Month: April 2011

By Olesya Minina

Writer

After celebrating his ninth anniversary at the University this past February, beloved Vice President for Enrollment Management, Kurt Thiede, is leaving the University to help establish a non-profit foundation.

The foundation that will become a program is designed to encourage, facilitate and support the enrollment of community college students at private four-year colleges, which will be based in Boston.

“[This program] is based on many of the lessons learned through Bucknell’s Community College Scholars Program and the partnership the University has with the Posse Scholars Program; it has long been my passion to identify and support avenues through which underrepresented cohorts of students can gain access to outstanding higher education opportunities,” Thiede said.

Along with his long-desired goal, the move will allow Thiede and his wife to be closer to their grandson, Jack.

“Through Posse I’ve had the opportunity to meet and connect with so many great people and it has helped me be a better student and become a leader on campus. I have such a great support system from everyone involved with Posse and feel that it’s a wonderful part of the Bucknell community,” said Michel Ajjan ’14, a member of the Posse Scholars program who has been impacted by Thiede.

A typical day for Thiede revolves around responsibilities in the enrollment management area such as admissions, financial aid, registrar and retention. He also works closely with the departmental offices which report directly to President John Bravman as part of the administrative team. He is also a member of the Operations Management Group.

For the three years, Thiede served as the Dean of Admissions along with vice president responsibilities, but with the appointment of Rob Springall as Dean of Admissions two years ago, Thiede has focused spending more time on the “long-range strategic issues of enrollment,” he said.

“Kurt has contributed a lot to Bucknell and his impact will be felt for many, many years to come. Our involvement with the Posse Foundation and the establishment of the Bucknell Community College Scholars Program have made significant changes to the University,” Dean of Admissions Rob Springall said. “These are cornerstones of our admissions processes now and we continue to build on them.”

Thiede said that one of his favorite things about his job “is that I get to know a number of students on a personal basis, yet have responsibility for gathering, analyzing and utilizing a lot of data that inform decisions that will impact the institution many years into the future and I have had the opportunity to see the Bucknell experience have a transformational impact on many students; individuals whose lives were changed forever because of this learning community they joined and to which they contributed.”

Thiede also has great pride in the Univeristy. “During these past nine years we have become more intentional about the work necessary to enroll a student body that better reflects the demographics of the 21st century and will assist all our students to become better prepared to be contributing members of the world they will enter as Bucknellians,” he said.

Thiede’s family is also full of University alumni, including his wife Laura ’78, and their son Brian ’08. They also have a daughter named Sara.

Prior to arriving at the University in February 2002, Thiede worked as an independent consultant focusing on strategic planning and operational issues related to higher education enrollment management and marketing. Thiede received his Master of Education degree in Higher Education Administration from the University of Vermont in 1979 and his undergraduate degree is in Interdisciplinary Philosophy from Barrington College in Rhode Island.

The University wishes him the best of luck in the future and will greatly miss him.

By Christina Oddo

Writer

The Graduate Record Exam (GRE) General Test for graduate or business students has been revised by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and will be available online in August.

According to Andrea Halpern, professor of psychology and graduate school advising coordinator, there will be fewer verbal sections, and the test will be more oriented towards reading comprehension than towards isolated word knowledge.

“The math section will have a calculator available,” Halpern said. “The scoring scale will change so that scores will vary by ones, not tens, unlike the current 600-610-620 etc. scale.”

Furthermore, students will be able to edit answers, change answers and skip questions within a section. This new method may be beneficial for some students “to the extent that students feel the ability to review and change answers gives them more control and puts them in a more positive frame of mind,” Halpern said.

Currently, if you answer some questions incorrectly, the following questions are easier and vice versa. “It’s unclear to what extent the test is ‘adaptive,’” Halpern said.

The revised GRE will also have new types of questions that will feature real-life scenarios that reflect the thinking that many graduate programs support and encourage. The new test will also present a new score scale that will make it easier for schools to compare GRE scores.

