Beloit is in the top 50 colleges and universities nationally in producing graduates who earn doctorates, outranking many prominent schools. In the latest report from the Higher Education Data Sharing Consortium, Beloit ranked 22nd among all four-year liberal arts colleges and 32nd among all colleges and universities in the percentage of graduates who go on to earn PhDs.

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Assistant Professor of Anthropology Lisa Anderson-Levy received the James S. Underkofler Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award in April. She was nominated by students for the honor, which the Alliant Energy Foundation awards to select Wisconsin faculty members.

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The Arthur Vining Davis Foundation awarded Beloit College a $250,000 grant to enhance the primary classroom spaces of the Pettibone World Affairs Center, originally Beloit’s library. The grant will return the building’s two largest ground-floor seminar rooms to their former glory while complementing them with new technology.

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Beloit will welcome its first black Mackey Professor to campus this spring when poet Kevin Young holds the Lois and Willard Mackey Chair in Creative Writing. Young’s most recent collection, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice selection in April.

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Nancy McDowell, the William S. Godfrey, Jr. Professor of Anthropology, retired from Beloit in May after 18 years of service in the classroom and in administration. She was honored with emeriti status during 2012 Commencement exercises.

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Travel + Leisure magazine recognized Beloit’s thriving downtown in its May 2012 issue, naming it one of America’s Greatest Main Streets. The magazine scoured lists from the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the American Planning Association for “the most vibrant, distinctive downtowns worth the trip.”

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Upward Bound, Beloit’s pre-college program, was awarded approximately $1.7 million in a five-year, federally funded grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Serving first-generation, low-income high school students primarily from Beloit and South Beloit high schools, the program currently enrolls 76 students. More than 90 percent of all Upward Bound seniors pursue a college education immediately after high school graduation.

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In June, the Beloit community bid adieu to Emily Chamlee-Wright, Elbert Neese Professor of Economics and associate dean. She has taken a post as provost and dean at Washington College in Maryland.

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As many as 600 Native Americans lived in a settlement along Turtle Creek in the 1830s in what is now South Beloit, Ill. For the first time, this area is being explored through an archaeological study led by Bill Green, James E. Lockwood Jr. Director of the Logan Museum of Anthropology. A number of Beloit students are assisting Green on the project.

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After a recent Middle College renovation project rebuilt and repainted the cupola atop Beloit’s oldest structure, the exterior approach to the iconic building is being upgraded this summer. Improvements include the addition of twin accessibility ramps to the sides of a newly built front staircase and plaza.