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Alum Honors Friend’s Supportive Spirit with Scholarship and Bench

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John Anstey ’93 remembers meeting Carl “Coby” B. Frye ’93 on the first day of their freshman year at Mary Washington.

“His infectious laugh and broad smile immediately put me at ease,” John says. The pair, who lived a few doors down from each other in Westmoreland Hall and later roomed together, became inseparable. “And that friendship carried us through our time at Mary Washington and into adulthood.”

After Coby died unexpectedly in spring of 2019, John decided to channel his grief into something meaningful. He and his wife, Kara Lee Matala ’94, established the endowed Carl B. Frye Jr. ’93 Scholarship for University of Mary Washington students who embody Coby’s positive, “can-do” attitude. In addition, the couple raised funds, along with six of their classmates, to memorialize their friend by naming a bench for him on Campus Walk, a place where they made so many memories together as students.

Class of 1993 alums and friends of Coby Frye, who helped fund the bench. From left to right: Patrick Fines, Warren Fischi, John Cheatham, Keith Park and John Anstey. Photo courtesy of John Anstey.
Coby’s sons, Boice and Cole, unveil the memorial bench outside of George Washington Hall at the dedication ceremony at UMW on Sept. 19, 2021. Photo courtesy of John Anstey.
Coby’s sons, Boice and Cole, sitting on their dad’s bench after the dedication ceremony last fall. Photo courtesy of John Anstey.

“Coby had a big personality, and that’s what everyone loved about him,” says John, recalling that his friend “was the only person besides my dad who called me ‘Big John,’ another thing that drew me to him.”

At Mary Washington, the friends grew close, bench sitting, watching movies in Dodd Auditorium, double dating in downtown Fredericksburg and tubing on the Rappahannock. They experienced many college firsts together – parties, exams, broken hearts, job offers – and supported each other through it all.

Coby encouraged John to run for Honor Council president, which he won. John, an English major, edited and proofread Coby’s business term papers, once pulling an all-nighter to help him with a challenging assignment.

Then, there was the time that Coby was cut from the Mary Washington baseball team. In his remarks at the bench dedication last September, John shared how Coby returned to their room with a frown on his face, dragging his blue equipment bag behind him.

“But, in classic Coby fashion, he didn’t stay down for long,” John says. Coby picked up a lacrosse stick, taught himself a new sport, and became a star player on the team. “If there was an obstacle, he’d always find his way around it.”

Coby Frye’s Mary Washington friends and their spouses at his celebration of life ceremony in Richmond in April 2019. Photo courtesy of John Anstey.
From left to right: 1993 alums Warren Fischi, John Anstey, Coby Frye and Patrick Fines return to Mary Washington for Reunion Weekend in fall of 1993. Photo courtesy of John Anstey.
From left to right: John Anstey, Coby Frye and Keith Park inside Jefferson Hall before their senior formal in 1993. Photo courtesy of John Anstey.

After graduation, the friends moved far apart but continued to cheer each other on through all of life’s milestones: graduate school, weddings, promotions, business ventures and the births of their children. When John’s father was diagnosed with dementia, Coby frequently checked in. And Coby, the eldest of four children, even helped put two of his younger siblings through Mary Washington. “That’s just the kind of person he was,” John says.

So, when John and Kara learned that Coby had passed away, they wanted a way to celebrate the life of someone who was always there for those he loved.

“Setting up the scholarship at Mary Washington gave us a chance to reflect on all of Coby’s wonderful qualities and helped us in the healing process,” Kara says. “This has been a great way to remember him and benefit future UMW students.”

As for John, he hopes the scholarship’s recipients will be inspired by Coby’s supportive spirit.

“Our ultimate goal is to move his legacy forward here at Mary Washington,” he says. “It’s the kind of place that fosters friendships like ours.”

For information about naming opportunities at the University of Mary Washington, please contact the Office of University Advancement at advance@umw.edu or 540-654-1024.

