Multimedia Reporting (Bradford-Noland)

Next year, for the first time in almost a decade, the Department of Student Housing at the University of Kansas won’t be renovating a residence hall. Department of Student Housing is encouraging returning students to live in the residence halls another year by mounting a marketing campaign.

The campaign, which began this fall and will continue through spring semester, has the tagline: “Don’t just attend KU – live KU!”

With the completion of the Hashinger Hall renovations this fall, the Department of Student Housing finished its current renovations project. It has renovated Templin, Lewis, Ellsworth and Hashinger Halls. The University finished renovating Templin Hall in 1998.

Templin Hall was the first residence hall to begin the new round of renovations.

Kip Grosshans, associate director of Student Housing, said that each time Department of Student housing has done renovations, it gave new students priority over returning students in order to guarantee new students on-campus housing. The Department of Student Housing finished renovating the residence halls, so now it wants to encourage returning students to come back to the halls for a second or third year.

“This is a way to remind folks who are already with us that they might want to consider staying with us for the next year,” Grosshans said.

The meaning of the tagline, according to Grosshans, is that student housing offers a diverse and rewarding living environment. One advertisement on the Department of Student Housing Web site reads, “I‘m definitely returning to Student Housing. I’ve made great friends, food’s good, and I got a cool job right where I live.”

One bonus of living in the residence halls, according to Grosshans, is the easy access to food at the dining centers. “Going to the grocery store, schlepping the food into the car, paying for the food, going back to the apartment, unloading the food, fixing the food, cleaning up after the food; it’s a huge amount of time. It doesn’t seem like much when you think about it in general, but it’s time that most students really don’t have.”

Eric Grospitch, interim executive assistant to the director, said, “Our return numbers are up over last year. Having a year offline with Hashinger, that was 375 beds. It’s just a matter of getting those returners to stay on and seeing us beyond a first-year option.”

According to Grosshans, 452 sophomores and 101 juniors live in the residence halls this year out of a total 3,397 students.

Lindsey Eagle, Kansas City, Mo. junior, appears on the posters. She said that she thinks the Department of Student Housing is heading in the right direction by encouraging returning students to come back. She said that at her job as a student office assistant for the Department of Student Housing, she has received substantially more phone calls from prospective returning students than what she remembers from the past two years. She said usually students didn’t call until just a day or two before the “Intent to Return” form deadline.

“Students see the ads, which in turn causes them to contact our office to inquire about the process,” Eagle said.

Patrick Sittenauer, Kansas City, Mo. freshman, said that he will return to McCollum Residence Hall next year because he feels comfortable there. He said he has everything he needs: A bed, closet space, clean bathrooms and a desk. He said that if he lived anywhere else he would have to buy all of those things.

Sittenauer said he likes the residence halls because he’s met so many people. “You can pretty much always find someone to eat at E’s with,” Sittenauer said. “The dorms embody the spirit of a university: a place for any exchange of ideas, a place to learn. With 900 people within a few thousand square feet, I am sure you will find differing opinions.”

Sittenauer said he loves McCollum, but one of his gripes is all the rules. “It’s like living in my parents’ home. I can understand the reason for all the rules, and I would not change them, but living in a place one calls home means I should be able to set the rules.”

Ryan Bruno, Overland Park sophomore, said that the residence halls are a great place to meet new people. He said there’s always something going on there and that the residence halls feel like a home away from home.

“There is a bit of vulnerability that people feel when they come to the dorms, but it makes them more open to meet new people,” Bruno said. “It was a vulnerability that I welcomed when I came to KU.”

Bruno decided to return to the residence halls for a second year because he didn’t have enough money to live on his own. He said that he met new people and strengthened his relationships from last year as well.

Although Bruno said he dislikes the sometimes dirty bathrooms, the occasional fire alarms and late-night noise, he calls all of these complaints silly. “That’s part of the unique life of living in the dorms,” Bruno said.

Grosshans said this marketing program was a special project from the director of Student Housing. The campaign started by distributing bookmarks to the residence hall Academic Resource Centers in early October. The posters came out in the middle of October. Recently, Department of Student housing placed table tents in the dining centers. Department of Student Housing also bought advertisement space on a campus bus. Soon, Department of Student Housing will send out two sets of slightly different postcards: one set to students and one set to their parents.

