Campus Digest
5/5/2005TCF Kicks off Stadium Funding
The aroma of popcorn and bratwursts and the buzz of football filled the air this spring when the effort to bring Gopher football back to campus got a big boost. TCF Financial Corporation agreed to a $35 million sponsorship deal for the proposed on-campus stadium in late March, the day after a Minnesota Senate committee approved a proposal to fund 40 percent of the stadium's construction cost, provided the University can raise the rest of the money privately (a House committee followed suit in early April).
The TCF agreement will secure naming rights to TCF Bank Stadium for 25 years. The total stadium cost is estimated at $235 million, and University president Bob Bruininks says he hopes 10 more major sponsors will agree to buy rights to name various portions of the facility. “An anchor gift sends a message,” he said at a festive announcement held under the restored Memorial Stadium Processional Arch in the McNamara Alumni Center. “There are many other conversations that are ongoing.” (The other major donation in hand is $1 million from the University of Minnesota Alumni Association.)
Governor Tim Pawlenty (B.A. '83, J.D. '86) sent an encouraging note read at the announcement, and Bruininks added that a statewide public fund drive could begin in fall. The Minnesota Student Association's elected representatives voted last year to support using student fees in building a stadium as well; although that vote was nonbinding, Bruininks reasserted his commitment that fees would be no more than $50 per semester. Parking and other game-day revenue would also help pay for the stadium.
TCF Bank Stadium is proposed for an area of surface parking lots northeast of the old Memorial Stadium site and just east of Williams and Mariucci arenas on the East Bank of the Minneapolis campus. Environmental review of the site is already under way. If fund-raising is successful, the 50,000-seat open-air stadium could be finished in time for the 2008 football season. Minnesota's home games are currently played in the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome under a 30-year lease that expires in 2011.
A 2003 analysis estimated that the new stadium could generate as much as $3.5 million in extra net revenue each year from a half-dozen Gopher football games compared with what the Metrodome would provide.
TCF Bank Stadium would also be used for recreational sports programs and graduation ceremonies and other large events-and provide a home for the University of Minnesota Marching Band. Bruininks said the facility could be used for high school football playoffs, professional soccer games, and perhaps as a temporary home for pro sports teams as other stadiums are built.
The TCF agreement allows the bank to offer debit and gift cards to U alumni and supporters, students, and faculty and staff; to continue current offerings and programs on campus; and to open a branch outlet in Coffman Memorial Union. Those extra sponsorship agreements could produce more than $60 million in royalties and fees for the University, which would be used primarily for academic needs.
During the announcement and the press conference that followed, Bruininks emphasized that the stadium will enhance the academic mission of the University and that its financing is separate from academic priorities. “The stadium will serve as a center for campus life,” he said. “This stadium is about much more than football: It's about community. . . . Bringing Gopher football back to campus is the right thing to do and this is the right time to do it.”
Discoveries
Colon Cancer and Calcium
A University of Minnesota Cancer Center team found that women consuming the recommended daily allowance of 1,200 milligrams of calcium each day-about 800 from supplements and 400 through regular diet-reduced their risk of colorectal cancer by as much as 46 percent compared with women who took in fewer than 412 milligrams a day from all sources. A 26 percent reduction in risk of colorectal cancer occurred in those getting 800 milligrams a day from either their diet or through supplements. More than 45,000 women participated in the study over an average of 8.5 years. The mechanism of how calcium promotes colon health is still under investigation. The results appeared in the January issue of Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention.
Beating Bulimia
A small clinical trial by the University of Minnesota's Neuroscience Research Group offers hope for reversing the physiological changes that occur in severe bulimia and helping people overcome the disease. In bulimia, repeated binge eating and vomiting changes the vagus nerve, which controls information between the stomach and brain. When people with bulimia try to modify their behavior, the vagus nerve will sometimes malfunction and continue to send signals to vomit. An earlier U trial discovered the changes in the vagus nerve and found a drug therapy that helped some patients. The new treatment, called vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) therapy, involves electrical stimulation via an implanted device to the vagus nerve, dampening its activity. The six patients in the trial had no success with the drug treatment but all experienced “dramatic results” with VNS therapy, according to lead researcher Patricia Faris. VNS therapy was initially developed to treat drug-resistant epilepsy. Researchers hope to run larger trials on patients with bulimia to confirm the results. A National Institutes of Health grant funded the study, which was announced on campus in early March.
