Three remarkable generations of scholarship, service and dance

The Fourth Floor Angels lived in Roosevelt Hall in the mid-1940s, and one of them was Anne Nixon Thayer. She was a cheerleader, actress and sorority president, and met a returning GI when she was selling tickets to a dance and he said he’d buy one if she’d go with him. “We’ll dance together the rest of our lives,” he told her, and even though he later admitted it was just a pick-up line, it turned out he was right.

Six children later, Anne returned to URI to get her master’s in education. It was an example her kids took to heart. The youngest, Cindy Moffitt-Underhill, studied nursing as an undergrad, performing in various dance troupes, and returned for her master’s as a nurse practioner. She’s now URI’s Coordinator of Nursing Services.

So it’s not surprising that when it was Sarah Moffitt’s turn to apply to college, she vowed to go her own way. “URI was my last choice,” she says. “I grew up in Wakefield—I wanted to find my own path.”

She ended up enrolling here, but nothing clicked. In her second semester, she decided to take a year out to do AmeriCorps. Perhaps that’s not surprising, given what Cindy used to tell her every morning when she dropped her at school: “Do something nice for someone today.”

After a year in community service, Sarah returned with a new perspective. She was where she wanted to be.

“Everything fell into place. I changed my majors to health studies and sociology,” she recounts, a direction that has had her working with Rhode Island Department of Health epidemiologists and that will see her pursuing post-grad studies in medicine and public health. “Believe it or not, I’m looking at applying to nursing schools,” she laughs.

And she’s followed matrilineal tradition in other ways: She’s vice chair of the URI Dance Company and chair of the student entertainment committee, and helped found a new sorority on campus with a mission of service to others. “I try to get as involved as possible.”

Younger sister Hannah also loves to dance—how could she not, when the sisters twirled around Anne’s piano as toddlers? Unlike Sarah, she always knew she wanted to come to URI. She’s now a freshman, studying marketing. It must be something in the mitochondrial DNA.

—Pippa Jack