Christina O'Connor | The Roanoke Times

Families and friends of incoming Radford faculty mingle and eat during the faculty family reception Tuesday night at the Bonnie Hurlburt Student Center at Radford University. New faculty members said they were impressed by the university’s welcome.

RADFORD -- Finding a place where the routine noisiness of children is tolerated can be a challenge for parents.

Finding that tolerance at a work function is even harder.

But that's exactly what Nicole Hendrix and her family found at the Tuesday night reception for new Radford University faculty members. The experience reassured her that she had made the right decision to come here.

"Not all colleges are as welcoming to the private life of professors as Radford has been," she said while her husband, Ryan, kept their daughters, Emma and Isabel, busy with pink helium-filled balloons.

The reception came at the end of a three-day orientation session for the 43 new faculty members and was the brainchild of Ivelaw Griffith, the university's new provost.

Griffith wanted to bring the new professors and their families together so they would all start to feel connected to the university. He led by example Tuesday evening, when he introduced his wife, Francille, and spoke of their two children in college who could not attend the event.

Faculty members in attendance then introduced their own families. Besides children and spouses, some mothers, fathers and siblings came, too.

Renee Dickinson, an assistant professor of English, brought her husband, daughter and mother to the event.

Dickinson's mother was in town to help the family move in to their new home, where they've been for two weeks. Before accepting the job at RU, the family lived in Colorado, where Dickinson attended graduate school.

Like Hendrix, Dickinson said she appreciated the welcoming environment at the Radford reception. It helped her realize how many other parents of small children there are among the faculty, she said. Those new additions will also have to find child care, figure out school systems and balance being a parent and a professor.

"I'm not just trying to orient myself," Dickinson said.

Dickinson's daughter Hallie, a red-headed 2¹₂-year-old, seemed to have enjoyed herself at the party. She went home about 7:30 p.m. with bunches of leftover balloons, in enough time to take a bath and get to bed.

The balloons, along with plastic fluorescent hats, were gifts from the clown the university hired to entertain the children.

The kid-friendly atmosphere made one new faculty member wish she had brought her granddaughter.

Glenna Gustafson, who has a doctorate in education from Virginia Tech, brought her husband to the family event. Gustafson graduated from Radford in 1978 -- when it was called Radford College and only about 20 percent of students were male.

"I was just thrilled that I got the opportunity to come teach here," Gustafson said.