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October 23,1990____ University of Nebraska-Liricoln ' _ y0| 90 No. 40
Officials: Spending
lid could endanger
Nebraska’s growth
By Stacey McKenzie
Staff Reporter
The proposed 2 percent spend
ing lid could jeopardize Ne
braska’s ability to compete
nationally for industrial growth, two
officials said.
The lid “makes no allowances or
adjustments for inflation, emergen
cies, or economic growth,”said Char
les Lamphcar, director of the Bureau
of Business Research at the Univer
sity of Nebraska-Lincoln, in an ar
ticle in Business In Nebraska.
The lid amendment, which will go
before Nebraska voters Nov. 6, would
limit spending increases for state and
local governments to 2 percent a year.
In the article, the 2 percent lid law
is applied to budgets representative
of Nebraska’s municipalities and
school districts. It uses probable deci
sions of a representative city of Ne
braska to make projections.
The budget of the city is broken
into the following categories: general
government, building and insurance,
public works, public safety, street
maintenance, parks and recreation,
library, capital improvements and
contingency.
“The actions of municipal govern
ment officials used in this article are
pure conjecture,” Lamphcar says in
the article. “We believe, however,
that these conjectures represent prob
able decisions that a municipal gov
ernment would make if the 2 percent
lid amendment passes.”
Some ramifications of the 2 per
cent lid would be reduction of staff
See REPORTon3
«ulch Ireland Rally Nebraskan
English professor James Ford reflects on poems and their meanings. Ford has been
teaching at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for eight years.
Literary theorist expands minds
By Stacey McKenzie
Staff Reporter
Atypical English teacher
might ask students, “What
does this poem mean?”
James
Ford, an asso
ciate profes
sor ofEnglish
at the Univer
sity of Nc
braska-Lin
coln, would
ask, “What
docs it mean
for a poem to have a meaning?”
Ford is not talking in circles. He
is talking theory — literary theory.
Ford, whose specialty is the
philosophy of literary criticism, said
he knows literary theory may be
daunting to some students but be
lieves learning it teaches students
to tolerate “intellectual discomfort”
“Our culture doesn’t encourage
students to have much tolerance
for intellectual discomfort,” he said.
“Sometimes in life, feeling
uncomfortable because you don’t
know very much about something
can be exciting. But you have to
have some faith that somewhere
down the line it will start to be a
little more comfortable.”
It is possible to define things by
their effect, rather than their mate
rial makeup. Ford said, but most
students arc not taught to think that
way.
“If you ask students what a poem
is, they will generally say it is a
kind of language,” Ford said. “If
you ask them what a cathedral is,
they will not say that it is a building
made of stone. They will say it is a
place designed to create a certain
mood of worshipfulness or rever
ence.”
Teaching critical theory involves
creating categories in students’
minds, said Ford, who has taught at
UNL for eight years.
“If you don’t have a category to
attach some information to, it is
like throwing something against a
wall and it has no place to lodge,”
he said.
Besides pushing students to
expand their minds, Ford has coor
dinated the UNL English as a Sec
ond Language program and has
expanded it to its maximum capac
ity.
The program has grown 62 per
cent during the last five years. The
current ESL program offers 16
sections with about 20 students each.
The ESL program first inter
ested Ford while teaching at
Brigham Young Univcrsity-Hawaii
campus because the campus had
many foreign students, he said.
The BYU-Hawaii campus has
the highest percentage of second
language speakers of any school in
the United States, Ford said. Be
cause he is inclined to become in
terested in whatever is going on
around him, he said, he became
interested in the ESL program.
As part of an exchange pro
gram, Ford plans to go to the Tadzhik
Soviet Socialist Republic in March
and April to help develop an Eng
lish as a Second Language pro
gram at the University of Tadzhik.
The need for people who read
and speak English is great since the
the Soviet Union and East Bloc
countries arc opening up to the
West, he said.
There arc 30,000 Russian as a
second language teachers in Czecho
slovakia, but nobody wants to learn
Russian, he said.
Ford said he is more interested
in visiting Albania than Tadzhik,
because he has studied its national
hero, Scanderbeg, he said.
Ford said he plans to write a
screenplay about Scanderbeg, a 15th
century military hero who kept the
Turkish army out of Europe for 40
years. Scanderbeg lore became a
part of Ford’s life because of a
political science class in which Ford
was assigned to research Albania.