For this campaign, Department of Student Housing is offering returning students the chance to sign their contract early. In years past, during the school year returning students could only fill out an “Intent to Return” form, which only noted their housing preferences and it didn’t guarantee them anything. Because residents can sign their contracts early this year, they can immediately choose their exact room and building assignment instead of waiting for weeks.

Both Grosshans and Grospitch are excited to see more returning students in the residence halls. “We know we’re going to get around 75 percent, perhaps even more, of the entering freshman class each year,” Grosshans said.

He said that returning students are a commodity in a residence hall. “It would be great if the resident assistant wasn’t the only upperclassmen on the floor and that there was someone else to ask, ‘how to we do this camping for tickets thing?’”

Grosshans said that the Department of Student Housing is confident it will get plenty of new student admissions because of its Web site and view book. “The big deal for us is to increase our population of the students we want most, and frankly, that’s the people who’ve lived with us before.”

Posted by William McCullough at 5:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Psychologists used to think that depressed people had difficulty with attention and focus. According to research done by Dr. Ruth Ann Atchley and Dr. Stephen Ilardi, associate professors of psychology at the University of Kansas, they were wrong. It’s not that depressed people can’t pay attention. They just focus on the negative.

“The question is, what captures depressed people’s attention?” Atchley said.
In a recent study that has yet to be published, Atchley and Ilardi showed depressed, formerly depressed and non-depressed people (the control group) various stimuli. When shown neutral stimuli, such as words like coin, house or tool, they found that the brains of depressed people made smaller than normal electrical responses.

However, when given negative stimuli, such as words like loser, measles or cancer, the depressed brains made larger responses than even a normal brain.

“People with a history of depression and people who are currently depressed actually have an increased response,” Ilardi said. “In other words, their attentional functioning actually looks superior. It’s not that people with depression don’t have the ability to lock in on stuff, it’s just that if something is neutral, it’s insignificant to them.”

Atchley said that depressed people aren’t simply distracted in general. In fact, they can be hyper-sensitive to the right stimuli.

Ilardi said, “It’s not like depressed people have universally poor attention. It’s that they have universally poor attention for anything that’s not negative.”

Atchley and Ilardi discovered the new results by testing for a certain brain signal, called P300. According to Atchley, the signal is named P because it is a positive wave and 300 because it occurs 300 milliseconds after a person sees the stimulus.

“It’s a reflection of attention,” Atchley said. “It tells us that a person is attending to a particular stimulus in the environment. This signal is normally really big if you’re attending, and gets smaller if you’re not allocating as much attention to that stimulus.”

In the past, all the P300 testing in depressed people used neutral stimuli. “The most common were just simple sounds,” Atchley said.

In the old tests, participants were asked to identify the odd beep out in a series of beeps. When participants heard the odd sound, they produced a P300 response, which was recorded by EEG, or electroencephalography, which is a net of electrodes around the head. Depressed people consistently responded to the odd sounds with a depressed P300 signal.

Like many studies before theirs, Atchley and Ilardi tested for P300 responses in depressed, formerly depressed and non-depressed people. However, for the first time, they used words with good or bad connotations. When depressed people were presented with negative words, they responded with a stronger than normal P300 signal.

“Their attentional capacity is probably very much dependent on what task you’re asking them to do,” Atchley said. In the past, it was interpreted as a generalized attention deficit.

“They’re going to be even more sensitive to some kinds of information,” Atchley said. “If they’re hypersensitive to the negative stuff, that might influence the way you talk to a patient with depression.”

Ilardi said, “Depressed people have a particular negative cast on everything that they think about. Depression is like waking up one morning and someone had put these incredibly dark glasses on you, and you didn’t know it. You weren’t aware you had them on. And you go outside with a friend, it’s a beautiful sunny day, and they say, ‘Wow! Look at all the brilliant, beautiful colors, what a great day!’ And all you’re seeing is gray, dark. Depression filters out all the positive, all the light, all the color.”

