Despite the big hoo-ha from students when President John Casteen gave fundraiser extraordinaire Bob Sweeney a spot on the Lawn, the pavilions still serve as an all-star gallery for UVA professors.
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But just who are these powerful few? The list includes a well-known talking head, an endowment head and a handful of deans. All pavilion occupants have one thing in common: free landscaping services.
Pavilion I
David Breneman: This former dean of the Curry School of Education now oversees the planning and implementation of the new Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. He specializes in areas of finance and economics of higher education. So the man knows his way around an endowment portfolio.
Pavilion II
Jeanette Lancaster: Lancaster runs the School of Nursing—at least for a little while longer—and she’s also president of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. It might be assumed she is the Lawns’s go-to person in case someone needs CPR.
Pavilion III
Robert Pianta: He’s the dean of the Curry School, as well as the director of the Center of Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning. So surely the students living on the Lawn don’t have a problem with Pianta. Plus, in 2006, he bagged a $10 million grant for the Curry School to study preschool education.
Pavilion IV
Larry Sabato: If CNN is dialing a pavilion number, chances are it’s Sabato’s phone that’s ringing. A former Rhodes Scholar and ubiquitous political commentator, Sabato is also the founder and director of the Center for Politics. No word, though, on whether he handicaps the Student Senate races.
Pavilion V
Patricia Lampkin: What doesn’t Lampkin do? She oversees the Office of African-American Affairs, the Office of the Dean of Students, the Department of Student Health and on and on. She also boasts a doctorate from UVA.
Pavilion VI
Robert Sweeney: Mr. Big Money scored himself a spot on the Lawn in 2007. In protest of giving a fundraiser that spot, students tacked up “For Sale” signs on their Lawn doors. Apparently, $3 billion is considered a good offer.
Pavilion VII Upper Apartment
Sarah E. Turner: A professor of education and economics, she also co-edited the forthcoming book, Earnings From Learning: The Rise of For-Profit Universities, with Breneman and Brian Pusser. Maybe they talked to Sweeney while researching?
Pavilion VII Terrace Apartment
Gladys Saunders: Students interested in Gallo-Italian dialectology, French phonetics, phonological variation, historical linguistics and French sociolinguistics drop by this Francophone professor’s abode all the time, we imagine.
Pavilion IX
Karen Van Lengen: Few can appreciate the pavilions’ beauty more than Van Lengen, the dean of the Architecture School. Though it would be interesting to pop in and ask her where TJ went wrong.
Pavilion X
Carl Zeithaml: If anyone is likely to open up a pavilion bodega, selling all the items students may need (and sandwiches!), it would be Zeithaml, the dean of the McIntire School of Commerce. Maybe he could even put a Corner CVS out of business.
Montebello
James Aylor: Mr. UVA triple-threat himself, Aylor earned his bachelor’s, masters’s and doctoral degrees from UVA. The School of Engineering and Applied Science dean probably knows all the secret passageways on campus, too.
Additional reporting by Serene Aandahl