Centenarians on Campus
Fred A. Kummerow, who turned 100 in October, joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1950 to study lipids and then, as he put it, “ended up staying all my life.”
“I’m still at the university because I’m still researching,” says Mr. Kummerow, who had a paper published in Clinical Lipidology just last year. “I still want to convince physicians that cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease and that trans fat is.”
In 2009, Mr. Kummerow petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to ban trans fats. The agency made a preliminary determination that they are harmful and gathered comments, but a final decision is still pending. Meanwhile, Mr. Kummerow continues working at Burnsides Research Laboratory, which he helped create, collaborating with graduate students and postdocs.
Students haven’t changed much over the years, Mr. Kummerow says, though none can quite compare with the first group. “The first students I had were the hardest-working of all,” he says. “They’d been in the war, in the Army and Navy and Air Corps. They were in the thick of battle, had been wounded. That made them different.”
As he waits for the FDA, Mr. Kummerow has added to his list of projects. “I’m on the path of trying to solve what causes Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s,” he says. “My wife died two years ago of Parkinson’s, and I know it’s not something I can solve, but I hope I can help other researchers with my ideas.”
Another active centenarian is Morris J. Shapiro, a part-time faculty member in the department of emergency medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Dr. Shapiro, who is 101, helps teach and mentor residents. He retired from his full-time job as a professor of surgery at the medical center 31 years ago.
Some younger folks, nonagenarians, have also stayed close to their institutions. At Drake University, Paul Morrison, who is 97, has been working on campus for 70 years. He retired in 1986, but, he says, “I went to work the next day as a volunteer anyway.” The former sports-information director does outreach to alumni, and he catalogs and updates game scores.
“I take Fridays off now, but I haven’t missed many days in my career,” he says. “I always say that Drake has been my longtime love affair.”
And at Miami University, in Ohio, John Eicher, 93, an emeritus professor of chemistry, is heavily involved in teaching courses, and taking them, at the university’s Institute for Learning in Retirement. —Angela Chen
New Diversity Challenge
As only the second vice president for inclusion and equity ever hired at Grand Valley State University, Jesse M. Bernal will try to expand diversity at the predominantly white institution in a predominantly white part of Western Michigan.
Last month, Mr. Bernal, 34, was asked to join the president’s team. He was scheduled to leave his position last week as director for diversity and inclusion at Santa Clara University, in California, to begin his new job.
He says he will try to help make Grand Valley a model for diversity by improving the curriculum, creating educational partnerships with local community colleges and civic leaders, and setting up pipelines from underserved high schools, which have growing Latino populations.
Grand Valley’s freshman class in the fall of 2014 was 91 percent white, according to enrollment data. The surrounding town of Allendale is 90 percent white. The state of Michigan bans same-sex marriage.
But Mr. Bernal tries to see those situations not as obstacles but as opportunities. In working to “create an institution that is mindful of that future diversity,” he will rely on dialogue, analysis of campus-climate studies and other data, and his own research background in intersectionality—or how people’s multiple identities shape them and their experiences.
Mr. Bernal has known about Grand Valley’s commitment to inclusion for years, having looked at some of its research. That commitment, its collaborative spirit, and the goodheartedness of campus leaders, he says, helped him to decide to move. —Maddy Berner
Professor Emerges From His Dumpster
Molly Mandell
Jeff Wilson
If you were to cross Bill Nye the Science Guy with Oscar the Grouch, you might get Jeff Wilson.
Mr. Wilson, dean of the university college and an associate professor of biological sciences at Huston-Tillotson University, in Austin, Tex., lived in a 33-square-foot trash receptacle for the past year as part of the Dumpster Project, an effort to teach students to live with less. This month he moved out of the container, which he had transformed into a sustainable house and interactive teaching lab.
The small space forced him to enjoy life’s moments more than “stuff,” and broadened his audience, he says.
Mr. Wilson had been publishing papers on environmental science in peer-reviewed journals but was looking for a way to take his message to the public, and to reach schoolchildren. “The tongue-in-cheek ridiculousness of placing a professor in an oversized trash can proved to be interesting enough not only to engage our students,” he says, but also “a wide range of folks across the world.”
On the campus of the historically black institution, the project inspired the creation of Green Is the New Black, a student organization that promotes sustainability, particularly in communities of color. It also led to the hiring of the first campus sustainability coordinator, the construction of solar charging stations, and the strengthening of the environmental-studies program.
Off campus, the Dumpster Project has connected the university to the community through education projects like Dumpster Science Thursdays at a local elementary school and a new residency program that invites teachers to spend a night in the dumpster and design sustainability curricula to bring back to their schools.
And it’s not over yet, Mr. Wilson says: Outreach from the dumpster, and its renovation, will continue. —Sydni Dunn
An Advocate for HBCUs
APLU
John Michael Lee Jr.
John Michael Lee Jr., who is 35, stepped down this month as vice president of the Office for Access and Success at the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities. He spoke with The Chronicle’s Katherine Mangan about his transition to being a consultant.
Q. What are the most important things you helped the association accomplish?
A. Institutions want to do right by their students, but sometimes they just don’t know how. Presidential turnover is a huge issue. Almost two-thirds of our leaders at historically black colleges and universities have been on the job less than five years, a large number are interim leaders, and a significant number are retiring. We’ve put together conferences and summits where institutions can collaborate and share best practices on fund raising, student success, and recruiting.
Q. What will you do next?
A. I’ve been blessed in my career with the opportunity to view higher education from the 30,000-foot level. What I hope to gain in my consultancy, by becoming a campus administrator, and in my future goal of being a university president, is to get to that place where I’m on the ground, advancing low-resource institutions, and ensuring student success on a different level.
Q. What are some major challenges for minority-serving colleges?
A. With state support declining and tuition increasing for already underfunded minority-serving colleges, students are stressed, and too many are dropping out. In some cases, they are failing because they are not getting the money to pay tuition or buy books on time. Advising has to be proactive. Minority males, in particular, are often afraid to ask for help. With the increased competition for African-American students, historically black colleges will struggle to survive unless they continue to expand enrollments of other students, including Hispanics, white students from rural areas, and other low-income students. Serving black students has never meant excluding others.
Writers’ Mentor Dies
John (Jack) Leggett, a past director of the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, died on January 24 in California. He was 97.
Mr. Leggett, who was also a professor of English at Iowa and the author of several books, led the noted writing program from 1970 until his retirement in 1987. During his tenure, he fortified the faculty with writers like John Irving, Raymond Carver, and Ian McEwan. Among the students he admitted to the program are the now-famous Stuart Dybek, Tracy Kidder, Jane Smiley, and T.C. Boyle.
Herbert T. Boschung, a professor emeritus of biology at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, died on February 5 in Tuscaloosa. He was 89. An expert on freshwater fishes, he is a co-author of the illustrated book Fishes of Alabama. —Anais Strickland