Atchley and Ilardi hope that their research will help psychologists and other mental health professionals understand people suffering from depression. “If we understand their cognitive biases and their general way of thinking about the world, we can do a lot of things to help those folks more effectively than we currently do,” Atchley said.

Ilardi said that depression dampens people’s memory and causes them to only remember negative things. “It affects their interpretation of events,” Ilardi said. “So, if they’re talking to a friend on the phone, and their friend says, ‘Hold on, I’ve got a call coming,’ and they put them on call waiting. Their immediate interpretation would be, ‘They don’t like me. They don’t want to talk to me. I’m boring,’ etc, whereas a normal person wouldn’t think much of it.”

Atchley said the results from this study could be used for improving diagnoses of depression. Furthermore, since formerly depressed people also showed a weaker P300 response, a person’s response to a P300 test might be used to determine risk factors for relapsing into depression.

Atchley and Ilardi are now testing the P300 response of depressed people by using words with positive connotations. They hope to determine whether or not depressed people respond strongly to emotional situations in general or just to negative situations.

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Ah, the sweet age of 21. For many, the 21st birthday heralds the sweet access of legal liquor: the months of anticipation, the excited friends, the crazy night, and the mother-of-all-hangovers.

But for Paul Scott, born in Britain, now assistant professor of French and holder of the Cramer professorship in French, his 21st birthday was different. Scott was training to become a Catholic priest in France.

“Unlike most 21-year-olds, I was vowed to poverty, chastity and obedience, wearing a black garment that went down to my knees, a white collar around my neck, and I used to get up at 6 o’clock every day,” Scott said.

Even though Scott soon left the Catholic seminary in Paris, and even lapsed in his faith for several years during his subsequent college years, Scott is a man who deeply loves his faith, and this love of Catholicism has been a unifying theme in his life.

“The great thing about Catholicism, as its name implies, is that it’s universal,” Scott said. “Things vary: the congregation varies, the quality of singing varies, but it’s all the same.” Scott attends a Latin Mass because no matter where he goes, he said, it’s still the same.

One of Scott’s best friends, Bruce Hayes, assistant professor of French, said that Scott is extraordinarily intelligent and has a “wickedly ironic” sense of humor. Hayes said that Scott is deeply religious, but that his sense of humor also carries over into his religion.

“He used to have a bumper sticker which said, ‘I love my German Shepherd, Pope Benedict XVI,’” Hayes said. “He got the bumper sticker after he saw on-line that some Catholics found it offensive and inappropriate. He has a deep faith, but he is also a real humanist.”

Hayes also said that he and Scott love to take turns interrupting each other’s class in order to trade insults. “He and I take great pleasure in insulting each other in front of students, which leaves some of them mystified as to how we can actually be friends, which makes the joke all the more funny.”

While he found many joys with a life devoted strictly to God, Scott left his training soon after he turned 21 for personal reasons. He said that he couldn’t see himself as a priest, although others could.

Another reason was that he didn’t want to give up romantic love. “I had been in love before I entered seminary. So, in a way, I knew what I was giving up,” Scott said. “The thought of living a life without somebody to share it was too crushing sometimes.” Scott said he has loved and lost many times since, including a relationship that didn’t survive his move to the United States.

Despite leaving seminary, he didn’t give up his faith or his friendship with his former seminarians. “My friends are priests now, and I’m in good contact with them. I have a tremendous amount of respect for them. It’s not like I’ve had that life and it’s gone now, like I cut my ties with it.”

Scott was raised in Brampton, Cumbria, a small English town 10 miles away from Scotland. He describes his childhood as idyllic. One of his friends was the son of nobility, and oftentimes Scott visited him at his family’s castle. At the age of 15, he decided to become a priest. “I was brought up Catholic. I pretty much didn’t take my religion seriously until I reached the age of a teenager,” Scott said.

After leaving seminary, Scott began studying French literature at the University of Durham in the United Kingdom. For several years at the University he lapsed in his faith, he said. Scott earned his doctorate in 2001, and soon after, flew to the United States in search of a professorship.

“Kansas, I’ll be honest, the position sounded ideal, but it was the bottom of the list,” Scott said. The job was ideal, he said, because it dealt with 17th century literature, the department had a good reputation, and it was somewhere he could grow professionally.

