It takes everyone on campus to make One Drury a reality. A powerful outcome from acting in unity around the story of who we are and how we work together is the legacy that’s left behind by each person involved, even when they are no longer physically on campus. Whether it’s because of graduation, retirement, or moving on to a new phase of life, every person connected to Drury is a part of the university’s history. We asked members of the Drury community: 

Ali Deckard
Biochemistry + Mathematics, Pre-Engineering & Honors | Student Government Association President

My approach has always been to show up, speak honestly, and advocate for students, even when that means standing firm or asking difficult questions. If my time at Drury helped move conversations forward and made it a little easier for the next group of students to speak up and lead, that’s more than enough for me.

Chip Parker ’83 MEd ’89
Associate Dean of Students for Student Success

That I have made a positive impression with my students, my staff colleagues, and faculty that I have interacted with over the years. That I have ultimately made a difference in their Drury experience and helped someone succeed through our interaction. I have been labeled “a fixer,” so I hope that is true and I have made a difference in someone’s life.

Dr. Mark D. Wood ’81
Professor of Chemistry

The ethos of Drury was created from the hearts of Congregationalist missionaries who believed education could provide a balm of healing to the wounds inflicted by civil war. I am blessed to help continue this tradition of love and respect toward our students – and to believe our calling guides young minds to lives full of meaning and purpose.

Dr. Peter Browning
Retired Professor of Philosophy & Religion

My time at Drury was a gift for me. I loved teaching philosophy and religion courses. I delighted in holding weekly worship gatherings where many students got their first chance to preach. I also found joy in organizing conferences and in doing research and writing. I’m convinced that legacies aren’t chosen by us as much as they are recognized by others. I have no idea what my legacy will be. However, I do know that I wish for our new chaplain, the Rev. Dr. Charles Neff, the same joy, wonder, excitement, and sense of fulfillment that I had across the decades.

Bonnie Wilcox
Executive Assistant to the President

After more than three decades at Drury, my legacy isn’t tied to a single role but to the relationships, experiences, and shared successes along the way. I’ve been fortunate to serve in several positions across campus, each one deepening my appreciation for this community and the people I’ve had the honor to work with through the years. Some of my most meaningful memories come from working with the SIFE team and traveling with them as they competed nationally and on the world stage, and from being a fan of Drury basketball. But above all, I’m most proud that both of my daughters graduated from here. Drury has shaped my professional life and my family’s story, and it will always hold a special place in my heart.

Dr. Jennifer Joslin
Retired Director of the Robert & Mary Cox Compass Center

It was my great honor to serve as the first Director of the Cox Compass Center, a truly unique center for student success. The thrill of working with alumni donors, grant-funders, faculty, staff, and students was tremendous. I hope to be remembered for helping to launch such an amazing Center for students. My unofficial legacy was having a lot of fun with as many colleagues as possible everyday!

Rylie Blankenship
Political Science + Theatre | Student Union Board President | Head Resident Assistant

When I graduate this May, I would like my legacy that is left behind at Drury to be centered around kindness. When people think of me, I would like to think I bring a smile to their faces. I hope they remember our funny conversations that usually would lead to me cry laughing. I am grateful for all of the opportunities Drury has given me, and I am grateful that the roles I leave behind are being filled by other wonderful Drury students.

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The following is an excerpt from the Spring 2026 issue of Drury Magazine

Drury University’s purpose is to change lives through a personalized education. At Drury, students build lasting relationships, discover their sense of purpose, and gain skills that support a meaningful and successful life. Graduates often share stories about the people and experiences that had a lasting impact on them.

One Drury reflects the belief that the university community should be respectful, supportive, and cooperative. It emphasizes working together, valuing one another, and serving each other.

We spoke with four people from four very different walks of Drury life: a faculty member, a staff member, a traditional student, and an online student, to hear their thoughts on what One Drury means to them.

To keep reading, click here.

