Virginia Beach’s annual Something in the Waterfestival, set to take place in late April, has been canceled due to the coronavirus crisis. It will be back next year onApril 23-25, 2021, say organizers.
The brainchild of Grammy-winning musician and Virginia Beach native Pharrell Williams, the first festival in April 2019 sold 35,000 tickets and drew crowds of 12,000 to 15,000 people each of the three days of the concerts.
Amid school closures, colleges canceling in-person classes and officials urging organizers to postpone events, Something in the Water released a statement via Twitter on March 13: “After much consideration, in partnership with the city of Virginia Beach, we’ve sadly decided to postpone Something in the Water 2020. All tickets for 2020 will be honored for next year’s festival.”
The announcement came the same day that City Manager Tom Leahy declared a local emergency, activating an emergency operations and information center.
Organizers said that ticket purchasers who wanted refunds would be informed by late March how to get their money back.
The 2019 event yielded a $21.8 million economic impact on Virginia Beach and another $2.4 million financial boost to the larger Hampton Roads region, according to an analysis conducted by Vinod Agarwal, professor of economics at Old Dominion University. He predicted that the economic impact would have doubled in 2020.
This year’s festival, slated to run for an entire week, was being expanded in “just about every way possible,” according to SITW executive producer Robby Wells, and that included adding a lot more community-centric programming, including a career day for college students, a food festival and a slate of speakers highlighting innovation, entrepreneurship and technology. The SITW Marketplace was set to spotlight local musicians and vendors, selling art and other items that are unique to Virginia Beach.
The number of beachfront concert stages also was to expand from one to three stages in 2020.
Event officials expected to sell 60,000 tickets for the festival, which was to feature more than 60 top and emerging acts, including Usher, the Foo Fighters,A$AP Rocky — and of course, Williams himself. Celebrities such as Taraji P. Henson, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Tony Hawk and Sheila E. were also scheduled to appear at SITW 2020.
The brainchild of Grammy-winning musician and Virginia Beach native Pharrell Williams, the festival premiered in spring 2019, selling 35,000 tickets and drawing crowds of 12,000 to 15,000 people each of the three days of the concerts.
“After much consideration, in partnership with the city of Virginia Beach, we’ve sadly decided to postpone Something in the Water 2020,” read a statement posted to the festival’s Twitter account. “All tickets for 2020 will be honored for next year’s festival. Purchasers will be notified by Friday March 20th on how to obtain a refund if they are unable to attend.”
The 2019 Something in the Water festival yielded a $21.8 million economic impact for Virginia Beach in 2019 and another $2.4 million financial boost to the larger Hampton Roads region, according to an analysis conducted by Vinod Agarwal, professor of economics at Old Dominion University. He had predicted that the economic impact would at least double in 2020.
The 2020 SITW festival was slated to run for an entire week, with the number of beachfront concert stages increasing from one to three. Event officials planned to sell 60,000 tickets for the festival, which was to feature more than 60 top and emerging acts, including Usher, the Foo Fighters, A$AP Rocky — and of course, Williams himself. Celebrities such as Taraji P. Henson, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Tony Hawk and Sheila E were also scheduled to appear at SITW 2020.
If you thought simulators were just for pilots and astronauts, think again. Nursing students at Patrick Henry Community College (PHCC) can now train on complex, real-life patient-care scenarios inside the Clinical Simulation Lab for Nursing Education at Sovah Health’s Martinsville campus.
The Sim Lab, which opens this month, features sophisticated, high-tech “patient simulators” that respond to treatment and care just like a real patient, according to Amy Webster, PHCC’s director of nursing and allied health.
For example, nursing students can deliver a “baby,” stop a massive hemorrhage, care for sick infants and stroke patients, and perform blood transfusions. Educators watch the student in action from within a high-tech control room and use simulation software and a wireless connection to change a patient’s biological response in real time based on the student’s actions.
“The potential scenarios we can simulate really run the gamut,” Webster explains, noting that working nurses can also use the facility for continuing education.
The Sim Lab came about after the Harvest Foundation, a nonprofit foundation established by the sale of Memorial Hospital in 2002, awarded a $5.8 million grant to PHCC in 2018 to help grow the local workforce. More than $1.5 million of that funding is being used to build, equip and operate the Sim Lab and pay the salaries of four employees, including two full-time educators.
PHCC educates an average of 110 students each semester in each of its two nursing programs — a one-year practical nurse program and a two-year registered nurse program. Sovah Health, a major employer of PHCC graduates, partnered on the project by housing the Sim Lab within its Martinsville hospital.
“The Sim Lab is a multiplier factor for us,” says PHCC President Angeline Godwin. “Students get more hands-on practice and perform better in their clinicals and, ultimately, the community benefits because we have higher quality nurses doing patient care.”
Like other areas of the country, Southern Virginia suffers from a severe nursing shortage. Sovah Health, for example, which employs 200 full-time nurses at its Martinsville campus and 600 overall, is presently dealing with a 17 percent vacancy rate and a 23 percent turnover rate for nurses across all of its locations.
PHCC and Sovah Health officials say the Sim Lab will help remedy the shortage by attracting more top students and retaining more nurses already working in the region.
“Students who train in the Sim Lab will have more confidence in their clinical knowledge and skills and be more prepared for the challenges of nursing practice,” says Jacquelyn Wilkerson, market chief nursing officer for Sovah Health. “Additionally, retention data suggests that nurses enjoy growing and developing their skills and are looking for opportunities to help them do that.”
The University of Virginia has officially kicked off the public phase of the largest-ever capital fundraising campaign by a Virginia university, with a goal to raise $5 billion by 2025.
It may sound like a daunting challenge, but the university is already more than halfway to meeting its “Honor the Future” campaign goal. Leveraging a surging stock market, a new matching-donation approach and donor enthusiasm over President James E. Ryan, who started in August 2018, the U.Va. Board of Visitors’ Advancement Committee has already managed to pull in pledges of more than $2.75 billion since 2017.
The total includes the largest private gift in U.Va. history, $120 million, given last year by alumni Jaffrayand Merrill Woodriff through their Quantitative Foundation to start a School of Data Science.
