By Kim Hachiya, News & Information
A pantheon of university and governmental dignitaries paid tribute to the Beadle family and thanked numerous individuals during formal dedication ceremonies of the George W. Beadle Center for Genetics and Biomaterials on Sept. 22.
Even a group of Wahoo boosters were recognized. Beadle was a native of Wahoo and an NU alumnus whose work in genetics won him a Nobel prize in 1958. His son, stepson, grandson and great-granddaughters all participated in the ceremony.
U.S. Rep. Doug Bereuter (R-Neb.) lauded the work of Sen. Bob Kerrey and former U.S. Representative Virginia Smith for their work in securing more than $22 million in federal funds for the project. "It probably couldn't be done in these fiscal times," Bereuter said. "I would said that the Beadle Center crossed the threshhold just in time."
Bereuter challenged university officials and the state to adequately support the center with funding, resources and staffing.
"Without that sustained commitment, the center's potential is only partially achieved," he said. Bereuter said that federal officials must exact more of a commitment on the part of states to support facilities that were funded by federal dollars.
NU President L. Dennis Smith said in his remarks that he accepted Bereuter's challenge and pledged to staff the center with top-quality researchers and students.
Regent Nancy O'Brien said her participation in the ceremony brought her somewhat full-circle. Among her first duties as a regent was to approve the Beadle project five years ago, she said. She added that she hoped the center would live up to its namesake in terms of the cooperative spirit promoted by Beadle and that it became a familiar workspace for students and faculty.
Irv Omtvedt, vice chancellor for the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources, said the project was a team effort, and that he hoped it would solve the "split campus problem that has plagued this university for generations." Omtvedt said the center should bring together researchers from both sides of 33rd Street to work in an interdisciplinary manner.
Marion O'Leary, center director, said the wonder of the Beadle Center was more than its architecture and technology but that its promise was in the people who work and study in the building. O'Leary listed a number of researchers and their projects which have affects for Nebraskans.
"George W. Beadle would be proud. All of Nebraska should be proud,"
O'Leary said.
After the remarks, the dignitaries joined pieces of a red ribbon, rather
than the traditional ribbon cutting, to symbolize unity and as a reminder
of the double helix shape of DNA.
Visitors will step back 100 million years when they tour the new Mesozoic Gallery at the University of Nebraska State Museum.
The gallery opens Oct. 1 and shows Nebraska as an inland sea complete with the fossil skeletons of giant reptiles and other creatures. The $772,000 gallery took three years to develop and features a computer multimedia exhibit and other interactive displays that invite visitors to become active participants in the gallery in Morrill Hall at 14th and U streets on the UNL campus.
A weekend of festivities are planned to celebrate the opening of the new gallery. Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.) will cut the ribbon to official open the gallery at a 6 p.m. reception Sept. 30, followed by a 6:30 dinner called the "Dig Site Spectacular." UNL Interim Chancellor Joan Leitzel will deliver welcoming remarks and Mike Voorhies, the UNL paleontologist who discovered the Ashfall Fossil Beds, will talk about Nebraska during the Age of Dinosaurs.
The menu for the dinner includes a cake donated by HyVee that represents the layers of Nebraska's fossil history.
Reservations for the dinner are $15.50 for adults and $10.50 for children 12 and younger and can be made by calling Sally Hawkins at 2-6365. Reservations are due by Sept. 15.
Oct. 1, a family festival titled "Dinosaur Crazies" will be held at
Morrill Hall from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m. It will feature children's
activities, including strolling musicians who will sing dinosaur songs
composed specially for the event. A donation of $1 is suggested for
museum visitors over the age of 2 and parking is available outside the
museum at 14th and U streets.
More vigorous recruiting efforts and an increase in the number of high school graduates have reversed a decline in enrollments at the University of Nebraska. The headcount enrollment of 49,659 students is 157 higher than last year's fall enrollment.
