Fall PatternsThe first day of autumn brought a new weather pattern to the campus on Monday as umbrellas dotted the pedestrian mall by the Canfield Administration Building. (Photo by Richard Wright) |
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Susan J. Rosowski, Adele Hall distinguished professor of English, will inaugurate the new Distinguished Professor Lecture Series on Scholarship and Creative Activity, scheduled for
4 p.m. Oct. 8 in the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery auditorium. This lecture is free and open to the public.
In her speech, "The Place of Literature and the Cultural Phenomenon of Willa Cather," Rosowski will discuss why Cather has become an internationally recognized author. Drawing from her research, teaching and anecdotes from the field of Cather studies, Rosowski will share her ideas on what it means to be in a place, such as Nebraska, that is read through Cather. She will also discuss what responses to Cather reveal about the place of literature in our culture today.
Rosowski is one of the world's foremost Cather scholars. Born and reared in Topeka, Kan., she discovered Cather when she and her husband moved to Lincoln to begin their careers at the University of Nebraska. Although she had undergraduate and graduate degrees in literature, she wasn't familiar with Cather's writings before moving to the state (at that time Cather was widely dismissed as a regional writer and as a woman). Rosowski decided to read "A Lost Lady" to become acquainted with her new home. The book so engaged her, she began studying Cather, eventually becoming known as an expert. Rosowski earned her bachelor's degree from Whittier College and her master's and doctoral degrees from NU.
The Distinguished Professor Lecture Series on Scholarship and Creative Activity was initiated to recognize professors who receive distinguished professorships. Professors who receive these awards are selected by a campuswide committee and criteria are based on the quality of the individual's research. Rosowski became a distinguished professor as of Sept. 1.
-Karen Underwood
World-renowned rice breeder Henry Beachell and Clayton Yeutter, former U.S. trade representative and agriculture secretary, will be honored Sept. 26.
Beachell and Yeutter will be recognized as honorary alumni of Alpha Zeta, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln agricultural service fraternity. They will discuss the future of agriculture during the fraternity's initiation banquet in UNL's Nebraska East Union.
Beachell was a co-winner of the 1996 World Food Prize for contributing to the "Green Revolution." At the International Rice Research Institute in Los Banos, Philippines, he developed IR8, a rice breed credited with improving the diets of billions of people. He developed nine rice varieties while heading the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station's Rice Breeding Program in Beaumont, Texas. Beachell remains a consultant for Rice Tec Inc. in Alvin, Texas, and lives in Pearland, Texas.
Beachell was born in Waverly and raised in Valparaiso and Grant. He holds a bachelor's degree in agronomy from NU, a master's degree in plant breeding and genetics from Kansas State University and an honorary doctorate in agriculture from NU. Earlier this year, he was recognized with a Nebraska Alumni Association Alumni Achievement Award.
As U.S. trade representative under President Ronald Reagan, Yeutter led American negotiators in reaching a historic free trade agreement with Canada. As U.S. secretary of agriculture under President George Bush, Yeutter laid groundwork credited with expanding American agricultural exports.
Yeutter's other high-level posts include being president and chief executive officer of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and chairman of the national Republican Party. He is an attorney for Hogan and Hartson, a Washington, D.C., law firm and lives in McLean, Va.
The Eustis native holds a bachelor's degree, a law degree, a doctorate in agricultural economics and an honorary doctorate in law, all from NU. Yeutter was a faculty member in UNL's Department of Agricultural Economics from 1960-1966. He has been named to the Nebraska Hall of Agricultural Achievement.
Alpha Zeta students rank in the top 30 percent of UNL's College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources. The college is part of NU's Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
Nationally, Alpha Zeta is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. The UNL chapter was founded in 1904.
-Molly Klocksin, IANR news writer
Demand for student parking has decreased this fall, probably due to the drop in the number of students, members of the Parking Advisory Committee learned at their first meeting of the year Sept. 23.
Tad McDowell, parking manager, said demand has eased, particularly for residence hall parking. The university has nearly 1,100 fewer students this year, including a drop of about 500 in the first-year class.
McDowell said use of the Stadium Drive Parking Garage has been growing during its first weeks of operation. The garage opened to the public Sept. 2. He said he expected it to take a while before users become familiar with the garage's existence.
"It usually takes a month or two before a new garage really gets going," he said. "Also, since it opened after school started, I think a lot of people had already found their parking spots."
Additionally, the garage was built to reduce parking demand when two large city-operated lots on the southwest close. Both have been earmarked as construction sites. Once they close, McDowell predicted, garage use will increase.
The garage elevators should be operating by the end of the month, McDowell said. The Parking Office will move into the structure and be open for business by Sept. 29.
McDowell said there has been some misunderstanding on the part of people who once parked in the surface10/20 lot that disappeared when the structure was built. No promises were made that those people would receive parking in the identical spot, he said. A substitute lot is available 1/2 block north of the structure and reserved parking is available in and west of the garage.
McDowell said other summer projects for the Parking Office included the paving of student resident parking lots at 17th and Q streets and 21st and Vine streets. A strip of land north of the Reunion building will be paved to provide additional Area 20 parking. And parallel Area 20 parking was added along Avery Avenue after it became a one-way street.
McDowell said he is interested in pursuing some speed-limit reductions to improve pedestrian safety on 17th Street north of Vine and 14th and U streets. The city will need to respond to these concerns, he said.
The group also debated reducing or changing twice annual safety walks to once a year. Currently, the group walks the entire campus late at night in the fall and early in the morning in the spring. Options include having a morning walk one year and an evening walk the next and splitting the group in two so both campuses can be walked the same night. Board chair Linda Swoboda said she would check with the Campus Safety Committee for input.