“We have donors who are fiercely loyal to the university and incredibly generous,” says Mark Luellen, vice president for advancement. “But one thing that’s different now is that instead of saying, ‘Give what you can to this general project,’ we are instead talking to them about, ‘What are your philanthropic passions?’ If they have a deep passion around research and autism, or they want to increase the study of English literature, these are goals that the university can help further and achieve.”
Another new element to this campaign is U.Va.’s provision of matching funds to increase scholarships and professorships. In the past few years, this strategy has helped bring in $300 million (including matching funds) for scholarships and has established 45 endowed faculty chairs.
“It’s been a game changer and really a new part of this campaign,” says Luellen. “People have been like, ‘If this is a priority for the university and you’re going to co-invest, then we’re also going to invest and we’re going to do this together.”
An illustration of how these strategies are making a difference is the October donation of $100 million by David and Jane Walentas. A U.Va. and Darden School of Business alum who built a real estate empire in New York, David Walentas has earmarked $75 million to provide scholarships for students who, like himself, are the first in their families to attend college. The board of visitors added $40 million in matching funds to the Walentas gift, significantly increasing its impact.
The University of Virginia has officially kicked off the public phase of the largest-ever capital fundraising campaign by a Virginia university, with a goal to raise $5 billion by 2025.
It may sound like a daunting challenge, but the university is already more than halfway to meeting its “Honor the Future” campaign goal. Leveraging a surging stock market, a new matching-donation approach and donor enthusiasm over President James E. Ryan, who started in August 2018, the U.Va. Board of Visitors’ Advancement Committee has already managed to pull in pledges of more than $2.75 billion since 2017.
The total includes the largest private gift in U.Va. history, $120 million, given last year by alumni Jaffrayand Merrill Woodriff through their Quantitative Foundation to start a School of Data Science.
“We have donors who are fiercely loyal to the university and incredibly generous,” says Mark Luellen, vice president for advancement. “But one thing that’s different now is that instead of saying, ‘Give what you can to this general project,’ we are instead talking to them about, ‘What are your philanthropic passions?’ If they have a deep passion around research and autism, or they want to increase the study of English literature, these are goals that the university can help further and achieve.”
Another new element to this campaign is U.Va.’s provision of matching funds to increase scholarships and professorships. In the past few years, this strategy has helped bring in $300 million (including matching funds) for scholarships and has established 45 endowed faculty chairs.
“It’s been a game changer and really a new part of this campaign,” says Luellen. “People have been like, ‘If this is a priority for the university and you’re going to co-invest, then we’re also going to invest and we’re going to do this together.”
An illustration of how these strategies are making a difference is the October donation of $100 million by David and Jane Walentas. A U.Va. and Darden School of Business alum who built a real estate empire in New York, David Walentas has earmarked $75 million to provide scholarships for students who, like himself, are the first in their families to attend college. The board of visitors added $40 million in matching funds to the Walentas gift, significantly increasing its impact.
Kent Rollins is exactly the kind of alum William & Mary likes to bring back to campus to speak to students about how to succeed in today’s changing work environment.
The 23-year-old certainly has plenty of personal accomplishments to tout. While still a freshman, he co-founded a profitable company called Candid Campus, which paired prospective students with students at 60 colleges across Virginia and other states, before selling the company’s contracts in June 2019 in exchange for a percentage of future profits. After earning his master’s degree at 21, Rollins hired on as a business intelligence analyst for a gaming studio and performed so well that he received three raises in nine months before being hired away by his current employer, North Carolina-based Epic Games, the maker of the massively popular video game Fortnite.
Still, when he speaks to W&M students, Rollins doesn’t start with his successes. Instead, he shows a PowerPoint presentation of the many times he says he “fell on his face” presenting new ideas, embarrassed himself in front of other students or felt the sting of rejection.
And that’s the most important lesson Rollins says he learned from being a student in the supportive environment at W&M’s Alan B. Miller Entrepreneurship Center — not being afraid of failing.
“Failure is not the end of the world,” he explains to his audience. “It’s going to happen — in fact, it’s necessary. You just get back up, figure out what you did wrong and try it again, only this time you do it a little bit differently, a little bit better. If you can do that, you’re going to be successful.”
New president, new focus
Students who want to excel in the workforce of the coming decades, will need to learn to think and act like entrepreneurs — to take risks, fail, discover opportunities, adapt, solve problems and work independently and collaboratively — which is why W&M, under the new leadership of President Katherine A. Rowe, has started working to embed those basic entrepreneurial skills and mindsets across the entire undergraduate and graduate student population.
“Given the pace of change in every organization, in every sector of every industry, we all need to be asking, ‘How can we as workers come up with a better way to do something?’” Rowe asks. “It’s a question that entrepreneurs routinely ask themselves, but it’s going to become expected of every profession [and] every employee in the future.”
Prior to her academic career, Rowe was an entrepreneur who co-founded and served as CEO for Luminary Digital Media, which has combined Shakespearean texts with interactive apps so readers can better engage with and understand the Bard’s works.
But entrepreneurial thinking isn’t just for those who want to start their own business ventures. The demand for employees who can be flexible and innovative is going to skyrocket, she notes, pointing to a recent forecast by the California-based think tank Institute for the Future, which predicted that 85% of the jobs that will exist in 2030 haven’t been invented yet.
“If those estimates are even marginally correct, then the ability to adapt to changing technology, changing workplaces, changing practices, is going to be one of the most important success factors for any professional,” Rowe states. “So that’s what we want to be practicing here.”
W&M views its traditional liberal arts and sciences teaching methodologies as a foundation for developing the entrepreneurial mindset that students will need to compete in the future workforce.
“When people hear liberal arts, they may not immediately think entrepreneurship,” says Henry R. Broaddus, vice president of strategic initiatives and public affairs at W&M. “But in reality, it’s an educational model that excels at and fits perfectly with developing and preparing students for a future that’s really unknown.”
As part of Rowe’s vision, W&M also is launching new fields of study and adding new programming. W&M has started offering a new minor in interdisciplinary innovation and entrepreneurship, for example, and it will launch a new major in data analytics “because every single field, every industry, every profession is being transformed by access to new kinds of data and it will be essential to enabling innovation,” Rowe explains.
Forward to the basics
The heart of the entrepreneurial culture at W&M still will be the Miller Entrepreneurship Center, but it, too, is undergoing major changes.
