LSU'S Biweekly Newsletter for Faculty & Staff
July 1, 2005 |
VOL. 21, NO.19 |
LSU, and higher education in general, fared very well during the recently completed Legislative session, and LSU officials are pleased with the results, Chancellor Sean O’Keefe said.
“The Legislature and the Governor were very good to LSU, the Flagship Agenda and to higher education,” O’Keefe said. “I am grateful to Governor Blanco for her leadership, as well as to the Legislature for providing LSU with necessary funding.”
The 2005 Legislative session, which ran from April 25 to June 23, provided funding to LSU through House Bill 1 – state appropriations, House Bill 2 – capital outlay, and House Bill 842 – supplemental appropriations. State appropriation funding is recurring, while capital outlay and supplemental appropriations are one-time expenditures.
Prior to the session, public higher education in Louisiana had a total of about $40 million worth of unfunded mandated costs. These costs include employee-related expenses, such as increased costs for health insurance and retirements. According to preliminary figures, the Legislature provided roughly $22 million toward this total, with the statewide three percent tuition increase, previously approved by the Legislature and the Louisiana Board of Regents, making up the remaining $18 million.
Also during the session, the Board of Regents introduced a tuition policy, which would have allowed colleges and universities to raise tuition to a peer average; however, the policy did not pass after lengthy deliberation. “The Regents advanced the tuition debate significantly by introducing a policy,” O’Keefe said. “This provides a framework to build on leading up to the next Legislative session. This is great progress.”
Public higher education also benefitted from the Legislature providing matching funds for endowed chairs and professorships. Private donors provide 60 percent of the value of these awards, which help the state’s public institutions attract top faculty. The state then provides a 40 percent match for the endowments. However, the state typically has a backlog of endowed chairs and professorships waiting to be matched. This year, the state’s backlog was $18.6 million. During the session, the Legislature provided more than $12 million, eliminating much of the backlog.
The Legislature also provided $280,000 for the planning phase of a Choppin Hall annex, $500,000 to renovate an engineering laboratory located on CEBA Lane, and $700,000 for renovations to facilities located on GSRI Rd. LSU also received $1.1 million in permanent funds for library, instructional and scientific equipment, and other additional one-time monies.
Two LSU outreach programs were also funded. The truancy program in the LSU School of Social Work was funded at $1.5 million and the LSU Fire and Emergency Training Institute received an additional $650,000.
In addition, the Governor and Legislature allocated $2 million to the Center for Computation & Technology at LSU through the Governor’s IT initiative.
All the funding is still subject to a line-item veto by the Governor, but O’Keefe said he is grateful for the progress made thus far and does not anticipate any major changes in the funding. O’Keefe has had a great deal of experience working with the federal government, and said he enjoyed this opportunity to experience the political process at the state level, which he said was more efficient than its national counterpart.
“Funds are always tight, and higher education is thankful for every bit of help it can get,” O’Keefe said. “I believe higher education is the key to improving the state and the quality of life for its residents, and I’m happy to see that the Legislature seems to agree with that philosophy and is willing to invest in this endeavor.”
After two decades of remarkable technological progress and innovation, the partnership between Intergraph Corp. and LSU’s Computer-Aided Design and Geographic Information Systems Research Laboratory, or CADGIS, is still going strong and spawning benefits for the LSU community that are better than ever. In the past two years alone, this relationship has enabled CADGIS to receive Intergraph GIS software, technical support and maintenance service valued at nearly $1.9 million.
Intergraph Corp. is a global company that develops geographic information systems and geospatial information-based solutions that can be deployed through computer workstations, the Internet and mobile technologies. LSU’s CADGIS Research Laboratory is dedicated to teaching and research in the areas of computer aided design, geographic information systems, remote sensing, image processing and other computer applications in art, architecture, design, geography and anthropology, interior design and landscape architecture.
The CADGIS-Intergraph partnership dates to the establishment of the lab in 1984, when Intergraph helped engineer the acquisition of two high-powered graphics terminals and a single VAX mini-computer for the LSU College of Art & Design and the Department of Geography & Anthropology.
Twenty years later, it is remarkable to recall that the original state-of-the-art technology acquired was roughly the size of a large refrigerator and had the computational capacity of today’s hand-held PDAs. Even so, the VAX was instrumental in the early sponsored research successes of CADGIS, and this work helped the lab develop a reputation for GIS expertise and innovation.
