By Kim Hachiya, News & Information
The United States' No. 1 health problem is violence, asserts the former president of the American Medical Association. And he's spearheading efforts to help doctors fight violence.
Robert McAfee, a surgeon from South Portland, Maine, spoke to the Town and Gown Breakfast Forum Nov. 14.
"We live in the most violent country in the world," McAfee said. "America is at war with itself." He cited annual homicide statistics, including that with 14,220 handgun homicides, the United States far outpaced the second country on the list, Canada, with 125. And, he noted, suicides have tripled recently, due in part to the "deadly efficiency" of handguns. McAfee noted that 100,000 children take guns to school each year and 66 percent of children report they could probably get a gun within 24 hours.
"When it's easier to get a gun than a library card, we are talking about a unique American problem," McAfee said.
The surgeon said violence is learned behavior and to attack the problem requires a multi-pronged approach to "unlearning" the behavior.
The AMA recognized several years ago that the years of life lost due to violence are greater than cancer, heart disease and stroke combined, he said. That's in part because victims of violence tend to be young.
A family physician is someone who can intervene, McAfee said. Some 87 percent of victims of family violence said they wished they could have told their doctors of their situation. Yet many doctors do not know what to do when confronted with a patient's plea for help, he said.
A new coalition of some 8,500 doctors has formed to help fight violence, he said. Those who join receive a kit with a number of protocols for intervention and action, including posters and literature for waiting rooms that urge victims to seek help. But there are more than 300,000 members of the AMA, he noted, so the numbers are not large yet.
The AMA will each spring "grade" the country on its progress toward stemming violence, McAfee said. The first grades, which he issued, resulted in a cumulative grade of D.
McAfee spoke in support of gun control laws, especially those that limit access to guns by children and which promote responsible gun storage and safety. He noted that the reaction to a rising tide of automobile fatalities was not to ban cars, but to educate and license drivers, to strengthen regulations, to create age restrictions and to improve auto safety. Similar measures should be taken with guns, he said.
McAfee said several folks had asked him to comment about the recent
case regarding Lawrence Phillips. He said his own opinion was not
important. But what was important, he said, was the opinion of community
members who want to curb violent behavior. "Lincoln needs to look at
itself and say 'what can we do to assure that violence is not accepted in
our community?'" he said. "That becomes the ground rule for Lincoln: 'If
you cannot abide by our rules, then you are not welcome in Lincoln.'"
UNL's World Wide Web site has been given a new design and structure, and NU Frontier users are being encouraged to check it out. A notice on the current homepage enables users to click to the proposed new site which is temporarily located at http://www.unl.edu/uaad/demo/UNLWEB.html
"The pages have what we think is a new and improved look. We are also hoping that the new structure will provide a flexible framework for adding new pages as well as an easy-to-use way for both internal and external users to find what they want," said Sally Flint, manager of Publications and Photography and chair of a team created by the CWIS Advisory Board to develop the new site. The new pages are linked to all of the web and gopher items that are connected to the current homepage. Users are encouraged to visit the new site and comment on its design and structure, especially since most items are now located through a different path than on the current pages.
"There is still a lot to be done with this; it's a constantly evolving communications tool," said Flint. "But this is the first step, to re-format all of the information that we have, and we're anxious to get feedback on whether we're heading in the right diirection."
The new site is scheduled to permanently replace the old site Dec. 5.
Comments on the new site can be sent to unlpub@cwis.unl.edu
By Tom Simons, News & Information
Melvin W. Jones, vice president for financial affairs/treasurer at Marquette University in Milwaukee, has been named vice chancellor for business and finance at UNL.
Jones, who has been vice president for financial affairs/treasurer at Marquette since August 1992, will assume his new duties at UNL Feb. 5, subject to the approval of the University of Nebraska Board of Regents. He will replace John Goebel, who became dean of UNL's College of Business Administration Jan. 1. Paul Carlson, who has served as interim vice chancellor for business and finance, will continue in that position until Jones arrives on campus.
"We're very fortunate to have someone of Melvin Jones's abilities and experience as our vice chancellor for business and finance," said Interim Chancellor Joan Leitzel, who selected Jones from a field of four finalists. "His long experience in public administration, both in government and higher education, makes him extremely well qualified to serve the UNL community."