In October, the Miller Center will branch out from its current site within the Mason School of Business to include a second central hub location at Tribe Square, a mixed-use retail and residential student housing complex near the heart of campus. There, it will share space with Launchpad, the Greater Williamsburg regional business incubator that will now be managed and staffed by W&M.
“This will significantly increase our reach and impact,” says Graham Henshaw, executive director of the Miller Center. “We’re intentionally designing the space to create collisions between entrepreneurs in the community and the students.”
Begun in 2010, the Miller Center initially worked to help train future business founders, and the students that participated were largely business majors.
However, when Henshaw, a former Richmond-based venture capitalist and business executive, took over in 2015, he enlarged the program’s scope to include fostering entrepreneurial skills and mindsets. And he began offering Miller Center programs to everyone on campus.
At present, the Miller Center has 350 members, approximately half of which are students majoring in nonbusiness fields, including neuroscience, art and international studies. Henshaw expects student participation to grow significantly as a result of the new location.
“We no longer measure success by the number of startups we’ve helped generate,” says Henshaw. “Instead, we’re looking to find a way to measure the line between that entrepreneurial thinking toolkit and how its presence impacts hiring decisions by companies and fosters rewarding careers for students, whether they go on to be a great product manager at an organization or an amazing teacher at a middle school.”
It’s certainly done that for Natalie Marcotullio, a W&M alum, who, although a marketing major, had never really been interested in entrepreneurship. After attending a Miller Center event at the start of her junior year, she realized that entrepreneurial thinking “was really about creativity and solving real problems, and that was something I could get on board with.”
Marcotullio was recently hired as technical marketing manager at Map My Customers, a startup company founded by W&M alum Matthew Sniff. The company creates geospatial-enabled software tools to help sales teams increase their lead generation, customer service and efficiency. Marcotullio’s time at the Miller Center prepared her well for a position that requires her to wear a lot of hats and adapt to constantly shifting challenges, she says.
“There’s no set formula in my work — no ‘just follow steps A to Z and you’ll get the right answer,’” says Marcotullio. “I don’t think I would have been OK with that reality if it wasn’t for my time at the Miller Center and learning how to be OK with trying new things and failing and figuring out how to do it better. So it’s been great for me.”
Creating customer value
For this reason, the startup concept remains front and center at the Miller Center, but it is simply a means to reach the important end of developing entrepreneurial thinkers. Henshaw adds, however, that “we are always more than happy to support any student venture that gets launched.”
The Miller Center hosts more than 100 programs, including “founder” talks by business owners and Entrepreneurship Week, an intensive program that coaches students on how to better develop ideas and pitches.
Henshaw hopes that the Miller Center’s more centralized and high-profile location will also help attract additional business partners. The center’s current partners include Ferguson Ventures, the Newport News-based innovation arm of plumbing supply giant Ferguson Enterprises. The company sponsors the center’s Friday Rocket Pitches competition and provides mentorship.
During the 2018-19 school year, the company held its first Ferguson Innovation Challenge, asking teams of students to chime in with a software solution that would help their plumbing and contractor clients run their businesses more efficiently.
Five teams, each made up of five students, pitched their ideas to a judging panel that included Ferguson Enterprises CEO Kevin Murphy and other executives.
“Their ideas were very creative, very well thought out, and their pitches were very crisp,” explains Blake Luse, director of Ferguson Ventures. “They came in with their ‘A’ game as if they were real startups pitching to a real group of potential investors.”
Four of those students were chosen for three-month internships at Ferguson Ventures.
The students, who came from diverse backgrounds and diverse majors, understood from the get-go that the process had to be focused on creating value for the customer, says Luse.
“Often, new workers want to focus on how to make money or creating a solution before they understand the problem,” Luse explains. “But the W&M students came in understanding that it’s all about the customer, so they were eager to talk to our customers and find out what they were struggling with in their business before they started putting new ideas down on paper. That’s the entrepreneurial approach, and these kids have it.”
This story has been corrected and updated from the version published in the October 2019 issue.
Heywood Fralin and his brother Horace grew up in Roanoke, but took divergent paths as young adults.
Horace attended Virginia Tech and became a businessman, taking over his father’s Roanoke-based construction business before starting his own company, Medical Facilities of America Inc. (MFA), a chain of nursing homes.
Heywood went to the University of Virginia and American University Law School and became an attorney.
One thing they did have in common, though, was a strong sense of community service — and a shared philanthropic philosophy.
Among many gifts, Horace and his wife, Ann, provided the major funding for the Fralin Life Science Institute at Virginia Tech. Heywood and his wife, Cynthia, in 2012 willed their collection of American art to the University of Virginia Art Museum, now called the Fralin Museum of Art.
When Horace died after a battle with cancer in 1993, Heywood returned to Roanoke, taking the helm of MFA and the Horace G. Fralin Charitable Trust. Under Heywood’s guidance, the trust has supported numerous projects and organizations in Roanoke, most notably the Taubman Museum of Art and Western Virginia Community College.
“My brother was very much focused on enabling change, gifts that would bring about major improvements in the lives of the citizens of the Roanoke Valley for generations to come,” says Heywood, 78. “I believe that also, and in my own charitable giving, I, too, try to make gifts that bring about meaningful structure or permanent change for the betterment of society — although personally, I have interests that are outside of Roanoke.”
The family’s shared ideals were evident in December when the Horace G. Fralin Charitable Trust and Heywood and Cynthia Fralin jointly donated $50 million to what is now the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC.
The donation, which is twice the size of the next largest gift ever received by Virginia Tech, will be used to hire and retain world-class teams of physician-scientists and researchers for the second research building currently under construction.
“What this money does is enable us to continue to be on the very front edge of biomedical research,” says Michael Friedlander, executive director of the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute. “When it comes to the next great idea and being able to innovate, having access to those funds will give us the flexibility and nimbleness our investigators need to move forward quickly. It has a tremendous multiplier effect.”
Institute expanding
Virginia Tech and Roanoke-based Carilion Clinic announced in 2007 that they would collaborate on the creation of a medical school and the biomedical research institute, which opened in 2010, as planned. The state provided $59 million to construct the building, and Virginia Tech and Carilion together put up $70 million, which, along with private capital, helped build out the labs and hire top researchers at the research institute and the staff needed to launch the medical school.