Even though the VAX was rendered obsolete long ago, the CADGIS-Intergraph partnership has kept pace with the rapid evolution of digital visualization and spatial data management technologies. The partnership took a significant step forward in 1995, when the company recognized CADGIS as an Intergraph Center of Mapping Excellence, making LSU one of only six institutions worldwide to receive this honor. This Intergraph acknowledgment proved to be a bankable endorsement, as it raised the national profile of CADGIS, underscored the lab’s research capabilities and academic credibility, gave access to valuable equipment and software resources and provided considerable leverage in the quest for sponsored research contracts.
In 2002, CADGIS entered into a new agreement with Intergraph to serve as a Geomedia Registered Research Laboratory, or RRL, which ensures that the benefits of the partnership will continue for many years to come. The RRL status has been assigned to select international academic institutions with a record of sustained GIS research and instructional accomplishment from Aberdeen, Scotland, to Zaragova, Spain. The new RRL partnership agreement means that CADGIS will continue to receive Intergraph software and technical support worth an estimated $365,000 each year.
The RRL benefits include a site license for the suite of Geomedia GIS software products. Geomedia supports development and deployment of high-end geospatial data systems necessary to manage large, complex data sets. Currently, CADGIS-based projects using Geomedia software include research efforts sponsored by the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, U.S. National Park Service, U.S. Sea Grant Program, Louisiana Division of Historic Preservation, Louisiana Oil Spill Consortium and the governments of Ascension and Livingston parishes.
In addition, the Geomedia RRL designation entitles all LSU faculty, students and staff to Geomedia software applications for personal and laboratory-based computer workstations. This access to expensive, high-end software helps undergraduate and graduate students develop essential proficiencies in state-of-the-art information management systems. In turn, these proficiencies enable students to become involved in research projects that enhance their competitiveness in the job market and position them to become innovative leaders in their respective professions.
The RRL status also provides CADGIS-based researchers and students with the opportunity to participate in the annual Intergraph Geomedia Users Group Conference and to present refereed papers concerning the utilization of GIS software systems in research and instruction.
As an Intergraph RRL, CADGIS is well-positioned to promote research initiatives, instructional opportunities and community engagement activities that are fundamental to the objectives of the LSU Flagship Agenda. Sponsored research activities and strategic partnerships, like the one with Intergraph, have enabled CADGIS to create the information technology infrastructure necessary to support the growing demands of LSU students and faculty. This is particularly important since, from the time of its inception, CADGIS has had no annual budget for equipment or software acquisition.
Clearly, the CADGIS-Intergraph partnership yields substantial dividends for LSU’s faculty, students and community-based constituencies. As LSU strives to advance the University’s National Flagship Agenda, there is confidence that the enduring CADGIS-Intergraph relationship will serve as a highly successful model for sustainable, mutually beneficial partnerships between the university and the private sector.
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| ExxonMobil presented LSU with a check from its Educational Matching Gift Program totaling $1.2 million. Pictured left to right are Bill Bowdon, LSU Foundation president and CEO; Truman Bell, ExxonMobil Foundation; Charlie Rowton, ExxonMobil state government relations advisor; Ed Galante, ExxonMobil senior vice president; Dave Gardner, ExxonMobil pubic affairs manager; Ed Steimel, College of Engineering director of development; and LSU Chancellor Sean O'Keefe. |
Academic programs at LSU will benefit from a windfall of donations from the ExxonMobil Corporation and its employees. On June 23, the ExxonMobil Foundation presented a check to LSU totaling $908,834 in matching funds collected during their 2004 Educational Matching Gift Program.
For the third year in a row, LSU was the top recipient of gifts from the Educational Matching Gift Program, which donated to 932 universities nationwide in 2004. The total $1.2 million gift to LSU is comprised of $303,329 collected from ExxonMobil employees, matched on a 3 to 1 basis ($908,834) from ExxonMobil Corporation. Fifty academic units at LSU will receive a share of ExxonMobil's gifts this year. In all, 231 ExxonMobil employees gave to LSU in 2004.
“We cannot thank ExxonMobil and its employees enough for their continued commitment of support for LSU academics year after year,” says Maj. Gen., USMC (Ret.) W.G. Bowdon, president and CEO of the LSU Foundation, LSU’s primary academic fundraising organization. “Their generosity reflects the spirit of a corporation that believes in the importance of higher education to our society. The LSU Foundation is grateful to have such a partner in our quest to support academic excellence at LSU,” he says.
Under the ExxonMobil 2004 Educational Matching Gift Program, a donor could give up to $5,000 a year to colleges or universities, which would then be matched on a 3 to 1 basis up to $15,000. Because the program is so successful and popular with ExxonMobil employees, ExxonMobil has agreed to increase the annual amount an employee can donate to the matching program for 2005. Employees may now donate up to $7,500 each year to higher education, which will then be matched 3 to 1 by ExxonMobil.