“Then I came to Lawrence for an on-campus interview and I loved it,” he said. “Lawrence is neither too big nor too small, is very attractive, and has a vibrant downtown. I was actually thinking, ‘Don’t get attached, because if you don’t get offered this job, it’ll be terrible.’” Scott was offered the job, and soon earned the Cramer professorship award for his work at the University of Kansas. This year, Scott is again a candidate for the three-year Cramer award.

One of Scott’s former students, Kendra Davis, Newton junior, said that he “bounces around the room almost as much as a little rubber ball I used to have as a kid.” She said that Scott’s charisma and allure drew her in to his lecture, regardless of what she thought about him.

Since moving to Kansas, Catholicism has still been a large part of Scott’s life, although he wouldn’t say he is a great Catholic or that he always does what is right.

Scott expressed this paradox with a story: one night, he and some of his friends who are professors went out, and they all had too much to drink. Scott said that even after drinking too much, he forced himself to get in a cab at 7 a.m. to attend Mass. His friends thought he was crazy.

Kirk Rich, Scott’s former roommate and fellow Catholic, said that even though he was very ill one Sunday, Scott insisted they go to Mass. Rich said they had to make several stops on the way to let Scott relieve himself. “We kept having to pull over so he could throw up on the side of the road,” Rich said, laughing.

Rich also said that after Pope John Paul II died, Scott and his mentor from Cambridge had a running bet as to what the new pope would name himself. According to Rich, Scott won the bet, having chosen Benedict XVI.

So how would Scott, who has attended Catholic seminary, respond to the ongoing sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church?

“I’m at a stage now where, when you’re deeply in love with somebody, you’re acutely aware of the flaws, but you love it so much that you live with it,” Scott said, referring to the Catholic Church.

“Catholicism, I believe, isn’t flawed in itself: it’s the Church, the spotless bride of Christ. But some of the people within it are deeply flawed. It’s the old thing about loving the sinner but hating the sin.”

Scott said that these deeply flawed people demonstrate hypocrisy in the Catholic Church. He also said, however, “I think hypocrisy manifests itself in every organization where human beings are.”

Furthermore, Scott said that hypocrisy could be a good thing, because it affords the Church a chance to define itself against the hypocrisy. “Hypocrisy is like error: how, throughout history, has the Christian church defined itself? It’s always been through reaction to heresies. So I think hypocrisy is needed to define what being a good and worthwhile person should be. It’s like truth: it’s dependent on error for its definition.”

Scott said, “There’s a most beautiful thing from the liturgy of Holy Saturday. The deacon chants a very ancient hymn that’s at least from the 6th century, and one of the lines is, ‘Oh happy fault, oh truly necessary sin of Adam that gained for us so great a redeemer.’” Scott said that without the sin of Adam, there would have been no need for Jesus.

“There’s something about how there would have been no Christ without sin, there would have been no Christ without Adam and the fall. There would have been no redemption.” Ultimately, Scott said, without the necessary evil in life, the good doesn’t have a chance to define itself.

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The University of Kansas will step up the number of classes it offers during summer session. Following its mantra of “graduate in four,” the University is reviewing which classes fill up quickly or are difficult to pass. More of these classes will then be offered in the summer or possibly during a proposed intersession term between fall and spring semesters.

“We’re trying to design a summer session that would enhance the opportunities to get out in four,” Don Steeples, vice provost for scholarly support said. “We’re in the process of looking at what classes would be most in demand; then, how can we provide staff and facilities for those classes that are most needed and in demand.”

Steeples also said that the University will advertise for summer session during the Spring 2007 semester. Steeples was unsure as to how many classes would be added this summer.

According to a 2005 report submitted by the Graduate in Four Task Force at the University, only 29 percent of undergraduate students graduate in four years. This percentage ranks the University of Kansas fifth in the Big 12. The University of Missouri is first with a 37 percent success rate.

On-time graduation is key to making the University of Kansas a more efficient and competitive University, Marlesa Roney, vice provost for student success, said. “Students who take longer to graduate end up spending more on tuition, fees and books and, in addition, forego income that would be earned while taking the additional semester(s). It's not necessarily ‘bad,’ but it is not the best use of one's time and resources.”