Over the next several years, Virginia Tech administrators and Friedlander, a leading neuroscientist who had built and led top 10 programs in brain research at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston before joining Virginia Tech, worked to make everyone within the business community aware of this new Virginia Tech Carilion partnership.
“It was very exciting, and everyone here in Roanoke knew it was a great opportunity, but I really didn’t know much about the operation itself,” Fralin recalls.
That changed a few years ago when Fralin asked Friedlander to speak at a Monday get-together of local business leaders. Fralin was impressed by the level of research being performed at the institute, the impact it was already having and its ambitious expansion plans. Construction of the second research building began in 2017 and is expected to open next year. The expansion will allow the institute to grow from 26 research teams to as many as 60 by 2027.
“In terms of a newly created research operation, it’s small, but it’s unparalleled in quality in terms of the people and the programs,” Fralin says. “Mike’s greatest need as the institute grows and expands is to maintain that quality, and that’s what our donation is intended to do. In order to maximize the economic impact of the Virginia Tech Carilion academic health center, it is essential to maintain that level of excellence that currently exists, and that takes a lot of money.”
The institute is focused primarily on three research areas: fundamental brain function in health and disease, including addiction and mental health; the healing of damaged hearts after heart attacks and preventing life-threatening arrhythmias; and malignant brain cancers, including those that are shared between humans and pets (including dogs, which allows the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine in Blacksburg to be involved).
The Fralin donation will enable the institute to expand its research efforts into complementary areas, such as obesity and diabetes, which are related to its specialized cardiovascular and brain research.
“This institute would still be successful if we hadn’t given them a dollar,” says Fralin, who has served on the board of visitors at both U.Va. and Virginia Tech. He also has been chairman of the Virginia Business Council and currently is chairman of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV). “But we do feel that this gift will increase the magnitude of their efforts and quicken their ability to grow and reach new levels of success.”
Friedlander, whom Fralin describes “as the best recruiter I’ve ever met,” has already brought in a number of senior world-famous researchers from leading universities.
Among them are Dr. Read Montague, a neuroscientist who invented a new field of medicine called computational psychiatry; Dr. Warren Bickel, who has pioneered the analysis of how the brain values the future to better diagnose and treat addiction; Dr. Rob Gourdie, who is studying molecules (called connexins) that enable direct communication between cardiac and other cells to develop new compounds to treat brain and heart disease and cancer and speed wound healing; and Dr. Sharon Ramey, who has developed intensive new treatments for rehabilitating the brains of children with cerebral palsy.
“Everything here is built around the quality of the programs and the quality of the people,” says Fralin.
As evidence, he points to the institute’s acceptance rate for grant applications to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the country’s largest source of medical research funding. While the average NIH acceptance rate for all research institutions is between 5 and 15 percent, the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute has averaged a cumulative 26 percent grant success rate since opening, with a 34 percent rate this year.
“That doesn’t happen unless you have researchers who are respected throughout the world,” Fralin says.
Widespread impact
The $50 million that Fralin donated to VTC is the largest gift that he’s ever made by himself or on behalf of the trust. He was willing to make such a large donation because of the major impact the institute will have on the Roanoke region. Already, the institute operates with a $130 million total active extramural grant portfolio and employs up to 500 people a year (including students) at an average annual salary of $93,000 for full-time employees.
“It’s not just the research, but it’s all the things from a business point of view that come with it: the commercialization of intellectual property, the spinoff companies that develop, the companies that will want to locate here, the development of a thriving ecosystem around the inventions that happen here,” says Fralin. “It brings an enormous growth potential and is something that should become the dominating factor of this community.”
He believes so much in the project that he and the trust may contribute more in the future. For now, though, he is focused on getting others to do their part. Since the Fralin gift was announced, the number of substantial private contributions has accelerated, according to Friedlander. Fralin routinely takes part in institute events, encouraging business leaders and others to contribute.
“I’m of the opinion that the more people who are involved and the more often they’re involved, the more successful this is going to be,” he states. “And in this case, that will be to the benefit of everyone — and in far greater ways than anything else that’s ever happened in this region.”
Anthony Nobles visited Liberty University for the first time in October to talk about a heart procedure involving one of his inventions.
Students at Liberty’s College of Osteopathic Medicine (LUCOM) listened as Nobles and Dr. Jim Thompson, a cardiac surgeon, described the procedure performed the previous summer at Inova Fairfax Hospital. The patient was a 56-year-old man with a congenital hole in his heart, a condition that could cause a major stroke or death.
Other, more invasive treatments were available, Nobles explained, but the medical team decided instead to use his relatively new NobleStitch — a mechanism that is remotely guided through the vascular system to the heart to sew the hole shut. The invention has been used successfully in the U.S. 130 times without any complications.
At the end of their presentation, Nobles and Thompson revealed the identity of their patient — Liberty President Jerry Falwell Jr. Students gasped and applauded as Falwell appeared on stage, expressing his gratitude to Nobles and Thompson.
Taking the microphone, Falwell encouraged students to take inspiration from Nobles’ invention. If you have an idea, “don’t just dismiss it — try it,” he said. “That’s what has made modern medicine the way it is today, all these brilliant people willing to test ideas out. [They’re] entrepreneurs really.”
Center leader
Nobles, the CEO of HeartStitch Inc. and Nobles Medical Technologies, is coming back to Liberty in 2019 — this time to stay.
The inventor will lead Liberty’s Center for Entrepreneurship, helping it promote an entrepreneurial spirit among students.
“What we really want to do is to teach students how to think like entrepreneurs,” Falwell explains. “Not just to go out and get a job and wait for the end of the week when they get their paycheck, but to really look for ways to add value, to have ideas and pursue them, to take risks, to problem-solve and innovate, to not be afraid to try and fail and try again, because that’s how this school was built — on entrepreneurialism.”
Nobles, who has lectured at many schools, had been looking for a permanent university position. Liberty, he explains, is a perfect fit because it operates more like a startup than an educational institution.
