Jill Koelling is curator of photographs and head of digital imaging at the Nebraska State Historical Society. She graduated from UNL's museum studies program in 1994 and says the need for museum professionals is increasing, making the UNL museum studies program increasingly important. Photo by Richard Wright.

Museum studies grads find wealth of opportunities

As number of museums grows, UNL program prepares graduates to fill need

By Courtney Russell
Special to the Scarlet

Historical dates and quotes from long-dead people are not the only remains of our nation's maturation. A trip to a history museum will show another angle of our past, but who creates, archives and cares for these collections? Museum professionals, such as those matriculating in UNL's museum studies program.

Museums encompass a broad variety of collections, from animals in a zoo to paintings in an art gallery, so museum studies students develop a strong foundation to foster career success.

Establishing roots in the late 1980s, UNL's museum studies program sprang up later than most comparable programs across the country, yet it has thrived and become one of the top six of its kind.

"The real blossoming of this type of program occurred in the late 1960s and into the 1970s," said Hugh Genoways, chair and professor of museum studies at UNL. "It was really part of a phenomenon when there was a big boom in building museums."

The U.S. bicentennial of 1976 was largely responsible for the increase in museums across America a few decades ago. Today another period of museum growth is in progress. The New York Times reported museums, botanical and zoological gardens as 18th of the top 20 growing industries in September 2000 and predicted a 4.8 percent increase in available jobs within the next year. Upcoming museum studies graduates welcome these hopeful numbers, and UNL's program has solid job placement records as well.

"We're placing 80 percent or more of our graduates into museum-type institutions within six months of graduation, which doesn't account for our graduates who are entering Ph.D. programs and not looking for jobs," Genoways said.

One graduate said she's ready to enter the work world.

"I'm very prepared," said Raney Morrison, who received her master's degree in museum studies from UNL in May. Morrison interned for the Forest Service in Lake Tahoe during the summer of 2001, and she was the first museum professional on the scene. She worked in a herbarium to diversify her experience in collections.

"The museum studies program gave me a great foundation of knowledge that was very vital, particularly the first year on the job," said Jill Koelling, curator of photographs and head of digital imaging at the Nebraska State Historical Society. Koelling graduated from UNL's museum studies program in 1994 and has seen the need for museum professionals increase.

"Small museums around the country haven't had the funding to jump on the technology bandwagon. As the years go by they'll be forced to and they'll need help," she said.

Interest in the past often intensifies with age, triggering many communities to create small history museums.

"They'll need people like the students coming out of the museum studies program to help them," Koelling said.

The numbers of museums are increasing, said Karen Janovy, senior lecturer for museum studies and curator of education at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden.

"The number of museums that crop up is about one museum per month opening across the country," Janovy said.

Corporations also hire museum professionals to preserve and organize their documents and artifacts.

"The litigious society we live in has forced corporations to think about their papers and legal documents and realize that they need them available," Genoways said. "That's opened a lot of jobs."

Because of the budding need for museum professionals, the museum studies program has grown, too.

"Genoways has expanded the program by adding career tracks, courses and specializations," said Janovy, who has witnessed the program's development over the years as both a student and instructor. Janovy graduated from the museum studies program in 1993 and teaches a museum studies course.

The museum studies department draws on faculty from seven departments. This broad background prepares students to work in traditional museums and in organizations not typically thought of as museums, such as zoos, nature centers, arboretums and botanical gardens.

"One of the things that makes this program successful is the interdisciplinary aspect," Genoways said. "We're able to tap in and use the strength of a lot of existing departments on campus, which is crucial to our success."

Leitzel: University leaders must focus on future

By Kim Hachiya, University Communications

The best university chancellors and presidents are concerned with the future, long-term success of their institutions, according to a recently retired university chancellor who spoke at UNL Oct. 9.

Joan Leitzel, who retired last summer as chancellor of the University of New Hampshire, was on campus to deliver the inaugural Robert Egbert Distinguished Lecture. Leitzel left UNL for New Hampshire in 1996 after serving as senior vice chancellor for academic affairs, and now lives in Columbus, Ohio. She has emerita status at Ohio State University, where she once was a math professor and associate provost.

Presidents and chancellors are chief executive officers, not chief operating officers, she said. They are, or should be, people whose primary responsibility is setting the agenda for the long-range future and stability of an institution. To do that, she said, they must understand their institutions' history, mission and values, and their vision for their institutions must reflect those three items.

For example, she said, when she arrived at the University of New Hampshire, the institution had done no meaningful long-range planning for several years. A two-year planning exercise resulted in a clear statement of institutional goals and mission that have helped the university progress, she said. The mission reflects the university's founding as a public liberal arts college, its core value that it "feels like" a private liberal arts college, and its value that it is a public university with a land-grant mission.

