inside
onday
Sports
Gilman named Huskers’
Lifter of the Year, page 7
Arts & Entertainment
Music professor to perform
with his students, page 9
April 17, 1995
Interim chancellor thrives on work
Leitzel ready
to take charge
By Matthew Waite
Senior Reporter
On a Friday-morning walk from
the administration building to the Ne
braska Union, Joan Leitzel got philo
sophical in between meetings.
“I think it was Mark Twain that
said, ‘Ifyou find ajobyou love, you’ll
never have to go to work,”’ the senior
vice chancellor for academic affairs
said on the already warm spring day.
That philosophy and the challenges
of each day are what drive Leitzel
when she begins work at 7:30 a.m. and
sometimes continues into the night.
On Aug. 15, Leitzel will takeon those I
days as the interim chancellor for the |
University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Busy throughout her 2 1/2 years at
UNL, Leitzel said she hadn’t found
time to look ahead to the possibility
that she could be the permanent re
placement for Graham Spanier.
Spanier will become the next presi
dent at Penn State.
“I’ll have to make that decision if I
am nominated for the position, but I
have not made it yet,” she said.
Still, some suggest the university
drop interim from her new title and
make Leitzel the next UNL chancel
lor.
Leitzel, hired as UNL’s senior aca
demic official in August 1992, lists
See LEITZEL on 2
Leitzel
■Joan Leitzel was hired as
UNL’s vice chancellor for
academic affairs in August
1992.
■ She says her most visible
accomplishment at UNL has
been preparing the
university’s general
education curriculum.
■ She will become interim
chancellor of UNL Aug. 15,
when current Chancellor
Graham Spanier leaves.
She says she has not
decided whether she would
accept a nomination to
become the next permanent
chancellor.
NU candidates
not ruled out
By Matthew Waite
Senior Reporter
Members of the NU Board of Re
gents aren’t saying officially whether
they would allow internal candidates
into the search for UNL’s next chan
cellor, Regent Chairwoman Nancy
O’Brien says.
But O’Brien said that shouldn’t
hold any candidates from the four NU
campuses back, including Joan Leitzel,
the senior vice chancellor for aca
demic affairs who will become in
terim chancellor on Aug. 15.
Some regents and university offi
cials have suggested Leitzel stay on as
chancellor.
The decision to be part of the search
is up to her, O’Brien said. Under a
normal search, candidates apply or
are nominated.
“She is a qualified lady and I will
leave it at that,” O’Brien said.
The past two searches — for the
University of Nebraska president and
University of Nebraska-Lincoln chan
cellor — have seen the board bar any
internal candidates. Graham Spanier
came from the University of Oregon;
Dennis Smith from the University of
Califomia-Irvine.
That decision came after the 1992
search to find an NU president. A
search committee had selected final
See CHANCELLOR on 6
Damon Lee/DN
Ben Harris, a third-year law student, makes his closing argument for the defense Saturday during a mock trial at the
County-City Building. Law students participated in the trials as part of their final exams in a trial advocacy class.
Law students
hold court
for final exam
By Brian Sharp
Senior Reporter
Welcome to the State of Nita.
In the District Court of the County, in the
case of State vs. John Bums, the honorable
Judge Tom Dawson presiding.
Please be seated. This court is now in ses
sion.
But there is no State of Nita and no real-life
Mr. Burns. For many second- and third-year
students at the University of Nebraska Law
School, the trial meant their final exam had
begun.
Students in a trial advocacy class argued
cases in mock trials held Saturday in the court
rooms of the County-City Building. The stu
dents tested how well they could prepare cases,
cross-examine witnesses and handle themselves
in court.
Ben Harris, who defended Burns on a first
degree murder charge, said the real judge, court
room and jury increased the pressure. He often
found himself lost in the action.
“I kept forgetting it was a class,” Harris said.
“Then you realize that in reality, you’re just
pushing for a grade.”
Twenty trials will be held in all, with the rest
finishing next weekend. Students, professors
and community members volunteer as jurors.
Witnesses were generally friends of the acting
See MOCK TRAIL on 2
50 years later, visions of Holocaust haunt survivor
Courtesy of Joe Boin
JoeBoin in 1946
By DeDra Janssen
Senior Editor
They came at night.,
The Nazi soldiers forced open
the door with the butts of their
rifles, almost ripping it from its
hinges.
With swastikas gleaming from
the sleeves of their green and gray
uniforms, the soldiers burst into
the room, interrupting 17-year
old Joe Boin’s evening meal...
and the next six years of his life.
“Who is Joe Boin?” the soldiers
asked.
“I am,” responded the fright
ened youth.
“Come on, you have to go.”
“Where am I going?”
“Never mind, just go.”
Boin asked no more questions.
Grabbing his jacket, he went with
the soldiers into the cold Novem
ber night, leaving his mother,
father and two younger sisters in
their Berlin home with their meal
of cream cheese, herring and
potatoes.
Boin, now 72, recalls that night
almost 50 years ago. It was the
night the Holocaust became his
reality.
Sitting in an armchair in his
Omaha apartment, Boin talks
stoically about his experience in
the concentration camps — first
at Sachsenhausen, then
Buchenwald, then Auschwitz and,
finally at Hindenburg. His voice
never waivers.
Lilly, his wife of 50 years,
listens from the sofa across the
small living room. Occasionally,
she interrupts him in German.
Mrs. Boin, 86, spent three years
at a concentration camp called
Theresienstadt, where she lost her
first husband. Her parents and
siblings also perished in the
Holocaust.
Boin’s nightmare began on
Nov. 12,1939, the year Adolf
Hitler’s troops invaded Poland
and set off World War II. It’s a
nightmare that will always be a
part of him.
“Every day I think about it,” he
says, speaking with a heavy
German accent. “You think about
it, and even if you don’t think
about it, you go to bed in the
evening, and somehow it comes
out.
“I sometimes wake up to the
smell at Auschwitz and the train
and seeing the children thrown
away like a bunch of garbage. I
don’t think it will ever get out of
your mind. It’s something that
will stay with you for the rest of
your life.”
* * *
It was cold that night, Boin
recalls, but it wasn’t snowing. He
even remembers what he was
wearing—a gray jacket over a
green sweater with gray pants.
Photographs show a handsome
young man with brown hair and
blue eyes. A mustache, thicker in
the middle than the ends, deco
rated his long, thin face. Though
he was thin at 145 pounds, his
body was muscular from playing
soccer and doing gymnastics.
It’s doubtful that the soldiers
noticed such details as they
pushed young Boin into the back
of the MacDiesel military truck
that would take him to
Sachsenhausen, a concentration
camp near Berlin.
See SURVIVOR on 3