The Louisiana Business and Technology Center at LSU’s E. J. Ourso College of Business has been named a 2005 Lantern Award winner by the Louisiana Department of Economic Development. The Lantern Awards were formally presented at a reception at the Louisiana governor’s mansion on Tuesday, June 14.
Lantern Awards are presented annually to organizations actively furthering the goals outlined in Louisiana: Vision 2020, the master plan for economic development in Louisiana and produced by the Louisiana Economic Development Council. The Louisiana Department of Economic Development, in cooperation with the Louisiana Industrial Development Executive Association, presents 13 Lantern Awards each year.
LBTC was recently named the 2005 Incubator of the Year by the National Business Incubator Association. Twenty small businesses are currently tenants of the LBTC incubator on LSU’s campus, and hundreds more throughout Louisiana receive free business consulting services from LBTC and the LSU Small Business Development Center.
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| W. Shelby McKenzie |
W. Shelby McKenzie of the Baton Rouge law firm Taylor, Porter, Brooks & Phillips, has been named the LSU Paul M. Hebert Law Center’s 2005 Distinguished Alumnus of the Year.
Law Center Chancellor John J. Costonis made the announcement at the spring meeting of the Law Center Alumni Board of Trustees. McKenzie will be honored at the Distinguished Alumnus Breakfast to be held on the LSU Campus on Saturday, Oct. 15.
McKenzie was born in Baton Rouge. He received his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from Princeton University and then entered the LSU Law Center. He is a 1964 graduate of the Law Center, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Louisiana Law Review, member of The Order of the Coif, and recipient of the ODK-Mortar Board Outstanding Law School Senior Award.
Since graduation, McKenzie has practiced with Taylor, Porter, Brooks & Phillips. There, he was mentored by some of the state’s best trial lawyers – Frank Middleton, Robert Vandaworker and Tom Phillips, who are all LSU Law graduates.
In 1970, McKenzie received a telephone call from then-LSU Law Center Dean, Paul Hebert, inquiring whether he would be interested in teaching Professor George Pugh’s course in Federal Jurisdiction and Procedure while Pugh was on sabbatical leave. The acceptance of that opportunity initiated a 35-year career as an adjunct faculty member at the Law Center. The following year, Dean Hebert asked McKenzie to assume responsibility for Professor J. Denson Smith’s Insurance Law course. He has now taught that course 55 times to an estimated total of more than 2,500 law students.
Throughout his career, McKenzie has served as legal counsel for the LSU Board of Supervisors. The issues were often challenging and at the forefront of evolving law. McKenzie stated, “I appreciate the opportunity to interact with outstanding administrative and faculty members and with dedicated board members and political leaders.” He serves as lead counsel for the LSU System in the higher education desegregation suit.
McKenzie’s professional activities have included terms as president of the Baton Rouge Bar Association and the Louisiana Association of Defense Counsel, as well as a frequent speaker at CLE seminars. Recently, McKenzie served as president of the LSU Law Center Alumni Board of Trustees, which he describes as a “very rewarding experience.”
The Law Center’s Distinguished Alumnus Award is given to individuals who exemplify the highest quality and ethical standards of the Law Center. The award recognizes personal and professional achievements and loyalty to their alma mater. Nominations are submitted by members of the Law Center Board of Trustees and the chancellor of the Law Center. A final selection is made by an advisory committee.
Imagine a 100,000-seat stadium filled to capacity on a beautiful autumn day. For familiarity’s sake, let’s use Tiger Stadium, and instead of the usual assortment of fans, let’s fill the stadium with children. They can be any age from newborn to 17 years old.
Then imagine 15 such stadiums lined up across the horizon, all of them full of children. Once you have that image firmly in your mind’s eye, erase those stadiums from the horizon. Every one of those children are gone, and now you have an idea of the 1.5 million Jewish children eradicated in the Holocaust.
Nearly five million more Jews were killed in concentration camps across Europe. The numbers seem almost incomprehensible, as though they are too grandiose to have actually happened. But they are real.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, are organizations devoted to proving that the Holocaust was in fact, nothing more than a hoax or propaganda. For instance, photographs of inmates looking malnourished and near death were allegedly posed by Allied photographers. They have become known by such organizations as “The Photographs.”
That was just one of the assertions detailed in a full-page ad, which ran on Jan. 29, 1992. The ad, titled Holocaust Controversy: The Case For Open Debate, appeared in The Daily Reveille, LSU’s student newspaper, and immediately prompted a maelstrom of criticism from religious and civic leaders alike. LSU’s administration, faculty and staff came out firing with two full pages of commentary in The Daily Reveille rebutting the ad. The University Chaplains Association also took out a full-page ad of their own, confirming the fact that, not only had six million Jews been slaughtered, but three to six million homosexuals, Slavic people, gypsies and mentally retarded persons as well.
