Back to the Future

Award recipients unearth the past, guide JMU into the information age

The JMU Alumni Association has looked back to the future to select its 2000 James Madison Distinguished Faculty and Service Awards recipients. One guides undergraduates through the archaeological past, and the other has guided the JMU community's registration systems through the transition into the information age.

Sociology and anthropology professor Clarence Geier's focus on the past has earned him the Distinguished Faculty Award and inspired students to focus their own futures on becoming professional or amateur archaeologists. Geier's grant contract work, totaling more than $5 million, has provided unprecedented undergraduate participation in scholarly research.

"There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of JMU students who have been in the field with 'Doc,'" says former student and present JMU colleague Carole Nash. "The Archaeological Field School, instituted by Geier, is the cornerstone of the JMU major in anthropology. It is one of the longest-running and best undergraduate programs in Virginia, thanks in large part to Geier's efforts and his unflagging belief in the power of undergraduate research."

The professor has specialized both in prehistorical archaeology, focusing on Native American settlements in the mid-Atlantic, and more recently on historical archaeology. In 1995, he co-edited Look to the Earth: Historical Archaeology and the American Civil War, the first book ever published on the archaeology of the U.S. Civil War. Geier co-edited To Peel the Land: Historical Archaeology and the War Between the States. He has published and presented numerous articles and papers on aspects of historical archaeology and works as a public scholar, lending expertise to groups of serious amateur archaeologists.

During the last seven years, Registrar Sherry Hood has embraced the future by helping to direct the university through four key challenges, earning her the Distinguished Service Award. Those challenges are record enrollment growth and the implementations of a new general education curriculum, a new first-year orientation program and a new student information system.

"Through all of these changes," says Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs Teresa A. Gonzalez, "I believe that the students have been well served. This fact is a credit to the leadership in the Registrar's Office, namely Sherry Hood. She is the quiet hero who has embraced change, worked out a strategy to implement new systems and guided her staff through retooling and learning new approaches. As important, the students have progressed almost seamlessly through normal registration processes. ... For several summers she has personally registered many of the 3000-plus first-year students by hand to make sure their schedules are accurate."

"She works quietly in the background making certain that the entire academic process retains integrity despite the many changes that have occurred throughout the past 10 years," says Vice President for Academic Affairs Douglas T. Brown.