Dear alumni and friends

So why is there a basketball player on the front of the Arts & Sciences magazine? Because Majestic Mapp — a basketball team captain and Econ major named to the ACC Honor Roll — embodies the challenge we examine in our cover story: balancing achievements on the court with success in the classroom.

U.Va. has equally high aspirations for its athletic and academic programs. The story, written by an alumnus who writes about U.Va. sports for The Washington Post, probes the issues confronting leaders in both the academic and athletic offices of the University who are willing to contemplate such double success.

This month we also celebrate a three-decades-long collaboration among environmental scientists from U.Va. and several African universities that’s shaping the way we understand the interaction between people and the natural landscape of Africa.

We look at the work of studio art majors who stay in Charlottesville a fifth year to focus on their art and take you behind the scenes on Broadway to meet an alumna just beginning to make her mark on stage and screen.

You’ll hear from a first-year student researching the skies, and a fourth-year student researching Voodoo; faculty members who know the subtleties of prejudice, and the complexities of music theory; an alumna who writes for The New York Times, and an alumnus who wrote the book on spies.

These are people for whom the totality of the U.Va. experience — in the classroom, and beyond — has made all the difference. And they are typical of our alumni. In fact, for all the stories we bring you on these pages, there are 90,000 more we could tell about your colleagues and friends.

There’s more of them to come, of course. For now, though, I invite you to read this issue for a glimpse of the breadth that is Arts & Sciences.