Media Watch (March 21-28, 2005)

"Media Watch" is a round-up of recent stories in the media about the University of Hartford, as well as significant stories about other local and peer institutions and news about trends and issues in higher education.

More than 50 university students decided to spend their Spring Break in Birmingham, Ala., building houses as part of Habitat for Humanity’s Alternative Spring Break program. The students were interviewed by the media in Birmingham and Hartford about their efforts. (Birmingham News, Ala., March 24)

Jennifer Shepard, a junior at the university, will introduce the film Paper Clips at the annual Hartford Jewish Film Festival. The film is about students in the Whitwell, Tennessee Middle School who honored the six million Holocaust survivors by collecting paper clips to represent each victim. Shepard helped raise about $11,000 for the paper clips project when she was a high school student in Nashville. (Hartford Courant, March 24)

NBC 30’s “Connecticut Discoveries” program included footage and interviews with students in the Hartt Community Division. (NBC 30, March 24)

The Science Center of Connecticut and the University of Hartford received a grant from the state Department of Higher Education to conduct a project for 25 high school teachers to learn how to incorporate bacteria testing activities in classrooms. (Hartford Courant, March 22)

Dr. John Mehm, a licensed psychologist and associate director of the university’s Graduate Institute of Professional Psychology, wrote a “letter to the editor” of the Waterbury Republican-American in support of a bill in the state legislature that would authorize trained psychologists to prescribe medications for people with emotional and behavioral disorders, thereby giving these patients timely access to care. (Waterbury Republican-American, March 16)

Warren Goldstein, chair of the history department, reviewed “The House I Live In: Race in the American Century” by Robert J. Norrell for the Chicago Tribune. “Norrell himself remains optimistic because of what Americans—black and white—have achieved in racial matters over the last century. Reading this book, I think you will too,” wrote Goldstein. (Chicago Tribune, March 27)

Marissa Cloutier, a Hillyer faculty member in biology, was recently quoted in People magazine in her capacity as the author of The Mediterranean Diet. The book and the diet have generated a lot of attention. (People magazine, March 2)

Chittaranjan Sahay, professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Connecticut Space Grant Foundation Consortium, was quoted in the Hartford Business Journal about the need to inspire young schoolchildren to be scientists or engineers. The Connecticut Space Grant Foundation Consortium is a co-sponsor of the Connecticut Invention Convention, a competition among students at more than 90 schools around the state. (Hartford Business Journal, March 21)

Dennis Nolan, an illustration professor at the Hartford Art School, was featured in the Hartford Courant’s “Java” column. Nolan illustrated a children’s book about the life of St. Francis of Assisi titled A Life of Joy written by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The column also featured a picture of Nolan. (Hartford Courant, March 22)

University student Trish McAleen was interviewed for a story about how Spring Break beachgoers were dealing with the news about shark sightings at Delray Beach. “The first chance possible, we came back down to (the beach),” McAleen said to the newspaper. (Boca Raton News, Fla., March 22)

Vera Smith-Winfree, a former associate in the university’s office of corporate and community relations, has been named executive director of the Bloomfield Chamber of Commerce. (Hartford Business Journal, March 28)

Newspaper stories, both locally and nationally, reflected on the Hartford Hawks women’s basketball team’s appearance in the NCAA tournament and the direction in which the women’s basketball program is heading. (New York Times, March 20; MSNBC, March 19)

University alum and PGA Tour professional Patrick Sheehan was the subject of a feature story in the Providence Journal. In the article, Sheehan reminisces about his days at the university with teammates Jerry Kelly and Tim Petrovic. (Providence Journal, March 23)

President Walter Harrison was interviewed for a story that looked at how New York area universities’ sports teams would do under the new NCAA guidelines that make colleges and universities more accountable for the academic progress of their student-athletes. (Newsday, March 24)

Other News

As lawmakers consider plans to make the state a hotbed for stem cell research, the University of Connecticut has announced it is poised to become one of the first colleges in the country to launch a program for making human embryonic stem cells. Xiangzhong Yang, a cloning expert who directs UConn’s Center for Regenerative Biology, said that his laboratory had become the first to create embryonic stem cells from cloned cattle embryos. The work was done in a partnership with the Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Boston Globe, March 28)

Governor M. Jodi Rell blocked the State Bond Commission from considering a payment of more than $1 million to Klewin Building Company of Norwich for a construction project at Manchester Community College. Klein hired former Governor Rowland in a $5,000-a-month contract after his resignation during an impeachment inquiry. (Associated Press, March 14; WTNH-TV8)

The University of Connecticut will sell union-made T-shirts and other apparel in an effort to combat sweatshop labor that has produced college paraphernalia. The bookstore will have an area that will feature logo apparel made in the United States by unionized workers. (Associated Press, March 28; Newsday, March 28)

State police have launched an investigation into how the University of Connecticut has awarded up to $1 billion worth of building projects and whether some of its contractors “cut corners” during construction, leading to safety and fire code violations. Many of the projects under review are part of UConn 2000, the building program that gave the university carte blanche to choose contractors and manage projects with no state oversight. (Hartford Courant, March 25)

The legislature’s higher education and advancement committee derailed a proposal by Gov. M. Jodi Rell to freeze tuition at state colleges and universities for one year. Public college officials had opposed the bill, saying it would strain classes and services. (Hartford Courant, March 23)

Legislators rejected a bill for a public audit of $54 million in taxpayers’ funds held by the University of Connecticut Foundation. On a tie vote that constituted a defeat, lawmakers on the higher education committee voted 10-10 against conducting an audit every two years for all private foundations of the state’s public colleges. (Hartford Courant, March 23)

New York University beat Harvard University as the top “dream college” for a second straight year, leading a survey of U.S. students who increasingly are applying to urban schools, The Princeton Review said. Stanford, Yale and Princeton universities rounded out students’ top five choices in the survey of 2,885 college applicants. (Bloomberg.com, March 23)

The days of doling out hundreds of dollars on textbooks at campus bookstores and receiving a small fraction of the cost when selling them back at semester's end may be numbered. Universities across the country are turning to online textbook exchanges that allow students to sell their used books and browse for books posted by others. (Washington Times, March 23)