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KU law school ranks 8th nationwide for ‘best jobs’ employment
LAWRENCE – Nearly 95% of graduates in the Class of 2021 at the University of Kansas School of Law found full-time, longtime legal employment, according to data recently released by the American Bar Association.
KU Pharmacy earns Healthier Together Award from Lawrence Douglas County Public Health
LAWRENCE — For its active role in countywide COVID-19 vaccine clinics, the University of Kansas School of Pharmacy has been honored with the Healthier Together Award from Lawrence Douglas County Public Health. KU Pharmacy students, alumni and faculty helped administer more than 50,000 vaccines in the past year in Douglas County and thousands more across the state.
15 students selected as the 41st class of University Scholars
LAWRENCE — The 41st class of University Scholars and their faculty mentors were recently recognized during a reception April 26 at the University of Kansas. Competitively selected from KU’s sophomore class, University Scholars include students from Andover, Assaria, Leavenworth, McLouth, Olathe, Overland Park, Topeka, Wakeeney and Wichita, and from Kansas City, Missouri.
Book investigates US military’s ongoing attempts at managing sex
LAWRENCE — A new book from a University of Kansas Foundation Distinguished Professor of History examines historical and contemporary U.S. military policies and offers diverse perspectives on both its successes and failures in handling sex — ranging from biological sex and gender identity to sexual behavior and sexuality.
KU engineering researcher receives Fulbright award
LAWRENCE — William Collins, associate professor of civil, environmental & architectural engineering at the University of Kansas, has received the Fulbright-VTT Award in Science, Technology, and Innovation. He will travel to Finland in 2023 to collaborate on research in fracture mechanics.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Margaret Hair, School of Law, 785-864-9205, [email protected], @kulawschool
KU law school ranks 8th nationwide for ‘best jobs’ employment
LAWRENCE – Nearly 95% of graduates in the Class of 2021 at the University of Kansas School of Law found full-time, longtime legal employment, according to data recently released by the American Bar Association.
KU Law ranks eighth among ABA-accredited law schools nationwide in the category sometimes referred to as “best jobs” – defined as full-time, long-term positions that require passing a bar exam or where a law degree offers an advantage. Employment data for KU and all ABA-accredited law schools is available on the ABA website.
Overall employment for the 2021 class was 96.9%. Compared with all ABA law schools, KU Law ranks 21st nationally for overall employment. This is the eighth consecutive year that KU Law employment has exceeded 90%, including graduates who enrolled in full-time graduate school after completing their Juris Doctor.
“We are encouraged that even in a year when the health crisis continued to take a toll on our economy, our students still achieved excellent employment outcomes,” said Heather Spielmaker, assistant dean for career services at KU Law. “High-caliber instruction and professional development guidance helped produce graduates who were competent and confident, and that clearly resonated with our employers.”
Graduates accepted positions with law firms, businesses, government agencies, public interest organizations and judges across the country. An analysis by the nonprofit Law School Transparency placed KU Law fourth nationwide for graduates in full-time, long-term government or public interest jobs. Just over 30% of graduates in the KU Law Class of 2021 accepted jobs in that category. Law School Transparency ranks KU Law 19th for graduates in full-time, long-term jobs that require a law license and are not solo practices.
Thirteen graduates secured full-time, long-term judicial clerkships, including two clerking with federal courts. KU Law is among the top quarter of law schools nationally for percentage of graduates in clerkships. Two additional graduates completed short-term clerkships before moving on to positions with law firms.
PreLaw Magazine recognized KU Law as one of the top schools in the country for trial advocacy in its winter 2022 issue. The rankings are based on law schools’ curricular offerings in trial advocacy. At KU Law, those offerings include a certificate in advocacy skills; skills simulation courses through the Shook, Hardy & Bacon Center for Excellence in Advocacy; and several clinical and externship programs that help students build practical experience.
The magazine also highlighted innovative, hands-on mediation training offered to first-year students in the law school’s Lawyering Skills program.
KU Law was listed as one of the “Best Schools for Practical Training” in the spring 2022 issue of PreLaw Magazine. That ranking focuses on hands-on offerings including clinics, field placements, simulation courses, pro bono service hours and moot court participation.
