UT Headlines

The University of Toledo has established the Dr. John M. Howard Endowed Professorship of Pancreatic Surgery to honor the man who has spent more than 34 years at MCO/UT and more than half a century in the field of medicine.

The Blade has a story about Dr. Howard in the front page of its second section today. Dr. Howard will join UT President Lloyd Jacobs and family and friends Friday, Aug. 28 at 4 p.m. in the Lucas Room of the Dana Conference Center on the HSC as UT formally announces the professorship.

CORRECTION: A caller correctly points out my initial entry was wrong regarding the recognition event. While there was a birthday party for Dr. Howard Aug. 26, the ceremony recognizing the newly established endowed professorship is this Friday. It has been corrected above. My thanks to those keeping me on my toes.

Several stories caught my eye these last few days, one good, one less so and one that I’ve read about seven times and still don’t understand.

1.) Xunlight makes first delivery, The Blade:

After more than half a decade the former UT start-up business Xunlight sold the first solar panel to come off its production line yesterday. The buyer? The UT Scott Park Campus of Energy and Innovation where it will serve both a symbolic and utilitarian role as UT’s alternative energy focus continues to broaden.

2.) $8 million deficit UT plans temporary furloughs, new layoffs, The Blade

The UT Trustees’ Finance Committee recommended to the full board for its Sept. 21 meeting the budget amendment needed to re-balance UT’s budget after the state cut funding to balance its budget in July. The result will be furloughs and another smaller, but no less painful, round of layoffs. The president spoke at the Aug. 6 Town Hall meeting about not letting today’s temporary pain overshadow the goals for the institution as a whole – and acknowledged just how difficult that task actually is.

3.) Nothing’s Guaranteed, Editorial, Independent Collegian

I have to assume this opinion piece is based on several basic misunderstandings. The editorial essentially asserts the UT Guarantee program is sitting on the edge of a metaphorical knife and could succeed or fail with the slightest news either way. While warnings about the potential dangers of pilot programs and trial runs may have made some sense a year ago, the results are actually in now; tangible results to measure and celebrate – which the IC points out on the front page of its news section. The editorial struck me like warning a marathon runner about the dangers of dehydration 30 minutes after she won the race and has been checked out and cleared by doctors.

The UT Guarantee has been a success for everyone, even those who may have never heard of it before. Here’s why:

• UT’s Strategic Plan calls for increasing the number of undergrads from 16,000 in 2006 to 20,000 in 2011. We’ve currently passed the 18,000 mark. The increase in Blue and Gold Scholars (recipients of the Guarantee) comes from students who either wouldn’t have gone to college or would have gone to schools in Cleveland, Columbus or local branch campuses.
• The Guarantee program brings in students who are well-qualified, diverse and more likely to graduate.
• Blue and Gold Scholars are, by-in-large, receiving sizable Pell Grants and state awards. The result is UT is paying about $3,000 per student, on average, to cover the remainder of their tuition rather than $8,000 per student to cover their tuition. This frees up more UT scholarship money available to award to UT’s student body. The UT Guarantee program certainly received the vast majority of UT’s marketing efforts this past year because it was new and innovative. Meanwhile, more quietly, the rest of the UT student body received the vast majority of the $40 million UT dedicates each year to scholarships.

The UT Guarantee would be a good idea even if it lost money because it changes the lives of many Blue and Gold Scholars from urban communities and that is exactly the mission of this University. The fact that one year after it was envisioned it has brought more, better-qualified students to campus AND more than paid for itself is cause for campus-wide celebration.

In March, UT CFO Scott Scarborough wrote – and received much flak for - a journal entry discussing UT’s use of new distance learning technologies to reach new student audiences currently served in increasing numbers by for-profit institutions like the University of Phoenix and Kaplan University.

As Scarborough says in the post, while he has no interest in copying Kaplan University, he is very interested having those students who currently look to a place like Kaplan U. instead choose and find the same accessibility to a higher quality education at UT.

In late June, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a column asking the same questions and highlighting the same ads as Scarborough’s March post.

The column, “Kaplan U.’s Catchy Ad Provokes a Question: Do Colleges Serve Today’s Students?” (subscription required) explores the same issues and in the end suggests (to me) the same conclusion:

Universities need to marry their quality with the innovations in accessibility the for-profits are currently offering. Creating a false mutual exclusivity between the two will leave higher education institutions across the nation with the same problem newspaper publishers are currently facing: offering a better service, but finding fewer and fewer people willing to pay for it.

Channel 11 interviewed jeweler and UT Alum Molly Strader Saturday morning to preview Art on the Mall:

And Channel 24 covered the event Sunday:

UT’s College of Law has been front and center discussing the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor.

Most recently, UT Professor Benjamin Davis spoke July 16 with radio host Jim Bohannon about the history of Supreme Court decisions, the role of the Supreme Court, as well as the legal issues surrounding Sotomayor’s nomination. Davis is the second guest and begins speaking at about the 20 minute mark.

Law colleagues Lee Strang and Rebecca Zietlow have both shared their views of the Sotomayor nomination in recent days and months.

UT Law Professor Lee Strang discussed the U.S. Constitution, Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing and the law with Brian Wilson on WSPD July 14, 2009. It’s about 30 minutes.

Part 1:

Strang on Constitution, Sotomayor

Part 2:

Strang on Sotomayor, Constitution (Part 2)

UT is featured in an exciting story published on CNBC.com about the city’s efforts to “become a green jobs metropolis”. The story emphasizes Toledo’s history with glass and Harold McMaster’s vision for solar energy back when oil was cheap. (Such a time existed.)