More information regarding the adaptive-level approach for the GRE changes will be available soon. For further inquiry, visit http://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/know

By Carleen Boyer

Writer

Projects for Peace, an organization which awards grants to student groups, recently gave grants of $10,000 to two groups on campus: Yehri Wi Cry and Bicycles Against Poverty.

Yehri Wi Cry, which translates from Krio to “Hear Our Cry,” is a project begun by Nadia Sasso ’11, an English and sociology major at the University. The project grew with help from the current Miss Sierra Leone-USA, Marie Mansaray.

The project strives to provide maternal kits to Sierra Leone where low birth rates are be a problem. Because of cultural taboos against hospitals, many natives of the area are unwilling to go to a hospital when giving birth.

Sowande Parkinson ’12, a civil engineer and economics major, has worked with Sasso to develop this project. “We’ve always wanted to do a project that will connect us to our native country,” Sasso said.

The materinal kits contain basic necessities to aid in sanitation and the prevention of the spread of HIV/AIDS.

“We also plan to do a workshop with the aides of the hospital to make sure they know how to use the kits,” Sasso said.

Sasso and Parkinson will travel to Sierra Leone this summer to deliver 1,000 of the birth kits. While there, they will provide training to the aides.

“By June, we’re looking to receive 501-C3 status, which will recognize us as an official non-profit,” Sasso said.

As a non-profit organization, more grants would become available. Various volunteers also help with other aspects of the organization, such as working as a webmaster.

Bicycles Against Poverty, a project launched by a University student in 2008, provides bicycles to Ugandan farmers. Kevin Matthews ’11 and Brian Chiu ’11, two mechanical engineers, have been working to manufacture an additional device for the bicycles.

“The machine that we’re making is a human-powered grain grinder using bicycles because we know that bicycles are available,” Matthews said.

The device is a part of a senior design project, and Chiu and Matthews have been working on this with two other mechanical engineers, Paul Moellers ’11 and Kevin Curran ’11.

“The actual machine is really simple, especially compared to a lot of the other senior design. We had a lot of constraints, such as making it as cheap as possible and being able to make it in Uganda,” Matthews said.

Matthews hopes that the grinder will provide not only an easier method for grain grinding, but also the ability to support a local machine shop. This would help to create a sustainable small business.

“The main premise is a partnership with BAP and Gyda, and what they do is they train youth in the city with technical skills to help them get a job. Gyda will make it and BAP will help distribute it in the village,” Matthews said.

In addition to the grain grinder, two other devices that can be used with the bicycles have been in production: a bicycle taxi and a bicycle cart.

The carts attach to the back of the bicycles, allowing a greater carrying capacity. Chemical engineer Tom Bollinger ’14 is working on the cart.

“The whole point of it is low cost and high-use technology. The carts reduce trips from five to six trips per day to about one,” Bollinger said.

The location provides additional constraints and challenges.

“We’re not sure how everything will turn it. When we get over there, we know we’ll be faced with things that we don’t expect, so we have to be flexible with both the design and how we’re going to implement the project,” Matthews said.

By Meghan Finlayson

Staff Writer

A report recently released by the American Federation of Teachers suggested that adjunct professors teach many courses and are heavily involved in a wide range of disciplines, but are underpaid.

It has turned into a nationwide issue. By underpaying adjuncts, universities can lower their costs and tuition, but risk reducing the quality of education.

Although state universities tend to have more adjunct professors and have been called out on their abuse, private universities are now also being critiqued.

The University currently does not employ many adjunct professors.

“At Bucknell, we have only used 20 adjuncts this year, which is less than six percent of the size of the faculty,” Dean of Arts and Sciences George Shields said. “[They] tell us that our pay is better than the pay at universities in the surrounding area.”

The University stands out from many institutions in the fact that most of the professors are tenure-track.

“Bucknell is distinctive in focusing our hiring of faculty in tenure-track positions … the strategic direction is to continue to have the core of our faculty be tenure-track,” Provost Mick Smyer said.

In about the past eight years, the University has added 60 faculty positions, all of which have been tenure-track, to achieve the five-course teaching load.

