THE NEBRASKA UNION MEMORIAL PLAZA will be rededicated in a public ceremony on the morning of April 15.

Broyhill Fountain Rededication, Picnic on Plaza

Union Reopening Events April 15

By Kim Hachiya, Public Relations

The campus community is invited to a gala grand opening celebration of the remodeled and renovated Nebraska Union beginning at 11 a.m. April 15 in the Memorial Plaza area. Among scheduled events for the day are the rededication of the Broyhill Fountain, and a free lunch of hotdogs, Pepsi products and cake. Several bands will play free concerts from noon to 2 p.m., also on Memorial Plaza.

Should it rain, events will move to the Union Lounge.

Union Director Daryl Swanson is noticeably pleased and proud of the building renovations. The latest addition to the structure originally built in 1938 for $400,000, added some 55,000 square feet and cost $13.5 million. It increased usable space by 25 percent, he said (the remainder is mechanical, elevator and other non-public space).

New features include a computer room that seems to have been filled to capacity since the first minute it opened, expanded lounge space, new meeting rooms and offices and a state-of-the-art auditorium. The Rotunda Gallery art space will continue a relationship with the Department of Art & Art History and the student Art League, but traveling exhibitions also are planned for the gallery.

The building is a barrier-free environment with new entrances for those who use wheelchairs.

"My objective through all of this was to attract people to the union. Once that's accomplished, a sort of synergy develops and a sense of community begins to occur," Swanson said. "At the dedication of the original union, Chancellor Burnett said the union was a melting pot for the community. I think maybe a better analogy is that we are a mixing bowl, where everyone comes together.

"The beauty of the union is that all those people come through. It's kind of neutral ground that belongs to everybody. We do that better than any single space on campus."

Work in the union is not completed. The current west entrances will be demolished and two large windows installed in the walls of the west lounge. The older part of the union will undergo a five-year plan to update its décor, which Swanson said he knew would look shabby and dark as compared to the new space. Painting in this area will begin this summer.

The bookstore, now owned by Follette, will undergo a million-dollar renovation to refurbish fixtures and reorganize space. Follette will pay for this work, he said.

The highlight of the April 15 activities, Swanson said, will be the rededication of the Broyhill Fountain. The original fountain was built in 1969 as a memorial to Lynn Diann Broyhill. Members of her family will attend the rededication, Swanson said.

Principle architects for the project were Sinclair Hille of Lincoln with John Sinclair as project manager; Sasaki Associates of Watertown, Mass., with Norris Strawbridge, chief architect, and Neil Dean, landscape architect. Builders Inc. of Lincoln was general contractor and Shanahan Mechanical and Electrical did the work on the heating, air conditioning and ventilation systems.

Academic Senate Questions Master Plan, OKs Benefits Requests

By Kim Hachiya, Public Relations

In a long meeting but unusually productive meeting, the Academic Senate on April 6 asked that the campus master plan be reconsidered and went on record supporting additional benefits for employees.

Several senators said they were concerned about the financial impact of higher parking fees particularly on low-wage workers, the safety issues involved with parking garages, having to share the garages with students and what they perceived as a lack of faculty input into the development of the campus master plan.

The plan was developed last summer and fall. In general, it calls for a pedestrian mall from the stadium east to the Beadle Center. Because of a variety of factors, as much as 40 percent of existing parking will be displaced in the next five years and three new parking garages have been suggested for the city campus and one is suggested for the east campus. Construction on the first garage, at 17th and R streets, is scheduled to begin next spring.

Some faculty expressed alarm that they weren't including in master plan development sessions. However, Jack Morris, biological sciences, said nearly a dozen public input sessions were held last spring and summer. He noted that few people attended them.

Morris said he was not defending the plan, but that the garages are in response to the immediate loss of parking when new buildings financed by donors are sited on current parking lots. He noted that while the plan looks 20 or so years into the future, the garages were the first things on the construction list because parking was a critical issue for the planners. Because the architectural consultants' goal was a "pedestrian friendly campus," he said they worked to move parking and cars from the campus core to the perimeter.

"If we have to have a pedestrian-friendly campus, this is what we are going to have to pay," he said.

The senate voted to ask that the master plan be reconsidered with the "full involvement of the Academic Senate or a subcommittee of the Senate." It also voted to support parking fee increases being levied on a basis proportional to salaries and to urge the administration to fund new parking garages through a means other than user fee increases.

Earlier in the meeting, the group voted favorably on three issues brought to it from the campus Employee Benefits Committee. These involved encouraging the committee to again urge the Universitywide Fringe Benefits Committee to consider adding domestic partner benefits to the medical plan, to urge the university to raise its contribution to retirement benefits by 1/2 percent beginning in FY99-00, and to increase the university's contribution to the NUCredits program.

In other business, the senate extensively questioned Chancellor James Moeser on a variety of subjects, including parking, information technology costs, funding for graduate assistantships and the proposed visitors center. On the latter issue, Moeser said that the Torn Notebook sculpture would not be moved to accommodate the new visitors center without the full cooperation and agreement of the artists.

When asked why the campus seems to be in such dire funding straits when the national economy is booming, Moeser said the attitude in Nebraska is to return taxes to citizens and the mood is tax reductions.

Rural Nebraskans are not seeing the best of times, he said. The issue of faculty salaries increases is a hard sell in communities where the average per capita income is less than $25,000 annually.

