Inclusive Excellence.

These are excerpts from a recent interview:

Based on your research on hospital capacity management, how do you think hospitals are handling COVID-19?

I did my doctoral thesis on hospital capacity management and I started my career as a statistical systems programmer at a medical school in 1989. I think they are coping with a huge volume and surge of service very well. They created field hospitals and used private hospitals. The issue is, we have the beds, but we need more personnel. Calling in retired medical service people is a good option. The other is to have a flexible pool where you can borrow medical personnel from other hospitals.

How have higher education and teaching changed since you started?

We have to learn how to update our mindset with the advancement of technology. When we went to school, we had the theory, but we didn't have all of the possibilities. Now we have hundreds of different Excel templates to solve problems. Students are going to go on the Internet to find the things they want to know. That's something I try to tell our faculty, especially senior faculty: We need to advance our sense of how to teach and how to learn. It's very, very different now.

Recovering from tragedy

2022-01-03T16:50:48.080Z

By Harry Minium '77

When he found his wife listless on their bathroom floor on Sept. 21, 2014, Tony Lucas called 911 and began performing CPR in a desperate effort to bring her back to life.

The EMT crew quickly arrived and took over, but 10 minutes later, Sarita Lucas was pronounced dead. She was 33 years old.

She died of complications related to her pregnancy. She was six months pregnant with a girl whom they planned to name Claire.

Lucas, who'd known Sarita since his freshman year in college, had heard how others let grief destroy their lives. That isn't me, he said. He got into counseling and told himself that someday he would be happy again.

He was so right.

Lucas, now an assistant football coach at ODU, got remarried two years ago, to Natasha Harrison, a friend from college who came to his aid after Sarita's death. Not only is he a husband again, he's also a father.

On May 15, Natasha gave birth to 7-pound, 2-ounce Sage. Her dad can't stop smiling every time he holds her.

His is a remarkable story of courage, religious faith and the power of finding love again.

Then an assistant football coach at the University of Delaware, Lucas returned to work, to his colleagues' surprise, a week after Sarita's death. Eric Ziady, the athletic director, urged him to see a social worker.

He reluctantly agreed. "I allowed myself to be open and share everything I was thinking," Lucas said.

When Natasha Harrison heard of Lucas' loss, she immediately called him. She was a doctor at West Virginia University. "I felt like this was my chance to be a friend to him when he needed one."

They started as weekly calls, but they became more frequent. "I forgot how much I enjoyed our friendship and just what a good guy he is," she said.

Months after Sarita's death, he visited Natasha in Morgantown, "just to get away for a weekend." They were still just friends.

"All through our friendship I really didn't think he was that attractive," she said, laughing. "He had a girlfriend who became his wife, so I never looked at him that way. When I took the so-called blinders off, I realized he was everything I wanted in a partner."

They began dating in 2015, nearly a year after Sarita died, and got married in 2018. She stayed in Morgantown while he coached at Temple, Elon and then ODU. After she got pregnant in early 2020, she moved to Norfolk.

Watching his daughter being born and cutting her cord was a spiritual experience for Lucas. He said a prayer of thanks as he held her for the first time.

"I do thank God for the life I've had. I feel so fortunate to be a father, so fortunate to be married to my best friend."

Harry Minium '77 is senior executive writer at Old Dominion University.

She’s back on the bookshelves

2022-01-14T16:05:27.519Z

By Philip Walzer

Sheri Reynolds is back - on the bookshelves.

Last spring, Bywater Books, a feminist and lesbian press, published "The Tender Grave," Reynolds' first novel since 2012.

"I kind of thought I was done," she said at a reading sponsored by the Muse Writers Center earlier this year.

But "I loved working on this book so much," said Reynolds, whose novel "The Rapture of Canaan" made Oprah's Book Club. "I reconnected with something in me that I had let go a little bit."

"The Tender Grave" springs from a hate crime, the poisons released in a dysfunctional family, and the first meeting of stepsisters from different worlds.

"I wasn't interested in representing the brutality of the crime," said Reynolds, the Ruth and Perry Morgan Chair of Southern Literature. "I'm interested in the possibility for healing on the other side of destruction."

She also hopes the book, her seventh novel, encourages readers to see beyond their beliefs. "We love to take sides. We want to put on a team's jersey. It can be baseball or politics. We have got to find ways to have compassion and love for the other."

John McManus, director of the M.F.A. creative writing program, said, "The novel's as vibrantly alive as everything Sheri writes, and I do mean everything. Even a departmental assessment report - not a genre of writing I turn to for pleasure reading - has heart and soul when Sheri's writing it."

