KU links: Research cuts, rising loan rates and missing butterflies in Canada

Posted by Matt Erickson

July 11, 2013 at 10:49 a.m.

It seems that news mentions of KU tend to slow down a bit during these summer months, so our little links roundup here has become an every-few-weeks feature for now.

But here are some assorted KU quotes, mentions and other bits from around the Internet from the last few weeks:

• Steve Warren, KU's vice chancellor for research and graduate studies, called the federal cuts to research funding a "slow-growing cancer" at a roundtable event Wednesday in Washington, D.C., as reported by Inside Higher Ed. (Or, if the Huffington Post is to be believed, he called them a "slowly growing cancer.") Warren talked to us about that very same subject earlier this week.

• Another KU official sounded off in a letter to the Chronicle of Higher Education last week about another hot-button higher-education issue of the moment: student-loan interest rates. Melinda Lewis, a policy director for the Assets and Education Initiative in KU's School of Social Welfare, wrote that whether or not loan interest rates rise, a better mechanism for helping children succeed in college would be government-funded savings accounts.

I wrote about the KU researchers studying that concept back in February. You might see some more media coverage of their ideas next week, when they'll be presenting a report in Washington, D.C.

• Also on the subject of student-loan interest rates, the Kansas City Star talked with KU student Tyler Childress about the loans he has piled up.

(In case you haven't seen, by the way: Congress has not yet reached an agreement to keep rates on subsidized federal loans from doubling to 6.8 percent.)

• The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. talked with KU monarch butterfly expert Chip Taylor about why monarchs have been rare in the province of Ontario so far this summer.

• The KC Star also talked with Lisa Pinamonti Kress, KU's admissions director, about how KU tries to recruit minority students after the U.S. Supreme Court's recent ruling on race-based admissions.

Now that I've listed them all out, I see most of those links contain a fair bit of doom and gloom. Sorry about that. Cheer me up by sending a KU news tip to merickson@ljworld.com.