As vice chancellor for business and finance, Jones will oversee all of UNL's accounting functions, including payroll and student accounts, the budget, internal audits, UNL police, facilities management, human resources and transportation services. He also will oversee auxiliary services such as printing services, mail services and the University Bookstore.
At Marquette, Jones oversees the university's $200 million budget and is responsible for all financial and business operations of the university, including accounting, purchasing, budgeting, investments and cash management, property acquisitions, contract administration, computer services, and several corporations developed to assist in the economic development of the campus community. He also is responsible for all legal matters relating to the university through the Office of General Counsel.
Jones earned his bachelor's degree in business administration and political science at the University of Iowa, his master's of public administration degree in public finance from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and his doctorate in public administration and finance from the School of Business and Public Management at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
He began his career as an Internal Revenue Service agent and officer in the District of Columbia and Iowa, then worked as an administrative assistant and budget administrator for the city of Iowa City, Iowa, from 1975-80. From October 1980 through June 1981, he worked for the U.S. Senate as assistant director of the Congressional Commission on Financial Oversight of the District of Columbia.
Jones then worked for the government of the District of Columbia for six years, as group controller (1981-82), deputy controller (1982-83), treasurer/controller (1983-84) and finally as director of the Department of Finance and Revenue from September 1984 until he left to become vice president for business and fiscal affairs and treasurer at Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1987.
He served at Howard for five years before going to Marquette. While at Howard, he also served as a visiting professor responsible for teaching graduate courses in public finance and intergovernmental relations at George Washington in 1991-92.
Jones will receive an annual salary of $140,000 at UNL.
Jones' wife, M. Colleen Jones, will join the UNL faculty next August
as an assistant professor of management in the College of Business
Administration. An assistant professor of management at the Suffolk
University School of Management in Boston, she has a doctorate in
business administration from George Washington.
University of Nebraska President L. Dennis Smith has announced the
names of three finalists for the position of chancellor of UNL. The names
were proposed to Smith by a 15-member search committee chaired by David
Sellmyer, professor of physics and astronomy at UNL. The finalists are:
University of Nebraska President L. Dennis Smith invites members of the UNL faculty and staff to receptions for the candidates for the position of chancellor. All three receptions will be at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery on the following dates:
For more information, please contact the Office of the President at
2-2111.
By Kim Hachiya, News & Information
Things are not all grim in Washington, D.C., according to Marsha Nye Adler, government relations officer for the national American Association of University Professors. Adler spoke to a local AAUP meeting Nov. 9 about lobbying progress in Congress.
Adler said there are many challenges to higher education being brought by the current Congress, and that victories sometimes are measured in terms of "well, we didn't lose as much as we thought we might."
Said she the AAUP has several priorities this year. First is preserving higher education funding through the appropriations process. Student financial aid is in peril, she said, and much effort has been concentrated in preserving loan programs. Some moneys have been restored, she said, and more may be forthcoming as the conference committees compromise.
"But they are playing a great big game of chicken in Washington right now. And they are not free-range," she said.
The AAUP's second priority is the reauthorization and funding of the national endowments for the arts and humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. CPB, she said, has survived for another three years, which was a happy surprise, she said. Both endowments have cut staff by 50 percent in anticipation of drastic cuts, she added.
Both the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health received research funding, she said, but their appropriations are contained within other bills that may not pass. "So you can imagine the anxiety that's in Washington right now."
The AAUP also has renewed its commitment to affirmative action and civil rights. "As far as higher education groups in general stand, there is strong commitment for affirmative action across the board," she said. "Our expectation is that affirmative action legislation will remain intact but we must also remain vigilant."
Freedom of expression legislation that AAUP is keeping a watchful eye upon includes the flag desecration amendment, the Internet pornography bill, a bill to add copyright protection to electronic publishing and a bill to restrict nonprofit entities in the area of advocacy. The latter, she said, would be far reaching in that it would prohibit nonprofits who receive any federal funds from "advocating," which she said is defined very broadly. Currently nonprofits can set up political action committees to advocate causes but this bill would change that, she said.
Glimmers of good news, she said, include changes that could fix problems with pensions and early buy-out plans by allowing one to continue to contribute to plans and by changing tax considerations.
Adler praised in particular Linda Pratt, professor of English at UNL,
who is past president of the AAUP, for helping revitalize the
organization at the national level. There are some 45,000 members of the
AAUP nationwide, Adler said.
