Star Tribune
We need ‘a shared vision’ for the U
University of Minnesota president finalist James Holloway told students and staff Wednesday that he was drawn to the job because of the U’s service to the state — and if he gets it, he’ll aim to sell others on the school’s value as well.
“I think it’s really important for us to create a shared vision of why we’re here and why what we do is important,” Holloway said in a public forum held on the Twin Cities campus Wednesday. “The thing about the University of Minnesota that is critically important is that it is very clearly created to support and serve the state.”
Holloway is one of three finalists in the running to become next University of Minnesota president, overseeing five campuses that together serve about 68,000 students and employ more than 27,000 people. Also up for consideration are Laura Bloomberg, president of Cleveland State University and former dean of the U’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs, and Rebecca Cunningham, vice president for research and innovation at the University of Michigan.
The new president will take over at a time when the U is trying to reverse declining enrollment at some of its locations, chart the future of its medical programs, and convince state lawmakers to provide hundreds of millions in additional funding. Student and faculty leaders have said they hope the next president will help them build a better relationship with the Legislature and bring in money to help lower tuition or increase faculty pay.
Holloway currently works as the provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at the University of New Mexico, a public research university that has nearly 27,000 students and about 14,000 employees.
His remarks came at the end of a whirlwind three-day tour in which he visited all five U campuses, as the other finalists will do as well. For about an hour, he fielded questions submitted online and from dozens of people gathered in a theater inside the U’s Coffman Memorial Union.
If he’s selected for the job, Holloway said he would aim to highlight the unique attributes of each campus for prospective students and to make information about new scholarship opportunities for Indigenous students more visible.
“I think one of the opportunities we have is to really think about enrollment across the system and think about how we can ensure that we give students the options to go to the part of the system that works for them,” he said.
Holloway said he built relationships with lawmakers in New Mexico by meeting with them before funding asks were on the table, sometimes to discuss something as simple as sharing book recommendations. And he credited those relationships with helping the university secure additional funding to raise faculty pay.
If a university loses someone because it offers lower pay, “it’s a loss to the state,” he 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.