The next meeting is Oct. 21.
-Kim Hachiya
Maintaining or building healthy small towns may be the best way to keep small farmers on the farm, a University of Nebraska survey found.
NU researchers sent a questionnaire to more than 1,000 farm families statewide to categorize types of farming, and identified three broad systems in Nebraska -- continuous corn, no-till and diversified (crops, pasture, animals). Researchers then focused their research on northeast Nebraska, where diversified farmers are most common, to learn whether quality of life differed with farm type.
"The commonality between all of these three groups, even though they have these different views about what farming is, was community," said John Allen, rural sociologist for NU's Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources, who conducted the project.
"The argument had always been that if you use sustainable practices, that would keep smaller farms and that would maintain rural communities," he said. "What these folks are telling us here is that if you maintain rural communities, that in turn will influence the ability of farmers to stay out there and farm smaller farms.
"What we (through federal farm policies) have been trying to do to make sure that we had a variety of farming system types. We put our money on the producer and said we will facilitate you retaining a smaller size and diversified farm," Allen said. "What these producers told us was that if you maintain community viability, it will allow me to be more diversified."
Researchers conducted confidential, in-depth interviews with 30 northeast Nebraska families to find out "about how they make decisions on the farm, why they make it, what does it mean to their lives," Allen said.
"We wanted to see if there were different quality of life outcomes if you farmed differently," Allen said. "We found there is a difference, but it wasn't exactly what we thought it'd be."
The survey showed similarities among farming systems, but significant differences also emerged.
Because of a high percentage of highly erodible land on their farms, 60 percent of these farmers use minimal tillage systems. Continuous corn farmers, primarily located on flat land along the Platte River Valley with easy access to irrigation, had the highest percentage of irrigated cropland (71 percent). Integrated farms, which rely on intensive management (crop rotation) and livestock operations to increase farm income, had the highest rate of land ownership and lowest debt.
Among other findings from the northeast regional study: the average farm size for continuous corn was 573 acres, for no-till it was 800 acres, and 288 acres for diversified farms. Continuous corn producers' average age was 53, no-till producers age was 46 and diversified was 51. About 45 percent of the no-till producers used a computer for their farm operations, compared to 28 percent for continuous corn and 14 percent for the diversified operations.
Researchers also studied the relationship between these farm families and their rural communities. As part of the survey, residents in neighboring towns also were questioned. Many townspeople said that they liked to see diversified farming, and believed that it leads to diversified downtown businesses and helps move the community away from dependence on one crop and one harvest, reducing some of the economic swings tied to monoculture agriculture.
Survey results will be shared with policy makers, Allen said. One potential outcome could be changing NU Cooperative Extension programs to focus more on strengthening community viability, Allen said, "so the people understand they're not alone if they happen to be facing some of these issues. We'll look to see how we can help support the marketing activities that try to deal with alternative products."
"I think that's a policy issue," Allen said, "something that our state of Nebraska needs to be thinking about."
The survey was funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's North Central Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program, in cooperation with IANR's Agricultural Research Division and Cooperative Extension.
- Dan Holder, IANR News Assistant
Nebraska's economy shows no signs of letting up on its healthy rate of growth according to the September issue of Business in Nebraska.
Reporting on the results of the second quarter 1997 Nebraska Quarterly Business Conditions Survey, Charles Lamphear, director of the Bureau of Business Research at the College of Business Administration, wrote that almost all indications are positive for continued strong economic growth.
Lamphear reported that three-fourths or more of the nearly 1,200 nonfarm, private-sector businesses that participated in the survey reported earnings gains for second quarter 1997 over second quarter 1996 and first quarter 1997.
Job creation continued to grow at a nearly constant rate of about 20,000 full-time jobs each quarter, with metro and nonmetro counties sharing about equally in the new job growth. Substantial new job growth occurred in each of the survey's nine occupational categories, with nearly 35 percent of new hires occurring in the professional groups (executives/administrators, managers/professional specialists and marketing/sales representatives).
Largely because of the increase in new hires in the professional ranks, the average hourly wage paid to new full-time hires in the state ($12.13) was $2.83 higher than the average wage paid to replacement hires. For metro counties (Cass, Douglas, Lancaster, Sarpy and Washington), the differential was even greater, $13.74 for full-time new hires, $9.77 for replacement hires.
"The possibility exists of a new trend in higher-wage job growth in Nebraska," Lamphear wrote. "If this is an emerging new trend, and there is evidence to support this notion, it should be welcome news for job seekers who want to make Nebraska their home."
Another positive mark was that new jobs appear to be geographically dispersed between the state's nonmetropolitan and metropolitan areas. In the second quarter, 56 percent of the hires for newly created, full-time positions occurred in the Lincoln-Omaha area and 44 percent elsewhere in the state. The first-quarter survey found this division to be 52 percent for nonmetro areas and 48 percent for metro areas.
The data also show that demand for qualified workers is strong. More than 10,900 full-time positions went unfilled in the second quarter due to a lack of qualified applicants. This is a slight change from the first quarter when 64 percent of available full-time positions were not filled due to a lack of qualified applicants. Lamphear urged caution in interpreting that statistic.
"Applicants may be unqualified for a variety of reasons," he wrote. "Further, it takes time to find suitable matches of jobs and skilled workers at virtually all occupational levels. Unfilled positions are an indication of how intense the search is for new employees."
However, state development officials stress that there are numerous opportunities for trained workers in the state because the tight market for trained employees is not stopping businesses from expanding. Almost nine of 10 businesses (89 percent) said they expect their third-quarter revenues to equal or exceed those of the same quarter of 1996.
The survey is a joint project of the Nebraska departments of Economic Development and Labor and the Bureau of Business Research.
-Tom Simons
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