Today’s News from the University of Kansas
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New findings refute idea of migration mortality as major reason for
LAWRENCE — In a new study, Monarch Watch Director Chip Taylor and colleagues have shown that speculation regarding the declining monarch population, despite having received much attention, is unsupported. Published Aug. 7 in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, the researchers show that the decline in the monarchs’ overwintering numbers is not due to an increase in the deaths of monarchs during the migration — the “migration mortality hypothesis.” The main determinant of yearly variation in overwintering population size, they found, is the size of the summer population.
$1M gift establishes KU architecture professorship
LAWRENCE — University of Kansas architecture professor Lou Michel had a way of making an impression on his students. “My classmates and I would poke fun at his double-knit leisure suits and ascots, but he really knew his stuff,” said Scott Davies, who received a degree in architecture from KU in 1979. “I would say that of all my professors at KU, he was probably the best.” Davies, of Hot Springs, Arkansas, decided to honor his former professor with a $1 million gift commitment through KU Endowment that establishes the Lou Michel Architecture Professorship in Design Theory.
KPR Wins Station of the Year for record 19th time
LAWRENCE – Kansas Public Radio, based at the University of Kansas, has earned the Station of the Year award for a record 19th time from the Kansas Association of Broadcasters (KAB). The KAB announced the award Aug. 12. In addition to the coveted top prize, the public radio station received eight individual accolades, including three first-place awards, four second-place awards and one honorable mention.
‘Bright Circle’ to bring early feminist philosophers to light
LAWRENCE – Now largely forgotten in the mists of time, the leading female intellects of the transcendentalist movement of early 19th century America will be resurrected in a book for which a University of Kansas professor recently won a National Endowment for the Humanities grant. The $60,000 grant to Randall Fuller will fund his new project, a group biography about the lives of Mary Moody Emerson (1774-1863), Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804-94), Sophia Hawthorne (1809-71), Lidian Jackson Emerson (1802-92) and Margaret Fuller (1810-50).
Full stories below.
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Contact: Erinn Barcomb-Peterson, KU News Service, 785-864-8858, [email protected], @ebpkansas
New findings refute idea of migration mortality as major
reason for declining monarch population
LAWRENCE — In a new study, Monarch Watch Director Chip Taylor and colleagues have shown that speculation regarding the declining monarch population, despite having received much attention, is unsupported.
Published Aug. 7 in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, the researchers show that the decline in the monarchs’ overwintering numbers is not due to an increase in the deaths of monarchs during the migration — the “migration mortality hypothesis.” The main determinant of yearly variation in overwintering population size, they found, is the size of the summer population.
Taylor, a University of Kansas professor emeritus of ecology & evolutionary biology, said the monarch butterfly populations have been declining for most of the last two decades. The numbers of monarchs measured at the monarch overwintering sites in Mexico in the winter of 2013-2014 were an all-time low.
The progressive decline in prior years, and these low numbers, led to the submission of a petition to the Department of the Interior to have the monarch declared a threatened species. These concerns also increased the search for an explanation for the decline.
The prevailing view was that the decline was due to habitat loss that followed increased use of glyphosate herbicide on corn and soybean fields in the Upper Midwest — the “milkweed limitation hypothesis.”
However, that view was challenged by a number of researchers who maintained that the decline was likely due to increasingly high levels of mortality during the butterflies’ migration. This became known as the migration mortality hypothesis.
Taylor said the migration mortality hypothesis, though unsupported by data, has received substantial coverage in Science and Scientific American.
“Monarch Watch has been collecting recovery data for tagged monarchs since 1992, and we knew that those advocating the migration mortality hypothesis were on the wrong track from the outset and told them so,” he said.
In this recently published study, Taylor and co-authors summarized the results of tagging almost 1.4 million monarchs that resulted in nearly 14,000 recoveries of tagged butterflies in Mexico.
“Showing the migration mortality hypothesis advocates their assumptions were wrong took awhile since that required a significant effort to vet our monarch tagging database for accuracy and to analyze the data,” Taylor said. “Dealing with 1.4 million records is no simple task.”
In contrast to the predictions of the migration mortality advocates, the tagging recoveries — a measure of migration success — did not decrease over time, the researchers found.
In addition, the number tagged each year was correlated with the size of the overwintering population in Mexico, consistent with the milkweed limitation hypothesis. The tagging also confirmed that the majority of monarchs reaching the overwintering sites originated from the Upper Midwest.
These findings support the conclusion reached by a team of experts that sustaining the monarch migration will require the restoration of over a billion milkweed stems in the Upper Midwest in the coming years.