Overall, the Big 12 schools’ four-year graduation rates are no comparison to the University of Virginia’s 83 percent four-year graduation success rate or the University of North Carolina’s 70 percent four-year success rate.

The report blames difficult prerequisite and entry-level classes as one problem that contributes to the low graduation rates. It cites several courses, including English 101, several beginning Spanish courses, Astronomy 191, Atmospheric Science 105, Communications 130, and Philosophy 148.
The report calls Math 002 “particularly problematic,” and says that approximately 20 to 30 percent of freshmen don’t successfully complete their first math course.

According to Vice Provost Steeples, the University’s goal is to offer more of these difficult classes in the summer so that students have an alternative time to take them, or at least another chance to pass them.

“The University’s efforts to strategically develop course offerings for summer session and intersessions will enable students to complete needed courses in a timely fashion,” Vice Provost Roney said. “In some cases, completing one three-credit course during summer session is all that will be needed for a student to graduate ‘on time’ the following spring.”

Brett Terp, Missouri senior, said he has taken two summer school courses: a Statistical Analysis course and an introductory Health, Sport and Exercise Science course. He took them during the summer because they conflicted with another class he had to take in the fall.

The Graduate in Four report also says freshmen hinder themselves by not taking enough credit hours at the beginning of their college careers. While most majors require an average of around 15 credit hours a semester, the average undergraduate took only 13.4 credit hours per semester in 2004. This has dropped from 14.7 credit hours in 1982. Also, undergraduates who take 12 hours one semester generally do not take more credit hours the next semester to make up for their deficit. This leads to delayed graduation.

“All students who intend to be full-time students are now strongly advised to enroll in and complete no fewer than 15 hours per semester,” Vice Provost Roney said. “This is a new initiative that was started during orientation in summer 2005 and continues. The statistics for the 2006 freshman class show that this is beginning to make a difference.”

Roney said she was unsure why students took fewer hours than they needed for an on-time graduation, but that the Freshman-Sophomore Advising Center is working on finding an answer. “Work also continues in order to understand whether or not there are institutional ‘roadblocks’ that prevent students from graduating on time, and, if so, to eliminate those roadblocks,” Roney said.

While it published the year-old Graduate in Four report and appointed Vice Provost JoAnn Smith to develop a comprehensive plan for improving summer session last spring, as of now the University has made no definitive policies for reworking or augmenting summer session.

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Eudora is growing. And fast. As a bedroom community 10 miles from the heart of Lawrence and just under 23 miles away from Lenexa, its location has helped it grow by 20 percent over the last five years. Eudora grew from 4,307 people in 2000 to 6,541 people in 2005.

Almost all of the growth in Eudora is residential, and while it provides the community with new families and new energy, it has also put strains on the city’s infrastructure. Furthermore, commercial development has been disproportionately stunted because of the lack of available land with infrastructures such as sewage and electricity, Caren Rowland, owner of the Coldwell Banker real estate office said.

Tom Pyle, mayor of Eudora, agrees that the city needs more commercial development. “You can’t do it on rooftops alone,” Pyle said.

The City Commission will meet tonight to discuss a Tax Increment Financing development area for the east side of Eudora. If the plans go through, the city would have to annex new land east of town. The commission must first hear the results from an independent report to see if Eudora qualifies for the TIF program.

According to Cheryl Beatty, city administrator of Eudora, TIF is an incentive program offered by the state to remedy bad economic situations. It allows a city to pay for needed additions to infrastructure without increasing its taxes because the taxes from the new businesses created by the new available land will pay for the improvements, rather than local residents being forced to foot the bill. The Kansas Speedway area is a large-scale example of a program similar to TIF.

The city is in the preliminary stages of this development project and no definite plans have been made for development at the possible TIF site. “It’s a flexible deal,” Mayor Pyle said.

Carol Rowland said, “It’s kind of like the question, ‘if we build it will they come?’ I think it’s a Catch-22. Right now, we don’t have the commercial space, so nobody can come. We just don’t have the land developed to do that. There’s not a lot of infrastructure right now. Eudora needs more infrastructure. We need more sewer lines and electrical lines.”