Diabetes and Islet Cell Survival
A breakthrough in treating the most serious cases of type 1 diabetes may be on the horizon, thanks to a University of Minnesota clinical trial. In diabetes sufferers, the islet cells do not produce enough insulin to control blood sugar levels, which leads to a host of complications. Islet cells, found in the pancreas, sense blood sugar and, in healthy people, regulate it by producing insulin. Until now, islet cell transplants have required two or three donated organs because a large number of islet cells do not survive the transplant. This has been a significant obstacle given the shortage of organ donors. (Islet cells are removed from a pancreas after the donor dies, and are injected into the diabetes patient.) The U team used anti-inflammatory arthritis drugs to help the islet cells survive. In a trial with eight patients who each received islet cells from single donors, five did not require insulin injections for an entire year. An estimated one million people in the United States have type 1 diabetes, sometimes called juvenile diabetes. The trial was reported in The Journal of the American Medical Association in February.
Impulsiveness Is for the Birds
“You might want to cover your ears,” says Dave Stephens, professor of ecology, evolution, and behavior at the University of Minnesota, as he opens a door to a cacophony of 35 complaining eastern blue jays. “I'm pretty deaf, so it doesn't bother me.” The tiny room in the basement of the Ecology Building on the St. Paul campus is ringed by rows of simple wire cages in which the jays bob, hop from perch to perch, and screech mightily. It's hard to imagine hard science going on in such a setting.
But by watching these birds work their way through a series of food-choice experiments, Stephens and his colleagues believe they may have insight into why humans and other mammals are impulsive, why sudden desires so often overwhelm common sense.
Stephens's “ecological rationality hypothesis” flies in the face of the currently accepted explanation of why lab animals repeatedly prefer a small immediate meal to waiting a few moments for a larger one. The current theory, “discounting,” maintains that we place extra value on immediacy-that $100 today is worth more to us than $101 or even $105 next Saturday. But, in reviewing past studies with pigeons and rats and by watching his own flock, Stephens found the discounting impulse is so strong “that it makes them look really stupid. They were discounting up to 50 percent in one second,” he says, meaning that an animal would rather have one food unit now than twice as much if it waited just one second longer. “It just doesn't make sense. How could natural selection favor such stupid behavior?”
In impulse experiments, animals are trained to recognize that when certain lights flash, a small food reward will appear. The animals also observe that if they leave the food untouched, a larger one will follow. Yet over as many as 1,000 repetitions, the animals don't learn-or they simply refuse-to wait for the bigger reward. But Stephens, who is as quiet and thoughtful as his blue jays are loud and impulsive, was bothered by drawing a conclusion from such a simple experiment.
“In nature, the choices are more fuzzy,” Stephens explains. “An animal is never guaranteed anything.” In Stephens' experiments, the jays could either wait for the bigger reward or snatch the small one and move on to another small one in a different place, and another, and so on. By “skimming the cream,” Stephens says, the birds showed they could actually get more food than if they had waited for the larger reward. Stephens sums up his hypothesis in a sentence: “In a natural setting, you can actually do quite well in the long run by being impulsive.”
Observations in the field support his hypothesis, first described in The Proceedings of the Royal Society in November 2004. A bird that eats the easily accessible seeds in a pinecone and then moves on to the next one, for example, does better than a bird that works at the pinecone hoping to find a bigger cache of seeds inside. “Our guess is that human brains have evolved in a similar way,” Stephens says. But modern society forces people to make either-or decisions about delayed benefits such as from education, investment, and marriage, so the impulsive rules that work well for foragers do more harm than good to people in these situations.
His next series of experiments, with Japanese quail, involves selecting birds for extreme impulsiveness and looking for physical or chemical differences in the brain as a step toward understanding addiction and other dangerous impulsive behavior. “Humans are not as impulsive as animals, but we're still more impulsive than economists think we ought to be.”