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Winter Kinne ’05 MBA ’10 and Lauren Holtkamp-Sterling ’03 MA ‘04 provided the commencement addresses for Drury’s two graduation ceremonies. A total of 443 students were conferred degrees, including those from Day School, Drury GO, and the College of Graduate Studies (CGS).

Winter Kinne, Community Foundation of the Ozarks President & CEO, addressed the Drury GO and CGS graduates on Friday, using the Tony Award-winning Musical Hamilton to draw parallels with the impact Drury had on her.

Kinne, a native of Mount Vernon, Missouri, originally wanted to go away for college. She ended up staying close to home instead.

“I will be honest with you,” Kinne said. “I thought I was throwing away my shot when I came to Drury. I didn’t mean to go to school here. But Drury offered me an amazing scholarship opportunity. So instead of going far away like I told my 18-year-old self I would, I ended up 30 minutes from home.”

Ultimately, Kinne admitted, “I was wrong. I loved my Drury experience. From student life to campus activities to my professors and lifelong friends. I got my first real job because of Drury.”

On Saturday, former NBA referee Holtkamp-Sterling spoke to Day School graduates about following their dreams and not being afraid to adjust those dreams throughout their lives.

A member of Drury’s inaugural women’s basketball team, Holtkamp-Sterling used the program’s early successes as a guide for her professional life.

“Nobody told us we couldn’t do it,” she said of Drury’s appearance in the 2004 national championship game, just a few years after the program began. “That’s the most important thing Drury ever taught me.”

Holtkamp-Sterling illustrated how dreams can change by using the Drury campus and its growth as an example.

“The school I’m standing in today is not the school I left 22 years ago,” she said. “The university that taught me to be the first person to walk through the door has kept walking through new doors of its own. And that’s exactly what it should be doing.”

When Holtkamp-Sterling graduated in 2003, she returned the next year to obtain a master’s degree and continue her basketball playing career. She never imagined during those years that she would someday pick up a whistle as a referee and make history in the process as just the third woman hired to be a full time NBA official. She told graduates that while following your dreams matters, it’s just as important to make sure to dream big.

“I’m not here to tell you to follow your dreams,” she said. “I’m here to tell you that your dreams, as currently constructed, are probably too small. And the only way you’ll find out is by walking toward the unknown on purpose.”

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Sponsored by Cox Health, the event featured six teams – 2 each from Drury and Evangel, and one each from Missouri State and OTC – competing for cash prizes, internship possibilities, and an opportunity to participate in a behind-the-scenes tour of Cox Health North.

“Drury University and the Breech School of Business were pleased to help facilitate such a wonderful event, sponsored by Cox Health,” said Dr. Dan Bumblauskas, Dean Breech School of Business. “It was great to have participation from all four schools in the area, and we look forward to continued partnerships on events like this in the future.”

The CASE Competition gave teams an opportunity to present case studies on the future of health care, and featured a question-and-answer session between the teams and a panel of judges.

Drury’s team of Lukas Rieber, Matteo Pisu, and Marco Romano finished second and secured a $2,500 prize with their presentation of CareOS: One Platform. Two Flywheels. The presentation focused on advancing system-wide employee and consumer experience through AI, technology, people, and processes.

Drury’s other team also performed admirably. That team consisted of Hannah Bryant, Nyheeta Powell, Aweellie Aganya and Jiana Knighten. The quartet’s presentation was entitled Integrating People, Process, & Technology to Elevate Cox Health NPS.

A team from Evangel University took home the top prize of $5,000.

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Owen will be discussing his new book “The Wicked Among Us: Murder, Blackmail, and Book Collecting in the Ozarks”, a deep dive into the murder of Springfield resident Roland Comstock, an eccentric attorney, owner of pet wolves, and curator of a massive, world-famous personal book collection in the Ozarks—whose 2007 murder stunned the community.

Owen, who knew Comstock personally and worked for him right out of law school, spent years researching and writing this compelling story, filled with all the intrigue, mystery, and twists of a gripping true-crime drama.