When he found little informa
tion, he contacted the Albanian
delegation to the United Nations
for more. Ford said he was sur
prised when abox full of booksand
magazines about Albania arrived
at his home.
See FORD on 6
Minority enrollment up;
official credits efforts
By Tabitha Hiner
Staff Reporter
Better recruiting efforts, mort
scholarships and an improved
campus atmosphere helped
UNL’s minority enrollment climb 16.5
percent this year, an official said.
James Griesen, vice chancellor for
student affairs, said that while 866
minority students attended the Uni
versity of Nebraska-Lincoln last year,
1,009 currently arc enrolled in the
university’s undergraduate, graduate
and professional schools.
Foreign, black, American Indian,
Asian and Hispanic student enroll
ments were used to determine the
minority enrollment, Griesen said.
The figures only lake into account
students who arc taking classes on the
Lincoln campuses. Some students take
classes through UN L but attend them
at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
The effort to increase minority
enrollment started gelling more at
tention about two years ago when
officials realized that UNL’s minor
ity enrollment wasn’t adequate, Grie
sen said. More staff members then
were devoted to recruiting minori
ties, he said.
Scholarships and endowments also
have been important in attracting
minority students, Griesen said.
The SI million R.H. “Rick” Davis
Minority Scholarship Program and
1984 1989 1990
Source: UNL Office of Student Affairs
John Bruce/Daily Nebraskan
the S25(),(XX) Vin Gupia Endowment
are two UNL minority awards re
cently started up, Griesen said. An
S8(X),(XX) stale appropriation also is
available for minorities.
UNL has encouraged major do
nors who are concerned about low
minority enrollment at the university
to specify that their gills to the NU
Foundation be targeted to minority
students, Griesen said.
UNL received the state appropria
See MINORITY on 3
Committee’s proposal to combat apartheid
By Jennifer O’Cilka
Senior Reporter
Members of the President’s Special Com
mittee on South Africa say the group
has refined its goals to include a pro
gram to combat apartheid and to benefit stu
dents.
James McShane, president of the University
of Nebraska-Lincoln Academic Senate and a
memberof thecommitice,said thegroupsharp
ened its focus by “looking at what we might
reasonably do.”
“The University of Nebraska is not likely to
be able to bootstrap South Africa,” McShane
said.
But, he said, NU could have input into
changing the apartheid system in South Africa
and some things to leam from black South
Africans.
Phil Gosch, UNL student regent and a member
of the committee, said the goal of the commit
tee is to submit a proposal to Marlin Massen
galc, NU interim president and UNL chancel
— ft -
The University of Nebraska is not likely to be able to bootstrap
South Africa.
McShane
president, Academic Senate
--
lor, that would “in some way combat apartheid
and prepare black South Africans for post
apartheid society,” while benefiting students.
The committee was appointed by Masscn
galc earlier this fall. Its target date for submit
ting the proposal is December.
Committee members are looking at several
avenues by which to achieve their goals, Gosch
said. These include instituting a general schol
arship program, expanding existing African
studies programs at NU and creating new pro
grams.
“One thing we want to do is talk to other
universities that have programs” of this kind,
McShane said.
The group is examining the University of
Missouri South African exchange program,
semi-arid agriculture programs and African
studies programs, Gosch said.
“We have a lot more specifics now,” Gosch
said. “The past few months have been spent
seeing what other universities do. Now, we arc
in the process of seeing which are benelicial
both for black South Africans and university
students.”
McShanc said UNL. docs not have a major
black studies program, but the University of
Nebraska at Omaha docs.
Gosch said that one of the most important
focuses of the committee is to use the special
lies of UNL and apply them 10 South Africa.
McShanc said he would like to see the
university develop programs dealing with agri
culture on semi-arid lands.
“Our institution has a great deal to offer
black South Africans,” he said.
Gosch said bringing black South Africans to
UNL would not benefit all students.
“But I think every student who has some
type of interaction with black students from
South Africa will benefit, because I think it’s
difficult for us to even imagine that kind of
oppression,” Gosch said.
To achieve its goals, MeShane said, the
committee must “tap into the experts on the
conditions in South Africa.”
One reason the committee’s research lakes
so long is that many of its members have little
or no expertise in South Africa, MeShane said.
“What will eventually happen is the presi
dent’s committee will be dependent on other
folk to shape the program,” he said.