The co-authors on the paper were John Pleasants of Iowa State University; Ralph Grundel and Samuel Pecoraro, both of the U.S. Geological Survey Great Lakes Science Center; and James Lovett and Ann Ryan of Monarch Watch and the Kansas Biological Survey.
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Contact: Michelle Tevis, KU Endowment, 785-832-7363, [email protected]; Michelle Keller, KU Endowment, 785-832-7336, [email protected]
$1M gift establishes KU architecture professorship
LAWRENCE — University of Kansas architecture professor Lou Michel had a way of making an impression on his students.
“My classmates and I would poke fun at his double-knit leisure suits and ascots, but he really knew his stuff,” said Scott Davies, who received a degree in architecture from KU in 1979. “I would say that of all my professors at KU, he was probably the best.”
Davies, of Hot Springs, Arkansas, decided to honor his former professor with a $1 million gift commitment through KU Endowment that establishes the Lou Michel Architecture Professorship in Design Theory.
Michel taught architectural history at KU for 30 years. Through his classes, he opened up a new world to Davies, a kid from the small town of Camden, Arkansas, by exposing him to art and architecture from all over the globe. And through conversations with classmates, Davies said he’s learned that Michel’s classes had the same influence on them.
“When they travel and see these works of art or significant architectural landmarks, they can still quote what Lou taught them, all these years later,” Davies said.
After graduating from KU, Davies returned to Arkansas, met his wife, Jeanette, and spent 25 years in private practice, eventually retiring in 2013.
Michel retired from KU in 2000 and lives in Bellingham, Washington, with his wife, Diane Carol Michel. In 2001, almost 100 alumni and faculty members established a scholarship in Michel’s honor, recognizing his achievements in architecture and his legendary status as an impassioned lecturer.
Mahbub Rashid, interim dean of the School of Architecture & Design, expressed his gratitude for the Davies’ generosity and dedication to KU’s continued academic excellence.
“Scott and Jeanette Davies’ gift to the school will help us permanently honor Lou Michel — one of our most beloved professors,” Rashid said. “And at a time when resources are limited, it also will help our school attract an outstanding theorist of architecture and urban design for impactful teaching, research and learning befitting the 21st century.”
KU Endowment is the independent, nonprofit organization serving as the official fundraising and fund-management organization for KU. Founded in 1891, KU Endowment was the first foundation of its kind at a U.S. public university.
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Contact: J. Schafer, Kansas Public Radio, [email protected], @KPRInfo
KPR Wins Station of the Year for record 19th time
LAWRENCE – Kansas Public Radio, based at the University of Kansas, has earned the Station of the Year award for a record 19th time from the Kansas Association of Broadcasters (KAB). The KAB announced the award Aug. 12.
The Station of the Year award was first presented in 1996. KPR won the prize that first year and has now earned the KAB’s highest honor more than any other radio or TV station in the state.
In addition to the coveted top prize, the public radio station received eight individual accolades, including three first-place awards, four second-place awards and one honorable mention.
The individual honors were earned in public affairs programs, complete newscast, sports feature, hard news feature/enterprise, news feature and editorial/commentary. This year’s individual awards for KPR:
News Feature
First place: “Abused, Neglected, Rescued, Saved; How JAG-K Helped a Kansas Girl Reclaim Her Life,” by KPR’s J. Schafer
Honorable Mention: “Where Are All the Birds? Ranch Hand Wonders Why So Many Have Vanished from Chase County,” by J. Schafer.
Hard news feature/enterprise
Second place: “LMH Health Eliminates Health Insurance for 3 Dozen Part Time Employees,” by J. Schafer.
Complete Newscast:
Second place: “Morning Edition News with Tom Parkinson.”
Public Affairs Program:
Second place: “KPR Presents: Woodstock, 50 Years Later,” by KPR’s Kaye McIntyre.
Sports Feature:
First place: “The NAIA Title Basketball Game That Wasn’t… and What Lies in Store,” by Greg Echlin, edited by J. Schafer.
Editorial/commentary:
First place: “KU Professor’s New Book: Remembering Emmett Till,” by KPR commentator Rex Buchanan, edited by J. Schafer
Second place: “How the Success of Vaccines Led to Less Vaccination,” by KPR commentator John Richard Schrock, edited by J. Schafer.
In years past the KAB awards would be distributed to winners at the KAB Convention in October. Due to COVID-19, this year’s convention will be held virtually, and the awards will be mailed out to their recipients prior to the virtual convention.
