An artist's rendering of changes to be made to McCollum Hall, home of NU's Law College.

Law College to get a face lift

McCollum Hall construction will improve library, add offices

By Kim Hachiya, University Communications

Steve Willborn alternately smiles and winces as he describes the architecture of Ross McCollum Hall. Home to the College of Law, McCollum Hall's mid-1970s architecture has been described as "brutalist," Dean Willborn says.

Ouch. In its first iteration in 1975, the college lacked adequate women's restrooms on the first floor, he noted. That soon changed. And soon, the entire college will change as an addition and renovation project will add 27,000 square feet to the college and renovate about 53,000 more.

The best news: The entire $8.2 million project is funded with private donations, mostly from law alumni.

Notable changes in the building will be new staircases in the center of the library with a clerestory atrium to bring light into the library; matching colonnade entrances on the north and south sides of the building; and a first-floor connection between the current building and the adjacent Welpton Courtroom.

The bulk of the new space will be a new elliptical-shaped wing jutting east from the Schmid Law Library. The southern portion of that addition comprises the Larry Berger & Richard S. Harnsberger Faculty Wing. Named in honor of two longtime faculty members, this addition adds much needed faculty office space, Willborn said.

The new addition will also feature a reading room with 20-foot ceilings; the Governors' Room (named for the five Nebraska govern ors who are NU Law grads); and the J. Lee Rankin room, named in honor of an NU Law grad who argued for the U.S. government in the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education case, which overturned school segregation. A Presidents' Room honors NU Law graduates who have become state bar presidents. The latter three rooms will be used as seminar and other meeting space.

The library will gain much-needed space for library duties such as binding, cataloging and other administrative functions that once happened in Love Library when the Schmid library was a branch of University Libraries. Offices for librarians and a computer manager also will be added.

An addition connecting the main building to the Welpton Courtroom will house the Kauffman Legal Writing Center. A greenspace, the Kit and Dick Schmoker Courtyard, will improve exterior aesthetics, Willborn said.

The project solves a number of problems for the college.

"We have tremendous problems with disability access," Willborn said, and the renovation will eliminate those problems. The library's collections had far outgrown their allotted space; an area in the basement will be remodeled to accommodate materials. The legal writing program lacked a home, and adjunct faculty who teach the courses had no offices. The Kauffman Legal Writing Center solves that dilemma.

The building will have extensive technology updates, including a wireless network and the addition of data ports and electrical outlets. And long-standing heating, air conditioning and ventilation problems will be addressed.

And, Willborn hopes, the "brutality" of the building will be softened.

"Our space is usable and functional," he said. "But it's never been very aesthetically pleasing. It's not really a nice space to work or study. I think it will be."

The dean said he hopes the renovation/addition will help student and faculty recruitment.

"Students actually go look at schools now and make part of their decisions on how the buildings look," he said.

The technology upgrade also will enhance research. Most legal research is done online, Willborn said, and many professors have Web sites where assignments are posted and discussions occur.

"It's really important to have that available," he said.

The college admits 140 to 150 new students annually and has about 400 students. There are about 24 FTE faculty members.

"We are about the size we want to be," Willborn said.

Former dean and now chancellor Harvey Perlman raised the bulk of the funding, Willborn said. But he added that as he has spoken to alumni, he finds they are willing to donate to the college because they find they "got a good value out of the law school."

"They value the education they got here and they want to be sure others benefit as well."

The project is expected to be completed in January 2003. Brad Muehling is project manager for UNL Facilities Management. Albert Machietto of Alley Poynter Architects in Omaha and John Sinclair of Sinclair Hille Architects of Lincoln designed the project. Hawkins Construction Co. is the general contractor.

Lee, Luthans and Digman.

Nebraskans lead charge in Pan-Pacific Conference

By Tom Simons, University Communications

It began as an idea to help U.S. business people and academics understand innovative Japanese business practices. Twenty years later, Sang Lee's idea has become an event that annually attracts hundreds of scholars from more than 30 countries around the Pacific Rim and beyond.

