May 2, 1997



Leaving Their Mark

Textiles, Clothing and Design students Cathie Miller, left, Brian Hauter and June Senkbeil work on their design outside the State Capitol Monday afternoon. Students in TCD 121 copied artwork from inside the Capitol for their sidewalk designs. (Photo by Richard Wright)


Chancellor Chides Students for Insensitivity

Speaking at the final Academic Senate meeting this term, Chancellor James Moeser said he was dismayed by students' apparent lack of sensitivity toward race, gender and cultural issues despite a semester's work at education.

"I'm struck," he said, "that the mainstream of students are so unaware" of how their actions and words affect others.

"We still have serious work to do in areas of climate, tolerance and diversity."

Moeser again called on faculty to open dialogue in their classroom about diversity, sensitivity and awareness. The university, he said, should be a role model and change agent for society. But he said, the challenge is not to indoctrinate students but to encourage freedom of thought and expression while celebrating disagreement.

The university has failed, he said, if after four or five years of study students leave with no greater sensitivity than that which they brought with them.

Activities such as new student orientation and convocation and the summer reading program are some of the ways he hopes to address the issue, Moeser added.

In a straw vote, senators voiced approval for a draft document on post tenure review. The body overturned newly installed president Jim Ford's decision to label the policy as an emergency so a vote could be taken. Senators expressed discomfort with the speed at which the policy was developed and said colleagues had little time to respond. The issue was tabled until the fall.

The senate elected Patricia Kennedy, associate professor of marketing, as president-elect. Z.B. Mayo, entomology; Paul Shoemaker, accountancy; and Sheila Scheideler, animal science, to the executive committee. Mary McGarvey, economics, and Kay Rockwell, agricultural leadership education and communication, were elected to the committee on committees.

- Kim Hachiya

Distinguished Professorships to Rosowski, Forsythe

Two long-time professors at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln have been named to distinguished professorships by Chancellor James Moeser. Susan Rosowski is the Adele Hall Distinguished Professor of English. David Forsythe is the Charles J. Mach Distinguished Professor of Political Science.

Distinguished professorships are awarded by the chancellor based on recommendation by a faculty committee. They are awarded to professors who have demonstrated an extraordinary level of scholarship and enhanced the reputation of the university.

Fred Luthans, George Holmes Distinguished Professor of Management, is chairman of the committee that recommended the professorships. He said approximately 20 UNL professors hold the title of "distinguished."

Rosowski has a national reputation for scholarship into the writings of Nebraska author Willa Cather and is considered the leading Cather scholar working today. She is chief editor of the definitive scholarly series of Cather's novels being published by the University of Nebraska Press, for which she has been awarded funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Each volume has received accolades from the Modern Language Association.

She began her career at the university in 1971 as an instructor in the English department. She was named a full professor of English in 1986 and has been Adele Hall Professor of English since 1991. She has received numerous universitywide honors for her teaching and scholarship.

Forsythe has an international reputation as a scholar of human rights, international organization and law. He recently received a United Nations Research Grant, an unusual feat for an American academic. He is on the editorial board for "Human Rights Quarterly," a scholarly journal and is national vice president of the International Studies Association. He has received numerous universitywide awards for excellence in teaching and research.

His career at Nebraska began in 1973 when he was hired as an associate professor. He was named a full professor in 1977.

Both professorships are for five-year terms and are renewable.

Gomes to Speak at Commencement

Peter Gomes, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and minister in the Memorial Church at Harvard University, will give the address at Commencement Exercises at 9:30 a.m. May 10 in the Bob Devaney Sports Center.

Gomes, who will receive an honorary doctor of humane letters degree, is the author of the current bestseller, The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart. His teaching and research interests include the history of the ancient Christian church, Elizabethan Puritanism, worship, church music and the history of the black American experience.

Henry Munger, professor emeritus of plant breeding at Cornell University, will receive an honorary doctor of science degree. He is one of the foremost vegetable breeders in this century and a strong advocate for improvement of human health through increased use of vegetables throughout the world.

The University of Nebraska Alumni Association will present Distinguished Service Awards to Dorcas Cavett, a 1937 graduate and Gladys Yungblut Ricketts, a 1932 graduate. Nearly 1,800 students will graduate.

International Manufacturing Conference May 20-23

Manufacturing engineers, researchers and industrial representatives from around the world will be in Lincoln May 20-23 when UNL hosts the 25th North American Manufacturing Research Conference.

Billed as NAMRC XXV, the conference is sponsored annually by the North American Manufacturing Research Institution of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. The conference provides a forum for the exchange of research findings and critical reviews relating to the state of the art in manufacturing. Eighty-five peer-reviewed papers will be presented in 27 sessions at the Cornhusker Hotel's Burnham Yates Conference Center.

Gov. Ben Nelson, Chancellor James Moeser and James Hendrix, dean of the College of Engineering and Technology, will welcome participants at the opening session May 21. Gary Kuck, founder and president of Centurion International Inc., will speak about Centurion's road to success and the challenges it faces in the global market. Other activities will include a tour of UNL laboratories and a reception at Sheldon Art Gallery.

