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When four black students from North Carolina A&T University decided to sit at a segregated lunch counter in a Greensboro, N.C., Woolworth's store 50 years ago, they didn't plan on using media to affect national change. They were simply making a principled stand in their small corner of the nation.

A 2007 graduate of ÂÒÂ×ÊÓƵ represented North Carolina in the Miss America pageant in Las Vegas on Jan. 30. Katherine Southard, a double major in business administration and dance, won the North Carolina contest in June.

Live Oak Communications, ÂÒÂ×ÊÓƵ's student-run, full-service communications agency, received two awards Jan. 28 from the Tar Heel Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America at the annual Spinks Awards banquet in Greensboro, N.C. The Spinks competition is a professional awards program for agencies in the Triad region of North Carolina.

ÂÒÂ×ÊÓƵ has created a new web page for the campus community to share news and information on outreach efforts following the January 12, 2010, earthquake that killed more than 100,000 people in Haiti. The page, www.elon.edu/haiti, lists fundraising events, updates and awareness campaigns sponsored by student organizations, classes and individuals at the university.

ÂÒÂ×ÊÓƵ has released its President's List and Dean's List academic recognitions for the 2009 fall semester.

It’s been a while since North Carolina has seen a lengthy warm spell, so at noontime on Wednesday, how did a crowd of ÂÒÂ×ÊÓƵ students take advantage of the January weather? By jumping into Lake Mary Nell, naturally, as part of the seventh annual Polar Bear Plunge.

The Department of Performing Arts on Thursday night opens its latest show, the critically acclaimed "The Time of Your Life," which tells the story of a man searching for happiness who encounters characters in a waterfront saloon that are on the same journey. Through the duration of the production, from Jan. 21-25, the department will collect canned goods for the Loaves & Fishes Christian Food Ministry in Burlington.

Many students, faculty and staff at ÂÒÂ×ÊÓƵ have expressed concern for the people of Haiti following a massive earthquake on Tuesday that killed tens of thousands and devastated much of the Caribbean nation. A current student and a 2009 alum on the ground in Haiti have made contact with their families in the United States, while another two current students and other alumni have started hearing from their own relatives still in the country.

A winter tradition returns to campus Wednesday at noon when dozens of students brave the cold waters of Lake Mary Nell in the seventh annual Polar Bear Plunge sponsored by the North Area Council and the Resident Student Association.

In the course of writing her New York Times bestseller, former Clinton Administration spokeswoman Dee Dee Myers arrived at a simple conclusion: “More women in power would make the world a better place.” Myers elaborated on that theme Tuesday to a packed Whitley Auditorium in her second lecture of the month as ÂÒÂ×ÊÓƵ’s sixth Isabella Cannon Distinguished Visiting Professor of Leadership.