In 1981, the U.S. economy was struggling, the Japanese economy was booming and comparisons between the two filled the news.

"The U.S. economy was in terrible shape and American corporations were having a tough time competing against the Japanese, especially in the area of automobiles, machine tools and consumer electronics," recalled Lee, university eminent scholar and chair of the department of management in the UNL College of Business Administration.

"American products had just terrible quality problems. We didn't know how to control our inventory too well and our production processes were stretched out too long."

Lee had been on the Nebraska faculty for five years in 1981 and had earned a reputation as a rising star in the study of global management issues. Educated in both his native South Korea and the United States, he was highly knowledgeable about economies on both sides of the Pacific, and recognized that much of the Japanese advantage was because of two relatively recent management innovations. His background also gave him the insight to see that those new practices were adaptable to businesses in the United States.

Those Japanese innovations were Total Quality Management, or TQM, and Just in Time inventory control, or JIT.

TQM is a companywide quality control technique. JIT allows companies to control inventories by obtaining smaller quantities of materials, thus reducing storage costs and the risks of over-ordering. Ironically, TQM is based on the ideas of an American, Edwards Deming, that had been ignored by U.S. industries.

Kawasaki became one of the first firms to use the JIT system in the United States when it introduced it in its Lincoln plant in 1980 and 1981. The arrival of that innovation in his back yard inspired Lee to organize the Japan-U.S. Business Conference in 1981. Its central goal was to provide American business and academic leaders with a chance to learn about TQM and JIT, including a tour of the Lincoln Kawasaki plant.

About 300 people attended the conference, including 200 American business executives eager to learn about the new Japanese management practices. When a second conference two years later drew 500 participants to Tokyo, Lee and his colleagues in the management department began to understand what they had on their hands.

"At the time I thought the conference was unique and exciting because we felt more or less like pioneers in the field," said Fred Luthans, George Holmes university distinguished professor of management. "International marketing had been around for a long time and international economics has been around forever, but international management was fairly new."

Lee and his colleagues realized, however, that to make a real impact, they had to expand the conference to include other Pacific Rim nations.

"We realized this is broader than just Japan-U.S. or Asian-U.S.," said Les Digman, US Bank professor of management. "There were the four 'Asian tigers' - Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan - attracting a lot of attention at that point and the term 'Pan Pacific' was settled on because it encompassed the whole Pacific Rim area."

In 1984, the Pan-Pacific Conference met for the first time in Hawaii. It has convened every year since, with conferences in Australia, Canada, China, Fiji, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Taiwan and most-recently in Viña del Mar, Chile, in May 2001. That marked the first time the conference convened in South America.

Despite travel times that can span 44 hours door-to-door, the conference attracts a large crowd. On average, 350 to 450 participants register each year, with a high of 850 for the 1990 conference in Beijing. Even this year's Viña del Mar conference, which drew 220 participants because of the distance from East Asia and a slowing economy, had presenters from 105 institutions in 23 countries on every inhabited continent.

Luthans said the conference offered business scholars something they can't get anywhere else: firsthand information on Pacific rim economies.

It also offers great international publicity for the university, Luthans said, adding that Lee's exemplary reputation helps polish that image.

While the conference has put the University of Nebraska on the map in the area of global management, it has also put a global imprint on Nebraska faculty. For example Luthans, an expert on organizational behavior, had no international expertise or experience before getting involved with Lee in the Pan Pacific Conference. But he since has written International Management. Now going into its fifth edition, it's the top-selling textbook on the subject.

Lee, Digman and Luthans said they think the conference has rewarded the College of Business Administration, the university and the state. It has broadened the perspectives of Nebraska faculty members and has informed their work in the classroom and in service activities performed for Nebraska citizens with a vital international viewpoint. And it has helped attract outstanding international students, especially graduate students, to the university.

The conference has evolved from a professional development seminar for business executives and academics into an almost exclusively academic conference. But it still retains elements of the hands-on business aspect that originally inspired it in 1981, with visits to industries in the host country every year, such as inspection of Chile's wine industry in 2001.