Additionally, that CNBC is one of the most prominent business news organizations increases the profile in the business community – the ones who will be investing venture capital money in solar power – of UT and of companies like Xunlight, which is also featured in the story.

President Jacobs has said in the past when speaking about his vision for a University City filled with high-tech, knowledge-economy jobs that Toledo and UT “are what we hold ourselves out to be.” For some time now UT has held itself out to be one of the best institutions for the study and creation of innovative solar technologies in the nation. And increasingly, news organizations and business investors are recognizing that is exactly what we are.

Some excerpts:

The University of Toledo is one of the driving forces behind the city’s green makeover. In 2000, the university started looking at ways to support regional development, eventually deciding the best way was to develop a clean energy program, with a focus on solar energy.

“We wanted to establish one premiere area where we could be as good as anybody in the world,” says Dr. Frank Calzonetti, vice president of research development at the University of Toledo. “We picked one area where we wanted to build a very strong core of research that would lend itself to invention and also support technology development in our area.”

The University of Toledo has a long history with solar energy. In the 1980s, a glass expert and Ohio native by the name of Harold McMaster used his knowledge to create solar cells. He started a business at the university called Solar Cells, which more than a decade later became First Solar [FSLR 160.14 -2.06 (-1.27%) ], now the largest manufacturer of thin-film solar cells in the world. Although the company is now headquartered in Tempe, Ariz., it has a manufacturing plant just outside Toledo that employees more than 700 people.

The university wanted to further what McMaster started more than two decades ago. In 2005, it started a clean and alternative energy business incubator, which has accounted for 130-plus jobs and nearly $8 million in payroll, according to university statistics. Then in 2006, the university launched the Wright Center for Photovoltaics, a university, industry and government collaboration focused on reducing solar costs, improving technologies and transferring knowledge from the labs to the production line.

The university currently has two big energy projects in development: the School of Solar and Advanced Renewable Energy and the Scott Park campus of Energy and Innovation, a physical campus dedicated to researching renewable, alternative and sustainable energies. The university is hoping to secure $75 million in federal stimulus funding for the projects, but they are not contingent on federal money.

One beneficiary of the University of Toledo’s clean energy initiatives is Xunlight, one of four graduates of the university’s business incubator program. Xunlight develops and manufactures solar panels that can be used for commercial and residential rooftops.

A special UT/MCO alum is remembered on NBC’s Today Show this morning.

An equally moving story written by Cynthia Nowak was published shortly after her recent Oct. 2008 visit to UT.

The chair of the political science department at Duke has a smart essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required – which is free when on the UT network) on faculty and the media and offers some excellent suggestions about how to handle interviews and how to deal with the last-minute nature of the news media.

His best tip:

Ignore the question. Reporters ask bad questions. Fact is, they may not know enough about your subject to know what a good question even looks like. Faculty members often say after an interview, “But I never got to talk about what I really wanted to say!” Well, that means you misunderstood the whole process.

Questions are a way to get you, the faculty expert, to talk. Reporters can’t guess what question you want to answer. So ignore the question. Many, many times, I have gotten a question, and I nod and then answer a completely unrelated question. I cover something I want to talk about, have prepared, and really know about. Surprisingly often, the reporter looks at the cameraman, they both nod, and say, “Thanks, that’s all we need.”

While we have many faculty members at UT who are willing and/or happy to do media interviews, we’re always looking for more. These interviews offer the chance for UT to position itself as a community resource and for faculty members to position themselves, their department and their college as important players in broader societal discussions.

As Dr. Michael Munger discusses in his essay, the stop/go, hurry-up/wait culture of the media can be frustrating at times, but, particularly in a world where video can be saved and reused via new media, media interviews can be used to convey faculty expertise across the world in seconds.

The University Communications Office does offer media training to anyone who is interested in improving his or her on-camera presence or who has questions about the interview process. Please e-mail me at jonathan.strunk@utoledo.edu if you are interested.

As Munger says, “Don’t go turtle. Your university needs you, and so does the world.”

As we become more comfortable using new media tools, Chris Ankney’s UT’s able to capture moments like this one to put online just hours after they take place. In a short time a moment viewed by about 20 people can be seen around the world by alumns and others who have only the fondest wishes of destruction on the old BP station at the corner of Dorr and Secor.

As this event involved technology collapsing metal and general decimation, I sent in New Media Expert Chris Ankney to do the filming. UT President Lloyd Jacobs and Toledo Councilwoman Wilma Brown speak:

This razing follows the demolishment of the Student Classroom Annex and the old ROTC building on the Main Campus and in the weeks to come, the old Papa John’s and NAPA Auto Parts store on Dorr will come down. Several other UT-owned properties along Dorr will be razed as well. Eliminating the blight of these vacant buildings is great, but what’s even better is the economic development efforts planned for that corner of campus.

Matt Schroeder in the UT Foundation has been working closely with students, the neighbors in Secor Gardens (who are only too happy to see vacant buildings go away) and UT and UT Foundation leadership to begin getting input and crafting a plan for a corner of campus with student-friendly businesses and shops. (UT leaders have been quick to point out that any new construction efforts on that corner will include parking to support them.)

Also, for no other reason than that Chris Ankney we can, Chris we’ve also included video of the excavator putting the demolished building back together.