The U Aims to Be in the Top Three
An “aspirational, bold, and inspirational” goal-to become one of the top three public research universities in the world within 10 years-may lead to a major restructuring of the University of Minnesota. The University's Board of Regents will vote in June on several recommendations to realign the U's structure with that goal in mind. Among the proposals are closing and splitting up two Twin Cities campus colleges and putting in place programs to attract the most qualified students.
The recommendations were released March 30 after months of public meetings and task force deliberations on what has been called “strategic positioning.” In April and early May, University president Bob Bruininks was to field comments on the proposals before delivering his final set of recommendations to the regents.
Repositioning the University has become necessary, Bruininks told regents in February, because of several factors: declining state support as a percentage of expenses, duplications with programs in the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system, and the state's changing research and economic needs. “We can't continue to do all the things we do” given the current declines in state funding, Bruininks said. “If we want the University to thrive, we must make bold and effective choices.”
The U is currently ranked among the 10 best public research institutions in the nation in most measures, but it falls short in test scores for incoming freshmen and graduation rates. The U is already taking steps to improve graduation by requiring full credit loads for most students and offering tuition breaks for taking extra classes.
“Excellence builds on excellence,” Provost Tom Sullivan said in presenting a report to the regents in February. Admitting more top students will convince excellent professors to remain at or to come to the U, he explained, while top professors will convince better and better students to come to the U. That report set out the goal, criteria for evaluating the U's academic and administrative units, and five broad actions for reaching the goal: recruiting outstanding students, recruiting outstanding faculty, being responsive to change, effectively using resources, and communicating clearly and being engaged with the public.
While other recent efforts to refine the University system-including a late 1980s plan called Commitment to Focus and a late 1990s plan called U 2000-lost momentum, Bruininks told regents in March that this time the process has been more transparent and collaborative and that having a clear goal to work toward will inspire people inside and outside the U. “We think that the U is at a truly important and exciting crossroads.”
For more on the process and the recommendations, visit www.umn.edu/systemwide/strategic_positioning.
Major Recommendations
Among the 31 recommendations for academic changes:
• General College, a unit that accepts underprepared students with the goal of transferring them to a degree-granting program, would become a developmental education department in the College of Education and Human Development and would no longer admit students.
• The College of Human Ecology would cease to exist and its current offerings would be divided between the College of Education and Human Development and a new College of Design.
• The College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture would be renamed the College of Design and incorporate the current design, housing, and apparel department of the College of Human Ecology.
• An undergraduate writing initiative would provide comprehensive writing instruction and require graduating students to demonstrate an effective command of written English.
• A University Honors College would admit about 300 students per year and offer honors courses on issues that span the breadth of the University. Although students would earn degrees through other colleges, they might be housed together or be offered guaranteed admission to the U's professional schools.
• Task forces would look at the structure of the College of Liberal Arts and at how to reconfigure current science, agriculture, natural resources, and engineering programs in several colleges and make recommendations by the end of 2005.
An additional 28 recommendations for administrative improvements were made that would centralize some functions, reduce regulation, and focus on supporting students and faculty.
What People Are Saying
“President [Bob] Bruininks is guiding this great university through a realignment process that I think, in the long haul, is going to serve our state very well.”
-Governor Tim Pawlenty (B.A. '83, J.D. '86)
“I can't find an alignment between where the University wants to position itself as a world-class institution and the threat that this college poses. . . . To take a nationally known program of this sort and to reduce it to a shell is not becoming of this University.”
-David Taylor (B.A. '67, Ph. D. '77), dean of General College
“In the long run, it's not going to hurt students. . . . It just means [underprepared students] may have to be at a different site and, with improvements in their academic standing, eventually come back to the University.”
-State Representative Bud Nornes, R-Fergus Falls
“{U]ltimately, a more prestigious reputation will increase the value of a degree from this institution and put us on par with other flagship universities in the country.”
-From a Minnesota Daily editorial
“It's important to stay focused on the fact that nothing is merging; we're creating something new.”
-Shirley Baugher, dean of the College of Human Ecology
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