Star Tribune
The job ‘feels like a natural fit.’
Rebecca Cunningham, one of three finalists in the running to become the next University of Minnesota president, told students and staff Wednesday that the U’s top job “really just feels like a natural fit.”
The vice president for research and innovation at the University of Michigan — another Big Ten school in the Midwest — said she developed an affinity for Minnesota after meeting her in-laws. Her father-in-law worked at the U, her family frequently vacationed in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, and one of her daughters lives in the Twin Cities.
But she said she was also drawn to the idea of serving the state and felt her experience working as an emergency room physician could help the U as it works to determine the future of its medical programs.
“I’m particularly excited about how, potentially, my experiences and the skills I bring could help Minnesota at this pivotal time,” Cunningham said at a forum held on the Twin Cities campus, the last stop on a whirlwind three-day tour of all five U campuses.
Regents will meet Monday to select the next U president. Also in the running are Laura Bloomberg, president of Cleveland State University and a former dean of the U’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs; and James Holloway, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at the University of New Mexico.
The University of Minnesota president oversees a system that enrolls about 68,000 students and employs more than 27,000 people. The next president will take over at a time when the U is trying to reverse declining enrollment at some locations, convince lawmakers to provide more funding, and figure out how to best navigate cultural conflicts.
The University of Michigan enrolls more than 65,000 students. As its vice president for research and innovation, Cunningham oversees a unit that stretches across three campuses and a health system, employs more than 13,000 research staff and faculty, and reports about $1.8 billion in research expenditures.
During the hour-long forum, Cunningham fielded question about how she views the liberal arts and what she believes a university’s role is in protecting academic freedom.
“Research is not in competition with our educational mission. It is deeply linked,” she said, adding that while working in Michigan she fundraised to help provide paid research experiences for students and intentionally reached out to people working in literature, arts and music to talk about how grants could better support them.
She said a university should protect free speech — especially when it’s difficult — while acknowledging that protected speech can feel hurtful. She compared it to a scenario she saw in emergency rooms, when two people would come in injured from a fight. Someone started it, someone finished it and “it’s complicated.”
“My role, as a physician, is not to figure out that conflict but to look at the two human beings that are in front of me and to figure out how I’m going to take care of both of them so they can live long, optimal lives and to do that with deep compassion,” she said.
“Under the Biden-Harris Administration, more than 11,000 bridges in communities across America are finally getting the repairs they’ve long needed with funding from our infrastructure law,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in a news release. He said the bridge repairs ensure “people and goods can get where they need to go, safely and efficiently.”
A 19-year-old driver trying to get around slower vehicles collided head-on with an SUV in Wright County and killed one person and injured several others, officials said Thursday.
SUV passenger Janice Evelyn Johnson, 92, of Arden Hills, died Monday at HCMC from injuries she suffered in the collision on Oct. 22 in Monticello Township on County Road 37 near County Road 12, the Sheriff’s Office said in a search warrant affidavit filed in Hennepin County District Court.
The driver and two other people in the SUV survived their injuries, according to the affidavit, which the Sheriff’s Office filed to collect Johnson’s medical records at HCMC as part of its investigation.
According to the affidavit:
Deputies arrived at the crash scene and spoke with the car’s driver, Christian Kabunangu, of Brooklyn Park, who said he was heading west on County Road 37 and found himself behind two vehicles traveling below the speed limit.
“He was late for work, so he decided to pass them,” the affidavit read. Kabunangu said he saw the oncoming SUV and estimated it was about a half-mile down the road.
As he attempted to pass one of the slower vehicles, he explained, the other driver “sped up, preventing him from getting back into the westbound lane,” the filing continued.
As the Honda drew near, he swerved to the left, but the SUV did the same and they collided.
Star Tribune
University of Minnesota researchers find that native plants can beat invasive buckthorn on their own turf.
If the invasive buckthorn that is strangling the life out of Minnesota’s forest floor has a weakness, it is right now, in the shortening daylight of the late fall.
With a little help and planning, certain native plants have the best chance of beating buckthorn back and helping to eradicate it from the woods, according to new research from the University of Minnesota.
The sprawling bush has been one of the most formidable invasive species to take root in Minnesota since it was brought from Europe in the mid-1800s. It was prized as an ornamental privacy hedge. All the attributes that make buckthorn good at that job — dense thick leaves that stay late into the fall, toughness and resilience to damage and pruning, unappealing taste to wildlife and herbivores — have allowed it to thrive in the wild.
It grows fast and thick, out-competing the vast majority of native plants and shrubs for sunlight and then starving them under its shade. It creates damaging feedback loops, providing ideal habitat and calcium-rich food for invasive earthworms, which in turn kill off and uproot native plants. That leaves even less competition for buckthorn to take root, said Mike Schuster, a researcher for the university’s Department of Forest Resources.
When it takes over a natural area, buckthorn creates a “green desert,” Schuster said. “All that’s left is just a perpetual hedge, with little biodiversity.”
Since the 1990s, when the spread became impossible to ignore, Minnesota foresters, park managers and cities have spent millions of dollars a year trying to beat it back. They’ve used chainsaws and trimmers, poisons and herbicides, and even goats for hire. The buckthorn almost always grows back within a few years.
It’s been so pervasive that a conventional wisdom formed that buckthorn seeds could survive dormant in the soil for up to six years. That thought has led to a sort of fatalism: even if the plant were entirely removed from a property there would be a looming threat that it would sprout back, Schuster said.
But there is nothing special about buckthorn seeds. They only survive for a year or two.