Murray is a professor at New York University School of Law and the host of the popular Strict Scrutiny podcast, which offers timely and accessible commentary on the U.S. Supreme Court and the broader judicial culture surrounding it. Professor Murray is a nationally and internationally renowned scholar of constitutional law and family law. She is a frequent voice in national media, has guest-hosted Deadline: White House for Nicolle Wallace, and previously clerked for Federal Judge (and future Supreme Court Justice) Sonia Sotomayor.

About The Meador Center

The Department of Political Science and International Affairs at Drury University houses the L.E. Meador Center for Politics and Citizenship, supported by the Meador Endowment. Founded in 2015 in honor of Professor L.E. Meador, the Drury University Meador Center for Politics and Citizenship is dedicated to the academic inquiry of politics and citizenship in the modern world. The work of the Meador Center is to inspire and engage Drury University students and faculty to work toward that “more democratic and more hopeful world” of which Professor Meador spoke.

For more information on the Meador Center Speaker Series, contact Meador Center Director Dr. Daniel Ponder at (417) 873-7394 or deponder@drury.edu.

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A high-energy adjunct professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Drury since 1991, Pierce ends every class with a magic trick, something he has been doing since before he arrived in Springfield.

“I do about 40 different tricks,” Pierce said. “Card tricks, silk tricks, mind-reading tricks. Sometimes it ties in directly to the lesson, but mostly it’s just for fun.”

Earlier this month, freshman Kole Esselstyn .

“He told us if he didn’t get out in under three minutes, we’d get an extra five points on the next test,” Esselstyn said. “And, of course, he made it in under two minutes.”

Esselstyn didn’t know it at the time, but his recording would soon become social media gold.

Around noon on Feb. 10, Esselstyn posted a 30-second clip of Pierce with the tag of, “My psych professor is crazy” to one of his two Instagram accounts,. By 4:30 p.m., the video had 100,000 views. By the time he went to bed, it was up to 2 million views.

By the next morning, it was at 10 million.

As of midday on Feb. 24, the video had been viewed more than 34.7 million times and had 3.1 million likes, making it one of the most viral videos on Instagram for the month of February. The video became so popular, ESPN SportsCenter reached out to Esselstyn and the video was featured by social media content factories Viral Hog, LADBible, and Overtime.

While Esselstyn is soaking up the attention a viral video brings, Pierce is taking it all in stride.

“I don’t really have a concept of what’s going on. I’m on Facebook a little bit, but I’m mostly doing research,” Pierce said. “I’ve been doing the same thing at the end of every class all these years, and I’m glad somebody’s getting smiles out of it.”

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But that’s not the case for all students. In December, 19 Drury students from the Breech School of Business and Hammons School of Architecture joined Dr. Gehan Dhameeth, Associate Dean & Associate Professor of Marketing at Breech, on a trip to his native Sri Lanka as part of Drury’s long-standing Study Abroad program.

And while the students took in the beauty and culture of the South Asian island located just off the southeast coast of India, they were much more than tourists.

Sri Lanka is home to as many as 7,500 wild elephants, which are protected in Sri Lanka. And while those elephants are beautiful and majestic, they can also be a nuisance for the farming community. That’s where the Drury students came in.

“There is a specific location of Sri Lanka which we call Habarana,” Dr. Dhameeth said. “That’s where the highest numbers of human-elephant conflict exists. I took the students there to help the farmers who are affected by elephant attacks. They learned about the natural techniques the farmers use to keep elephants away and chase them out in order to safeguard their crops.

“We also learned from researchers about the behavior of the elephant, how human beings should avoid conflicts with them, and the strategies that they use.”

In helping be a part of the solution, the students also learned more about global farming techniques and supply chain operations in a developing nation.

“Our students technically helped the farmers plant their crops and pack them up in the initial stages of the supply chain,” Dr. Dhameeth said. “They were able to understand the difference between the labor-intensive process in a country like Sri Lanka versus automated processes like what we have here in the United States.”

The students were so taken with the trip and the entirety of the experience that, for many, it won’t be their last visit.

