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Climate scientist to give 2022 Kenneth Spencer Lecture
LAWRENCE – Climate scientist and author Katharine Hayhoe will give the 2022 Spencer Lecture, “Saving Us: An Evening with Katharine Hayhoe,” inspired by her latest book. The event, hosted by The Commons at the University of Kansas, will take place at 7 p.m. April 27 as a webinar. Additionally, Hayhoe will offer a dialogue in the “All We Can Save” series at 10 a.m. April 28.
Book outlines how historically Black colleges and universities weather accreditation, pandemic budget challenges
LAWRENCE — The COVID-19 pandemic took a heavy toll on schools at all levels. Yet, for historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), the pandemic was one more challenge that has strained budgets and even put some schools at risk of closure. A University of Kansas journalism researcher has written a book that examines the financial, accreditation and political difficulties of recent years at HBCUs and how their leaders can rise to the challenge.
KU Foundation Distinguished Professor of History awarded 2022 Morison Prize
LAWRENCE — University of Kansas Foundation Distinguished Professor Beth Bailey received the 2022 Samuel Eliot Morison Prize from the Society for Military History. She is the first woman to be awarded the prize, which recognizes Bailey’s contributions in the field of military history and reflects her range of scholarly activity.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Emily Ryan, The Commons, 785-864-6293, [email protected], @TheCommonsKU
Climate scientist, author to give 2022 Kenneth Spencer Lecture
LAWRENCE – Climate scientist and author Katharine Hayhoe will give the 2022 Spencer Lecture, “Saving Us: An Evening with Katharine Hayhoe,” inspired by her latest book. The event, hosted by The Commons at the University of Kansas, will take place at 7 p.m. April 27 as a Zoom webinar. Additionally, Hayhoe will offer a dialogue in the “All We Can Save” series at 10 a.m. April 28.
Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist who studies climate change and why it matters to humans. She has been awarded numerous accolades, including the National Center for Science Education’s Friend of the Planet award and the American Geophysical Union’s Climate Communication Prize. She has been named to lists including Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, FORTUNE magazine’s World’s Greatest Leaders and the United Nations Champion of the Earth in Science and Innovation. In her public-facing scholarship, Hayhoe hosts the PBS digital series “Global Weirding,” and she has served on advisory committees for organizations including the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, the Earth Science Women’s Network and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Hayhoe serves as chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy and is a Paul W. Horn Distinguished Professor and the Political Science Endowed Professor in Public Policy and Public Law at Texas Tech University. She has a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Toronto and a master’s degree and doctorate in atmospheric science from the University of Illinois. She has been awarded honorary doctorates from Colgate University and Victoria University at the University of Toronto.
Following her presentation on Wednesday evening, Hayhoe will be in conversation with attendees for an “All We Can Save” session, discussing “The Power of Communication” with Megan Kaminski, associate professor of English and poet, and Ali Brox, assistant teaching professor in the Environmental Studies Program. This session will also be hosted on Zoom. Attendees are encouraged to bring questions for conversation.
The Kenneth A. Spencer Lecture is hosted by The Commons annually to invite leading thinkers whose work applies across disciplines to address the KU and regional communities. In recent years, the lecture series has featured architectural biologist Jessica Green, writer/historian Rebecca Solnit, poet/scholar/artist Eve Ewing, activist/writer Jose Antonio Vargas, author/illustrator/screenwriter Jonny Sun, and writer, scientist and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Robin Wall Kimmerer.
The Spencer Lecture will be broadcast via Zoom webinar. To register, visit https://bit.ly/HayhoeKU. The “All We Can Save” event will be hosted via Zoom meeting. To register, visit https://bit.ly/AWCSHayhoe.
Anyone needing special accommodations may contact The Commons staff for assistance at [email protected].
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Contact: Mike Krings, KU News Service, 785-864-8860, [email protected], @MikeKrings
Book outlines how historically Black colleges and universities weather accreditation, pandemic budget challenges
LAWRENCE — The COVID-19 pandemic took a heavy toll on schools at all levels. Yet, for historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), the pandemic was one more challenge that has strained budgets and even put some schools at risk of closure. A University of Kansas researcher has written a book that examines the financial, accreditation and political difficulties of recent years at HBCUs and how their leaders can rise to the challenge.
“Journalism at Historically Black Colleges and Universities: Governance and Accreditation,” by Jerry Crawford II, associate professor of journalism & mass communications at KU, traces the current-day obstacles present for the institutions, as well as those for minority-serving institutions, tribal colleges and universities, and Hispanic-serving institutions. HBCUs — often referred to as 1890s schools for when they were founded as a way for newly freed African Americans to access higher education often denied them at other institutions — face a number of challenges, including existential.
“I wanted to put this in the framework of where we are in 2021 and 2022, and look at how presidents, provosts and leaders of these institutions lead among these challenges,” Crawford said. “The book is not political, but it does look at the big question that is so often asked, ‘Why are these schools still here?’ I want to show why they are valuable and essential.”
Some HBCUs that were in operation when Crawford began his research in the area are no longer open. Budget cuts, loss of accreditation, political decisions and declining enrollment are among the factors that have led to the shuttering of several HBCUs. While majority-white institutions have also seen declining enrollments, they more often have large endowments to rely on to weather financial storms.
In the book, Crawford outlines how HBCU leaders can take their schools into the future by relying on best practices. That often takes the form of accreditation. While bodies such as the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications can declare whether a program has met its criteria for accreditation, not achieving the designation does not have to be a death knell. Crawford said that while accreditation is beneficial, there are unique challenges at some HBCUs to attaining it. For example, one criterion for journalism accreditation is faculty scholarship and research. However, faculty at the institutions are often teaching three or four separate courses per semester, leaving very little time for research. Schools with mostly minority enrollment were often not deemed equal to majority-white schools but still managed to educate their students.
