Section A · Page 6
The University Daily Kansan
Friday. February 19. 1999
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Students organize regional meeting of Black engineers
The University of Kansas will be the host of the National Society of Black Engineers Region 5 conference this weekend to plan for future meetings.
By Jennifer Roush Kansan staff writer
Students and educators from Kansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Missouri, Texas, North Dakota and South Dakota will attend the conference, which begins today and concludes Sunday. This is the last time for the region members to meet before the national convention in March.
Patton said that the event had been organized and executed by students.
More than 10,000 engineering students nationwide are members of NSBE, said Strauder Patton, president of the KU chapter. The society is the largest student-managed organization in the country.
There are 30 schools in Region 5, said Leah Robinson, St. Louis senior and NSBE member. She said that she expected delegates from at least half of the 30 schools to attend the conference.
Robinson said that she was looking forward to the conference. She planned to attend a workshop called "Non-traditional Pathways in Engineering."
Robinson also said that she wanted to learn more about what she could do with an engineering degree, aside from crunching numbers at a computer terminal.
Robinson said she was a member of NSBE because there was a lack of
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"If I'm the only Black female in a group of white male engineers, being Black stands out more to me than being female," she said.
According to NSBE's Web site, the organization's mission is "to increase the number of culturally responsible Black engineers who excel academically, succeed professionally and positively impact the community."
Adrian Franks, KU NSBE treasurer, also is the entertainment coordinator for conference attendees. Franks, a St. Louis senior, is anticipating this weekend's event with mixed emotions.
focus on minorities in the engineering field.
Winners of the academic technical bowl — a question-and-answer contest — will have their registration fees waived for the national convention.
Patton said that the conference would allow students from chapters in the region to take care of any unfinished internal business before the national convention. The conference also will offer students the opportunity to network with businesses and each other.
"I'm looking forward to the conference," he said. "I'm also looking forward to it being over. There's been a lot of stress."
Patton said that highlights of the conference would include the emerging technology fair, the precollege initiative conference for high school students and the academic technical bowl.
—Edited by Chris Fickett
House budget committee gives money to KU projects
Continued from page 1A
University of Kansas Chancellor Robert Hemenway expressed frustration with the committee's actions.
"If legislators can find a reason to object to faculty salaries, they will," Hemenway said. "What I understood them to say is that 10 percent below average is good enough for Kansas."
The budget committee recommended using the $1.5 million cut to pay for smaller enhancement projects and programs at individual campuses, including electrical rewiring in KU buildings.
Some legislators indicated that even if the Appropriations Committee passed the budget committee's proposal, the issue of increased faculty salaries was not dead.
Rep. Jeff Peterson, R-Manhattan, motioned to remove the funding from the enhancement projects and add it back to the faculty salary pool. The motion failed, 7-15.
"We think these enhancements are very important," said Rep. George Dean, D-Wichita, a budget committee member. "If we can get them in now, we can add the faculty salaries on the House floor, in the Senate or in a conference committee."
Later in the day at the Board of Regents' monthly meeting, members
"We need to step up to the plate," said Regent Kenneth Havner. "We need to tell the legislators, 'We don't want these enhancements, we want faculty salaries.'"
restated that faculty salaries were their top priority and discussed what they should do next.
Hemenway said he thought the leaders of Regents universities had made that point repeatedly.
"The way to make it clear that this is our top priority is to reiterate it and keep pounding away," he said.
The Appropriations Committee is expected to vote on the budget committee's proposal today.
in other regents news, the board:
■ Authorized the University of Kansas to negotiate with the government to acquire 200 acres of federally owned property in Johnson County for environmental research;
In other Regents news, the board:
Accepted reviews of academic programs, including the chemistry program at KU and the M.D. program at the University of Kansas Medical Center;
Extended its decision to refrain from endorsing the governor's plan to restructure higher education until it had reviewed other legislative restructuring plans.
Edited by Aerica Veazey
Maryemma Graham, professor of English, is on a quest to record each and every book written by an African American. She began this project when she realized that many African-American novels from the early 20th century could not be found. Photo by Joseph Griffin/KANSAN.
Professor seeks lost African-American work
By Dan Curry
Kansan staff writer
In the South, she tracked down titles of African-American books that only a few people could remember.
In the Northeast, she recovered African-American novels that lay forgotten on library shelves.
Now at the University of Kansas, Maryemma Graham, professor of English, has brought to the Midwest her quest to record each and every work written by an African American.
"I got involved in this project because I've been teaching African-American literature for a long time and reading it for a long time," Graham said.
She discovered as a young professor at the University of Mississippi that while contemporary African-American texts and reprints of classic ones were available, many novels from the early 20th century and before were nowhere to be found, Graham said.
It was a gap that she thought could be filled. Graham said.
These towns, mostly ghost towns now, Graham said, may hold many written recordings of their past inhabitants.
"The only way to prove my theory was to find the books," she said.
And she has found plenty — more than 1,200 titles in the last decade by looking in libraries, digging through private collections and listening to the memories of the elderly.
But African-American writers who spent part of their lives in Kansas may have left some of their work around — writers such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Jacob Lawrence, Gordon Parks, Langston
Graham said that Kansas held opportunities for discovery of new work by African-American writers.
"What's interesting about Kansas is all the black towns that existed," Graham said.
Hughes and Frank Marshall Davis.
Much of Graham's research, how,
ever, does not involve physically
exploring musty basements and
dusty attics.
"Technology is a wonderful, thing." Graham said.
Doretha Williams, Topea graduate student, assists Graham with the search for the novels by using online catalogs to scan American libraries holds for titles of little-known African-American books.
After they locate the book, they ask that the book he sent to them.
Once they see that the book exists, Graham's other assistant, Tony Harris, Lawrence graduate student, enters its bibliographical information into a computer database.
Graham, Harris and Williams are working on a side project for Microsoft's Encarta Africana, a two-disc encyclopedia of African culture, Graham said.
They will send Microsoft the complete texts of about 70 rare African-American novels written between 1853 and 1919 to be placed within Encarta Africana, Harris said. They have about half of those texts in hand now.
However, Encarta Africana is a very small part of Graham's overall project, Harris said.
"It's the first major project for us to work on within the larger history of Black writing," Harris said.
"A lot of the books probably aren't important individually," she said.
The edition of Encarta Africana that they are working on will be available by the end of the year, Graham said.
Collectively, however, they give a sense of African-American life that we were not aware of, Graham said.
"It not only tells us that Black people lived in the 19th century, but that they were writing, thinking, dreaming and hoping," she said. "It really makes our sense of who people were come alive."
— Edited by Darrin Peschka
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