He was impressed with Liberty’s willingness to take risks on innovative ideas during its 47-year history. Today, it is Virginia’s largest university in terms of total enrollment, with 103,388 students (15,105 residential and 88,283 online). Liberty also has more than $3 billion in gross assets, including nearly $1.7 billion in cash reserves.
“I just believe in what they’re doing there. I have a lot to give and I needed a home to do it — and I think Liberty’s that place,” Nobles says.
In addition to teaching and leading the Center for Entrepreneurship, Nobles plans to create a think tank of professors and consultants. It will review students’ business ideas, providing them with advice and resources to launch companies.
Nobles eventually plans to create a HeartStitch research subsidiary, housing it at LUTECH, Liberty’s 28-acre technology park site in Bedford County.
Engineering dean
In another key hire, Mark Horstemeyer has been named dean of Liberty’s engineering school.
Horstemeyer, also an entrepreneur, was a professor at Mississippi State University where he led its Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems. He plans to take Liberty’s engineering school — which has about 700 students — in a new direction, emphasizing research on integrated computational materials engineering.
“The heart of what we’ll be doing is multi-scale modeling and optimization, which means we’ll use high-performance computing and other precise tools to go through and simulate, calibrate, validate and optimize the chemistry, process, material structure and property performance of something, whether it’s a building for civil engineering, a semiconductor for electrical engineering or a car component for mechanical engineering,” he explains.
Liberty plans to break ground on a new engineering school building in 2020 and invest in a $1 million supercomputer.
In the meantime, Horstemeyer is recruiting faculty and doctoral students, with a goal of helping Liberty climb into the top 80 list of engineering schools in eight years and the top 50 five years after that.
The dean is the founder of two startups: Predictive Design Technologies, which performs modeling, simulation and failure analysis of metals and metal structural compounds, and Yobel Technologies, which has a grant from the National Football League to build a better helmet for players. Both companies are likely to be housed at LUTECH.
“Engineers, as a rule, tend to be risk-averse. I know because I was that way for a long time,” Horstemeyer explains. “But we’d like to inspire our engineering students to really weigh out those risks against the benefits that can be gained by thinking creatively within all of the engineering processes. And I think if we do that, there will be a real paradigm shift in the kind of ecosystem we can create.”
The next wave
While these programs take shape, Liberty is wrapping up a $500 million rebuilding project kicked off in 2011, which has reshaped its campus.
The school’s architectural centerpiece is the 17-story Freedom Tower, home of the Rawls School of Divinity, which opened in 2018.
Soon to be completed is a new 78,000-square-foot building for the school of business. During the 2017-18 school year, 23,644 students were enrolled in the school’s 25 degree programs, including business administration, marketing analytics, information systems, health-care management and health-care informatics.
Liberty has kicked off a nationwide search for a new business school dean with both academic and entrepreneurial credentials.
“We are finally starting to slow down on the growing,” Falwell says. “Now we can really focus on strengthening our academics and hiring the deans and building the programs and policies and partnerships that can help us do that.”
Liberty Provost Scott Hicks says all academic programs, not just those in the business school, will teach entrepreneurial basics and offer coursework aligned with fast-changing industry demands. “Our goal is to make our students highly employable, so that they hit the market at a fast trot rather than a crawl,” he says.
For example, Liberty offers six degrees in cybersecurity. “The cyber field has matured to the point where there are different types of cyber jobs,” such as compliance, technology and secure coding, says Allen Harper, executive director of Liberty’s Center for Cyber Excellence. “So we don’t approach it like it’s a one-size-fits-all market.”
Currently, 1,250 Liberty students are studying cyber programs, which are housed in the school of business.
The school’s largest cyber program, a a bachelor’s degree track in IT with data networking and security, was recently named a National Center for Academic
Excellence in Cyber Defense Education by the National Security Administration, the most rigorous and elite credential for this field.
Staying in the know
To strengthen its business relationships, Liberty last summer opened the Office of Outreach and Business Engagement. “We are sort of a front door for companies who need their questions answered or need to be connected to the right resources and don’t really know where to start,” says Jonathan Witt, a university vice president who is in charge of the office.
Liberty is growing its sponsored programs with industry and is in the process of rewriting its intellectual property policy. “Our IP policy is very entrepreneur- and company-friendly and something that’s a game-changer for how we engage with companies,” Whitt explains. “This will only add to our reputation as an entrepreneurial university that’s marketplace-focused.”
Liberty already has developed a number of partnerships with hundreds of companies. For example, the university asked Hendrick Automotive Group to help it develop an automotive dealership management program.
The Center for Entrepreneurship, meanwhile, is giving students a chance to talk with local CEOs with a weekly event, “Meet Up! Start Up!”
The center also offers an eight-week incubator program pairing students with mentors. They help students research the market and create business plans. Each semester, students can pitch their business ideas, earning prize money as part of the school’s “Spark! Tank” competition.
JT Bicket, a 20-year-old finance major, worked with Michael Mullins, founder and CEO of Specialty Communications Inc., to flesh out an idea for a digital strategy company.
“One of the biggest things I learned from him was how to recognize pain points and find a way to create more value for my customers,” the student says.
While Bicket didn’t win the Spark! Tank competition, he already has started a business. His company, Elevate Marketing, provides web design for a number of cybersecurity firms — even as the Liberty sophomore continues to pursue his degree.
When it traveled to Texas in September to face the Baylor University Bears, Liberty University’s football team was a 34-point underdog.
Baylor has long played at the highest level of college sports, making an appearance in the Cotton Bowl in 2015. The Liberty Flames, by contrast, have been longtime members of the NCAA’s Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) where it plays opponents such as Charleston Southern, Gardner-Webb and Kennesaw State.
That backstory, however, didn’t stop the Flames from winning, 48-45. The upset is just one sign that Liberty believes it is ready to compete on the nation’s biggest stage.
“It was a big moment to realize that we can compete and win against an opponent of Baylor’s caliber because those are the types of teams that we’re going to be playing beginning next year,” says Ian McCaw, Baylor’s former athletic director who joined Liberty in the same position last year.
Liberty has been preparing to take on the likes of Baylor for some time. During the past decade, the university has been taking steps to move up to the elite Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), where teams like Alabama and Virginia Tech play before national television audiences.