“It always seems the smaller HBCUs are the ones shuttered. I wanted to look at in the book how we could address that,” Crawford said. “Maybe they can’t get accreditation, but they can still use best practices for educating their students. Not being accredited does not necessarily mean they are inferior, especially looking at American schooling in the wake of Plessy v. Ferguson.”
The book examines accreditation standards, especially for journalism programs, how they have evolved in recent years and examples of how HBCU administrators have met them or improved their programs when they have not been able to do so. Such challenges speak to the importance of leadership having buy-in from the faculty of their institutions, Crawford said. That shared governance is key to HBCUs meeting goals and overcoming challenges, and Crawford devotes a chapter to how the institutions can and have successfully paired leadership in working relationships with the faculty to stay viable.
While recruitment and retention of students are paramount concerns for many schools, HBCUs face the threat on a more fundamental level. Where a majority-white institution may look to reverse declining enrollment trends, people including political leaders don’t often question why they still exist. But that is a challenge for HBCUs, Crawford said, as people often ask why they exist when African American students have been allowed to enroll at any school for decades. He shares the example of St. Paul’s College in Virginia that was closed because of declining enrollment and similar courses of study offered at the larger state schools.
“I encourage people to think about these institutions as economic engines for their areas as well,” Crawford said. “Closing HBCUs would be like if we closed Pittsburg State or Emporia State here in Kansas, simply because the majors offered at those schools are offered at larger state institutions. It would be devastating for those communities.”
The COVID-19 pandemic was a threat to HBCUs, just as it was to the entire field of education. One of the book’s chapters focuses on how HBCUs met the pandemic and unique challenges it posed. While many schools quickly shifted to remote learning, others did not have it so easy, as some did not have institutional Zoom accounts to enable online classes, or others did not have tech security staff members who could oversee online learning. Throughout the chapter, HBCU leaders shared how they managed the pandemic and how work/family conflict, role overload and job demands all weighed on their handling of education during a pandemic, as well as how confident they were that their institution would be able to reopen.
The book closes with chapters on the role of academic libraries at HBCUs and how they can help faculty attain accreditation, as well as a look at the specific accreditation challenges of other minority-serving institutions, tribal colleges and universities, and Hispanic-serving institutions.
Those institutions, as well as HBCUs, “represent the hopes and dreams for many students from underrepresented communities,” Crawford wrote. He also points out that more than 80% of people of color working in media have been touched by HBCUs in some way. Losing them would only further reduce the diversity of voices working in that field and the many others that the institutions prepare young people for, he wrote.
Crawford closes by urging leaders to work closely with their faculty to ensure they remain viable and achieve their goals together in achieving accreditation, balancing budgets, attracting and retaining students, and keeping their doors open.
“The book is largely about journalism programs, but I also look at the totality of how presidents, regents and leaders can provide good leadership to keep these institutions open and viable,” Crawford said. “I want to champion HBCUs and minority-serving institutions as vital places of learning and help them use good leadership and governance to meet their challenges.”
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KU Foundation Distinguished Professor of History awarded 2022 Morison Prize
LAWRENCE — Foundation Distinguished Professor Beth Bailey received the 2022 Samuel Eliot Morison Prize from the Society for Military History. She is the first woman to be awarded the prize as well as the first nontraditional military historian – the first to define herself as a historian of military, war and society – to be honored.
The Morison Prize recognizes the University of Kansas researcher’s body of contributions in the field of military history and reflects her range of scholarly activity to the field.
“I’m thrilled to receive this award, and it was an enormous surprise,” Bailey said. “It means even more because the elected trustees of the Society of Military History vote on its recipient, and to my mind, those votes demonstrate that the society has increasingly become a big tent, welcoming a wide variety of approaches to military history.”
Bailey’s current research examines how the U.S. Army, as an institution, addressed calls for racial justice and tried to manage pervasive racial conflict during the broader unrest of the Vietnam War era. She is excited to see “that the field of military history is thriving, with cohort after cohort of scholars doing exciting work that strengthens the field of military history and the discipline of history more broadly.”
“This is a well-deserved honor for Dr. Bailey, who is a leading expert in the field of military history,” said John Colombo, interim dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. “We are fortunate to have her scholarship and leadership here in the College.”
Bailey is Foundation Distinguished Professor, director of the Center for Military, War, and Society Studies, and a member of the KU Department of History. She is the author, editor or co-contributor of 12 books, including “America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force,” “Sex in the Heartland,” “The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii,” “Understanding the U.S. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” “Managing Sex in the U.S. Military” and “Beyond Pearl Harbor: A Pacific History.”
Bailey has twice received the Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award. A co-editor of the Cambridge University Press book series on Military, War, and Society in the Modern United States, she now chairs the Department of the Army Historical Advisory Subcommittee. She has given invited talks or been a visiting scholar in Australia, Indonesia, France, Japan, the United Kingdom, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Germany, Saudi Arabia and China. Her new book, “An Army Afire,” forthcoming next year from the University of North Carolina Press, analyzes how the U.S. Army, as an institution, attempted to manage “the problem of race” during the Vietnam War era. Bailey was elected to the Society of American Historians in 2017, and in 2022 she received the Jeffrey Balfour-Higuchi Award for the Kansas Board of Regents system. She is currently a Carnegie Foundation Fellow and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar.
Established in 1933 as the American Military History Foundation, renamed in 1939 the American Military Institute and renamed again in 1990 the Society for Military History, the society is devoted to stimulating and advancing the study of military history. Its membership (today more than 2,700) has included many of the world’s most prominent scholars, soldiers and citizens interested in military history.
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