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Jerry Tanner, Ron Tanner and Chancellor James Moeser break ground July 14 on the Tanner Plaza, which is now under construction just north of Morrill Hall. (Photo: Richard Wright) |
The NU Foundation has announced a gift to fund the development of the plaza at the entrance to Morrill Hall. Ron and Lynn Tanner of Omaha and Jerry and Jana Tanner of Lincoln have made this gift in honor of their father, long-time museum fossil expert Lloyd G. Tanner.
The Lloyd G. Tanner Plaza at Morrill Hall, 14th and U streets, was announced in a ceremony July 14. The naming is awaiting approval by the NU Board of Regents. The plaza will provide benches for visitors and students and a park-like setting for artist Fred Hoppe's life-size bronze sculpture of Archie, the large fossil imperial mammoth on display in Elephant Hall of the University of Nebraska State Museum in Morrill Hall.
New landscaping in the central plaza will provide an area for the university community and visitors to enjoy. "We believe that this will attract visitors to the museum," said Jim Estes, museum director. "The plaza will clearly set the museum apart from the rest of the campus."
The Tanners have funded the renovation as a memorial to Lloyd Tanner's lifelong dedication to the NU State Museum and Nebraska's fossil history.
"My father worked at the museum for so many years, it's only fitting that we acknowledge his contributions in this manner," said Lloyd Tanner's son, Ron Tanner.
Tanner made significant contributions to the museum throughout his life. For almost 20 years, he was the curator of vertebrate paleontology. A life member of the Nebraska Academy of Sciences and president of the Nebraska Geological Society, Tanner was responsible for the excavation and maintenance of thousands of fossils throughout his career. Three fossil species have been named in Tanner's honor, marking his scientific legacy.
Tanner came to the University of Nebraska during the height of the Great Depression in 1937. To help fund the cost of his education, he enrolled in the student worker program. He was assigned to work in the museum for 45 hours a month and was paid a little over 33 cents an hour. Two years later, he became the field supervisor in fossil collection in western Nebraska for the NU State Museum.
Tanner graduated in 1951 with a bachelor's degree in geology and earned a master's degree in secondary education in 1956, while he continued his professional career as curator at the museum.
Estes said museum curators hold a very important position. "Lloyd was responsible to the people of the state of Nebraska," Estes said. "He held the record of our past, as well as the key to helping us understand what it means to be a Nebraskan. Even while Lloyd was part of a successful field expedition throughout the Middle East and Egypt, he brought his contributions home to Morrill Hall. His work always had a local effect."
"Lloyd was always very dedicated and committed to his job," said his widow, Mary Tanner. "He took his education and his position very seriously."
"My father always showed a great interest in any individual who was interested in the history and fossils of Nebraska," said Ron Tanner. "He would drop everything to explain the wide array of historical resources this state has to offer."
Jerry Tanner said Lloyd volunteered his time to teach young school children about the fossils found in this state.
George Corner, collection manager of vertebrate paleontology at the museum, said Tanner was a constant source of information. "If anyone had a question about the museum, Lloyd was the resource. He knew more about the history of the museum than anyone," he said.
In addition to a great amount of knowledge about the museum, Ron Tanner said his father was excited about his work. "I can remember hunting for fossils with him in western Nebraska. He had a real sense of urgency and energy toward vertebrate paleontology."
The plaza will be dedicated in September. "The plaza will provide an impressive memorial in honor of his gifts to the state of Nebraska," Estes said.
"Lloyd would be very satisfied to know that he was going to be memorialized in this way," said Mary Tanner. "It would mean so much to him to have the plaza named for him."
The university is expected to connect to Internet 2, the fast lane of the online alternative around Oct. 1. That will put Nebraska about six months ahead of the other institutions in the six-state Great Plains Network to connect to Internet 2, said Kent Hendrickson, the university's associate vice chancellor for information services.
The Great Plains Network was created last November with a two-year, $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation and $1.3 million from the states involved - Nebraska, Arkansas, Kansas, North Dakota, Oklahoma and South Dakota. The network is a partnership of universities and research facilities in those states to develop a virtual scientific computer network. It was initiated and funded by the NSF EPSCOR project (Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) in Nebraska and by the EPSCOR programs in the other states.
Nebraska's efforts got a boost when the university was one of 23 Internet 2 members that received $350,000 NSF grants in February. Announced by President Clinton, the awards allowed the recipients to connect the Gigapop in Kansas City to a new Internet Protocol network called the Abilene Project. A Gigapop is a regional aggregation point for traffic on both high-perfomance networks and traditional Internet service providers.
Qwest Communications, a multimedia communications company based in Denver, donated high-speed network capacity to the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development to make development of the Abilene Project possible. NU is a member of the corporation, which is the organization creating Internet 2. When the Great Plains Network signed a contract with Qwest, Nebraska was ready to move forward.