– Article written by Assistant Director of Advancement Communications Jill Graziano Laiacona ’04

Recognizing Faculty Impact

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Award named for former biology professor continues to promote excellence.

Prior to this year’s commencement, the Class of 2021 chose Associate Professor of Marketing Kashef Majid as the 23rd recipient of the Mary W. Pinschmidt Teaching Award. “It was totally unexpected, ” says Majid. “It’s an individual award, but I think there’s really so much more. Your work in the classroom is a reflection of so many other people. It really is a team effort—it’s not that I hold something magical.”

Associate Professor Kashef Majid is the recipient of the 2021 Mary W. Pinschmidt Teaching Award.

Majid might not hold a magical power, but his commitment to students during a pandemic year makes him stand out as a dedicated professor – just like Dr. Pinschmidt.

Named in memory of a beloved and longtime biology professor, the Mary W. Pinschmidt Teaching Award was established to annually recognize one faculty member selected by graduating seniors to have had the greatest impact on their lives. The late Mary Pinschmidt was one such exemplary professor.

Posthumously promoted to Distinguished Professor of Biology, Pinschmidt was committed to her students. She was heavily involved in Chi Beta Phi, pioneered several graduate and continuing education programs, and worked for many years on the HIV-AIDS Education Committee. In 1982, she became the eleventh recipient of the Grellet C. Simpson Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the highest faculty award at Mary Washington.

Dr. Mary Pinschmidt taught biology at Mary Washington for 37 years.

Pinschmidt also helped restructure Mary Washington’s general education program, including more core learning experiences for students of all levels. She even taught a class two days before her sudden illness and unexpected death in 1998. Perhaps most importantly, she left an enduring impact on the faculty and students who knew her.

Students quoted in the December 3, 1998, issue of The Bullet fondly remembered Pinschmidt as a “friendly, kind professor who was always there to help and never in a bad mood.” Her colleague at the time, Professor of Psychology Roy Smith, remembered her as “a wonderful presence in the classroom. She was an ultimate teacher. That’s who she was.”

Pinschmidt taught at Mary Washington for 37 years, often serving in high-level administrative roles. Her husband, Bill Pinschmidt, also taught biology at Mary Washington. Immediately following her death, those who knew her were determined to keep Mary Pinschmidt’s legacy alive by making gifts in her memory. Ultimately, those memorial gifts from caring family, friends, faculty, staff, and students helped create the teaching award that bears her name.

Professor Farnsworth (left) received the first Mary W. Pinschmidt Award in 1999 at Mary Washington’s commencement.

In 1999, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs Stephen Farnsworth was selected as the award’s first recipient.

“I’m one of the dwindling number of faculty members whose time at Mary Washington overlaps with Dr. Pinschmidt,” says Farnsworth. “I was honored to receive the award because she was an extraordinary faculty member, so committed to student excellence. It’s a wonderful tribute to her that this award exists. It’s great that it keeps her memory alive in a generation of students who now weren’t even born when she taught here.”

While today’s UMW students do not have the opportunity to learn from Pinschmidt, they continue to benefit from her legacy through lectures inside the Mary W. Pinschmidt Lecture Hall in Jepson Science Center and through the faculty who continue to share her commitment to student excellence.

For information about making a gift to support students and faculty, visit giving.umw.edu or contact the Office of Advancement at advance.umw.edu.

Article written by Advancement Intern Tabitha Robinson ’24

Recognizing Excellence

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Privately funded award goes to Professor Mara Scanlon.

What began with a gift from an anonymous donor has now become reality with the naming of the first recipient of the Donald E. Glover Faculty Award. The award criteria specify the recipient be a full Professor of English who has demonstrated dedication and excellence in teaching, energizes and inspires their students, and encourages creative thinking. The 2021-2023 recipient of the monetary award is Mara Scanlon, professor of English and associate director of the UMW Honors Program.

