Former Rector Establishes Fellowship

A memorial gift designated to the English department by Board of Visitors member James A. Hixon will provide a boost for selected faculty members in the years ahead.

Hixon, a former board rector, recently established a fellowship in memory of his wife, Robin L. Hixon, who died in January of last year.

The fellowship will be used to reduce the teaching load and offset the costs of research for one or more full-time faculty members in the English department who are engaged in writing a book-length manuscript or compiling a substantial body of research.

“The Robin L. Hixon Faculty Research Fellowship comes to the English department at precisely the right time in the department’s growth,” said chair David Metzger. “It affords us the opportunity to provide our faculty with the kind of research support that their colleagues at other doctoral-granting institutions simply take for granted. It will have a major impact on our ability to recruit new faculty and to retain the excellent faculty already here.”

Hixon, who is executive vice president for law and corporate relations at Norfolk Southern Corp., was reappointed to a second four-year term on the ODU board in 2006. He served as board rector from 2004-06.

“Both my wife and I have been very impressed with Old Dominion and what President Runte has been able to do there,” Hixon said. “I wanted to do a number of things in my wife’s memory, and supporting Old Dominion was one of them. Robin always enjoyed attending events at the university and spending time with Roseann, her mother and others there. It was just one of the institutions I wanted to support, and I wanted to make the gift while Roseann was still there.”

Hixon, who has supported the College of Business and Public Administration with previous gifts, designated the fellowship for the English department in tribute to his wife’s love of reading. “She really enjoyed reading and belonged to book clubs,” he said. She held an undergraduate degree in English from the University of Arizona.

The two met as students at the College of William and Mary’s Marshall-Wythe School of Law. Robin Hixon practiced law at Woods, Rogers & Hazelgrove in Roanoke and at the Association of American Railroads in Washington, D.C., and clerked at the Virginia Supreme Court in Richmond. She retired from the practice of law to raise her two children and participate in community organizations.

She was active in many organizations, including the Virginia Arts Festival, Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters Driftwood Circle, the Virginia Opera Association and the Middle Plantation Garden Club.