“KU Law’s curriculum is designed to give students the type of practical training that will prepare them for a successful legal career, starting during the first year of law school,” said Stephen Mazza, dean and professor of law. “From the first-year Lawyering Skills course to upper-level workshops in negotiating business deals or taking depositions, KU Law’s courses and faculty help ensure graduates can pursue jobs that match their interests.”
Visit the KU Law website for an infographic with additional Class of 2021 employment data.
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Contact: Brad Stauffer, School of Pharmacy, [email protected], @KUPharmacy
KU Pharmacy earns Healthier Together Award from Lawrence Douglas County Public Health
LAWRENCE — For its active role in countywide COVID-19 vaccine clinics, the University of Kansas School of Pharmacy has been honored with the Healthier Together Award from Lawrence Douglas County Public Health. KU Pharmacy students, alumni and faculty helped administer more than 50,000 vaccines in the past year in Douglas County and thousands more across the state.
“We will always be grateful to the KU School of Pharmacy as a shining example of the groundswell of community support that enabled our drive-through clinics to vaccinate tens of thousands of people in just a few months. It was humbling to witness their early and persistent presence. Their contribution to our success cannot be overstated,” said LDCPH Director Dan Partridge.
With the award comes a $200 check that is being donated to the KU Medical Center’s JayDoc Free Clinic, where KU Pharmacy students and faculty frequently volunteer. Associate Dean Joe Heidrick accepted the award on behalf of the School of Pharmacy.
“We are so proud to accept this award on behalf of the many School of Pharmacy students, alums and faculty members who volunteered their time to help keep our fellow Kansans healthy during the pandemic,” Heidrick said. “The School of Pharmacy has a long history of serving the community and giving students practical experience as they train to serve the needs of their future communities.”
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Contact: Justin Runge, University Honors Program, [email protected], @KUHonors
15 students selected as the 41st class of University Scholars
LAWRENCE — The 41st class of University Scholars and their faculty mentors were recently recognized during a reception April 26 in the Big 12 Room of the Kansas Memorial Union at the University of Kansas. University Honors Program Director Sarah Crawford-Parker and faculty member Hannah Britton delivered short remarks before attendees celebrated this year’s scholars and mentors with refreshments.
Competitively selected from KU’s sophomore class, University Scholars earn their distinction through rigorous academic achievement, intellectual promise, curiosity and leadership. This year’s cohort joins almost 800 alumni of the program and continues the tradition of exploring recent events through a multidisciplinary lens during a seminar taught by a distinguished KU faculty member.
This spring’s seminar is led by Britton, professor of political science and women, gender, & sexuality studies. “Justice or Reconciliation? Building Sustainable Peace After Conflict” examines the many ways societies try to come to terms with their collective pasts and specific histories. What effects do truth commissions, criminal tribunals or traditional healing ceremonies have on postwar nations? The course explores these various strategies to envision and attain lasting peace, their guiding values and their long-term impact.
Scholars also received a $1,500 scholarship and mentoring to help develop their academic and research interests. For 2022, an Honors Faculty Fellow was assigned as the faculty mentor for each scholar. The 2022 University Scholars are listed alphabetically with their hometowns, majors and mentors:
1. Elizabeth Appel: Kansas City, Missouri; majoring in civil engineering; mentored by Nilou Vakil, associate professor of architecture
2. Fatima Asif: Overland Park; majoring in biochemistry and English; mentored by Katie Batza, associate professor and director of graduate studies of women, gender & sexuality studies
3. Camden Baxter: Andover; majoring in economics and sociology; mentored by Dave Tell, professor of communication studies
4. Madeline Blake: Assaria; majoring in sociology and English; mentored by Stephanie Zelnick, professor of clarinet
5. Libby Frost: Wakeeney; majoring in management & leadership; mentored by Mary Klayder, associate director of undergraduate studies and lecturer in the Department of English
6. Elizabeth Funk: McLouth; majoring in chemical engineering; mentored by Kyle Camarda, associate professor of chemical & petroleum engineering
7. Bethlehem Kelecha: Olathe; majoring in English and political science; mentored by Darren Canady, director of undergraduate studies and professor of English
8. Nidia Lazos: Wichita; majoring in environmental studies; mentored by Amy Burgin, associate professor of ecology & evolutionary biology and associate scientist for the Kansas Biological Survey
9. Faith Lopez: Leavenworth; majoring in social welfare; mentored by Katie Rhine, associate professor in the departments of African & African-American Studies and Geography & Atmospheric Science
10. John Lubianetsky: Kansas City, Missouri; majoring in Chinese language & literature, global & international studies and political science; mentored by Nathan Wood, associate professor of history
11. Miles Luce: Kansas City, Missouri; majoring in women, gender & sexuality studies and history of art; mentored by Stephanie Zelnick, professor of clarinet
12. Mei McConnell: Davis, California; majoring in sports management; mentored by Katie Rhine, associate professor in the departments of African & African American Studies and Geography & Atmospheric Science
13. Emma Nasseri: Topeka; majoring in computer science and visual arts; mentored by Nilou Vakil, associate professor of architecture
14. Navya Singh: Chandigarh, India; majoring in molecular, cellular & developmental biology and chemistry; mentored by Katie Batza, associate professor and director of graduate studies of women, gender & sexuality studies
15. Kate Wienke: St. Louis; majoring in physics; mentored by Perry Alexander, AT&T Foundation Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and director of the Information & Telecommunication Technology Center.