Reynolds writes those reports as chair of the English department, which, she said, "requires many of the same skills as writing a novel, in terms of being willing to do long-term projects and investing in a small piece and following the leads."

Reynolds became chair in 2016. "I was supported by the rpeople who came before me, and I wanted to give back. I knew the job would be demanding, but I didn't know how and in what ways."

She will leave that position this summer after finishing her second three-year term. That will allow her more time to write and teach. "I want to work with first-year students. I want to help them tell their stories."

One thing Reynolds will guarantee about her future books: "If anyone is worried, I am not interested in modeling my characters on anyone I worked with."

Camping on the waves at the Oceanfront

2022-01-14T16:02:19.664Z

By Lorraine Eaton '85 (M.F.A. '99)

The surf report read pretty good for Virginia Beach that searing June day: One to two feet, semi-clean with a light onshore breeze, all under a drift of cotton ball clouds.

But one of the East Coast's best-known surfers wasn't in the water. Jason Borte '95 (M.S.Ed. '97) stood in the sand in a sea of blue, pink and lime green surfboards.

"How many of you have surfed before?" he asked the 30 or so wannabes fanned out in front of him.

A couple of boys in the back tentatively raised their hands, one admitting, yeah, but it was, like, only on the fake waves at Great Wolf Lodge.

No matter. This was the first day of Borte's Stoke-a-Thon, where disadvantaged kids got a week of free surf lessons.

It's just one of the ways Borte combines altruism with his evangelical love of surfing. The East Coast Pro Champion and Surfing Hall of Fame inductee has taught wounded veterans, children with autism and people with disabilities. His summer camps attract hundreds of other kids and adults.

But Borte, 51, considers teaching underprivileged kids his most important work.

The Stoke-a-Thon mission: to open the eyes of dozens to the playground in their backyard, to have them experience the exhilarating push of a wave, the sense of accomplishment that comes with standing on water and gliding to shore. Ultimately, to get them hooked on a sport that costs almost nothing - just a $2 hunk of surfboard wax - after snagging a board.

At 12, Borte wanted to imitate his older brother, Derrick '91, a surfer who's now a filmmaker. He soon found he had a natural knack for the sport. Borte became known for his explosive roundhouse, a sort of crazy-8 on the face of a wave.

He skipped classes at First Colonial High School to surf Hatteras and started winning local events.

By 1988, Borte was considered "pro," but his total winnings were $36. A year later, he scored a sponsorship with the Ocean Pacific clothing brand. He could hardly believe his luck. He was getting paid to surf, and at the world's hottest surf spots - Indonesia, Cuba, Fiji, Hawaii, South Africa.

In between, he got married, had three kids and received degrees in English and social studies from ODU. Borte taught middle school for a year, then turned to writing for surf magazines. He became one of the most respected international surf journalists in his field.

And he kept surfing.

Borte was so good he won the prestigious East Coast pro title in 1997, at age 27. He also founded The Surf School, now known as the Billabong Surf Camp, in partnership with 17th Street Surf Shop.

In 2003, his first book, a biography of surfing legend Kelly Slater, "Pipe Dreams: A Surfer's Journey," made The New York Times bestseller list. In 2010, he published "The Kook's Guide to Surfing - The Ultimate Instruction Manual: How to Ride Waves with Skill, Style, and Etiquette." (Every Stoke-a-Thoner got a copy.)

A year later, he surprised the surfing world when he gave up the sport for a year of "surfbriety," chronicled in a snarky, witty, introspective blog titled "How Surfing Ruined My Life."

It was tough seeing other surfers at the jetty. But "I learned a lot about myself and surfing."

These days Borte is teaching technology at Salem High School and spending summers doing what he loves best: teaching kids to surf. And, of course, surfing himself.

By the final day in June, the Stoke-a-Thoners had experienced all sorts of waves.

"Clean, choppy, big, small. A lot of them are pretty self-sufficient at this point," Borte said, surveying the action.

The Friday surf report again read better than average for Virginia Beach - waves two to three feet, a little bumpy, but fun.

Some kids rode to shore lying belly-down on their boards. Others made it to their knees. Some were bona fide surfing.

Brayan Herrera, 13, riding a lime green board, maneuvered all the way to shore, finishing triumphantly with arms spread wide and a big, big grin. He hurried over to his family and, after a flurry of Spanish, paddled right back out to catch another wave, totally stoked.