$1 Million Gift Benefits Biotechnology at UNL

By IANR News Service

A$1 million gift to the University of Nebraska Foundation from Ken Morrison of Hastings, Neb., will greatly enhance the research capabilities in the George W. Beadle Center for Genetics and Biomaterials Research at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The $1 million gift will benefit agriculture and biotechnology programs through an expendable fund.

Morrison's gift complements several grants and will complete funding for the Beadle Center's Microscopy Facility. This facility fills a niche in the plant science arena and builds on existing programs in biochemistry, agronomy, plant pathology and biological sciences. The facility will have some of the most advanced technology and will permit the launching of new biotechnology initiatives at UNL. It also will provide a core facility to further research efforts of the entire campus as well as outside companies that need such capabilities.

"The field of biotechnology is a rapidly growing sector of agriculture," said Morrison, an NU Foundation trustee. "At this point in time, agriculture needs all the help it can get. By supporting biotechnology at UNL, I hope to increase interest in this field as it relates to agriculture in Nebraska."

This is the latest of Morrison's contributions to the university's agriculture and biotechnology efforts. Almost a decade ago, Morrison funded the Kenneth Morrison Professorship in Food Engineering in the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources. Milford Hanna, a biological systems engineer and director of NU's Industrial Agricultural Products Center, holds the Morrison professorship.

Morrison is a general partner and business manager of Morrison Enterprises, an agricultural company engaging in alfalfa production and marketing, grain storage, livestock production, farmland development and management, aquaculture, and cotton and feed grain production.

"This gift will provide UNL with opportunities to strengthen our research capabilities particularly in the area of molecular biology while utilizing the developments in biotechnology techniques in research and teaching programs as they relate to plant, animal and food research studies," said Irv Omtvedt, vice chancellor for NU's Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources. "We are extremely appreciative of the generosity Mr. Morrison has shown to the university. He has played a major role in making UNL's biotechnology program capabilities truly impressive through this gift."

William Olubodun 'Finally Arrives'

By Gabi Volgyes, Public Relations

It seems a long way from northwestern Nigeria to the University of Nebraska. But William Olubodun, acting assistant director in the Student Involvement Office, seems to have found the journey to be a natural one. He's led a life full of twists, turns and apparently, plenty of luck and perseverance.

When Olubodun was old enough to stretch his right hand over his head to touch his left ear, he started elementary school two miles from his home, a small farming village in Northwestern Nigeria. The village is called Mogan, which means "finally arrived." No one living in the village could read or write well, so the children who were born there did not have birth certificates. When the time came for Olubodun to register for high school, and he needed to tell the headmaster his birthday, he returned to his village to ask his uncle if he could remember when Olubodun had been born. "I laugh when I remember that day, when we had to figure out when I was born by what happened," Olubodun remembers. His uncle remembered that so many rainy seasons ago, after the corn harvest, the village had been happy over his birth. And since William asked his uncle during the eighth day of August, the month of the corn harvest, the family settled upon Aug. 8, 1955 for the day that William Olubodun had entered the world.

Olubodun finished all the free education he had access to at the age of 10, and then, because his family could not afford to send him to secondary school, he learned to be a car mechanic. However, his life changed drastically when he was injured in a fire at age 17. After seven months in the hospital, the now totally deaf Olubodun returned to his village.

He found nothing to keep him there. The land his father had inherited was already shared with his father's 10 siblings, and would not belong to the him until his father had died. "My family sent me to a deaf school for one year to review my elementary education and to prepare for the high school [entrance] exams," Olubodun said. While there, Olubodun renewed his acquaintance with a couple from Scotland whom he had met during his hospital stay. The couple, impressed with the young boy, agreed that if he passed his exams, they would fully financially support Olubodun's five years in high school. The same day, he received his acceptance letter; he started high school in 1975.

Despite the fact that he is, in his own words, "1000 percent deaf," Olubodun excelled in high school. He was not given any special help; special education was unheard of, and Olubodun never had an interpreter during classes.

His approach to success was simple: he read, voraciously. "I would buy the textbook for the class, then I would buy every book I could find on the topic. I made sure I knew everything about the subject-I read in every free moment," Olubodun explained. He laughed as he recalled that the teachers took him seriously "because on the first exam, I had the second highest score out of 165 boys."

His excellence continued throughout high school, primarily unimpeded. However, when he took his college entrance exams, he ran into prejudice. Ranked in the top 20 students out of 4,000 who applied to the Methodist Teacher's College, he was nonetheless denied admission. Olubodun warns against pity, however; "I look back with a kind of pride that I survived it, and through God's grace I'm still here, standing and talking and living my life." When Olubodun returned home from the unsuccessful interview at the Nigerian college, he found at letter inviting him to attend Gallaudette University in Washington, D.C., the only liberal arts college for deaf students.

After college, and a brief stint in New York, Olubodun decided to seek his doctorate. "It occurred to me that people would listen to me if I had a Ph.D. Professor (Don) Uerling here at UNL was really great about encouraging me to come here. And Nebraska had a good, affordable school," he said.

He is working on his degree in higher education administration, policy and leadership, and is receiving encouragement from everyone in the department.

Olubodun is also working in the UNL office of Student Involvement as the acting assistant director. While sometimes it can be challenging to work around his disability, he is impressed by the attitude of the people he works with. "The people in the department don't seem to view me as deaf," he says. "I think they see me as a scholar and a student first. I value that."

"Sometimes, funny things will happen," Olubodun relates. "People will talk to me, and when I tell them I'm deaf, they'll repeat themselves, or maybe talk loud. I'm not offended by it, just amused. In general, people are nice, but sometimes they just don't get it."