Nearly a year after she was chosen to lead her alma mater, Jo Allen will formally be installed as president of Meredith College at a ceremony in downtown Raleigh on Thursday.

Allen, a North Carolina native who earned a bachelors degree in English from Meredith in 1980, began her tenure as the eighth president of the womens college last July. Meredith traditionally holds the formal installation ceremony during the first year of the presidents term.

Allen is the first alumna to ever serve as president of the college.

The theme of the ceremony is Remembering Our Roots, Extending Our Reach, recognizing the 121-year history of the school while celebrating its recent expansion in an increasingly tough environment for womens colleges.

About 50 colleges nationwide remain women-only, down from more than 200 in 1950. William Peace University, formerly Peace College, will begin admitting full-time male students this fall to try to broaden its appeal and ensure its survival, leaving Meredith as the largest of only three remaining womens colleges statewide.

Despite these trends, students at Meredith have seen an increase in the programs in recent years. The school recently began offering an undergraduate major in criminology; became one of the first colleges in the state to offer an interdisciplinary major focused on environmental sustainability; and expanded its engineering dual-degree program to include mechanical engineering.

This fall, the school will become the first college or university in Raleigh to have a womens lacrosse team.

Freshman applications are up 11 percent compared to last year, and applications to its honors program have increased 34 percent, according to the college.

The installation ceremony will take place at Raleigh Memorial Auditorium to symbolize the colleges original location downtown. Alumnae from classes as early as 1934 will march in the academic procession.

RALEIGH, N.C. The University of North Carolina at Greensboro said a Christian student group will be recognized as a campus organization after the school previously denied it official status and a legal group stepped in to sue on its behalf, officials said Tuesday.

The school previously told the pro-abstinence, anti-abortion group Make Up Your Own Mind they didn’t qualify as a religious organization that could restrict membership to students with shared beliefs. Groups with official access would be able to access university facilities and funding.

That prompted the Christian legal group Alliance Defense Fund last month to file a lawsuit for the student group.

“We have apologized to (the group) for the delay in determining their status and notified them that we are granting the organization recognition” subject to getting an updated contact list and signed set of bylaws, university spokeswoman Helen Dennison Hebert wrote in an email Tuesday.

Last year, the university told the group it did not meet the qualifications to be a religious or political organization. The group, which is affiliated with a local crisis pregnancy center, wants its members to adhere to a Christian statement of faith, something that recognized religious organizations may do under a university policy.

“We certainly appreciate them doing the right thing after 10 or so months of denying the group recognition,” said Jeremy Tedesco, an Alliance Defense Fund lawyer representing the organization.

Tedesco said lawyers for Make Up Your Own Mind had yet to receive formal legal confirmation that the university will grant recognition to the group, and that decisions about the state of the lawsuit will have to wait until that happens.

After the lawsuit was filed, the university conducted an investigation of its policy and determined that the student group had been denied because of a misinterpretation of the university’s non-discrimination policy, Herbert said in the statement.

“The University of North Carolina at Greensboro supports the open and free expression of our students, faculty, staff, and guests through many methods, including a strong, vibrant and diverse set of student organizations,” Hebert wrote. There are currently about 200 active student groups with official status at the university.

The problem goes deeper than a misunderstanding of existing policy, though, Tedesco said.

What a difference a week makes.

Geno Auriemma and his UConn Huskies were left with a lot of questions about themselves after losing to Notre Dame by 13 points in the final game of the regular season eight days ago.

They answered many of them with a fifth-straight Big East tournament championship Tuesday night.

“They’re a little bit more grown up now then they were a week ago,” Auriemma said. “They’ve come a long way. It seems like they’ve come a long way in a short time, but they’ve been building on this since September. I’m thrilled for them. The championship is important, the intangible stuff that came out of this weekend is even more important.”

Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis scored 19 points and Bria Hartley added 18 to help No. 4 Connecticut beat third-ranked Notre Dame 63-54, ending a three-game skid against the Irish. That victory came a night after UConn routed St. John’s, which had ended the Huskies’ 99-game home winning streak on Feb. 18.

“I think this proves we had some fight in us,” Hartley said. “Every time we step on the court we want to go out and prove that we play hard. Tonight, no matter what we did, no matter if Notre Dame went on a run or anything, we made sure we came back and made plays.”

Now it’s on to the NCAA tournament for the Irish and the Huskies, where both likely will be No. 1 seeds.