But there was one more outcome of the ad. Prior to its being published, former LSU Chancellor Bud Davis alerted Rabbi Barry Weinstein, who was serving as an adjunct professor at LSU at the time. After some conversation, it was decided that a class on the Holocaust would be taught as a three-hour elective under the auspices of LSU’s Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies and co-sponsored by the Jewish Chautauqua Society.
In the fall of 1992, Weinstein began educating a new generation on the events that nearly wiped out an entire race and shaped his life forever.
The Rabbi
Weinstein was born Sept. 11, 1942, in Waverly, N.Y. Only two days earlier, German soldiers had begun burning bodies at the prison camp Auschwitz because they were afraid burying prisoners would foul the ground water.
There was no rabbi in the small village of Waverly. Instead, on Jewish holy days, a “rabbi-like person” would come in on the train to conduct services. The reverence that families had for this person, Weinstein said, struck a chord with him. As early as childhood, he was sure of what he wanted to do with his life.
After graduating Union College in Schenectady, NY, with a bachelor of arts in Spanish, Weinstein attended Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio. There, he spent five years in rabbinical study.
“We were one of maybe 10 (Jewish) families in the village, and I was one of three (Jewish) people in school after my brother left,” Weinstein said. “Preserving our Jewishness has always been important to (my family).
“I became very immersed in the Holocaust, and I thought ‘I have to do something with my life to preserve the Jewish community.’ As a young adult, I did my best to strengthen Jewish life ... through high school and in college during my undergraduate years.”
And so, Weinstein traveled, all the while learning and preparing himself for his vocation.
He traveled to Jerusalem during his third year of seminary. He traveled to Madrid to learn about Jewish life there before the Spanish Inquisition. He traveled to Arkansas, where he served as a student rabbi. He even traveled to Omaha, Neb, where he became assistant/associate rabbi and director of education at the Temple Israel synagogue.
Finally, his travels brought him to Baton Rouge, where he became rabbi at Congregation B’nai Israel in Baton Rouge. Now the journey into uncharted waters could begin.
Class Begins
It was not, Weinstein said, until the late 1960s or early 70s that the Holocaust was talked about as much as it is today. For years after the final camp closed at Mauthausen in 1945, no one spoke of the Holocaust. And why would they?
Even as late as 1961, Adolf Eichmann was sentenced in Jerusalem to hang for crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity and other war crimes. One of his last statements, a final slap in the face of the Jewish people, was that he “would leap laughing into the grave because the feeling that he had five million people on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction.”
By the time Weinstein’s class was ready to begin, talk was not only more prevalent about the Holocaust, but against it as well. That made Weinstein’s work even more important. He set to work assembling materials and educational resources on the Holocaust that today fill a couple bookcases and then some. He answered questions on everything from the basics of Judaism, to the validity of claims like the ones made in The Reveille ad. He even brought in survivors to talk to his students.
From their own memories, they described how German soldiers hurled babies into the air to see who could shoot them first. They related how, instead of water, poisonous gas poured out of shower heads, killing masses of prisoners that were herded into such rooms on a daily basis.
“(The students) were horrified, shocked ... aghast,” Weinstein said. “The first couple of classes we cover the basics of Judaism ... because it gives them a quick overview of the history behind what we’re discussing. I get tons of questions on the Jewish view of Jesus, the crucifixion, and how they relate to each other.
“Eyes get opened, but always simply with the purpose of education.”
As eyes opened, classroom space dwindled until several class periods were needed to meet the demands of the students who wanted a spot in Weinstein’s class. But it was, and is, worth it to Weinstein to make sure that bigotry and racism are kept at bay if communities are to work to make the world better.
At the end of each semester, Weinstein writes a letter to each of his students and closes with a very poignant prayer from a book called Gates of Prayer. It is a small summation of what they have spent the past several months learning, discussing and, one might argue, experiencing.
In the presence of eyes which witnessed the slaughter, which saw the oppression the heart could not bear, and as witness the heart that once taught compassion until the days came to pass that crushed human feeling, I have taken an oath: To remember it all, to remember, not once to forget! Forget not one thing to the last generation when degradation shall cease, to the last, to its ending, when the rod of instruction shall have come to conclusion. An oath: Not in vain passed over the night of the terror. An oath: No morning shall see me at flesh-pots again. An oath: Lest from this we learned nothing.