Created to recognize and encourage academically talented and motivated sophomores, University Scholars was founded in 1982 under the leadership of retired U.S. 10th Circuit Chief Judge Deanell Tacha, then KU’s vice chancellor for academic affairs, along with longtime University Honors Program director Francis Heller, the Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor of Law and Political Science.
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Contact: Jon Niccum, KU News Service, 785-864-7633, [email protected]
Book investigates US military’s ongoing attempts at managing sex
LAWRENCE — Sex can mean many different things. In a military context, the definition expands even further.
“Military regulations that govern sexual behavior are actually stricter than in civilian society,” said Beth Bailey, Foundation Distinguished Professor of History and director of the Center for Military, War, and Society Studies at the University of Kansas.
“You don’t get prosecuted for adultery in civilian society, for instance. So what does it mean when the military attempts to manage sex?”
Her latest book, “Managing Sex in the U.S. Military: Gender, Identity, and Behavior,” seeks to answer that question and many others. The multi-author collection examines historical and contemporary U.S. military policies and offers diverse perspectives on both its successes and failures in handling sex. It’s published by University of Nebraska Press.
Co-edited with KU professors Alesha Doan and Shannon Portillo and Kara Dixon Vuic of Texas Christian University (the four of whom craft the introduction and afterword), the book addresses whether sex can indeed be managed like its title suggests.
“Communities manage sex all the time. We’re constantly creating policies based around our understandings of the significance of sex,” Bailey said.
“One of the things we did in this book was to use sex as an all-encompassing signifier. So by sex, here, we mean the biological sex to which one has been assigned, gender identity, sexual behavior and sexuality. Our society — and the military in particular — perpetually categorizes people by sex.”
There’s an Army cliché that requests to “break it down Barney-style.” While referencing TV’s purple dinosaur, it’s asking for someone to simplify a process that has gotten convoluted. But wading through the complexities of how the armed forces deals with sex requires a Barney-style breakdown.
Bailey said, “On some level, it seems like managing sex should be relatively easy because those in the military are subject to military authority 24/7. They are subject to orders. There is rank hierarchy. There are all sorts of tools that don’t exist in the civilian world. Nonetheless, problems such as the crisis of sexual assault have persisted.”
The 12 chapters explore topics such as how the military handles harassment, childbirth, combat exclusion policies and bans based on openly gay service members. Bailey’s chapter is titled “‘A Higher Moral Character’: Respectability and the Women’s Army Corps,’” which traces the often shocking history of this branch.
“One of the key points I wanted to make is the ongoing emphasis on WACs’ respectability wasn’t simply due to men imposing standards of what they believed was appropriate behavior for women; it was also women officers very carefully protecting the reputation of the women who served under them,” she said.
According to her chapter, unlike Great Britain or the Soviet Union, there was a lot of resistance in the U.S. to females serving in uniform during World War II. Some of that translated into attacks on women that focused on the place they were often most vulnerable: their sexual reputation.