"We've been working very hard on this," Hendrickson said. "This will help our researchers in two ways, by providing much faster speeds and a larger bandwidth (carrying capacity).
"The original Internet has become quite congested in some areas, particularly on the coasts, but also in the Midwest. Internet 2 will be used primarily for research purposes, particularly for projects requiring high levels of speed and bandwidth. It will not only be a wonderful tool for the research community, but it will also take pressure off Internet 1, and that should be good news for commercial and private Internet users."
Internet 2 is a high priority for the university, said Rick Edwards, senior vice chancellor for academic affairs. It's extremely important that Nebraska be a player, he said, because Internet 2 will support research activities.
Hendrickson said Suzanne Ortega, representing the senior vice chancellor's office, is attending a meeting in Lawrence, Kan., this week to meet with other Great Plains area universities to talk about collaborative projects that will require Intenet 2 use. He added that Sharad Seth in computer science and engineering and David Beukelman in special education and communication disorders are working on separate projects to explore use of Internet 2 in their research activities.
Edwards said the university must encourage and support researchers in their use of Internet 2. That means additional wiring, hardware and software. While recent grants are helping to defray early costs, it's estimated that Internet 2 and associated expenses will cost the university $1.7 million annually in new permanent money, Edwards said.
Internet 2 is an experimental network that theoretically will be able to send more than 2.4 billion bits of information - more than enough to send the contents of the entire 30-volume Encyclopedia Britannica - per second. Most ordinary telephone modems, such as those commonly used on the original Internet, operate at speeds up to 56,000 bits per second. Nebraska is one of more than 120 research institutions nationwide that are developing Internet 2.
The potential benefits of Internet 2 go far beyond campuses and research centers, Vice President Al Gore said in announcing the Abilene Project in April.
"In the coming years, this investment may enable the best medical specialists to give advice to patients in rural hospitals, scientists to use remote supercomputers to predict tornadoes and adults to get new skills through distance learning," Gore said.
-Tom Simons, Public Relations
The University of Nebraska would be faced with at least a $20 million reduction from current appropriations if a change in the state constitution is enacted by Nebraska voters this November.
The proposed constitutional amendment is backed by a group called Citizens for Nebraska's Future, an outgrowth of the Nebraska Business Leaders' Summit, an influential group of business executives from Omaha and other communities. The proposal is designed to limit growth in state and local government spending by linking future revenue increases to growth in inflation and population.
The group submitted more than 180,000 signatures July 3 to the secretary of state's office. About 105,000 verified signatures are needed to place the amendment on the November ballot.
Supporters claim the amendment will simply slow the growth in government spending and will not result in "harmful cuts" to existing budgets.
University officials and legislative researchers who have carefully studied the fiscal impact of the proposal believe the facts show otherwise.
L. Dennis Smith, president of the University of Nebraska, said state funding for the university would have to be cut at least $20 million the fiscal year beginning July 1, 1999 if the constitutional amendment is adopted. Smith recently presented to members of the Board of Regents an analysis by university and legislative staff which concludes that overall state spending would have to be cut approximately $40 million in FY 1999-2000.
The group sponsoring the petition has challenged the conclusions reached by university and legislative staff. A spokesman said the proposal allows state tax revenues to grow, and thus does not require a cut in spending. However, several state senators and others have said budget cuts will result because the Legislature used surplus revenue to cut the income and sales tax in FY 2000 by approximately $120 million, which is more than the revenue growth allowed under the petition. Thus, despite the allowable revenue increase, more than $75 million in spending will have to be cut from nonmandated programs the first year the amendment is in place.
Smith said some areas of the state budget, such as federally mandated Medicaid and special education programs, cannot be cut. He said this will compound the fiscal impact on nonmandated programs such as the university, increasing the required cut in those areas to about $75 million. Of that amount, Smith and legislative researchers project the university's budget would be cut at least $20 million in the first year alone. The estimate assumes a 5.4 percent reduction in the university's state appropriation and a 9.8 percent reduction in scholarship assistance known as tuition remission.
To offset the $20 million cut, Smith said, the university could be forced to significantly raise tuition. Every $1 million decrease in state support requires a tuition increase of approximately 1.1 percent in order to maintain current operations and programs. Thus, a 22 percent increase in tuition would be required to offset a $20 million cut in the university's state appropriation.
Smith said such an increase would likely affect access to the
university
and impact its ability to effectively compete with other institutions for
the best students and faculty. He also said the university may have
difficulty
responding to the needs of Nebraska citizens for new programs and
information
technology resources to extend the reach of the university into outstate
Nebraska.
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