“I think we have two of the best teams in America coming out of the conference,” Auriemma said. “I don’t think we take a back seat to anyone ever, I think tonight you saw why.”

The victory also made Auriemma the sixth Division I women’s coach with 800 career victories, reaching the mark in fewer games than anybody else.

“We felt like we won 800 this year,” said Auriemma, who is 800-128 in 27 seasons at UConn. “That’s what it felt like. This was the most grueling and taxing year that we’ve had at Connecticut in a long, long time.”

Tennessee’s Pat Summitt had been the fastest to 800 wins, doing it in 958 games and 29 seasons.

The Huskies entered the tournament as the three seed after dropping their final two home games of the regular season, including a 13-point loss last Monday night to Notre Dame in Hartford. After that game, the Huskies were searching for their usual swagger.

They have it back now.

“We got it back last night, a little more tonight,” Auriemma said. “Hopefully now we can hold on to it for three weekends. Today’s Tuesday, I wish the NCAA tournament started Saturday. This is when you want to keep going now. For us to have to wait two weeks is difficult. So we’ll have to work really hard to hold on to this thing we have.”

Notre Dame was seeking its first Big East tournament title. The Irish, who won the outright regular-season title for the first time, have made the tournament championship game six times and lost each one to the Huskies (29-4).

UConn also ended a rare three-game losing streak to the Irish. Notre Dame beat the Huskies in the national semifinals last season, then swept the two regular-season meetings this year.

“It’s hard to lose any game,” said senior guard Tiffany Hayes, who didn’t drop a game in her first two years at UConn. “To lose to one team three straight times doesn’t sit well. With this team we just knew we were better than we have played the last couple of games. We were willing to fight till the end.”

The Irish were trying to join an elite club by becoming the fourth team to beat Connecticut three times in the same season. Miami was the last to do it, 20 years ago. The Hurricanes also were the last team to knock off UConn in four straight meetings. No team has done that since the Huskies won their first national championship in 1995.

“It’s tough to beat a team three times,” Notre Dame coach Muffet McGraw said. “I don’t think we have to do anything different. I don’t think there was more pressure on us. I just think they’ve outplayed us.”

It’s the 18th tournament title for the Huskies and 19th straight year that they have won either the Big East regular-season or tournament titles.

After the teams met last Monday night, UConn was left searching for answers with Notre Dame winning 72-59 on the Huskies’ home floor. The Huskies found them in Hartley and Mosqueda-Lewis, who was selected the tournament’s most outstanding player.

UConn was trailing 36-33 early in the second half when the pair scored 10 points during a 10-1 run. Mosqueda-Lewis had a floater and a jump shot. Hartley finished it off with the last six points, the final two coming after she stole the ball at midcourt and then made an acrobatic layup.

Notre Dame closed to 46-43 with 8:46 left on Kayla McBride’s 3-pointer, but couldn’t complete the comeback.

Mosqueda-Lewis and Hartley hit back-to-back baskets and UConn held Notre Dame without a field goal for 5 1/2 minutes after Skylar Diggins’ lay-in made it 50-45 with 7:05 left. Diggins finally ended the drought with 1:35 remaining, but UConn hit its free throws down the stretch to seal the win.

Diggins scored 16 points for Notre Dame (30-3).

The Huskies led 27-17 before Notre Dame closed the first half on a 13-4 burst. Kaila Turner’s 3-pointer with a second left made it 31-30 at the break.

It’s the first time all season that the Irish trailed a Big East opponent at the half.

Notre Dame kept the run going, scoring six of the first eight points of the second half to take a 36-33 lead on Devereaux Peters’ layup. Then Hartley and Mosqueda-Lewis took over.

Patriotism, Samuel Johnson said, is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Bullying, then, must be the first refuge of teen murderers and their apologists.

Think about it. Nearly every time some misanthropic minor sprays a school with lead, the first thing we hear is that he – and they’ve all been “he” thus far – was bullied.

To their credit, attorneys for T.J. Lane, the confessed shooter at Chardon High in Ohio, have not invoked the bullying defense. But even before the smoke had cleared in that high school cafeteria, some reporters were spinning a simplistic, sympathetic narrative that Lane had been bullied in school and had possibly reached a murderous breaking point.

Whether he was or wasn’t bullied, here’s a question for those of you who’ve already been through the intense state of mind that was high school: Who the heck wasn’t?