It has also outlived and outgrown its founder's expectations.

"We thought it might last a few years and maybe fizzle out, or who knows," Lee said. "It turned out that the conference has really made a major contribution in many countries. We came up with all kinds of innovative new ideas and discussed some of the major issues, such as the Asian financial crisis in 1997. We offered a forum to discuss ways to overcome those problems.

"Of course we don't know the exact impact, but I've been told by people in different countries that government officials came and listened to some of the papers that were presented and some of the ideas were later reflected in their policies."

Chris Calkins, a University of Nebraska meat scientist, measures the thickness of a cut of beef round. Calkins' team conducted the largest ever study of the muscles that make up the beef round and chuck. This research found that many muscles in the round and chuck could be put to higher-value uses. These findings could lead to new products and better uses for these major beef cuts.

Research shows parts of chuck, beef round merit better uses

By Monica Norby, for IANR News Service

Processors typically grind it up, but University of Nebraska research shows there's plenty of tender, high-quality meat in the beef round and chuck that deserves a better fate than being slapped between two hamburger buns.

A two-year study profiling the muscles that constitute the beef chuck and round revealed many of the muscles that traditionally are ground should have higher value uses, said Chris Calkins, Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources meat scientist who headed this research.

"We wanted to completely characterize the muscles with the ultimate goal of finding their optimal use and optimal value," Calkins said.

Nebraska meat scientists teamed with University of Florida colleagues on the largest and most comprehensive meat profiling study ever.

The study was sparked by a 1997 cattle industry report showing that over a five-year period, the value of the loin and rib had increased 4 percent to 12 percent, while chuck and round values decreased more than 20 percent. That's a huge loss considering these cuts make up the majority of the weight of the beef carcass.

"This was startling," Calkins said. "We wanted to know how to recapture some of this value."

IANR researchers extensively profiled more than 5,500 muscles from the chuck and round. Calkins' lab performed more than 25,000 different tests, including measurements of color, fat and moisture content, pH, water-holding capacity and amount of connective tissue.

Calkins summarizes the study's findings in one word: variation. The team found a wide range of variation for virtually every trait studied, leading Calkins to conclude that many muscles of the chuck and round have a higher quality and warrant a better use than butchers and chefs traditionally have given them.

"There are things we do with these cuts that are just a matter of tradition, like grouping certain muscles together or cutting them to a shape that the consumer is accustomed to seeing," Calkins said. "Now we have definitive information that can be used to develop new products that can benefit both the industry and the consumer."

Findings from the study have sparked interest from national retailers, who are testing ideas in key areas. The National Cattlemen's Beef Association hired a top-notch chef to develop recipes using eight of the characterized muscles. As a result, one of the largest beef distributors in the eastern United States has begun to order these cuts. Calkins compiled the extensive test results in a usable, understandable booklet published by the NCBA that he calls a veritable "encyclopedia of the chuck and round."

He also teamed with IANR colleague Steve Jones and information technologists in IANR's Communications and Information Technology unit to compile the information on a CD-ROM. The CD-ROM also is being distributed by the NCBA.

"The CD-ROM is a premier educational tool and makes the information available in a format that industry and academia can really use," Calkins said. "If you are someone in industry looking for a muscle for a particular value-added product and you know the traits you need, you can go to this information and easily identify a candidate muscle."

The university teamed with NCBA last fall to officially release findings and information at a national "rollout" session. The meeting in Lincoln attracted representatives from the beef processing, food manufacturing and grocery industries. It helped build awareness of this information resource and create interest in exploring the potential for adding value to beef, Calkins said.

The study has opened new avenues of research for IANR meat scientists. The team has launched marination studies with the chuck and round and is developing innovative beef fabrication strategies to provide access to specific desirable muscles identified by the profiling.

This research was conducted in cooperation with IANR's Agricultural Research Division, funded by beef checkoff dollars and was produced for the Cattleman's Beef Board and state beef councils by the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.