Up-and-coming faculty 40 and under

2022-03-15T13:57:49.989Z

By Philip Walzer

Meet five faculty members 40 or under who are making a mark in their teaching and research:

Anna Bulysheva has enjoyed the best of both worlds at Old Dominion University.

She began as a post-doc and then research assistant professor at the Frank Reidy Research Center for Bioelectrics, where she built strong research partnerships on and off campus. Now she's an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, which also allows her to "mentor and teach students and give back to the community."

What attracted her to biomedical engineering? "I always had an interest in therapeutic and medical devices created to regenerate tissue. I like the idea of being able to come up with solutions to disease and dysfunction."

Bulysheva, 37, has co-written about 20 refereed articles. The most recent, in the journal Bioelectrochemistry, looks at the successful regeneration of heart muscle tissue after myocardial infarction.

Using lightning-quick electric pulses, each lasting 20 to 100 milliseconds, Bulysheva's team injected vascular endothelial growth factor B into a heart. "We were able to show that you can have muscle cells return to the site where the damage occurred," she says. The application could end up speeding recovery times and reducing deaths.

Marvin Chiles found his calling early.

He started watching the History Channel when he was 4. A few years later, he got a History Channel book for Christmas. "I read that book all day."

Chiles joined ODU as an assistant professor of history in 2020. He expects his first book, "The Courage to Change: The Politics of Racial Reconciliation in Modern Richmond," to be published in 2023. "The book argues that what's going on in Richmond is proof that the modern South is getting less racist over time," Chiles, 29, says. "However, it has not gone far enough."

Chiles warns students of his Black history courses: "If you expect a chronicle of victimhood, drop my class now." He covers free Blacks who came to America, the 20,000 who fought on both sides during the Revolution and slaves who negotiated their freedom. "They did everything they could not to live in oppression."

He also believes in the importance of making research accessible to the public. In his Richmond book, he's experimenting with writing in first person. "History is, by its very nature, democratic."

The board at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill drew a hailstorm of protest after it initially rejected journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones for tenure, ignoring the recommendations of faculty and administrators. But some good may come of it, says Felecia Commodore, assistant professor of educational foundations and leadership.

"The curtain was pulled back, like in 'The Wizard of Oz,' " says Commodore, who wrote about the incident for The Conversation and analyzed it in a videocast for the Chronicle of Higher Education. "People found out the amount of power boards have. And now they're asking questions."

Commodore, 38, also asks questions - and suggests answers - in her research, which includes university governance, the role and composition of boards, Black women leaders and historically Black colleges and universities. She co-wrote "Black Women College Students," a 2018 book that offered a roadmap to promote their success and encouraged colleges to look at factors like mental health.

The UNC controversy, Commodore says, could prod boards toward greater accountability. That should include expectations for advancing diversity and equity, which she has outlined in a model she calls Culturally Sustaining Governance.

A main reason Christine Strong came to Old Dominion in 2019 as an assistant professor of economics was this: "It was the place I felt most comfortable," she says. "They didn't only talk about diversity; they tried to do something about it."

In the classroom, her philosophy is to "get to know the students. Lighten the room. Allow them to connect with you on a human level."

That doesn't mean Strong ignores serious subjects. "We should push the boundaries," she says. So in her Money and Banking course, she prompted an intense discussion on discrimination in the U.S. banking system and advocated an analytical approach: "Your job is to look at the data and come up with solutions."

Strong, 36, who was born in Cameroon, studies the CFA franc zone, which covers 14 sub-Saharan African countries. The system has brought relative stability, though Africans see vestiges of French colonialism.

She also incorporates it in her classes. Her message: "What works in the U.S. doesn't necessarily work in other parts of the world. I also want them to understand how lucky we are here, although things are not perfect."

"I'm interested in the engine that makes animals run," says John Whiteman, assistant professor of biological sciences, who came to ODU in 2018. Specifically, how they process nutrients.

His subjects include sun bears and emperor penguins. But his focus burrows down to the atomic level.

Whiteman, 40, is lead researcher in a multi-institutional project with a $900,000 National Science Foundation grant examining how animals process water with different oxygen isotopes.

The goal: to discover "a simple way to assess metabolic rate and water intake - two very important factors that are notoriously difficult to measure in the field."

Other work includes:

- Researching with Ian Bartol, professor of biological sciences, whether stingrays absorb nitrogen directly from seawater.

- Debunking the belief that polar bears engage in "walking hibernation" in the summer when food is hard to find. "Basically," says Whiteman, who was quoted on the subject in The New York Times, "they're doing what you or I would do if we lost access to food for a while - fasting, losing body mass, but not dramatically slowing their metabolism."