“It’s hard to understand today how important it was at that time to be considered sexually respectable, but the threat of being considered ‘loose’ or ‘fast’ or ‘easy’ threatened one’s marriageability. While certainly there were women in the military who didn’t want to marry a man, it was hard to support oneself independently as a woman. Being accepted into a kind of middle-class respectable society was fundamentally important.”
Ugly rumors began to circulate that WACs who had been overseas during wartime were being sent home on ships full of pregnant servicewomen, and many were jumping overboard to kill themselves out of shame. More rumors implied they were merely in the military to provide intimate entertainment for the officers. Or they were lesbian at a time when that was not publicly acceptable.
“We can look back and say those rumors are pathetic. But they really affected the way women experienced their service and how their families and communities viewed them,” she said.
“Managing Sex” spawned from a symposium sponsored by KU’s Center for Military, War, and Society Studies. The idea was to partner historians and public administration experts to analyze this topic. While Bailey originally studied gender and sexuality, she pivoted in the 1990s to include the military after becoming fascinated with an Army recruiting commercial that depicted a young soldier thanking his third grade teacher for believing in him.
A KU professor for the last seven years, Bailey has written and/or edited a dozen books, including “Beyond Pearl Harbor: A Pacific History,” (2019, University Press of Kansas) “The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii” (2012, Johns Hopkins University Press) and “America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force” (2009, Harvard University Press).
Through all her studies, she said there was one thing that constantly astonished her about the nation’s armed forces.
“Given the size of the institution, its conservative nature and its bureaucratic nature, the thing I’m most surprised about is that the military — particularly the Army — is as creative as it is in trying to address what it perceives as problems,” Bailey said.
“Of course, policies and inventive ideas don’t always translate well into implementation, and there are people in the way who have different understandings. But I am always impressed by the military’s sheer level of creativity.”
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The official university Twitter account has changed to @UnivOfKansas.
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Contact: Christine Metz Howard, International Affairs, [email protected], @KUintlaffairs
KU engineering researcher receives Fulbright award
LAWRENCE — William Collins, University of Kansas associate professor of civil, environmental & architectural engineering, has received a Fulbright Scholar Award to conduct research for six months in Finland. Jointly funded by the VTT Technical Research Center of Finland and the Fulbright Finland Foundation, Collins was awarded the Fulbright-VTT Award in Science, Technology, and Innovation.
Beginning in January 2023, Collins will work with researchers at the VTT Technical Research Center in Espoo, Finland. The research will focus on fracture mechanics, which studies how cracks form and spread in materials. In particular, Collins aims to identify and bridge the gaps that exist between current industry practices and state-of-the-art work in the field of fracture mechanics.
Fulbright Scholar Awards are prestigious and competitive fellowships that provide unique opportunities for scholars to teach and conduct research abroad. The Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program offers over 400 awards in more than 130 countries.
According to Collins, many industries have practices based on an outdated understanding of fracture mechanics, which can result in overly conservative design codes causing higher costs; or design codes that are not conservative enough that could result in potential failures.
To address this issue, Collins’ proposed work in Finland will include the following:
1. Compiling and re-characterizing a database of steel fracture toughness, which measures a material’s ability to resist cracking,
2. Evaluating fractures at the interface of joints using dissimilar metal welds
3. Identifying areas where current specification can benefit from adopting modern approaches to fracture mechanics, focusing on the energy industry and transportation infrastructure.
The award will allow Collins to work with materials and applications that are outside of his primary area of research, which is focused on highway infrastructure. His collaborators in Finland are mechanical engineers who work primarily in the nuclear energy industry. The project aims to use the existing synergies in fracture mechanics to connect civil and mechanical engineering researchers.
“There are many well-respected fracture researchers at VTT, and I look forward to learning from them,” Collins said. “I hope that the relationships I build with them will continue upon my return to KU, resulting in long-term international collaborations.”
The award could also open up new funding opportunities and will result in improvements to the fracture mechanics course Collins teaches at KU.
The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to build lasting connections between the people of the U.S. and the people of other countries. Since its establishment in 1946, the Fulbright Program has given more than 400,000 students, scholars, teachers, artists and scientists the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research, exchange ideas and contribute to finding solutions to shared international concerns.
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