6A the university daily kansan
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news
thursday, may 13, 2004
Professor emeritus offers Stop Day tours for students
By Rupla Gor
rgor@kansan.com
kansan staff writer
The beauty of the University of Kansas campus is where Ted Johnson finds an inspiring pool of ideas.
The professor emeritus of French and Italian said the campus was a growing place, which was important to students because they develop during their time on campus at the University.
Johnson took his classes around campus as a way of teaching them, but he wanted more time to show them campus because his classes were only 50 minutes. He decided to present a Stop Day tour, which began in 1992. The tour is from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and begins at the KU Natural History Museum.
The tour of campus is similar to a Socratic dialogue, Johnson said. Like Socrates, Johnson asks a question that people respond to, which starts a discussion in a place outside. The conversation turns and spins so that people participate, he said.
"Students see through the eyes of somebody else," he said. "They get to abandon their view and see someone else's view."
Johnson shows the group various buildings on campus. He talks about architecture, iconography and details on the buildings. He mainly wants people to notice what they haven't seen before and to see it metaphorically — nothing material, such as the cost of buildings.
Peter Wolf, Lawrence resident, was a KU student in 1997 and started on tours since the
mid '90s. He likes the structure of Dyche Hall, because it mimics a zodiac, he said, with an animal appearance.
Johnson takes his own ideas about astrology and biology and relates it to the building.
"It's just wild, all of the ideas he's pulled out of it," Wolf said. "A lot of it is his interpretation, but it all just makes sense."
Wolf said Johnson would even comment on the designs of sidewalks and manhole covers. Wolf said the first time he saw how people could look at those designs he was blown away.
"One of the things I love most about the tour is that Ted tries to evoke the ideas of the past and beauty of architecture and open it to ideas people have at the moment," Wolf said.
— Edited by Ashley Arnold
EVENTINFO
The Stop Day tour is open to the public tomorrow from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. People are welcome to attend and leave at any time. On the tour will be stops such as, "Whose Findeth Wisdom Findeth Life," at the main entrance of KU Natural History Museum at 9 a.m., "Memory, the Muses, and the Liberal Arts and Sciences," at Watson Library, then across campus to Murphy Hall at noon, "Tentative Syntheses and Perspectives," at Weaver Court by Spooner Hall at 5 p.m. Check out www.kansan.com to see the complete tour schedule.
Source: Ted Johnson, professor emeritus of French and Italian
Abbv Tillerv/Kansan
Ted Johnson, University of Kansas professor emeritus, gives a tour of the KU campus every stop day. Johnson has done the tour for 12 years
Associate professor: research funding has its drawbacks
By J.T. Mitchum
jmitchum@kansan.com
Kansan staff writer
White millions of dollars for research funding come through the University of Kansas every year, these millions aren't enough to cover the cost of keeping up research nor the cost of bringing it.
Recent research by Christopher Morphew, associate professor of teaching and leadership, looked at the budgets of universities that made dedicated efforts to gain federal funding. Morphew said it seemed that as universities pushed for more research funding, more money was spent on administrative fees, which included anything from paperclips and stationery to the salaries paid for people who help attract and manage incoming research money. As the administrative fees increase and the money from grants run out, universities are left with the tab. How the universities compensate for these costs
remains largely undiscussed in public circles, Morphew said.
The University is in its second year of five planned years of steady tuition increase. And while the state's budget for the University has decreased, research funding has nearly doubled since 1995, according to the Center for Research Web site. While research grants are paid during periods of a few years, the faculty hired to either attract or maintain that research as well as the buildings constructed to house them, have long-term costs, Morphew said.
Morphew's paper compared university budgets as they went from a Carnegie class RU2 to the higher funded RU1 status. RU2 refers to universities gathering $15 million to $40 million a year in federal grants while RU1 federal grants total more than $40 million, a classification the University of Kansas went to in 1994.
Universities looking to climb in rankings often have to spend increasing amounts of money in
administrative costs to catch up to the competitors, Morphew said. While this increased spending occurs, the piece of the financial pie for education typically takes the cut, Morphew said.
Just looking at the pie chart doesn't tell the whole story.
"No matter what color the money was, when it gets to the University, it is just money," said James Roberts, vice chancellor of research. His salary is one example of an administrative cost.
When these grants are figured, the costs for the buildings used, the researchers working and graduate students' salaries are all accounted for in the estimates. Roberts said.
These costs are called facility and administrative costs and are considered overhead in addition to the money for the actual research.
While there is no limit to the charge associated with facilities, administrative costs have firm ceilings in place, Roberts said.
Roberts said that for every dollar of research money that came in, there was compensation for the building, much like rent and utilities.
Administrative costs are typically capped at 26 percent for any university, Roberts said. Roberts estimated the reality of administrative costs for the University to be about 30 percent.
This means 4 percent that isn't accounted for in the grant writing. This isn't the only gap.
Grants from the state of Kansas, for example, typically pay for none of the overhead costs for administration.
Roberts said the state felt as if it already had paid administrative costs by supporting the University with state funding.
While some universities receive larger facility reimbursements, the University's facility reimbursement suffers because of buildings that are considered worthless in depreciated value under the grant writing considerations. Depreciated value is similar to rent going down as an
apartment ages.
Buildings depreciate in research value as soon as they are built. Roberts said that Spooner Hall was probably worth zero dollars in rent for research because it had been here for so long.The facility charge increases when a university is using newer buildings.
The University has an aggressive building plan, which includes adding 250,000 sq. ft. of research space in the next three to five years, Roberts said.
Roberts said a good deal of the money taken in for overhead was reinvested back into the effort of getting more research.
This money is spent on the attraction of people who bring research with them or buildings that allow more room for further research projects.
Roberts pointed out that this deficit of administrative funding was something every university had to deal with.
Morphew's research indicated
most schools increasing in research spent more money on administrative fees; usually larger amounts than established RU1 universities.
Colleges aren't measured just by the students they turn out, but by the new knowledge they find, Roberts said.
A university develops and disperses knowledge, which in turn benefits students.
The pay-off to research may not translate well into immediate dollars. The idea is that it pays off in what a degree is worth.
Roberts said this research money often meant jobs and tuition grants for graduate students. These students get to work on the leading edge of their field with researchers equally in the forefront of their fields.
"The caliber of student you are sitting next to in class and of the professor who teaches it is higher overall in part because of research," Roberts said.
Edited by Guillaume Doane
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