The upward trend is expected to continue due to anticipated increases in the number of Nebraska high school graduates over the next several years. Changes in enrollments vary by campus: UNL and UNK enrollments are each higher, by 2 percent at UNL and .5 percent at UNK. UNMC enrollment was marginally lower (.5 percent).
Only UNO experienced a significant decline. UNO's 2.4 percent decrease, however, results largely from the all-time record number of students (1,620) who graduated in the past year. Freshman enrollments at UNO are up by seven percent over last year. Overall, UNO's decrease is less than half of last year's decline of 5.3 percent, indicating the trend is reversing on that campus as well.
Enrollment changes also vary by educational level. Undergraduate
enrollments were up by 2.6 percent at UNL while graduate enrollments
declined slightly (.4 percent). At UNO, undergraduate enrollments were up
by .2 percent, graduate enrollments up by 1.9 percent.
Enrollment at the Nebraska College of Technical Agriculture increased
nearly 12 percent to 263 students.
By Kim Hachiya, News & Information
First off, it's Robert, not Bob, Knoll. And it's "prairie university." No caps. He's a beloved professor emeritus of English, not history. But his latest book is a history of the University of Nebraska.
So let's get the C-SPAN "Booknotes" questions out of the way.
He wrote "prairie university" at his office in the English Department. On an electric typewriter. He didn't work at home. He did write some of it in the Archives in Love Library. He's been collecting data, stories, oral histories, documents and memorabilia on the University of Nebraska for more than 25 years. He started work on the book after he retired five years ago. It was published in September by the University of Nebraska Press. ("Be sure to mention that Richard Eckersley was the designer. He's one of the prizes on this campus. An impressive genius," Knoll says.)
The book, he says, is his labor of love. His attempt to make sense of the institution that has cast its shadow upon his personal life since before he was born. He says it's his apologia pro sua vita. The apology for, or explanation of, his life. But it's much more than that.
In 200 pages, Robert Knoll has pulled no punches. It's a readable essay outlining the 126-year history of the institution. He's peppered it with a good dose of his own analysis and commentary. And it's not all flattering, as one might guess from a look at some of the chapter titles:
"A Golden Era": 1891-1900; From College to University: 1900-1908; The Beginning of a Long Retreat: 1909-1919; A University on the Defensive: 1920-1927; Marking Time: 1938-1946; Turning the University Around: 1946-1953.
Knoll looks not only at the events that occurred in the past 126 years, but he also places them in the context of the people who caused them. There's where he may have parted ways from the standard historian. He vigorously applauds folks like James Canfield, chancellor from 1891-1895, and his successor, Benjamin Andrews, who headed the institution from 1900 to 1909. He is much less kind to Samuel Avery and Edgar Burnett, who were in charge from 1910 to 1938.
Knoll has grown up within the university. His parents both were NU graduates (1910). He took his undergraduate degree here, in 1943, and he joined the English faculty in 1950. He has collected a number of books about the beginnings of the university, written by folks who were prominent in those early university circles. And he personally talked to many of them during his undergraduate days or as a young professor. The backbone of the book, he said, is based upon those conversations and materials.
"I knew the gossip," Knoll said. "I gathered the gossip from the professors and their predecessors. The gossip was necessary because it allowed me to check the official record and use the gossip as a guide to read through the documents to what was really being said. For instance, the anger the professoriate felt toward Burnett in particular was astonishing. Once I knew it was there, I could look between the lines and really understand why."
(Part of the problem, it seems, was that Burnett and the board of
regents didn't pursue available federal monies during the Depression that
would have helped stave off serious problems with crumbling buildings.)
Several themes emerged for Knoll as he waded through the material.
One was the importance of visionary leadership.
"It's just vital. It's so important to have people of vision." That lack of vision, starting about 1910, he said, is what knocked the University of Nebraska off a pedestal that also contained esteemed state institutions like the universities of Michigan, Wisconsin and California. The university aspires to climb back on that pedestal, he said, but the climb has been hindered by a lack of vision.
