LJWorld.com weblogs Heard on the Hill

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

Posted by Matt Erickson
July 11, 2013 at 10:49 a.m.

Advertisement

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.

More LJWorld KU News Coverage

  • Recent Kansas University news stories
  • Heard on the Hill KU news blog
  • Follow @LJW_KU on Twitter

    • Comments

    Use the comment form below to begin a discussion about this content.

    Commenting has been disabled for this item.

    Reply

    Tags

    1. KU
    2. Chip Taylor
    3. monarch butterfly
    4. Assets and Education Initiative
    5. Kansas University
    6. Steve Warren
    loading...