By Kim Hachiya, News & Information
Members of UNL's Academic Senate at its Oct. 3 meeting heard a long presentation on enforcement of student conduct. By the time it was over, the house had lost its quorum, so a vote to place faculty on UNL's Judicial Board was delayed and moved to a mail ballot.
The process by which UNL's Judicial Board operates, as well as processes used by ROTC, the Athletic Department and the UNL Marching Band to enforce student conduct were outlined.
Barbara Hibner, associate athletic director and senior women's administrator, said UNL's student athletes must adhere to the UNL Student Code of Conduct, the UNL Athletic Code of Conduct, Big Eight/12 rules, NCAA rules and all federal, state and local laws. Extensive efforts are made to ensure students know the rules, she said. She added that student athletes are "screened" for values and personality attributes during the recruiting process. Some promising athletes have not been offered letters of intent to UNL because recruiters did not feel they had the proper character, Hibner said.
Questions to the presenters from the senate asked the philosophical question of when is a student "representing" the university. Are all students always representing UNL, or only during certain capacities, asked Jim Ford, English, arguing that the issue should be defined.
Jim McShane, English, said that through the Freshman Foundations courses he talks to many freshmen each week. He has noticed that questions about personal safety and danger are becoming more prevalent. McShane said the senate should look into whether current UNL policies diminish the academic environment. Students who feel unsafe cannot concentrate on academics, he said.
Jim Griesen, vice chancellor for student affairs, said UNL is not unique in experiencing more problems with violence on campus. Many campuses, he said, have installed metal detectors to screen out weapons from dances, for instance. "We live in a society of more and more violence," he said. "We've got to work hard to keep our campus from becoming more violent."
Due to the length of the presention, more than half of the senators left. So when Kay Logan-Peters, associate professor of libraries and chair of committee on committees, presented a ballot to elect faculty to the University Judicial Board, a quorum question was issued. Herb Howe, associate to the chancellor, said the Judicial Board was "pretty impotent right now" because it cannot convene without faculty representation.
The ballots will be mailed. Because of lack of quorum, the senate
adjourned without completing its agenda.
Duane Acker, former University of Nebraska administrator, will be the guest speaker at dedication ceremonies Oct. 10 for the Research and Education Building at the NU Agricultural Research and Development Center at Ithaca.
The $2.89 million Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources building will be dedicated at 1 p.m.
To facilitate research and education efforts at the ARDC, the new building was constructed at the southeast corner of the 9,500-acre facility. Members of the Cooperative Extension staff in Saunders County also are located in the building.
Acker, who served as the first vice chancellor of the NU Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources, will speak on the "Challenges and Opportunities Facing Agriculture and Natural Resources." He joined the university April 1, 1974, and subsequently was named president of Kansas State University. He later became assistant secretary, Science and Education, in the U.S. Department of Agriculture at Washington, D.C. Acker now resides on the family farm near Atlantic, Iowa.
Other speakers on the program include Irv Omtvedt, vice chancellor of the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources, master of ceremonies; State Sen. Carol Hudkins of Malcolm; Nancy O'Brien, Omaha, chairperson of the NU Board of Regents; L. Dennis Smith, NU President; Joan R. Leitzel, UNL interim chancellor; Don Furasek, Wahoo, chairperson of the Saunders County Cooperative Extension Board; Darrell Nelson, Dean of the IANR Agricultural Research Division; Ken Bolen, dean of IANR Cooperative Extension; and Dan Duncan, director of ARDC.
There will be tours and refreshments after the program. Prior to the dedication, there will be a regional symposium on "Agriculture People . . . Building a Shared Environment" Oct. 9-10 in the building. Guest speakers from Nebraska and other states will discuss integrated management for livestock operations.
The Research and Education building includes an auditorium with 150 seats, meeting rooms, space for educational displays, and laboratories for use by faculty and staff as well as extension offices for Saunders County. Funds for the building were provided by the Nebraska Legislature and donations. Duncan said the building will be the hub for interaction with crop and livestock producers as well as urban and rural audiences interested in turf, garden, trees and national environments.
The building is designed to take advantage of the earth and sun to help heat, cool and light the interior, and materials used in construction were chosen to minimize the impact of the structure on the environment, Duncan said.
The building in strategically located in an area with many diverse environments including wetlands, forests, a stream, sub-irrigated meadows, and agricultural research and production areas.
ARDC is a major IANR research and education facility. It serves as the primary site for field-based research involving 90 faculty members and 150 graduate students in nine IANR departments. There are 5,000 acres in row crops, and more than 5,000 domestic farm animals used for research and teaching reside at ARDC.
