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Amanda Brown Cartee pursued education like she pursued life: with astounding determination and energy. Her commitment was well-known to her family and friends, and it so impressed her co-workers at Alden Library that they couldn't let it go unrecognized.     Ronale Brown Mitchell looks at the diploma posthumously awarded to her daughter, Amanda Brown Cartee, in January. Photo by John McGann In January, an associate in arts degree was posthumously awarded to Cartee, who died two years ago at the age of 21 when her car was hit by that of a drunk driver on a winding southeastern Ohio roadway. Attired in full academic regalia, President Robert Glidden presented the degree to Cartee's mother, Ronale Brown Mitchell, at an emotional ceremony attended by 45 family members and friends. The ceremony was held at Alden Library, where Cartee worked during her sophomore and junior years. The Vinton County native, who was the first in her family to attend college, was pursuing a bachelor's degree in education but already had earned enough credits for an associate's degree. She had dreamed of being a teacher since she was a little girl. "About a month before she passed away, Mandy said to me that if she could make a difference in just one person's life, that it would all be worth it," Mitchell told those attending the ceremony as Cartee's husband of eight months, Andrew, kept a supportive hand on her right shoulder. "Amanda didn't realize the teacher that she had already become. She didn't realize the lives that she had already changed and the lives that she's still changing today." Bill Kimok and his colleagues in the library's Archives and Special Collections department pushed for the degree out of admiration. University College officials made it a reality. "The year Amanda died, a memorial service was held on campus in Galbreath Chapel and a tree was planted along University Terrace, but the effort she put into academics had not been formally acknowledged," says Kimok, the University's records manager. "Her education was so important to her -- and so much a part of who she was and who she was becoming." An active member of her community, Cartee taught Sunday school at Allensville Church of Christ in Christian Union, and she and her husband portrayed Mary and Joseph in the church's live nativity the December before she died. The following Christmas season, the nativity was dedicated to Cartee. She also was on the church's softball league, 3CU (for Church of Christ in Christian Union), and her teammates wore her name on their jerseys during the 2000 and 2001 seasons. At Vinton County High School, where she graduated in 1997, Cartee tutored some of her fellow students. Kimok says Cartee was compelled to learn. While not a straight-A student, she was determined to make the most of her time and opportunities at Ohio University.     Amanda Brown Cartee "She wasn't a person who took classes to get through the next hoop," Kimok says. "Amanda was driven to expand her horizons." The thoughts of her instructor in a black poetry class she was enrolled in the quarter she died illustrate that. A letter by Gabrielle Civil, now an assistant professor of English at Minnesota's College of St. Catherine, was read at the ceremony. Civil wrote: "Amanda Cartee wore big glasses that only magnified the warmth, curiosity and intelligence of her eyes. Always sitting in the back corner of my Comparative Approaches to Black Poetry class, she was an anchor of dedication. She wrote her own poems, developed her own voice and engaged the work of African-American, Caribbean and African poets. Although these authors were superficially different from her, Amanda was able to connect with them truly through the power of education and her own good mind and heart. Similarly, she worked with a very diverse group of students toward the final presentation. Black, white, male, female, urban and rural, these students all liked and respected Amanda Cartee and were devastated by her untimely passing -- as was I. To this end, I believe that Amanda represented the best of Ohio University and its potential to create an environment of growth, empowerment, diversity and connection." -- Mary Alice Casey and Katie Fitzgerald