“Several of the students said they want to go back and do it again,” Dr. Dhameeth shared. “Several of them have already promoted this trip to their parents, and now the parents are asking how to contact local partners to arrange their own similar trip.”

As one might imagine, getting from Springfield to Sri Lanka isn’t easy. Dr. Dhameeth and his student contingent traveled for 34 straight hours, making stops in St. Louis, Toronto, and London before finally touching down in Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital, for their 8-day stay.

The students making the trip were: Loreli Fronabarger, Annika Gabel, Brady Horton, Jase Howard, Camden Kozikoski, Branden Lowe, Jake Lyons, Brendan Moehle, Vishanta Patterson, Riley Petrone, Ways Raasch, Elijah Roberts, Kyle Romanewicz, Thomas Shuster, Aidan Spaulding, Abby Stunja, Noah Wells, Jase White, and Danielle Buker.

“It wasn’t an easy trip; they had to do all of the work,” Dr. Dhameeth said. “They seemed to enjoy it. Several students commented that it was an experience they never expected to have.”

And one they won’t soon forget.

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Drury University faculty, students and staff, along with several Springfield-area healthcare leaders, gathered on Thursday at Drury’s O’Reilly Enterprise Center as a series of plaques were dedicated honoring their support of Drury’s Master of Health Administration (MHA) program, which began this fall.

“This program is built on the chassis of a liberal arts university, a university that trains you on the humanities,” Drury Board of Trustees member and program leader Steve Edwards ’88 told those gathered. “And I think that foundation makes us especially unique, because in the humanities we learn to serve others.”

Edwards, the former CoxHealth president and CEO, teamed with former Mercy Springfield Communities COO Jay Guffey to launch the program. Guffey is now MHA program director.

Drury’s MHA program is a one-of-a-kind cooperation between CoxHealth, Mercy Springfield Communities, Burrell Behavioral Health, Mid-America Transplant and the Edwards family to provide support, resources and expertise.

The program is designed to prepare the next generation of healthcare leaders. The concentrated two-year curriculum is a seated degree program designed to accommodate working professionals and full-time students. The seated courses are taught by preeminently qualified healthcare leaders and healthcare academicians to provide students with a blend of cutting-edge theory and real-life experience. The first cohort includes 12 students.

“Our MHA program is grounded in the practice of collaboration,” Drury President Jeff Frederick said. “The idea that partners can work together in word and in deed to make our community stronger, to make our community more creative, and more transformative, and to make our community healthier. That is the task in front of our health care leaders.”

University Provost Beth Harville, whom Edwards credited as being key to launching the curriculum this fall, spoke about the program’s exceptional nature.

“This program is distinct and unique because it was shaped in partnership with all of our healthcare leaders that are here today, and those who were unable to join us,” she said. “These are the people who understand the realities of the field. This program is not about theory; it’s about the real world that these leaders will practice in today and in the future.”

If you’d like to learn more about Drury’s MHA program, please visit drury.edu/graduate/mha.

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For the Stillwell family, Tuesday afternoon in Bay Hall was a full-circle kind of moment.

Brothers and alums Paul Stillwell ’66 and Mark Stillwell ’67, their families and several dozen friends and well-wishers gathered to honor their father, the late Carl Stillwell, as his name was forever placed above the door of a room Drury University President Dr. Jeff Frederick referred to as “one of the most important, most used spaces on our campus.”

Known informally around campus for years as the Hearth Room, the newly named Carl Stillwell Room is where hundreds of future Drury students are received when they visit campus for the first time.

“Bay Hall is the heartbeat of the campus,” Frederick said. “The students who enter this building will walk under the Carl Stillwell name into an area where they’ll learn more about an experience at Drury and how we can prepare them for the rest of their lives.”

Born in 1912, Carl Stillwell lived a life of service. He was a banker, an officer in the Merchant Marines, a pastor, a city councilman, former Mayor of Springfield and, for a time, an air raid warden in Dayton, Ohio, during World War II.

