College of Liberal Arts honors 2018 distinguished alumni

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Purdue University’s College of Liberal Arts will honor five distinguished alumni during its 2018 annual awards banquet on Friday (April 20). Jeffrey Bulington, Suzanne Crouch, William Forstchen, Rodney Hero and Karen Siciliano are this year’s recipients of the distinguished alumni award.

• Bulington, of Monon, Indiana, is the executive director and lead teacher of the Southwest Mississippi Chess Foundation in Franklin County, Mississippi. He grew up on the outskirts of Toledo, Ohio, where he learned to move the chess pieces from his first-grade teacher in 1972, but was introduced to tournament chess by a local farmer after moving to Indiana as a junior high student. He earned a Bachelor and Master of Arts in philosophy, as well as a Master of Arts in teaching and a Ph.D. in curriculum studies from Purdue. His work in Franklin County has been featured in Chess Life magazine and the television show “60 Minutes.” He was recently named Chess Educator of the Year at the University of Texas at Dallas.

• Crouch, of Evansville, is Indiana’s lieutenant governor. Previously, she served as the state’s auditor and as a state representative for House District 78, which encompasses parts of Vanderburgh and Warrick Counties. Throughout her years of public service, she has focused on programs and services for people with disabilities. She received the 2012 Public Policy Award from the Arc of Indiana for her work with those that have disabilities and was named Legislator of the Year in 2011 by the Indiana Association of Rehabilitation Facilities. Crouch graduated from Mater Dei High School in Evansville and went on to receive her bachelor’s degree from Purdue in political science.

• Forstchen, of Asheville, North Carolina, is an author and professor at Montreat College. He is the author of nearly fifty books, ranging from science fiction to history, and numerous articles, op-eds, essays and short stories. His 2009 novel “One Second After” became a New York Times best seller and has sold more than one million copies. He has also worked with NASA to create a novel, titled “Pillar to the Sky,” about the development of space elevators, and he set a major scene for the book at Purdue. His next book will be published in January 2018 and deals with the issue of coronal mass ejection. Forstchen attended Purdue as a full-time graduate student in 1989, earning his Master of Arts in history in 1991 and his Ph.D. in 1994.

• Hero is the Raul Yzaguirre Chair of the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. His book "Latinos and the U.S. Political System: Two-tiered Pluralism" received the American Political Science Association's Ralph J. Bunche Award in 1993. He also authored "Faces of Inequality: Social Diversity in American Politics,” which was selected for the APSA’s Woodrow Wilson Award in 1999. He co-authored the book "Black-Latino Relations in U.S. National Politics: Beyond Conflict or Cooperation," which was chosen for the 2014 Best Book on Latino Politics Award given by the Latino Caucus of the APSA. He received his Master of Arts in 1976 and his Ph.D. in 1980 in political science at Purdue.

• Siciliano, of Red Bank, New Jersey, is president of Siciliano Landscaping Company LLC. She was the vice president of mortgage backed securities at JP Morgan and Chase Manhattan Bank and was working on Wall Street the morning of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. She lost colleagues and friends that day, which hastened her decision to change her own course in life. After a brief return to Wall Street, she agreed to her father’s request to run the  family-owned landscaping company, which provides landscape design, installation and maintenance for commercial and residential clients in Red Bank. She graduated from Purdue in 1983 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in communication.

The College of Liberal Arts is home to the departments of Anthropology, English, History,

Philosophy, Political Science and Sociology; the Brian Lamb School of Communication; the

Patti and Rusty Rueff School of Visual and Performing Arts; and the schools of Interdisciplinary Studies and Languages and Cultures. 

Writer: Joseph Paul, 765-494-9541, paul102@purdue.edu  

Source: Gabby Hlavek, ghlavek@purdue.edu