While waiting for NCAA approval, Liberty has moved forward as if FBS membership was inevitable. In 2011, the school hired head coach Turner Gill, who previously led the Kansas Jayhawks, a member of the Big 12 Conference,
Since 2007, Liberty also has spent more than $200 million building and upgrading all of its athletic facilities, including a $29 million indoor football practice field and the 60,000-square-foot Liberty Athletics Center. Plans are gearing up to expand Williams Stadium from 19,200 seats to 25,000, while also adding new video boards, more restrooms, concession areas and better Wi-Fi for fans.
“Football is really the economic engine of an athletic program and such a big part of establishing a university’s brand,” McCaw says. “And being an FBS team just really elevates the profile of the football team, but also the entire university because it just makes us so much more visible in terms of national exposure.”
In February, NCAA finally granted Liberty’s request to compete as an FBS team, despite the fact that it has no conference affiliation at that level. The team will play its first full season as an FBS independent in 2019.
“This was not a new ambition for us,” says Jerry Falwell Jr., Liberty’s president who is the son of its founder, the late Jerry Falwell Sr. “It was all intended from the beginning. My father had a vision to build a world-class Christian university that provided Christian students with the full range of experiences that any other major university provides, including a football team and other sports teams that can compete at the highest levels.”
Rebel with a cause
In many areas Liberty is pushing the envelope and gaining a higher visibility.
“We just don’t think that we need to do things the same way other academic institutions do them just because that’s the way they’ve always done them,” says Falwell. “We’re willing to think outside of the box and take risks.”
For example, Liberty has been the primary sponsor of NASCAR driver William Byron, a Liberty student, since his career started in 2014. Byron, the top driver in the 2017 Xfinity Series, was recently selected by Hendrick Motorsports to drive the No. 24 car in the elite Monster Energy Cup series. The 20-year-old sophomore will make his debut at the Daytona 500 in February.
Liberty will continue to be his primary sponsor through at least 2019.
Meanwhile, Liberty’s Cinematic Arts Department showed its film “Extraordinary” during a one-night event in September at more than 400 theaters across the country. More than 60 Liberty students worked on the one-hour-and-40-minute film, which tells the story of Liberty professor David Horton, an ultra-marathon runner.
“It’s the first time in cinema history that a film school or department has ever had a nationwide theatrical release,” says Stephan Schultze, Liberty’s executive director of cinematic arts.
“Extraordinary” is the fourth feature film Liberty has produced. The university’s ambition is to build a department that can compete with more well-established film schools, such as Columbia University, New York University and the University of Southern California.
“It usually takes 20 to 30 years to build a program where you’re actually doing movies and getting them seen,” Schultze says, noting that the school sought support and financial help from industry players like Working Title Agency, Fathom Events and Sony Provident. “Now, we’re looking to expand into a television series so our students can graduate into a job.”
This type of exposure is reaping benefits for Liberty. Its residential student enrollment hit a record high this fall, with 15,566 students, a 2 percent increase over 2016 numbers. Liberty’s online program is growing at a rate of 10 percent a year, with 85,000 to 88,000 students expected to take courses in 2017-18.
In moving to the FBS, Liberty also will be able to increase the number of football scholarships it offers from 63 to 85. “It’s opened us up to a whole new pool of student athletes,” says McCaw. “We already have some commitments from a number of top prospects who have multiple FBS offers, so it’s really made a dramatic change in our recruiting process and we’ve just gotten started.”
Student quality is also rising. According to Schultze, one in six Liberty film students has a 4.0 grade point average and 65 percent have a GPA of 3.5 or higher. This year’s incoming freshman class had an average GPA of 3.5 and scored an average of 1079 on the SAT, the highest ever for the school. Liberty’s College of Osteopathic Medicine received 4,000 applications this fall for 160 slots.
Taking on controversy
Liberty attracts attention by being willing to take a stand on sometimes white-hot national issues. That poses risks, Falwell admits.
“We know it makes us a bit of a target, but we’re just going to keep moving forward pursuing our vision and our plans, and we’re not afraid to stand up for what we believe in,” he says.
In the midst of an ongoing national argument about gun control, Liberty is set to open a $1 million outdoor gun range, the first part of a multiphase project that will also include several other shooting venues.
Liberty already allows licensed students and faculty to carry concealed weapons on campus. More than 3,000 students have completed a free university-provided firearms safety class during the past 24 months.
Not surprisingly, news of the new 60-acre shooting center prompted headlines in a number of national publications, including The Washington Post and the New York Daily News, although about 30 colleges also have on-campus gun ranges.
“The majority of our students are pro-Second Amendment, and they have told us for a long time that they want to participate in this kind of activity,” says Brad Butler, Liberty’s planning coordinator who notes students must complete the firearms safety class before using the shooting range. “We’re providing a safe and convenient venue for them to come out and shoot shotguns, pistols, rifles, three-gun competition, skeet, archery, paintball, a whole myriad of activities.”
Liberty expects to eventually have venues for all Olympic shooting sports, a move that prompted a junior national champion skeet shooter from South Africa to enroll at Liberty.
Liberty also has launched the Center for Law and Government, a public policy program with a strong focus on self-government, free markets and the rule of law.
“We think we have a unique opportunity here to hold thoughtful and courteous debate and serious academic study on these issues and to hear different points of view from high-profile guests,” says Robert Hurt, a former congressman from Virginia’s 5th District, who is the center’s executive director.
Last spring, the center hosted Constitution Week, bringing in federal judges; representatives from the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations; and several U.S. lawmakers, including Rep. Trey Gowdy and Sen. Tim Scott, both Republicans from South Carolina. In addition, students have taken several trips to Washington, meeting with, among others, Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia.
Falwell’s staunch support for President Trump occasionally has drawn criticism from some Liberty students and alumni. Falwell defended the president when he came under fire for blaming “both sides” for the violence that occurred at an August alt-right rally in Charlottesville. In protest, a small group of alumni began a campaign urging fellow graduates to return their Liberty diplomas.
In a statement, Liberty University said it “strongly supports our students’ right to express their own political opinions, including any opposition they have to their school leader’s relationship with this president of the U.S., just as other students may have opposed leadership of liberal institutions supporting previous presidents.”
Living out faith
Organizations that get bigger and more nationally prominent run the risk of losing touch with their core mission, but Liberty officials say they are taking steps to ensure that it remains a faith-based school.