Dr. Mara Scanlon is the first recipient of the Donald E. Glover Faculty Award

“Mara has been an excellent teacher, and she is a leader in integrating digital technology into the classroom, while offering thoughtful, exciting courses,” says Dr. Gary Richards, professor and chair of the Department of English and Linguistics. “Her classes are consistently student-centered, and she is unfailing in her attention to promoting students’ learning. Additionally, her annual teaching evaluations have been consistently glowing for years, and she is one of the most beloved instructors at UMW.”

A member of the UMW faculty since 1999, Scanlon currently is a full professor of English, as well as an affiliated faculty member of the interdisciplinary programs in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; American Studies; and Asian Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in twentieth-century literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she wrote the dissertation “Novelty in Verse: Bakhtin and the Multivocal Epics of Pound, H. D., and Walcott.”

Her areas of academic expertise include: twentieth-century literature, especially Modernism; poetry (epic, lyric, long poem); ethics and literature; women’s literature and gender theory; literature of the First World War; periodical studies; Asian American literature; and genre studies.

Among Scanlon’s many awards are the 2014 Grellet C. Simpson Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Mary Washington and a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Grant for “Looking for Whitman: The Poetry of Place in the Life and Work of Walt Whitman,” a 2008-2010 multi-university collaborative teaching project.

Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English Donald E. Glover taught at UMW for 37 years

An anonymous donor from the Class of 1971 endowed this award to recognize the inspirational teaching of her favorite professor and the impact it had – not only on how to approach reading literature – but also on how to apply analytical thinking skills to everyday life. Donald E. Glover began teaching English at Mary Washington in 1961 and retired as Distinguished Professor Emeritus in 1998 after 37 years of service. He passed away in August of 2020, but his legacy continues through the enlightened lives of the students he taught, and now in the inspired work of the faculty who succeed him.

“The Glover Award publicly documents the excellent teaching that Mara has done and, I hope, energizes her as she continues to change lives in the classroom,” says Richards. “Any time a faculty member is energized that, of course, benefits students, who thrive on dynamic professorial presences in the classroom.”

Scanlon says she is touched by receiving an award named for Donald Glover. “He has been described to me by his contemporaries as kind, passionate, creative, and devoted to his students.” She adds, “Though innovation is paradoxically predictable in my teaching, the award stipend will support my continued growth in fields of scholarly interest with direct effects on my classroom.”

She plans to utilize a portion of the monetary award to focus on her scholarship and teaching on literature of the Great War (WWI). “Two areas of increasing importance to me are first, the intersection of my scholarship and teaching on literature of the Great War with the work I do in the field of Ethics and Literature, a nexus I am beginning to explore in nurses’ representations of pain. The second is the 1918 flu pandemic, the wave of global devastation that overlapped and eventually dwarfed the war’s human toll. Extraordinarily little has been written about the 1918 pandemic in literary genres,” says Scanlon. “In a Spring 2022 iteration of the course I hope to include a text for a student audience now fully aware of what a ‘pandemic’ looks like. The Donald Glover award will allow me to obtain the scholarly materials necessary to bring these topics into the classroom with more expertise.”

Scanlon says she also will use award funds for various poetry classes she teaches UMW students, as well as one planned for an upcoming Elderstudy presentation about Emily Dickinson. “The Donald Glover award will, again, enable me to purchase materials that reinforce my own scholarship in these fields,” she says. “Eventually, I hope this will be part of a larger scholarly project, as well as having benefits for my traditional students and those in our regional Elderstudy community.”

All the above is in keeping with the wishes of the anonymous donor, who writes, “My hope is that Mary Washington English faculty can follow in Dr. Glover’s footsteps, while having a positive and lasting impact on students’ lives.”

*To read more about Dr. Mara Scanlon’s academic background, visit bit.ly/umwscanlon.

*To read more about Dr. Donald E. Glover and the gift behind the endowed faculty award, visit bit.ly/umwglover0221.

*For information about making a gift to support UMW students, faculty, and programs, contact the Office of Advancement at advance@umw.edu or 540-654-1024.

 

Article by Donna Harter, Executive Director of Advancement Initiatives