Stillwell also made a major impact at Drury, where he served in a variety of leadership roles in his nearly 30 years on campus, including business manager, vice president and even interim president. Between 1945 and 1971, he shepherded the construction of nearly a dozen buildings.

Both Paul and Mark have remained connected to Drury and Springfield over the years. Paul received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the university in 2023 and is a Navy historian and former editor-in-chief of Naval History magazine. Mark spent 37 years as the Sports Information Director at Missouri State and was inducted into the Drury Athletics Hall of Fame in 2019. He is a current member of the Drury Alumni Council.

“This is a special, special thing for our family,” Mark said. “We are deeply grateful Drury is allowing us to do this and name this room after our dad. My dad led a life of service. Everything was for someone else. He set a tremendous example for us.”

The naming was made possible through an endowment established by the Stillwell brothers and their families.

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The day opened in the Oasis Ballroom with keynote speaker Don Harkey, CEO of People Centric Consulting Group, who framed the theme of his talk, “The Perfect Storm,” around the challenges reshaping the American workforce. He described a rising tide of retirements, a shortage of experienced workers, and an accelerating demand for leadership that can adapt, connect, and sustain teams through uncertainty.

It wasn’t a doomsday message — it was a wake-up call. Harkey’s energy filled the room as he challenged us to look beyond our staffing spreadsheets and see the deeper issue: culture. “People don’t leave bad jobs,” he said, “they leave bad leadership.”

His message resonated with every nonprofit professional who’s ever had to balance mission with burnout or inspiration with limited resources. What made the talk powerful wasn’t just the data he shared, but the empathy he brought to it. It was an invitation to lead differently by listening, building trust, investing in people as the foundation of every thriving organization.

After the keynote, attendees scattered into breakout sessions that offered practical tools for today’s most pressing nonprofit challenges. One such session was titled “AI-Powered Grant Writing: Enhancing Expertise, Not Replacing It,” led by Kasey Hammock, founder of Partner for Better. Hammock cut through the fear and hype surrounding artificial intelligence, grounding her presentation in ethics and empowerment.

She reminded us that AI is a tool that we should use to enhance our jobs rather than replace technical skills and talent. Hammock showed how adjusting prompts could turn flat, mechanical language into something nuanced and funder-ready. By the end of the hour, participants left with an AI prompt framework and a renewed sense of agency: technology may be evolving fast, but human creativity and authenticity still matter most.

The afternoon brought “Leading Nonprofit Teams Through Change,” co-facilitated by Paige Oxendine of Habitat Communication & Culture and Spencer Harris, President and Co-Owner of Mostly Serious. The room was quiet at first, maybe because everyone in the nonprofit sector knows what it feels like to be stretched by change. But the session quickly became a space for honesty and reflection.

We examined our own responses to uncertainty and how they ripple through our teams. Oxendine and Harris guided us through a framework for leading both high- and low-resistance employees through transition — not with rigidity, but with empathy and clarity. It was comforting to hear that leadership doesn’t always mean having the answers; it means creating stability while navigating the unknown together.

My final session, “The Marketing Basics to Thrive in a Changing Environment,” led by Mar’Ellen Felin of Felin Communications, offered a fitting close to the day. Felin began with a line from a Greek philosopher: “You can’t step into the same river twice.” It captured the essence of nonprofit work: We change, our communities change, and so must the way we communicate our missions. Felin helped us evaluate our positioning, audiences, and competition through a strategic lens. Her insight was clear that marketing is about knowing who you are and who you serve.

As the conference wound down, I felt the familiar mix of inspiration and exhaustion that comes after a day full of learning and connection. But more than anything, I felt encouraged. Each session echoed a truth that nonprofits already live by: Our strength isn’t in our budgets or our titles, but in our adaptability, our empathy, and our shared commitment to people.

The 2025 Drury Nonprofit Leadership Conference didn’t just offer strategies; it reminded us that in this “perfect storm,” leadership grounded in humanity will always be our most powerful anchor.

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