“I like to say that Liberty is conservative with a small ‘c,’ but we are Christian with a capital ‘C,’” says Falwell. “We’re not looking for students who feel entitled to the best that life has to offer, but students who are looking to be equipped with what they need to go out and serve others as Christ calls us to do and to give their very best in their chosen field.”
The school began an initiative this fall called “We the Champions.” The project gives students, faculty, staff and alumni the opportunity to share their experience at the university.
“As we have found ourselves more on the national stage, we realized that we’re at a pivotal moment where we have a chance to really define and show exactly who we are and not let other people do it for us,” says Kristin Conrad, Liberty’s vice president of communications and marketing.
“A champion isn’t just someone who succeeds in business or who wins on the field, it’s someone who lives out their faith by showing the Fruits of the Spirit — kindness, joy, peace, patience, charity, faithfulness — in everything that they do,” Conrad explains. “And so we wanted to ask: What does that look like in 2017?”
Stories told include a Liberty student who collected 22,000 shoes and sent them to his home country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and a 2010 Liberty graduate who has built an international ministry to combat human trafficking.
Students and staff provide more than 500,000 hours of volunteer service each year locally, nationally and internationally, says David Nasser, Liberty’s senior vicepresident of spiritual development.
And it’s not always labor and time. “We help in whatever way is needed,” Nasser explains. For example, the school took up a collection to help pay the medical and funeral costs of the victims of the Las Vegas mass shooting and ran a local blood drive for the victims of the Orlando Pulse nightclub attack last year. “I think that definitely draws a certain type of student who wants to make a difference because that is what we are really known for,” he says.
Last year, Liberty started its Send Now program, which trains student volunteers to help with disaster relief and other emergencies. Already, 1,900 Liberty students have registered to be part of the program.
This fall, numerous groups of Liberty students were sent to help in areas affected by Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma, Hurricane Jose, the Mexican earthquake and the California wildfires.
Falwell notes that none of Liberty’s initiatives are pursued in a vacuum, including the effort to play at the highest level of college football. The end goal is still to train champions for Christianity.
“Football is not our mission, of course, but it shines a light on our mission like nothing else ever can,” he explains.
“Athletics is a way to promote your brand, it’s the easiest way to make your school known to the public and let parents and students know what Liberty has available for them. With academics, it takes generations to develop a reputation that’s well known and well-regarded, but with sports, you can do it relatively quickly. And that’s what we’re hoping to do.”
Liberty University at a glance
Location: Lynchburg Founded: 1971 Campus: More than 7,000 acres, Over 6.6 million square feet of building space, 385 buildings and structures, 215 classrooms
Enrollment Total enrollment: more than 110,000 Military students: more than 30,000 International students: more than 900
Tuition, fees, housing and dining
$33,100 approximate annual undergraduate resident cost including tuition, mandatory fees, housing, and a meal plan (can be as high as $34,690 depending on the housing type and meal plan chosen)
95 percent of Liberty students receive some form of financial aid
In 1977, community banks were numerous across Virginia, but all of them were small, thanks to a state law then in effect that restricted their ability to expand beyond their local service areas.
In response, a group of community bank leaders decided to create the Virginia Association of Community Banks (VACB), providing its members with “a common voice against harmful regulation, an avenue to collaborate for efficiencies and an opportunity to network,” says Alice Frazier, who recently finished her term as VACB chairwoman.
This year, the VACB is celebrating its 40th anniversary, and community bankers say that its advocacy work in Richmond and Washington, D.C., is as critical as ever.
“The VACB has been and continues to be extremely helpful to us,” says Susan K. Still, president and CEO of HomeTown Bank, a community bank opened in 2005 that now has six branches in Roanoke, Salem, Smith Mountain Lake and the New River Valley.
“They are really great at staying a step or two ahead on important topics and giving us information that is pertinent to what we might need on a day-to-day basis or for future business decisions. It frees up more of our time to focus on our customers,” she says.
Small banks now bigger
Virginia community banks have evolved quite a bit during the past four decades. That period saw a legislative loosening of restrictions on the size and geographic range that community banks could attain, along with two major real-estate bubbles that significantly altered the competitive and regulatory landscape.
Today, there are fewer community banks in Virginia, just 73, and they have gotten much bigger, a reflection of the consolidation trend that took hold in the aftermath of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, which added a mass of new regulatory requirements to all banks, regardless of size.
“Every community bank, for the most part, is getting bigger, and most of them recognize the need to get bigger in order to absorb these regulatory costs that everybody is suffering with,” says G. Robert Aston Jr., chairman and CEO of Hampton Roads-based TowneBank.
Aston’s bank expanded into the Richmond market in 2015 with its acquisition of Franklin Federal Savings Bank and this year announced a new merger with Paragon Bank, a $1.5 billion institution with three branches in North Carolina. When the merger is completed in January, TowneBank will have total assets of nearly $10 billion.
“We are centered around business lending and private banking, and so for us, any expansion needed to be into a somewhat larger metro market like Richmond and Raleigh rather than some of the other smaller communities in Virginia,” explains Aston, who adds that the overall expansion will allow TowneBank to grow at an annual rate of at least 8 percent. “That is very manageable but still gets us the returns that we need to have the right performance in our stock price.”
Crossing a threshold
Meanwhile, Union Bank & Trust, a once-tiny bank founded in Bowling Green in 1902, will soon be so big that it will cross the $10 billion threshold that technically differentiates a community bank from a regional bank. Its $701.2 million acquisition of Richmond-based Xenith Bankshares, scheduled to be completed in January, will take Union assets to more than $12 billion. That asset total will subject the bank to additional Dodd- Frank regulations, including the Durbin Amendment, which imposes a price cap on debit-card interchange fees and a more extensive stress test.
The deal, however, also will make Union Bank the first statewide independent Virginia bank since the 1990s, when major regional banks, such as Crestar, Sovran and Central Fidelity were sold. Once the deal is completed, Union Bank will have 111 branches in Virginia and North Carolina and 1,400 employees.
“We now have the scale and the technology capacity to serve most of the commonwealth’s population and the resources to meet the needs of small to midsize businesses around the state, and that makes us the clear alternative for those folks who would otherwise go to the large national and superregional banks,” says CEO John Asbury.