"That was a difficult exercise to come to consensus," she said.

The biggest tool a chancellor or president has to effect change is the budget, she noted. As public universities see their state funding shrink, and their reliance on private funding, federal funding and student tuition grow, the way they serve their publics will change, she predicted.

As public colleges become more aggressive in recruiting out-of-state students and more selective in admitting students, often a strategy adopted because it boosts the academic reputation of a school, the spectre of "elitism," can arise, she said.

"The (land-grant) mission of providing access to all students becomes somewhat distorted," she said. "Limiting access means a change in your climate and changes in opportunities for your students."

Land-grant schools, she said, serve a definite purpose. But the glory of U.S. higher education is that it takes many forms ­ public colleges and universities, private colleges and universities, community colleges, technical schools and for-profit institutions all serve specific audiences and niches.

Universities often are told they should be run like businesses, she said, although she noted that recent business downturns and scandals have reduced those comments. In many ways, universities are like businesses, she said, yet the product, learning and application, is difficult to measure.

"There is no analog to profit," she said. Shared governance, campus climate and the need for discussion and debate run counter to the "business model," she said.

A good campus CEO, she said, ensures the institution is accountable for its decisions, communicates well, takes advantage of opportunities and efficiencies, and hires well. And, she added, it's important that the CEO recognizes and celebrates successes.

Because campus CEOs need to be future-oriented, they need to develop in their current students a loyalty that will be repaid when the students become alumni. As public institutions fight for dwindling public money, voices from outside the institution must persuade lawmakers of the value of higher education, or at least help lawmakers make higher education a priority, she said. Those voices will come from alumni, if they have been cultivated as students, business leaders and students themselves.

"We have the privilege of employment in an organization responsible for the future, and it's a wonderful and exciting thing," she said. "It's a lot of fun. It should be fun. It's rewarding in its own context."

Lecture offers perspective on future of graduate education

By Dan Schmit, Teachers College

Recent and probable changes in higher education will affect the collegiate world and will affect graduate students, graduate faculty and graduate programs, Joan Leitzel said. She was vice chancellor of academic affairs at UNL from 1992 to 1996 and presented a discussion, "Graduate Studies and the Changing Face of Higher Education," Oct. 7 at Teachers College. The presentation drew more than 40 faculty members, graduate students and administrators.

Leitzel identified several key issues that are prompting change in higher education, including increased globalization and diversity; changes in technology; the roles of state and federal governments; and the threat of terrorism. After elaborating on each of these issues with some interaction with the audience, Leitzel identified five skills that may be more important for the next generation of faculty/leaders in higher education:

• commitment to educate all segments of the U.S. population;
• deep international understanding;
• understanding of state and federal decision-making processes;
• the ability to manage budgets; and
• skills with accountability measures and marketing strategies.

Leitzel's insight helped some attending the lecture gain a broad perspective of the evolution of higher education.

Ali Moeller, director of the Teachers College Institute and Professor of Curriculum and Instruction, said Leitzel had "a way of describing the most complex issues in ways that make these issues comprehensible and accessible to everyone."

"Her deep understanding of issues related to higher education and her ability to draw from her firsthand experience as a past president and provost made this discussion with faculty and graduate students a very rich and rare opportunity to learn from an insider about the challenges facing higher education in the 21st century."

The Oct. 7 discussion was sponsored by Teachers College, the College of Human Resources and Family Sciences, and UNL Graduate Studies.

Grant to help abused, neglected children

By Tom Simons, University Communications

Abused and neglected children in Nebraska's three metro counties may find their ways to permanent homes faster in the future as a result of the Court-Agency Collaboration Project.

A three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has funded a project in which the Center on Children, Families and the Law at UNL works with state and local agencies in Douglas, Lancaster and Sarpy counties to develop and implement system improvements that reduce the delays in returning those children to their homes or placing them in permanent ones.

"Children who are in the foster care system in Nebraska - as well as the country at large - have not fared well as far as our court system and child welfare system," said Vicky Weisz, research assistant professor in the Center on Children, Families and the Law. "All the systems that are designed to help children typically are under-resourced and overburdened, and the result is that many children languish in the foster-care systems for years on end. In some more crowded urban areas where resources are even more limited, many children go to shelters, so they're not even going to foster homes. They're staying in shelters for long periods sometimes. So it's a real crisis."