Unless you were one of the preternaturally perfect few – I’m putting their ranks at less than 1 percent of students – you were the victim of bullying and teasing by classmates. Did you feel the urge to grab a gun and mow down a bunch of them?

Let me re-phrase that: Did you grab a gun and mow down a bunch of them? Many of us may have nursed a grudge and dreamed about going in and wreaking havoc, but we didn’t.

Dr. Peter Perault, a Chapel Hill psychiatrist and president of the N.C. Psychoanalytic Society, said that group’s foundation implemented a program at Durham’s Central Park Elementary School to help students and teachers identify bullies and deal with bullying. “The person doing the bullying,” he said, “has usually been bullied.”

Perhaps initiatives such as the one by Perault’s group can make us more attuned to when a child is suffering – or who wants to make others suffer.

In his book “Is There Life After High School?” – I call it the nerd bible – Ralph Keyes writes about singer Janis Joplin, who, after becoming famous, “never missed an opportunity to strike back at her Port Arthur, Texas, classmates, the ones who had called her ‘pig’ and threw things at her in the hallways.”

Bruce Springsteen’s hit song “Glory Days” was about a former high school baseball teammate who was a star and who hung the nickname “Saddie” – short for “Sad” – on the future “Boss.”

Writing a song about someone who spends his time hunched over a brew and yearning after high school glory seems like a far better way to exorcise the hurt of high school than killing innocent people.

Of course, it’s possible to feel sympathy for young people – old ones, too, for that matter – who view violence as an antidote to their own pain. Few things are more scarring than being subjected to classroom humiliations by peers adept at homing in on your weak spots. At 15, 16, 17 years of age, everything is a weak spot.

Most of our sympathy, though, should go for the families and friends of those five young’uns who were shot by Lane – three of whom will never reach adulthood, will never be able to look back on their own “glory days.”

FARMINGTON The Davis County Board of Education discussed a boundary change for Wasatch and Holt Elementary Schools during a workshop Tuesday.

A boundary study for the two schools began last year and is expected to be finalized at the end of the academic year in preparation for the opening of the new Wasatch Elementary School in the fall. Assistant Superintendent Craig Poll presented the study and said that the proposed changes ease enrollment at Holt, which is currently over-capacity, while simultaneously filling the classrooms of the new school.

“Holt has four portables, they really need a couple more,” he said. “Holt will lose kids but will not lose faculty.”

Wasatch currently enrolls around 350 students, compared to more than 700 at Holt. Poll said the boundary committee has met with both school faculties and community councils, which have been supportive of the boundary plan.

“They had some questions but had no suggestions for change,” he said.

In its current state, the boundary change would re-allocate students living in the area south of 150 North and north of 200 South between 500 West and Pacific Street. Those students, of which there are more than 100, would attend Wasatch Elementary.

Poll said the only foreseen issue would be students crossing Pacific Street, but added that a pedestrian walkway is already in place for children to cross safely and precautions for snow removal and crossing guards have been taken.

“It’s a safe walk out of traffic,” Poll said.

District Spokesperson Christopher Williams said the committee is being proactive in making sure parents are aware of the changes. An open house will be held Feb 28 at Clearfield City Hall where residents will be able to see the boundary maps and direct their questions and concerns to members of the district. Fliers will also be distributed with information about the boundary study.

Poll said that compared to prior boundary studies, the Wasatch and Holt change has elicited overwhelmingly positive feedback. Both schools feed into the same Jr. High and High School, meaning students effected by the change will only see a difference at the elementary level.

“It’s been quiet and quiet is good,” he said. “We’re not hearing anything. We’re not used to that with a boundary study.”

In other Board of Education business, Poll also presented a Davis School District plan for increasing ethnic minority hiring. Discussion of the plan focused on not only the need to better represent the diversity of Davis County, but also to attract the highest quality of new teachers.

“The goal is to get the best and the finest,” Poll said.

The plan focused on increasing the number of minority applicants, including a more focused effort on out of state recruiting and the development of programs like Latinos in Action and education grants that encourage Davis County students to return after receiving their education certificates.

Board member Peter Cannon emphasized that the quality of a teaching candidate should be considered before any other criteria, saying when he was a student what mattered was whether the teacher was inspiring, not the teacher’s ethnicity.

“He didn’t need to be my ethnic group, he didn’t need to be my own race, he just needed to be inspiring,” Cannon said. “It’s just a slippery slope when we think anyone in America needs to be inspired by their own ethnic type. If they’re good and inspiring, that’s who we want.”