The dedication program is open to the public. The building is at the
southeast corner of the intersection of Nebraska Highway 63 and County
Road 11 in Saunders County.
By Robert Sheldon, News & Information
The image of the sea is inescapable to anyone who has walked the Nebraska Sandhills or seen those stabilized dunes from the air. They appear to UNL's Paul Johnsgard "like fading snapshots of the gigantic waves that once raged over the surface of a now silent sea."
So even though much of the water in the Sandhills lies unseen beneath the surface, Johnsgard's latest book, This Fragile Land: A Natural History of the Nebraska Sandhills, is about a place with "shores" rather than borders, so that there are chapters titled "The Grassy Ocean," "The Northern Shore," "The Southern Shore," "The Western Shore" and "The Eastern Shore."
Johnsgard, a professor of biological sciences, is illustrator as well as author of his latest book, the 34th he has written in nearly 35 years at UNL. Over the years, he has ridden the Sandhills' waves from shore to shore, east to west, north to south, from lakes and marshes to open prairie lands, from hay meadows to bottomland forests. This Fragile Land provides a panoramic view of the region, including in its pages a geological history of the largest area of sand dunes in the Western Hemisphere, descriptions of the region as it exists today, and a review of some of the environmental dangers that plague the region's future.
Throughout, Johnsgard provides intriguing details of how the Sandhills support an incredibly diverse array of plants and animals, both in habitats widely separated from one another, but sometimes as close as opposite sides of a single dune. Some species of shallow-rooted plants, he notes, flourish on the windward side of a dune while the leeward side supports a totally different plant community with wider leaves and taproots that penetrate all the way to groundwater.
Johnsgard describes many birds and animals in loving detail, finding grace and beauty in unexpected places: "The most characteristic small mammal of these sandy grasslands," he writes, "is the kangaroo rat." These creatures are," he writes, "the most visually appealing of all Nebraskan mammals. Their large heads, enormous limpid eyes, kangaroolike body shape, and occasionally upright posture all confer an air of 'cuteness' that is impossible to resist."
The western grebe is another species that Johnsgard rhapsodizes over even more eloquently: "Watching courting western grebes is something like attending a performance of the Bolshoi Ballet without having to stand in line for tickets," he says. "Even the music is delightful: Someone once described the calls of courting western grebes as resembling the tinkling of silver bells. Seeing and hearing western grebes in spring is thus an experience that all persons who are not absolutely convinced that they will be going to heaven should make every effort to achieve."
In describing the geological history of the Sandhills, Johnsgard notes that the Sandhills have been stable for the past few thousand years. There was, however, a period within the last 10,000 years when dune migrations appear to have occurred on a large scale. One such movement, he says, may have occurred in Keith County, where UNL geologist Robert Diffendal discovered in the 1970s sediments of a large lake formed when dunes blocked the channel of the Platte River. Interestingly, Johnsgard points out, the sand-based dam was at approximately the same site chosen by engineers in the early 20th century to construct Kingsley Dam and create Lake McConaughey.
Effects on the environment due to construction of Kingsley Dam in the 1930s have been mixed, Johnsgard says. Some species of birds, for instance, particularly those that need open sandbars and islands, (sand hill cranes, piping plover and least tern), have suffered from vegetational succession and forest encroachment along the Platte River due to changes in river flow controlled through the dam. On the other hand, many forest-adapted species of birds have prospered.
More recently, modifications of the dam in the 1980s to provide increased hydroelectric capabilities produced extensive ecological modifications of the lake in the form of dredging, higher average water levels, and increased short-term fluctuations, Johnsgard says.
"These activities . . . have had major deleterious effects on the fish and wildlife populations of Lake Ogallala," he says. Reckless exploitation of groundwater also continues to be a serious problem for Nebraska,
Johnsgard says. "The depth and richness of the Ogallala aquifer in Nebraska is almost incredible," he says. But he warns that high water use coupled with permeability of the aquifer and its closeness to the surface make Nebraska vulnerable to groundwater pollution from pesticides. Soil and sand erosion resulting from the dune-leveling activities often performed during the installation of center-pivot irrigation systems was a problem that poses another threat.
"A house built on sand is unstable," Johnsgard says. "This harsh lesson has been relearned over the past century, since the Sandhills began to be settled in the late 1800s.
"Our lifetimes are too short and our attitudes too strongly shaped by
personal experience to allow us to look at the world very objectively.
But we must do the best we can, hoping that our proper choices outnumber
the mistaken ones, and that the wrong roads taken are not one-way tracks
like some Sandhills roads."
Back to menu
For questions regarding these Scarlet pages, contact:
dtaurins@unlinfo.unl.edu
(402) 472-8518, Fax: (402) 472-7825