"The University of Nebraska was a leading state university until about 1910. Then we had two weak chancellors in a row, men completely without vision, and the university did not develop as it should have. It didn't develop while other universities did."
Institutions, he believed, really are shaped by the individuals that populate them. "Historians are not as persuaded as I am that history is biography. But I do think that the characters of individuals reshape their times."
Knoll believes that bickering, in-fighting and self-serving agendas on the part of members of the NU Board of Regents between 1970 and 1985 hurt the university. "They were the university's chief critics, not its biggest cheerleaders, and that's not how to be a good steward of the institution that has been entrusted to you."
Knoll seems unafraid to point out the emperor's nakedness, even when some of those emperors are still around. Former President Ronald Roskens is depicted in a manner that's less than flattering, particularly in regard to his cultivation of interests outside the university.
"An historian friend of mine said to me 'I wouldn't have had the nerve to say some of what you have said.' I think he meant I was willing to pass judgment on the actions and decisions of persons still living and he might have hesitated. In a sense, I am putting my neck on the block. So what have I got to lose? I have documentation. I have not hesitated to come to some wide conclusions when I think they are justified."
And what are those conclusions, Professor Knoll?
"For 100 years, this university has gone with the goal of Canfield, who toured the state in the 1890s and sold the university as public education. He gave the university to the state and built psychic support for the idea of 'if you can't earn, then at least learn.'"
"The university continues to define itself, see itself, through the language of the charter. It's both an academic and professional school, and not one at the cost of the other. It's much more than a trade school. It sees science as the leading idea, not vocationalism. It's inclusive; from the beginning men and women were eligible. And the burden of learning is left up to the students. The university is in service to the state, but not exclusively the industrial service. The vision is much wider. We are charged not only with passing on the received wisdom but also to search out and illuminate the new. That's research. So we receive the past and transmit the past, but we also are the future. Other institutions in the state are not required to be on the cutting edge. But we at the university in Lincoln are in the big time, and we have been there all along. We don't have the resources like those in Michigan, Wisconsin and California. But wise administrators, chancellors, regents and others will define the limits of possibility and work within those limits. They need to define and be excellent within the realm of possibilities for the state. That is not to say that we need to limit our research only to the investigation of corn, although we have done some very fine work in that area."
"This state has had a love-hate relationship with its university for a very long time. And by university, most of the state still thinks Lincoln. The people are more willing to pay for their university than the Legislature thinks they are. The legislators are afraid to ask them to pay. They lost their nerve many times."
"Circumstances really limit your possibilities sometimes. Woody Varner (former NU president) was a remarkable man but circumstances did not let him do what he really could have done. But he did change the nature of the state through his interests and bents. He is determined to widen the horizons for the people of the state, particularly through his interest in the arts."
"Nobody paid as much attention to the welfare of students for generations as did Graham Spanier. He was concerned about their education, campus life, the look of the campus. He got rid of those awful lines. He did what he could do, and he moved on."
Robert Knoll said he did find himself in writing this book. And he also knows that the book looks at a slice of time, from one person's viewpoint.
"As I found out about the institution, it became clear what my role had been in it," he says.
He seems pleased to leave it at that. Read the book, he seems to say, and you will find out as well.
Editor's Note: Royalties from sales of the book will return to the
university, according to Knoll.
By Monica Norby, IANR News Assistant
Tiny green shoots sprouting in clear plastic cubes in a UNL laboratory represent rebirth for the majestic American chestnut tree.
Disease has nearly wiped out this once abundant species. Chestnut blight, a fungal disease, ravaged the American chestnut early this century. By the late 1930s the chestnut was nearly eliminated form its native range, which extended form Maine to Georgia and west into Indiana and Illinois.
It will take many thousands of the tiny new breed of chestnuts growing in UNL Horticulturist Paul Read's lab to begin restoration. Read, UNL horticulture department head, is developing tissue culture techniques to multiply chestnut trees bred for resistance to deadly chestnut blight.
