photo by: Richard Gwin

The President was introduced by Alyssa Cole, a KU senior majoring in History and African and African-American studies. Alyssa, a single mother, wrote to Obama in 2013 to explain her concerns about education and quality, affordable childcare. She said she felt forced to choose among her education, working, and taking care of her children who are now 3, 4 and 7. Alyssa was recently accepted into the McNair Scholars Program..

Kansas University’s newly released Chancellor’s Report draws a parallel between the tumultuous times in which the university was founded and some of its present challenges.

The annual report highlighting a variety of success stories and projects at KU went live online Friday, and print copies are being distributed around campus early this week, I’m told by KU public affairs. In a video introduction to this year’s collection of stories, headlined “My call to you …,” Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little recalls when KU was founded 150 years ago, on the heels of the Civil War.

Other KU faculty, staff, students and alumni then chime in:

Since its beginning this university
has been central to our nation’s story
and has grappled with our society’s
greatest challenges. Some of those
challenges today — citizenship, race,
state’s rights — aren’t that different
from those of 150 years ago.

Responding to those challenges is why they’re here, they say:

It’s not always easy. It makes some
people uncomfortable, but that’s good
… to be challenged, to experience
intellectual discomfort, to learn and
to test new ideas.

Familiar faces from the video, to name just a few, include KU alumna Alyssa Cole, the then-student and single mom who introduced President Barack Obama for his January 2015 speech at KU; physics and astronomy professor Alice Bean, who’s led a team helping with upgrades to the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva; professor of ecology and evolutionary biology Jim Thorp, lead investigator on a $4.2 million grant to study climate change via U.S. and Mongolian rivers; and associate professor of film Kevin Willmott, who co-wrote the recent film “Chi-Raq” with Spike Lee.

See the full Chancellor’s Report and read stories about some of these KU representatives and others online at [report2016.ku.edu][5].

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• I’m the Journal-World’s KU and higher ed reporter. See all the newspaper’s KU coverage here. Reach me by email at sshepherd@ljworld.com, by phone at 832-7187, on Twitter @saramarieshep or via Facebook at Facebook.com/SaraShepherdNews.

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