Ken Adkinson, member of the Eudora Planning Commission, said that the commission believes organized growth is good for Eudora and that it has not turned away any reasonable request to expand the industrial or commercial base in Eudora.

Adkinson said that like any small town in America, residents are split on whether or not the growth should happen.

The Eudora Planning Commission represents the landowners in the 3-mile area that surrounds the city as well as the citizens of Eudora. The commission discusses how to create new economic growth without losing the small town atmosphere. Sometimes the commission ends up placing landowners’ rights and the city’s needs at the opposite ends of a pole, Adkinson said.

One of the biggest problems with growth in any city is a question of balance: how much residential versus commercial and industrial. “During my first three years on the planning commission a report was given to us indicating that residential growth would pay its own way,” Adkinson said. “We are currently being told that not enough industrial/commercial in the mix will cause economic disaster.” Eudora needs commercial and industrial development because those entities create the real tax revenue.

One thing is for sure: Eudora’s residential base is still growing. Caren Rowland said that over the last year, 115 single-family homes were sold in Eudora at an average price of $170,933. The year before, 133 single-family homes were sold at an average price of $152,860. This compares with an average home price of $123,881 in Tonganoxie and $187,465 in Lawrence. Both numbers are from 2005.

While the actual number of units sold has gone down, the average price has gone up, indicating an increase in land values and a rise in residential demand in the community. Rowland said that the drop in actual real estate sales correlates to increasing gas prices. “Because we’re a bedroom community, people who want to move out of the city to a small town have stopped a little bit because gas has gotten so high.”

The growth is also crunching Eudora’s schools. A new high school was built three years ago, and Eudora jumped up several rankings in school size, according to Brooke Schram, office manager of State Farm Insurance and Eudora mother.

According to the School District 491 Web site, Eudora High School currently enrolls 357 students. The middle school has 214 students. The elementary schools show the true effects of the growth: Eudora West Elementary currently has 271 students and Nottingham Elementary ties the high school with 357 students, showing that something will have to be done soon to expand the school facilities even further.

John Durkin, co-owner of Durkin’s Hardware, exemplifies the new commercial growth in Eudora. He started his business from the ground up two years ago to the south of Kansas Highway 10. “We were the first ones on this side of the highway to build anything.”

Durkin’s Hardware has 5,000 square feet of showroom space, and he added a new service center last month. This year, he is expecting at least a 25 percent increase in business from last year.

Aaron Boden, owner of Gambino’s Pizza, tells a similar history. Boden has owned the franchise for six years. “Over the past five years, business is up 30 percent,” Boden said. “Maybe even higher.”

Boden said he believed the cheap price of land helped Eudora grow. He now said that land prices have gone up significantly, and that has affected the availability of new commercial development. “The developers have got to make a profit,” he said.

Eudora’s older part of town is to the north, with older businesses mostly along Main Street. Main Street sleepily ends a few blocks south from downtown. A few blocks east along West 10th St., Church St. energetically becomes the dominant commercial corridor.

Most of the new businesses in town are located to the south near Kansas Highway 10 on Church Street. Not much development has occurred south of the highway. A few businesses, a new subdivision, and the new high school are the only developments to the south.

Brooke Schram has enjoyed seeing Eudora grow. “Just in the last seven years I’ve seen major growth. They’ve probably put in four new subdivisions since we moved here. It has grown phenomenally. But it still has that small-town feel, which is what we like.”

Schram was raised in Lenexa, Kan., while her husband grew up on a dairy farm. “This was a happy little medium, and it’s a great bedroom community. It’s right off the highway; you can be in Olathe in 20 minutes. It’s great. I was really adamant at first, saying, ‘If in one year we don’t like it, can we move back?’ Now, I can’t imagine moving back.”

John Durkin, who grew up in Eudora and returned recently, paints a different picture. “It was a small town then; now it’s not really,” Durkin said. “You have the old part of town with the people who lived here forever, and you have all the younger people who live out in the newer housing. There’s basically two parts of town.”

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