About 200 people are expected to attend the conference, including representatives from Ford, General Electric, General Motors, Extrude Hone Corp., Eaton, Sunstrand Aerospace, Norton, Lear Jet, Lucent Technologies, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Michigan, Purdue University, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois and universities in Germany, Poland, China, India, Japan and Korea.

Also participating will be U.S. and South African delegates to meetings between the two countries on the topic of manufacturing research. The National Science Foundation is sponsoring the meetings and chose the conference as the venue for them.

UNL's department of industrial and management systems engineering will coordinate the conference under the leadership of two of its faculty members, conference co-chairs K.P. Rajurkar and Robert E. Williams. Rajurkar is director of UNL's Center for Nontraditional Manufacturing Research. Williams is a faculty research associate with the center.

Rajurkar said Lincoln was chosen as the conference site this year because of the center and his personal commitment to the North American Manufacturing Research Institution of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers.

"I've been attending this conference since 1981, each and every one of the them," he said. "We have always had a paper presented there, and we have always taken two or three graduate students. And we are now recognized as a world-class manufacturing research institution, particularly in nontraditional manufacturing."

The Center for Nontraditional Manufacturing is recognized by many as a world leader in research into the machining of advanced materials such as ceramics and super alloys. It was established in 1989 in the UNL College of Engineering and Technology through the Nebraska Research Initiative program. The center's mission is to help improve Nebraska's economy by researching modern industrial techniques and transferring technical knowledge to Nebraska businesses.

As part of that mission, the center has secured a five-year, half-million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation to participate in the National Coalition for Machine Tool Technology's Agile Manufacturing Research Institute. This ambitious program pools the expertise of seven universities, NSF, the U.S. Department of Defense and 23 industrial partners. Its goal is to restore the United States to leadership in the world's machine tool industry. Agile manufacturing will be the topic of one of the conference sessions.

Post-Divorce Family National Symposium Topic

A national symposium on "The Post-Divorce Family: Research and Policy Issues" is expected to draw 200 researchers in the social sciences and family law to campus May 30-31.

The symposium, to be conducted in the Wick Alumni Center, will be concerned with factors predicting the well-being of children, mothers and fathers to life after divorce.

Keynote speakers will be Robert E. Emery, professor of psychology and director of clinical training at the University of Virginia, and Alan Booth, formerly professor of sociology at Nebraska and now professor of sociology at Pennsylvania State University.

Booth is the principle investigator in an ongoing nationwide project that has been studying marital instability in the United States since 1980. Periodic surveys of individuals first contacted in 1980 are conducted by the Bureau of Sociological Research at NU under the direction of David Johnson, director of the bureau, and Paul Amato, professor of sociology.

Other featured speakers will be Eleanor E. Maccoby, professor of psychology emeritus at Stanford University; Katharine T. Bartlett, professor of law at Duke University School of Law; Michael E. Lamb, head of the Section on Social and Emotional Development of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; and Daniel R. Meyers, associate professor in the School of Social Work and affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The symposium will have sessions dealing with children's and parents' adaptation to post-divorce family life, child custody issues, and the role of the non-custodial parent.

The sponsor of the symposium is the NU Family Research and Policy Initiative, a consortium of researchers at NU concerned with the contemporary well-being of families and children. The College of Arts and Sciences has designated family development studies as an "area of strength" in the college for the purpose of encouraging interdisciplinary research and providing insights and policy perspectives into a major contemporary social issue. The consortium includes researchers from sociology, psychology, communications studies, and NU's Center on Children, Families and the Law.

Global View

The Future of the Fulbright


Many UNL faculty and students have benefitted from the federally funded Fulbright Grant program, which was established to increase understanding between the peoples of the United States and other countries through an exchange of scholars. Two UNL faculty members and one student have already been accepted for the 1997-98 program. But now the future of the United States Information Agency through which the Fulbright program is administered is uncertain.

As of April 18, the Clinton Administration has approved a plan to merge the USIA into the State Department. The State Department and Agencies Authorization bill , currently in committee, is the likely vehicle for this reorganization, much of which will require congressional approval.

As written now, the bill proposes no cuts but no increases for Fulbright funding in the 1998 budget, although it does propose eventual cuts to other international programs. But if the bill is re-written to facilitate the merger, all appropriations will probably be re-considered. The USIA office for international exchanges and cultural affairs, which administers Fulbright funding, would become a separate bureau in the State Department.

Many observers speculate that this proposal from the Clinton Administration is linked to Senate approval of the international chemical weapons treaty approved by the Senate April 25, which was opposed by Sen. Jesse Helms, who has been advocating cutbacks in U.S. foreign affairs operations for years. Congressional Democrats have contended that Helms is less interested in reorganizing the agencies than in finding a way to make deep cuts in foreign aid programs.

Nebraska Sen. Robert Kerrey has said that he has long supported the Fulbright program: "Although as yet no legislation is before Congress to reorganize our foreign affairs operation, I will continue to monitor the situation, while keeping in mind the concerns of those in higher education," he said.

Representative Doug Bereuter has said he supports the consolidation of USIA into the State Department, but is not concerned about the future of Fulbright funding, since the program enjoys strong bipartisan support in Congress.

- Lindsey Smith

Back to menu

For questions regarding the Scarlet's Web pages, contact:
dtaurins@unlinfo.unl.edu
(402) 472-8518, Fax: (402) 472-7825