It was once again my honor to be elected president of the Cavalier Daily Alumni Association during the Board of Directors meeting in April. My 1991-’95 tenure as president was both rewarding and challenging, and now with another four years under my belt as a board member and events director, I am looking forward to working with all of you again in this capacity.

Two other changes to our management structure occurred during the April meeting. First, I would like to welcome Sarah Lindenfeld as our new program director. Sarah is already working with CD Managing Editor Emily Kane on the fall journalism workshop, which is scheduled for Oct. 10. We extend our welcome to Sarah and our many thanks to Pat Riccards for his hard work in this position prior to Sarah’s arrival.

I would also like to welcome Mandy Biles as the new CDAA events director. Mandy was the CD managing editor in 1998-’99 and will be attending U.Va. Law this fall. We feel fortunate to have someone local in Charlottesville to help us with CDAA events!

Probably our biggest news item for this edition of College Topics is one that has been a long time coming. I am very excited to announce that the governing boards of the CDAA and the Virginia Press Association have agreed to launch a new internship program in the summer of 2000 that will provide a paid full-time internship for a deserving CD staff member at a Virginia newspaper each summer.

In reaction to this good news, the CDAA set a goal of raising the total for the internship endowment to at least $40,000 by the summer of 2000. We are pleased to report that we in fact already reached this goal a year early, with special thanks to all our donors, including a $6,000 gift from an anonymous donor. We are thrilled with this success and are pleased to note that any new internship-designated donations will go toward creating multiple internships with the VPA.

Of equal importance for the CDAA is our decision to move forward with the CD reunion event next year. The date, however, has been changed from May 6 to Homecoming weekend in hopes that a larger number of alumni will be able to attend.

There are two main purposes for such an event:

• To celebrate the Cavalier Daily’s existence into the next millennium, and
• To kick off the fund-raising effort to begin preservation of the CD bound volumes

Our goal is to preserve these important and historical documents of the University’s history by digitizing the CD volumes. The effort will be both time-consuming and expensive; projected costs are nearly $800,000 to digitize the entire archive. Thus, the CDAA will need to undertake this effort in phases, focusing on saving the oldest volumes first, and perhaps by the time we get to preserving some of the newer volumes, improved technology may exist to help us out.

Either way, this is an urgent need that will take priority over all other CD fund-raising efforts now that the VPA scholarship program is intact.

While the preservation of the bound volumes is an important component of the reunion event, we do not want to overshadow the ultimate purpose of the weekend: to pull College Topics and CD alumni together to reflect on the last century and celebrate the beginning of the new one! For details about planing for the weekend thus far, see Reunion. We hope that you will be able to join us for this memorable weekend.

We also hope that you will take note of the other upcoming CDAA events during Homecoming on Sept. 18, our fall board meeting on Oct. 3, and the annual journalism conference on Oct. 10.