KPR, 19-time winner of the KAB’s Station of the Year award, is licensed to the University of Kansas. KPR broadcasts on 91.5 FM and 96.1 FM in Lawrence, 89.7 FM in Emporia, 91.3 FM in Olsburg-Junction City, 89.9 FM in Atchison, 90.3 FM in Chanute, and 99.5 FM and 97.9 FM in Manhattan. KPR can also be heard online at kansaspublicradio.org. KPR also operates KPR2, a news-talk programming stream, which can be heard on an HD receiver or on KPR’s website.
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Don’t miss new episodes of “When Experts Attack!,”
a KU News Service podcast hosted by Kansas Public Radio.
https://kansaspublicradio.org/when-experts-attack
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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman
‘Bright Circle’ to bring early feminist philosophers to light
LAWRENCE – Now largely forgotten in the mists of time, the leading female intellects of the transcendentalist movement of early 19th century America will be resurrected in a book for which a University of Kansas professor recently won a National Endowment for the Humanities grant.
The $60,000 grant to Randall Fuller, who is the Herman Melville Distinguished Professor of American Literature in KU’s Department of English, was one of a group of 238 projects NEH announced last month it was funding to a tune of $30 million.
The NEH Public Scholars grant plus one from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation will give Fuller time to focus on the writing of a group biography he is calling “Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism.” It will illuminate the lives of Mary Moody Emerson (1774-1863), Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804-94), Sophia Hawthorne (1809-71), Lidian Jackson Emerson (1802-92) and Margaret Fuller (1810-50).
Randall Fuller said that while Margaret Fuller is the best known of the five women, he believes that she, and particularly the others, deserve a deeper accounting of their influence on the transcendentalist philosophy explicated by their better-known peers.
“When I was in graduate school, and certainly as an undergraduate, we tended to focus primarily on Ralph Waldo Emerson and (Henry) David Thoreau and maybe Walt Whitman as the poetic representative of transcendentalism,” Randall Fuller said. “But it turns out that transcendentalism was actually a very social movement. It was a movement that not only took place on the page — in essays and poems — but also in conversations and correspondence and journals. When you begin to look at those other sorts of materials, you find that there was a vigorous participation among women who were interested in the same ideas that Emerson and Thoreau were interested in.”
The title “Bright Circle,” Randall Fuller said, is a quote from one of the few dozen women invited to attend the weekly all-female salon hosted by Margaret Fuller starting in 1839 in Boston.
“They were conversations of 20 to 25 women,” Randall Fuller said. “They met every Wednesday at 11 in the morning and went for several hours, during which time they discussed classical history and philosophy. Margaret Fuller hoped to answer the following questions on behalf of the gathered women: ‘What were we born to do? How shall we do it?’ So these conversations were one of the earliest formations of feminism in the United States.”
It’s important to recall, Randall Fuller said, “just for context that this was a time when women had no access to higher education and often had no access to even a high school education. And so the conversations were educative. They were was community-based. They were a way for women to discuss the Greek and Latin they were teaching themselves to read and to talk about works of art that they didn’t have access to. And finally, they were a way for them to get involved in the feminist and abolitionist movements.”
The “Bright Circle” refers to some of the deepest thinkers among them.
“My bright circle is five women that I think are really extraordinary for the way they propelled the transcendentalist movement,” Randall Fuller said.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, has a 1,100-page spiritual autobiography that is still in manuscript, according to Randall Fuller.
“It is slowly being transcribed, but it is a thing that has yet to be really studied much,” he said. “Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s writings and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s writings and Lidian Jackson’s writings have been very little studied. And the more you look at them, the more you see how incredibly important they were for generating ideas that more public figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau would later adopt and use and transfigure in their own writing.”
The women were trailblazers, Randall Fuller said, citing Margaret Fuller as “the first female columnist for an American newspaper and then the first female international reporter in the United States.”
Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, he said, “was the first woman in America to make her living as an artist. … She wrote a three-volume journal about Cuba, which is really the first literary expression of transcendentalism that we have. But she is only famous now for having been the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Similar to her is Lidian Jackson, who also was ahead of her time, intellectually and artistically, but who is now known primarily as the wife of Ralph Waldo Emerson. With those last two, I’m trying to sort of peel away the fact of their marriages and to show what kind of thinkers and artists they were on their own.”
Transcendentalism remains important, Randall Fuller said, because with its optimistic belief in the moral progress of humankind, “it has provided American culture with an enormously powerful narrative, with both positive and also deeply negative ramifications.”
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