The Institute of Agriculture and Natural resources scientist has teamed with the American Chestnut Foundation for this research. The foundation is a non-profit organization that uses plant breeding and biological control techniques to return the American chestnut to its native forests.
Read received plants form the foundation's breeding program that are 7/8 American chestnut and 1/8 Chinese Chestnut. Chinese chestnut provides resistance to chestnut blight. He's using these plants to perfect tissue culture techniques to quickly multiply the new chestnut breed without growing them from a seed.
Tissue culture essentially involves growing entire plants from small plant pieces. Because tissue culture bypasses sexual reproduction, it is the fastest way to create many genetically identical plants from a few shoots.
Read forces new shoots to grow on young stem segments with attached buds. He disinfects these segments and cuts them into pieces that each contain a bud. He grows them on a special gel-like mix of nutrients, called a culture medium, in a sterile environment.
Two-inch shoots from these buds are transferred to a different medium to encourage root growth. Read is now concentrating on the most effective way to root the more than 4,000 cultures growing in his laboratory.
"We finally have enough numbers of shoots to do some serious and reliable experiments to find the best way to get them rooted," Read said.
For Read, a charter member and past president of the American Chestnut Foundation, this research is a labor of love as well as science.
"My father and his forebears saw these magnificent trees when they grew wild in the forests of upstate New York," Read said. "I wanted to be part of the effort to restore the American chestnut."
Praised by poets and woodworkers alike, the American chestnut produces exceptionally straight-grained, rot-resistant wood and nuts prized for their sweet, delicate flavor.
The American Chestnut once made up as much as 25 percent of the trees in eastern U.S. forests. Today, the few remaining mature American chestnuts, such as those at Arbor Lodge State Historical Park and Arboretum in Nebraska City, survive because they were planted outside the species' native range where the disease hasn't reached, Read said.
"The disease is very insidious, because in a sense it keeps its host alive," Read said. Above ground tree parts die, but roots stay alive and can send up new shoots that the fungus attacks.
Chestnut blight is lethal to the American chestnut but its smaller cousin, the Chinese chestnut, carries two genes that make it blight resistant.
Using knowledge of these two genes and a plant-breeding technique called backcrossing, which produces disease-resistant cultivators in other crops, American Chestnut Foundation scientists launched the chestnut breeding program in 1989.
They mate, or cross, an American chestnut with a Chinese chestnut. The resulting hybrid tree should be 50 percent Chinese and 50 percent American; some are blight resistant.
Scientists backcross resistant trees to a pure American chestnut. Each generation of backcrossing increases the percentage of genes from the parent.
Fourth generation offspring are 15/16 American chestnut and 1/16 Chinese chestnut. These hybrid trees should look like American chestnut but carry their Chinese great-great-grandparent's blight resistance, Read said. His tissue culture work began with third generation offspring because the breeding program had only progressed that far.
Once the tissue cultured plants are rooted and acclimated to growing outdoors, they'll be shipped to the Foundation for field testing. Read will take the first rooted plants to the foundation's annual meeting in October, but saving a devastated species is slow work.
"We are talking well into the 21st century before there are serious, large forest plantings of resistant trees," Read said. "Someday there will be timber-sized trees again."
The American Chestnut Foundation helps support this research, which is
conducted in cooperation with IANR's Agricultural Research Division.
UNL engineers and Interstate Steel Corp. of Big Spring, Texas, have developed a competitively priced guardrail terminal that will reduce the severity of injuries in highway accidents.
The new terminal may significantly reduce the number of deaths in guardrail accidents, according to Dean Sicking, director of the Midwest Roadside Safety Facility at the UNL College of Engineering and Technology.