UNL employees are continuing their efforts to help the Todd family pay for medical expenses resulting from their daughter's bout with cancer.
Chanel Jenkins-Todd, the daughter of Tom and Lynda Todd, both managerial/professional employees at UNL, is suffering from a rare form of cancer. While the Todds' insurance has covered many of the costs of 11-year-old Chanel's treatment to this point, the family is now facing a major expense.
Some departments on campus are planning a special holiday gift for the family. Sally Flint, president of the University Association for Administrative Development, said staff members in Publications and Photography have decided to make a donation to the family instead of exchanging gifts with each other. She suggested other departments may wish to do the same thing.
A fund has been established at the Cornhusker National Bank, and those wishing to make donations may make checks payable to the Chanel Jenkins-Todd Foundation and take or mail the contributions to any Cornhusker branch.
Chanel is a patient at Children's Hospital in Omaha, awaiting word from doctors about scheduling a bone marrow transplant. Lynda Todd said the transplant will not be covered by the family's health insurance because it is considered an experimental procedure.
Lynda Todd said this week that several community fund-raisers are also being planned to benefit the family. A Gospel Extravaganza is scheduled for 6 p.m. Dec. 2 at the Zion United Church of Christ, 848 D Street.
Images, the Lincoln Gospel Community Choir and other groups will be featured at the concert, and a freewill offering will be taken. The Lincoln Community Playhouse is planning an evening of entertainment aimed toward young people at 7 p.m. Dec. 3. Proceeds from the admissions fees and refreshments sold at intermission will be donated to the Todd fund.
Lenette Schwinn, children's theater director at the playhouse, said the program will feature performances by puppeteer Sam Rich, a group of cloggers, Renay Kushner and her trained dog, a group of pre-teens and teen-agers who dramatize poetry and a drill team from the Malone Community Center.
Chanel Todd appeared in a production of The Pied Piper that the
playhouse presented last year, Schwinn said.
By Gerald Shapiro, Associate Professor of English
Marly Swick, associate professor of English and the author of a new collection of short fiction, The Summer Before the Summer of Love (HarperCollins, $21), says her stories arise from "what we've all felt in our lives: sadness, disappointment, guilt, forgiveness, anger. Mostly guilt, I guess."
In a recent issue of the New York Times Book Review, Swick's writing was compared to the work of acclaimed Canadian author Alice Munro -- but reviews, even very positive ones make her nervous. "I can't stand all the public stuff that goes with being a writer," she says. "I try not to think about any of it. All I really care about is that people read my work. That's what matters. The rest of it..."
The road that led her to a successful -- and very public -- career as a fiction-writer was long and solitary, though hardly bleak. "All I ever really wanted to be was a writer," she said. "Maybe for a couple of years when I was little, I wanted to be a ballerina -- but after I got over the ballerina phase I wanted to be a writer. I wasn't a very extroverted person, and so my mother would say, 'Go outside and play. Find somebody to hang out with. Get your nose out of that book. Get some fresh air.' But all I wanted to do was read. I had wonderful English teachers when I was growing up, and when I'd do an assignment and I had a natural instinct for it, I'd get a lot of praise. So I was drawn to this thing that people told me I was good at. If I hadn't had really good, encouraging English teachers, it would have been a different story. But I always felt encouraged."
The praise that greeted her first literary efforts has continued unabated, with fellowships over the years from the Michener Foundation, the NEA, and the Nebraska Arts Council, among other honors. In 1990, Swick's first collection of stories, A Hole in the Language, won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize, and was published by the University of Iowa Press. (That collection was later published in paperback by HarperCollins under the title Monogamy.) Three stories from The Summer Before the Summer of Love appeared first in Atlantic Monthly, one of America's most prestigious fiction markets. One of those stories, "Moscow Nights," was later reprinted in the O. Henry Prize Stories. "That was my breakthrough story," she says, "the one that really made a difference for me."
This year marked a different kind of breakthrough -- the writing of her first novel, Paper Wings, which she completed in the late spring of 1995 while on a faculty development leave. The book was accepted in short order by HarperCollins, which plans to publish it in 1996.
Despite her success in this new genre, Swick still feels uneasy about the form. "I still have a much clearer sense of how to write a story than how to write a novel," she says. "I seem to understand stories instinctively. Endings of stories, particularly -- at least a certain kind of story.