There are many advantages of having a faculty made up of mostly tenure-track professors. The University hopes that by keeping the majority of the professors hired in these positions, close relationships can be built between faculty and students.

“We want to maximize interactions between our faculty and students, to increase the transformational opportunities of a liberal arts education, so we want full-time faculty working with our students whenever possible,” Shields said.

Another benefit of a tenure-track faculty is that the quality of overall education can be improved because of the long-term mindset.

“I have never had an adjunct professor here, but feel that since majority of the faculty is tenured, they are really committed to Bucknell and improving education as a whole,” Kristina Patrk, ’13.

That being said, adjunct professors can bring an interesting dynamic to the classroom.

“There are advantages to having an [adjunct] that complements, but does not replace tenure-track faculty and there may be instances where students would benefit from an adjunct,” Smyer said.

The University is committed and dedicated to keeping the faculty primarily in tenure-track positions as it moves forward.

By Eliza Macdonald

Writer

The Holocaust was the culmination of great bigotry but, as one Holocaust survivor argues, the endings of World War II and the Holocaust did not eliminate it. It is alive and well all over the world, said the survivor who spoke as part of the University’s observance of Yom HaShoah Holocaust Remembrance Day sponsored by Campus Jewish Life and Bucknell Hillel.

On April 21 in Bucknell Hall, quiet settled over the crowd as people intently listened to Alex Rosner speak about his childhood and how he and his family survived the 10 long years of the Holocaust. His final words to the audience at Bucknell Hall were that ignorance caused the Holocaust, and that people can’t explain or justify ignorance, only fight it.

“The problem with speaking about the past and remembering the events is that the forces which were present then are brought into the present and while it may be interesting and it may have benefits, there’s nothing like confronting a real life witness; you dig in the ashes, the Devil comes and grabs you by the throat,” Rosner said after minutes of silence.

Once in America, Rosner learned English quickly and pushed the Holocaust and his childhood out of his mind. He didn’t talk about the events of those years for 40 years of his life until finally a rabbi asked him to speak to a group of people in Kansas. That is where his life as a speaker began.

Rosner, who was born in 1935 in Warsaw, Poland, was the only child to a shopkeeper’s daughter and a violinist. While he grew up in Kraków, Poland, Rosner says he has no real memories before the start of the war.

“[This story is important because] the Holocaust isn’t such a distant, far-away thing, and this man is a survivor living among us and these people have their stories to tell, and they live among us,” Hannah Kotler ’13 said.

In 1940 Rosner and his family were taken in a truck into the woods where Nazi soldiers had been given orders to shoot all the people who arrived. Fortunately for the Rosner family, the soldiers refused and the people were left in the woods to find their way back to Kraków.

Rosner commented on his good timing in another example where he happened to go for a walk one day out of the ghetto he and his family were living in when he was about six or seven years old and got lost for hours. In those hours, all of the other children in the ghetto were taken away to a concentration camp.

“Where did the knowledge come from for me to take that walk?” Rosner said. Remembering the events proved difficult for the speaker, as many times he had to pause and regain his composure.

The movie “Schindler’s List” did a decent job depicting the actual events, Rosner said. His own family was saved by Oskar Schindler. Although every event in the movie really happened, Rosner said the violence was toned down, a comment that was greeted by gasps and murmurs among the crowd.

After being freed from Auschwitz concentration camp by American troops, Rosner and his family moved to New York City in 1946. Rosner remembers that his understanding of human nature had been completely disrupted by the Holocaust.

“I asked my father to get me a riding crop, like the Nazis had had, to beat women with. I thought that’s what it meant to be a man. Until I met the American soldiers, who played baseball, laughed and played music. When I heard that music, I thought I was in heaven,” Rosner said.

Rosner also argued that the Germans were not uniquely qualified to start the Holocaust, that they weren’t born with any special talent to be cruel. He emphasized that young people today need to take away from the Holocaust that when you see bigotry in your face, you have to challenge and stop it. Although it may take some sacrifice, sitting quietly makes you complicit which, in his eyes, is worse.