Sicking and Brian Pfeifer, research associate engineer at UNL, led a team of researchers in developing the new terminal, the Beam Eating Steel Terminal, or BEST. When hit by a vehicle, the terminal can bring the vehicle to a controlled stop, preventing the end of the guardrail from penetrating the passenger compartment and causing serious injury or death. resulting hybrid tree
The BEST terminal consists of an impact head mounted on the end of a standard wood post W-beam system. When the impact head is struck by a vehicle, three cutter teeth slice the guardrail into strips that are then bent out of the path of the vehicle. A 1,800-pound car hitting the terminal at 60 miles per hour can be brought to a safe, controlled stop in about 15 feet.
The biggest advantage of the BEST system, Sicking said, is the cost - about one-third less than competitive products. "State highway departments have the opportunity to reduce safety hazards to the traveling public at a lower cost," he said.
Sicking predicted the BEST system will gain widespread acceptance among state highway departments. It has already been adopted by Texas as an alternative guardrail end terminal system, and more than 250 units have been installed in the short amount of time it has been on the market.
The system meets all federal safety standards and has been approved by the Federal Highway Administration for use on federal aid projects. UNL has applied for a patent on the system, and Interstate Steel is marketing and producing the BEST system under a licensing agreement with the university.
The Midwest Roadside Safety Facility was established at UNL in 1990 to
conduct research in all aspects of highway design and safety. It is part
of UNL's Civil Engineering Department and is affiliated with UNL's Center
for Infrastructure Research and Mid-America Transportation Center. Its
full-scale vehicle crash testing facility, one of only a few in the
United States, is housed at the Lincoln Municipal Airport.
By Kim Hachiya, News & Information
Sheldon Hackney (shown at left) admitted that it was odd to be relieved that his agency was taking a 40 percent budget cut. But last January, the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities was expecting his agency to be abolished. So retaining 60 percent of budget is considered a milestone achievement.
Hackney, the former president of the University of Pennsylvania and an award-winning historian, spoke to the Town and Gown group Sept. 22 at the Cornhusker Hotel.
Hackney said a nation that can make room on its airwaves and libraries for Beavis and Butt-head and Howard Stern's Private Parts, but not documentaries on the Civil War or the writings of Willa Cather is not the nation of his dreams.
"Will we be happy in a society that makes no distinction between things of lasting value and things that are disposable?" he asked. "The thoughtless people who glibly assert that the country can do without the National Endowment for the Humanities are saying 'yes.' They are choosing an America of cultural decay and spiritual impoverishment."
Hackney said the NEH works to preserve the nation's cultural heritage, to allow universal access to that heritage regardless of ability to pay, and to make the United States a world leader in the development of ideas and wisdom.
Among projects he mentioned were the microfilming of brittle and decaying books and newspaper collections in the nation's libraries. One such newspaper project is being funded in Nebraska, he noted.
The NEH also funds summer seminars and institutes for teachers, who collectively teach some 500,000 students each year. The NEH also has funded the recently announced Encyclopedia of the Great Plains through the UNL Center for Great Plains Studies and the Lewis and Clark Journals project.
Hackney said his greatest goal for the NEH is to ensure access and participation in humanities programs by all, regardless of their ability to pay. Some, he said, say NEH programs are "playpens for the rich elites." He argued that was an elitist attitude because cutting off NEH funding would, he believes, ensure than only the rich would have access to humanities programs because only they could afford them.
Hackney said he doubts the "marketplace" could support the humanities because the beneficiaries are indirect. It's hard to assign a user fee to a student who's reading a book written by an author who did research using an NEH grant, Hackney said. However, he said, the societal benefits are compelling.
"There is an overwhelmingly important benefit to a democratic society from having a citizenry enlightened by the humanities," Hackney said.
And, he added, without the NEH, no one would be motivated to encourage humanities activities of national rather than regional scope. In addition, he said, the imprimatur of the NEH's review panels assures quality and encourages additional funding from private sources as federal dollars leverage private giving.
Hackney said the current $177 million appropriation, slated to drop to
$110 million next year, represents 70 cents per American per year.
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