The ending of a novel I don't really understand. In a way it's simple -- more a closure of the action -- whereas there's some kind of trick to writing a story ending, an image that pulls a string that ties these threads together. I understand that -- I know how to do it. I can't always do it, of course.
"With a novel there are other worries, too. I have trouble imagining a situation that can sustain itself over hundreds of pages. I have these horrible, contradictory, self-defeating impulses. When I'm writing a short story, I know it should be short, but the material just seems to expand. And when I'm writing a novel, just the opposite happens to me -- it all seems to contract.
"The bottom line when you're writing a novel is that it takes confidence -- almost arrogance, really -- to believe that this thing you're writing is worth 400 pages. I tend to have a sense of futility that sneaks in and undermines what I'm doing. I think the secret is to finish whatever you're working on before you start worrying about it too much."
If she hadn't become a writer she says she might have enjoyed being a psychologist. "People tell me they go into therapy because they want to be able to act consciously in their lives instead of always being driven by subconscious forces beyond their control," she says. "As a writer that's often what I'm doing -- figuring out the subconscious drives that are making a character do the things he does. It's too bad nobody pays me $150 an hour for my analysis."
Swick's payoff as a teacher comes, she says, in the process of helping
her students learn to develop their fictional characters. "I get excited
for them," she says, "when I see they have that sense of their characters
having a well of things in their past that they can dip into. That's
what's really great, I think, when stories are going well -- that sense
that the past is being created as you write a story. It's making itself
up as you go along -- making itself up out of nowhere."
By Jana McGuire, News & Information
Come Jan. 2, many people won't be quite as thankful for the food they consumed on Thanksgiving Day -- and every day in between. On average, Americans gain five to seven pounds during the holidays, but Karen Miller, UNL registered dietitian, offers this advice: Cut the fat and beat the odds.
"Fat is neither good nor bad," said Miller. "It's a food." As with any food, it's the amount we take in that matters and moderation is the key.
On average Americans consume 36 percent of their diet from fat. The goal is 30 percent, said Miller.
"As a rule of thumb, women can consume 50 grams of fat per day and still have less than 30 percent of their calories from fat. Men can consume 70 grams," she said.
We don't have to sacrifice our favorite holiday foods to keep fat grams in check. Miller recommends "recipe make-overs" such as:
If you want to throw moderation to the wind on the holidays, feel free, said Miller.
"Don't eat until you're stuffed, however, and your body will use the food appropriately -- Thanksgiving is one day out of the year, as are Christmas and New Year's," she said.
The problem comes when we take the "all or none" approach, said Miller.
"People say, 'either I'm going to pig out from Nov. 23 to Jan. 2 or I'm going to do all I can to not eat any fat,'" said Miller, who added that extremes are unhealthy, and instead recommends finding a good balance.
For those who choose to ignore her advice this holiday season, just
give thanks that your license to eat doesn't require a photo.
Although Nebraska's per capita personal income increased at a faster rate from 1993 to 1994 than it did from 1992 to 1993, the state slipped slightly in comparison to the rest of the country, according to a UNL economist.
Writing in the October edition of Business in Nebraska, Charles Lamphear cited recently released U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis figures that reported the state's per capita personal income in 1994 was $20,488. That was a 4.1 percent increase from 1993's figure of $19,672, which was 2.5 percent greater than the $19,189 reported in 1992. However, the state's per capita personal income in 1994 was 93.9 percent of the national average of $21,809, down from 94.6 percent in 1993 and 95.3 percent in 1992.
Lamphear, director of the Bureau of Business Research in UNL's College of Business Administration, also reported on per-capita income in Nebraska's 93 counties for 1993, the most-recent figures available. The five counties with the highest per capita incomes were Wheeler ($27,346), Hayes ($26,921), Douglas ($23,322), Dundy ($23,097) and Fillmore ($22,231), with Douglas County the only metropolitan county among the five. The five counties with the lowest per capita incomes were Loup ($11,063), Thurston ($12,356), Sioux ($13,129), Howard ($14,732) and Wayne ($14,813).
Lamphear showed that a county's per capita personal income ranking can be independent of its population ranking, and that a change in per capita personal income can be independent of an increase or decrease in population.
Lamphear cautioned, though, that per capita personal income is just
one measure of a region's economic performance and used alone it can
"result in an inaccurate reading of a region's performance and the
well-being of its population."
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