Elizabeth Sterns of the Center on Children, Families and the Law serves as the court-agency liaison in the project, working with the center's staff to organize and facilitate regular meetings that involve all juvenile judges in the counties, several child protection administrators and workers, attorneys appointed by the courts to represent the interests of the children, parents' attorneys, prosecutors and agency attorneys. She said Douglas, Lancaster and Sarpy counties were chosen for the project because they have separate juvenile court systems.

"It's a great project that holds considerable promise for improving things for children in the child welfare system," Sterns said. "The project is county-directed, and we provide a neutral environment in which to work. There are approximately 80 people in the three counties combined involved in the meetings. That's a significant number and it includes all 10 juvenile court judges in the three counties, all of whom have cleared their schedules for the project.

"The Children's Bureau of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released its final report in the Nebraska Child and Family Review in September. This comprehensive report found that we - that is the state of Nebraska - are not taking care of our children and that we must do better. The Collaboration Project offers the framework within which to examine this report and make substantive changes in Nebraska's child-welfare system to better serve our children."

Two of the judges involved in the project agreed that the collaboration holds great promise.

"It's already been helpful by bringing together a diversified group of people who can spend time and dialogue about how we can do a better job of serving children and families in the juvenile courts," said Judge Doug Johnson of Douglas County.

"I think it has energized the participants, and we're already starting to implement some changes in Douglas County. One example is front-end loading of abused and neglected children in the system. It helps keep children at home and at the same time it serves the family by reducing foster care and getting children to permanency faster."

Judge Larry Gendler of Sarpy County said the project has also helped local agencies and courts adapt to administrative changes at the state level.

"This project has taken on new importance with all of the changes occurring within the state as they relate to reorganization of the (state) Department of Health and Human Services," Gendler said. "During this transition process, we can do much to help each other and, hopefully, as a result, help the youth and families we serve."

Turf scientist Roch Gaussoin, left, and research technician Clint Meyer are part of NU's nationally known turfgrass science team. Here, they are inspecting turf in a test plot as a turfgrass wear simulator rolls over it. IANR photo.

Research helps get turf ready for wear and tear

By Vicki Miller, IANR News Service

If you think your kids are hard on the lawn, consider golf courses, baseball diamonds or football fields. From cleats to clubs, mud to mayhem, sports turf leads a decidedly rough life full of stomping, tromping and hacking.

Finding ways to provide quality sports turf using less water, chemicals and other inputs is among the hallmarks of UNL's nationally recognized turfgrass science team.

"Our integrated approach helps the end user manage turf in a more environmentally sound and economically effective way," said Bob Shearman, who became UNL's first turf scientist when he arrived in 1975. Turf research rapidly became a group effort. Today's NU Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources team includes turf scientists, plant pathologists and entomologists who collaborate on everything from basic research to applied problems.

"There's no other program in the nation with as strong an integrated team," Shearman said.

The program probably is most widely known for developing improved turf-type buffalograsses that need about half the water, chemicals and maintenance of conventional turfgrasses. The team's research also has helped reduce water and pesticide use on golf courses and changed industry thinking about fertilization and other management practices.

In the 1980s, Shearman's research on nutrition's impact on intensively managed turf revealed potassium's importance and helped rewrite turf industry fertilizer formulas.

"We found that if you increase potassium nutrition, you can increase wear, drought stress and heat tolerance," he said.

Based on this research, NU recommended applying nitrogen and potassium at a 1:1 ratio on intensively used turf, instead of using more nitrogen. Golf and sports turf managers nationwide adopted this balanced approach, and fertilizer manufacturers switched their formulations to meet this need.

Current research on golf green grow-in procedures led by Turf Scientist Roch Gaussoin also may change traditional thinking about how to get greens playable as quickly as possible.

Researchers compared conventional accelerated growing practices that require heavy fertilization and lots of water with a seemingly slower, more controlled approach.

Easy does it works best, this research showed. Accelerated grow-in requires twice as much water and fertilizer, but the controlled approach actually gets greens ready for play at least three or four weeks faster.

While accelerated practices promote faster top growth, the controlled approach encourages healthier roots that withstand disease, heat and other stresses. In the long run, controlled grow-in produces a healthier turf that needs fewer chemicals and less maintenance.

In the end, economics will help sell the controlled approach, Shearman predicted.

"What the university is beginning to show us is that if you push too hard, you'll pay for years to come," said Charlie Hadwick, superintendent of the Country Club of Lincoln.

Mostly, Hadwick said, he appreciates the turf team's unbiased information.

"When in doubt, I go with what the university says because their recommendations are based on sound scientific evidence."

The Nebraska Turfgrass Foundation and the U.S. Golf Association help fund the turf research, which is conducted in cooperation with IANR's Agricultural Research Division.