Asbury, a native Virginian and longtime banker, took over the reins at Union earlier this year after his most recent post running a $2 billion community bank in New Mexico. “With community banks come significant limitations on resources, on the ability to invest in technology, including cybersecurity, on the ability to attract talent, on the capital required to meet the needs of larger businesses,” he says. “The banking environment is a challenging place to be right now, and you don’t want to be too small.”
That was also the conclusion of the leadership of Richmond-based Eastern Virginia Bank (EVB), a Richmond-based bank, and Southern National Bank (Sonabank), based in McLean. Earlier this year, the two banks conducted a merger of equals. The new Richmond-based entity, known as Sonabank, has 44 branches in Northern and Central Virginia and Southern Maryland and $2.6 billion in assets.
“Both of us were making good money, but at the end of the day, we didn’t see how we could get that next jump up in profitability by staying the same,” says Joe Shearin, who headed EVB and now is president and CEO of Sonabank. “So what we’ve done is taken the best of both banks, put it all together to get more efficient, to add value to our shareholders and to have even better products and services. Ultimately, we felt that we would be better together than we could be independently.”
HomeTown Bank has also grown significantly over its 12-year lifetime, but all of that growth has been organic. CEO Susan Still says that the bank’s smaller $550 million size has not been an issue. “I’m a big believer that you need to have banks of all sizes, and we’ve positioned ourselves as a smaller, boutique type of bank that is a nice alternative to the larger banks, and fortunately, there are plenty of customers that are looking for that type of alternative,” she explains.
Keeping a local feel
No matter how much community banks have grown, they’re all working hard to hang onto their high-touch, local orientation. In fact, it’s a top priority. “It still all comes down to local decision-making, responsiveness and flexibility,” says Asbury. “No one calls me from Charlotte or Atlanta and tells me what Union branches can and cannot do. We still pride ourselves on local knowledge and local connections. And I don’t ever want to lose that — no matter how big we get.”
Ironically, the Great Recession helped customers gain a greater awareness of and appreciation for community banks — and that’s allowing for new opportunities across all areas of the state.
“It kind of caused a renaissance for community banks, because all the media attention on banks helped people realize, ‘Hey, big banks are fine, but they’re not the only choice out there, and I kind of like the more personal touch,’” says Still.
Aston agrees. “There’s always going to be in my view the need for personal interaction and a relationship business in banking and that’s something that community banks will always be able to outperform their larger bank brothers on,” he says. “That’s not going away, even with all the technology that’s out there.”
In fact, as many superregional banks, including BB&T, are announcing branch closures to adjust to the fact that a growing numbers of their customers prefer to use digital platforms, community banks are going to be there to pick up the slack for those customers who still prefer a branch experience, especially in small towns, according to Steven Yeakel, VACB’s president and CEO.
“Community banks in large part are staying very well grounded within their communities,” he says. “We don’t see lots of moves out of local economies.”
For all of the challenges community banks are facing, most community bankers are optimistic about the future. VACB officials are hopeful that Congress will ease some of the regulatory burden on community banks, potentially by the end of the year. There is currently omnibus legislation pending in both the House and Senate to ease Qualified Mortgage (QM) lending rules for community banks; a new bipartisan bill introduced in June would raise the classification of community banks from $10 billion to $50 billion, which would give community banks more room to grow without changing the dynamics of how they’re viewed.
“Community banks are not going away,” says Aston. “In fact, it wouldn’t shock me to see another spurt of growth in new community bank startups over the next five years, after seeing virtually none over the past 10 years.”
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“If those estimates are even marginally correct, then the ability to adapt to changing technology, changing workplaces, changing practices, is going to be one of the most important success factors for any professional,” Rowe states. “So that’s what we want to be practicing here.”
“This will significantly increase our reach and impact,” says Graham Henshaw, executive director of the Miller Center. “We’re intentionally designing the space to create collisions between entrepreneurs in the community and the students.”
The school’s architectural centerpiece is the 17-story Freedom Tower, home of the Rawls School of Divinity, which opened in 2018.
year, 23,644 students were enrolled in the school’s 25 degree programs, including business administration, marketing analytics, information systems, health-care management and health-care informatics.
“This was not a new ambition for us,” says Jerry Falwell Jr., Liberty’s president who is the son of its founder, the late Jerry Falwell Sr. “It was all intended from the beginning. My father had a vision to build a world-class Christian university that provided Christian students with the full range of experiences that any other major university provides, including a football team and other sports teams that can compete at the highest levels.”
And it’s not always labor and time. “We help in whatever way is needed,” Nasser explains. For example, the school took up a collection to help pay the medical and funeral costs of the victims of the Las Vegas mass shooting and ran a local blood drive for the victims of the Orlando Pulse nightclub attack last year. “I think that definitely draws a certain type of student who wants to make a difference because that is what we are really known for,” he says.
In response, a group of community bank leaders decided to create the Virginia Association of Community Banks (VACB), providing its members with “a common voice against harmful regulation, an avenue to collaborate for efficiencies and an opportunity to network,” says Alice Frazier, who recently finished her term as VACB chairwoman.
“The VACB has been and continues to be extremely helpful to us,” says Susan K. Still, president and CEO of HomeTown Bank, a community bank opened in 2005 that now has six branches in Roanoke, Salem, Smith Mountain Lake and the New River Valley.
“Every community bank, for the most part, is getting bigger, and most of them recognize the need to get bigger in order to absorb these regulatory costs that everybody is suffering with,” says G. Robert Aston Jr., chairman and CEO of Hampton Roads-based TowneBank.
“We now have the scale and the technology capacity to serve most of the commonwealth’s population and the resources to meet the needs of small to midsize businesses around the state, and that makes us the clear alternative for those folks who would otherwise go to the large national and superregional banks,” says CEO John Asbury.
“Both of us were making good money, but at the end of the day, we didn’t see how we could get that next jump up in profitability by staying the same,” says Joe Shearin, who headed EVB and now is president and CEO of Sonabank. “So what we’ve done is taken the best of both banks, put it all together to get more efficient, to add value to our shareholders and to have even better products and services. Ultimately, we felt that we would be better together than we could be independently.”