TROY News Center

January 9, 2012

Free trade and globalization is topic of lecture

TROY -- The president of one of the oldest free-market organizations in the United States will speak to Troy University students and the public in a special lecture on free trade and globalization on Jan. 19, sponsored by the Johnson Center for Political Economy.

Lawrence Reed, who became president of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in 2008, will lecture at 6 p.m. in Bibb Graves Hall room 129. The engagement is free to attend.

A former economics professor and chair of the Department of Economics at Northwood University in Michigan from 1977-1984, Dr. Reed was founder and president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland, Mich. for 20 years.

He earned his undergraduate degree in economics from Grove City College and a master's degree in history from Slippery Rock State University, and holds honorary doctorates in Public Administration from Central Michigan University and Laws from Northwood University. He has authored more than 1,000 newspapers columns and articles, and dozens of articles in magazines and journals in the U.S. and abroad. His stories have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, the Baltimore Sun, the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press, among others.

Dr. Reed has authored or co-authored five books, most recently "A Republic – If We Can Keep It" and "Striking the Root: Essays on Liberty." His interests in political and economic affairs have taken him as a freelance journalist to 78 countries on six continents.

He is a member of the prestigious Mont Pelerin Society and an advisor to numerous organizations around the world.

A native of Pennsylvania and a 30-year resident of Michigan, Dr. Reed now resides in Newnan, Ga.

January 9, 2012

McPherson-Mitchell Lecture in Southern History focuses on Freedom Riders

TROY – Troy University's McPherson-Mitchell Lecture in Southern History will this year feature a presentation on the Freedom Riders on Jan 26.

Dr. Raymond O. Arsenault, the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History at the University of South Florida, will present "Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice" at 5 p.m. in Claudia Crosby Theater.

"As America begins to look back on 50 years of social and racial activism, Professor Arsenault, one of the nation's leading historians of the 1960's civil rights movements, brings an additional layer of relevance to the Mitchell-McPherson series," said Dr. David Carlson, an assistant professor of history at TROY who is helping organize the lecture.

"His lecture on the Freedom Rides not only addresses national and Southern history, it touches deeply the history of the Troy-Montgomery area as many of the key events and figures of the Freedom Rides took place or were rooted in this region," he said.

Attending the lecture will also be Freedom Rider Margaret Burr Leonard, who now lives in Tallahassee, Fla. In June 1961, she was arrested in Jackson, Miss. and spent two weeks imprisoned in Mississippi's Parchman Penitentiary.

A specialist in the political, social and environmental history of the South, Arsenault has also taught at the University of Minnesota, Brandeis University and at the Universite d'Angers, in France, where he was a Fulbright Lecturer in 1984-1985. He earned an undergraduate degree from Princeton University and completed a doctorate in 1981 at Brandeis University.

He is the author of two prize-winning books "The Wild Ass of the Ozarks: Jeff Davis and the Social Bases of Southern Politics" (1984, pbk 1988) and "St. Petersburg and the Florida Dream, 1888-1950" (1988, pbk. 1998), and of "The End of the Long Hot Summer: The Air Conditioner and Southern Culture," "Journal of Southern History" (1984), which won the Southern Historical Association's Green-Ramsdell Prize. An edited volume, "Crucible of Liberty: 200 Years of the Bill of Rights," was published during the 1991 Bicentennial of the Bill of Rights. His recent publications include "Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice" (Oxford University Press, 2006), "Paradise Lost?" (2005) an anthology (co-edited with Jack Davis) on the environmental history of Florida, "The Changing South of Gene Patterson: Journalism and Civil Rights, 1960-1968" (2002), co-edited with Roy Peter Clark, and "The Public Storm: Hurricanes and the State in Twentieth-Century America," in Wendy Gamber, et al. eds., "American Public Life and the Historical Imagination" (2003). He is currently working on "Landmarks of American Sports," co-edited with Randall Miller.

Hosted by the College of Arts and Sciences through the History Department and co-sponsored by honor society Phi Alpha Theta, the lecture series is an annual event that honors two retired members of the department: Dr. Milton McPherson, who taught from 1968 to 1989, and Dr. Norma Taylor Mitchell, who taught from 1979 to 1999. The series invites leading historians of the South and the Southern experience.

The event is free and open to the public.

January 3, 2012

Troy Cadet Goes from Green Beret to Soldier Hero for Army All-American Bowl

By Rachael Tolliver

Fort Knox, Ky. – One of Troy University's Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) cadets, who also happens to be a Special Forces solider decorated with two Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart, will attend the 12th annual Army All-American Bowl in San Antonio, Texas, as a Soldier Hero.

Sgt. 1st Class John Burris, a native of Huntington Beach, Calif., spent eight years in various Special Forces assignments – including two deployments to Afghanistan – before he entered Troy's Army ROTC program under the Green to Gold Active Duty Option. This program allows him to continue to serve on active duty while going to school and participating in ROTC.

A Business major at Troy (because, he said, the organization, management and business leadership skills he's learning apply to any organization, whether a civilian business or the military), Burris graduated Warner Avenue Christian Academy in Huntington Beach at 15 and spent two years in community college "knocking out the basic courses," just before he joined the Army.

Burris, the son of Ryan and Donna Burris of Carson, Calif., said he had wanted to join the Army for as long as he could remember.

"I chose my career probably in the toddler years," he said, and when he walked into the recruiter's office, he knew exactly what he wanted to do.

"I told him I wanted to be an 18C (Special Forces engineer.) I wanted to be on the front lines and I did not want to sit behind a desk," he recalled. "I enlisted in October 2003 as an 18X, (Special Forces candidate) and graduated the Special Forces Qualification Course in 2005."

"I am a very different person now from who I was at the age of 18—the Army has allowed me to fulfill my goals," he said. "My experience in the Army also shaped who I was and taught me resiliency (after being injured)."

He said he earned his Purple Heart in 2007 after being hit by an IED while performing a recon as he rode an ATV. He and another soldier, "rolled up over the top of a hill, and we randomly hit an IED. I landed about 60 feet away."

Through it all Burris said he has stayed focused and enjoys the opportunities the Army has provided, the growth he has experienced and the friends he has made.

Armed with a perspective formed by experience, deployments and war, Burris said he decided to become an officer because he wanted to make a difference and lead from the front.

"The Army Values are important as they give every soldier the same set of rules to live by," he explained. "My favorite is integrity. If you have integrity, you should, by default, automatically fulfill the other six.

"Every military leader should keep the Army Values in mind. If every decision is made keeping those in mind, then it will be the right decision."