March 9 Schulke Collection Tops Funding Initiatives
LAWRENCEVILLE, NJ – Rider University has been awarded $500,000 in state funding to support three projects – two for its Lawrenceville campus and one for its Westminster Choir College campus in Princeton – through a New Jersey State Legislature initiative from the 2004 fiscal budget.
For the Lawrenceville campus, Rider has been awarded $100,000 to create a searchable database of 2,500 digital images from Flip Schulke’s historic photojournalistic collection, and $100,000 for programming in the Rider Science Education and Literacy Center (Rider SELECT), which was established in 1999 to improve the preparation and continuing education of K-12 science and mathematics teachers in the region.
For the Princeton campus, $300,000 will fund the installation of a full-fire suppression system, including sprinklers, at Talbott Library.
“We are deeply appreciative to the state of New Jersey for its support of these important campus initiatives,” said Rider President Mordechai Rozanski. “We thank State Senator Shirley Turner (D-15th) for assisting us in obtaining this special grant funding, which will benefit so many teachers, students and others around the nation.”
Senator Turner said, “I am delighted that Rider submitted three proposals for grant funding from the state’s 2004 budget and thrilled that money will go to meaningful and worthwhile projects on both campuses.”
Rider has been chosen to manage the Flip Schulke Education Through Photography Project, which will create a key-word searchable database of his historical collection of photographs of the civil rights movement. The state award will allow Rider to create and maintain the digitized photographic database. When completed, this catalogued database of 2,500 of Schulke’s images will be made available to researchers and scholars throughout the world, and regularly shared with Flip Schulke Archives, the University of Texas at Austin and his alma mater, Macalester College. Students will assist faculty and staff in building this historical database
Schulke is widely known as one of America’s premier photojournalists and a noted author, who for over 50 years, chronicled the lives of national and international figures and major historical events. He photographed Fidel Castro, John F. Kennedy, U.S. space flight history, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Muhammad Ali, Jacques Cousteau, and Aquasphere, but is best known for his documentation of the Civil Rights Movement and the late Dr. King. He covered nearly every major civil rights story in the South from the 1950s until Dr. King’s assassination in 1968.
In addition, Schulke is an acclaimed pioneer of underwater photography and his contributions to this field have transformed underwater photojournalism. Schulke, who received an honorary doctorate degree from Rider in 2003, has lectured at Rider and across the country on photojournalism, the civil rights movement and his friendship with Dr. King.
The state awards for the Rider SELECT and Talbott Library projects are equally important.
Funding for Rider SELECT will be earmarked for two initiatives – The Consortium for New Explorations in Coherent Teacher Education (CONNECT-ED), which provides science and math professional development for K-12 teachers in partnership with area school districts, colleges and Bristol-Myers Squibb; and the Program for Regional Outreach in Biology Education (PROBE), which offers science workshops for high school students and teachers.
The fire suppression system at Talbott Library is another step in Rider’s fire safety program. The Library’s collections comprise over 60,000 books, music scores and periodicals, approximately 5,000 choral music titles in performance qualities, a choral music reference collection of over 80,000 titles, and over 13,000 sound and video recordings.
