UNIVERSITY GAZETTE | September 7, 2005 | The University of North Carolina

As part of continuing efforts to remain connected to campus neighbors, the University conducted several community outreach projects as the academic year began.

On Aug. 23, about 60 area citizens and government officials learned more about happenings on campus through a windshield bus tour of construction projects and inside looks at the Rams Head Center, Michael Hooker Research Building, Memorial Hall and the Baity Hill student family housing complex.

Participants heard from University representatives such as Chancellor James Moeser; Jonathan Howes, special assistant to the chancellor; Linda Convissor, director of local relations; Anna Wu, director of facilities planning; Bruce Runberg, associate vice chancellor for planning and construction; Paul Kapp, campus historic preservation manager and Associate Provost Steve Allred during various stops.

Teams comprised of police officers, University employees, students and residents conduct a "Good Neighbor Walk Around" on Aug. 26 to welcome students to the community.

The teams distributed 1,000 packets -- which included voter registration forms, recycling/trash pickup details, Chapel Hill transit schedules, neighborhood maps, restaurant guides, bike trail brochures and coupons -- throughout the Northside, Pine Knolls and Cameron-McCauley neighborhoods.

Carolina ranked as the nation's fifth best public university and stands out as a national leader in promoting student accessibility, according to U.S. News & World Report magazine.

In addition, UNC posted an 11-point gain -- following last year's 21-point rise -- in faculty resources. That 39th overall ranking was up from 50th in 2004. It was the University's best showing in the past six years; the lowest had been 71st twice during that period. Two other rankings -- best value and least debt load -- affirmed Carolina's leadership role in measures of student accessibility.

In faculty resources, U.S. News examined snapshots of class size (fewer than 20 students and 50 students or more), average faculty compensation in 2003-04 and 2004-05, proportion of faculty who are full time and with the highest degree in their field, and student-faculty ratio.

"Carolina is making excellent progress toward University priorities we have set for ourselves," said Chancellor James Moeser. "Overall, our focus is on promoting excellence in all that we do in order to benefit the people of North Carolina and beyond. Our top priority is strengthening faculty recruitment, retention and development, and these U.S. News results show how last year's state appropriations and campus-based tuition revenue helped keep us competitive in faculty compensation with our national peers."

Another University priority is creating the richest possible learning environment for students, Moeser said. "The U.S. News rankings examine important aspects of the exceptional education we provide to undergraduates," he said.

Among public campuses, the University of California at Berkeley ranked first, followed by the University of Virginia. The universities of California at Los Angeles and Michigan at Ann Arbor tied for third, followed by UNC at fifth for the fifth consecutive year. For years, these five campuses have held the top five spots.

Overall, Carolina tied for 27th -- up two spots from last year -- among both public and private campuses with Tufts and Wake Forest universities. Other top public campuses ranked between 20th (Berkeley) and 25th (UCLA and Michigan).

The new rankings appear in the magazine's 2006 "America's Best Colleges" guidebook and are online at www.usnews.com.

The U.S. News rankings formula weighs data including opinion survey responses about academic excellence from peer presidents, provosts or admissions officials; student retention rates; faculty resources; student selectivity; financial resources; graduation rates; and alumni giving.

UNC ranked first among national public campuses and 10th overall -- up nine places from last year -- in "Great Schools, Great Prices," based on a formula determining which schools offer best value by relating academic quality to the net cost of attendance for a student who receives the average level of financial aid.

Another category -- least debt among students -- listed UNC fifth among public campuses and eighth overall, with 24 percent of graduates posting an average debt of $11,751 in 2004. In 2003, that number was $11,519, down from $13,700 in 2000. Less than a quarter of Carolina's graduating students accumulate debt. By contrast, the nation's average student debt loan doubled to $18,900 in about a decade.

Moeser said campus practices protect access and affordability. Among undergraduates, 33 percent received need-based financial aid in 2004-05. UNC met two-thirds of undergraduates' need with scholarships and grants and the remaining third with loans and work-study jobs. Traditionally, aid packages on most campuses are closer to two-thirds loans and one-third grants.

This fall, the second class of Carolina Covenant scholars is enrolling. An estimated 340 to 350 new first-year students will participate under expanded eligibility requirements announced by Moeser last year.

That was second (topped only by UC-Berkeley at 58 percent) among UNC's top public peers and up from 51 percent in 2003. U.S. News considered an additional measure: Only 11 percent of UNC's course sections enrolled 50 or more students in 2004, down from 12 percent the previous year.

In other U.S. News rankings, Kenan-Flagler Business School tied for fifth with Carnegie Mellon and New York universities, as well as the University of Texas at Austin, among undergraduate business degree programs. Kenan-Flagler tied for second among public campuses. In specialty areas, Kenan-Flagler tied for fourth with Berkeley for marketing and ranked fifth in management.

U.S. News included Carolina in a "programs to look for" category -- highlighting outstanding examples of academic programs that lead to student success. Carolina was among 43 public and private campuses cited for their first-year experiences programs, which include first-year seminars and other programs bringing small groups of students together with faculty and staff on a regular basis. UNC was one of 22 public campuses selected for this list.

Another category of "programs to look for" was undergraduate research/creative projects, in which UNC was listed among a dozen public campuses and 36 universities overall. This category reflects opportunities for students to engage in independent or small-team work under the direction of a faculty mentor.

University to honor Adler, Griffith, Swalin with first lifetime achievement awards for performing arts

The University will present its first lifetime achievement awards for the performing arts to Richard Adler, Andy Griffith and Maxine Swalin during opening gala events Sept. 10, marking the official reopening of the newly transformed Memorial Hall.

Called the Carolina Performing Arts Lifetime Achievement Award, the new honor recognizes an alumnus or alumna, organization or other exceptional individual whose work in the performing arts has greatly contributed to life at the University and enriched American culture. Recipients are selected for their efforts to advance the arts locally and nationally; for accomplishments acknowledged by scholars, critics, professional peers and the general public; and because their work has stood the test of time.

Adler, of New York City, had a lengthy career composing for Broadway, ballet and orchestra. Griffith, of Manteo, is a legendary television and film star. Swalin, of Chapel Hill, with her late husband, Benjamin F. Swalin, revived the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra and built it into a national treasure.

The University will launch the new award during a gala opening weekend Sept. 8 – 11 celebrating the official reopening of Memorial Hall, which underwent a nearly $18 million renovation made possible by the Higher Education Bond Referendum approved by N.C. voters and private gifts to the Carolina First Campaign and other sources.

All three award recipients will be honored during a grand opening gala concert Sept. 10 titled "A Classical Opening." The evening features violinist Itzhak Perlman, violinist/violist Pinchas Zukerman and the North Carolina Symphony, led by Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C. This performance begins at 7 p.m. Tickets to the performance remain available; call 843-6323.

Chancellor James Moeser will give his fifth annual State of the University Address for the campus community on Sept. 15 at 3 p.m. in the Great Hall of the Frank Porter Graham Student Union. Faculty, staff and students are invited to attend.

The chancellor, who came to the University in 2000, started the tradition of giving such an address a year later, bringing with him a practice begun when he was the chancellor of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

This year's speech is expected to focus in part on the implications of globalization on North Carolina and what that means for the University's role in serving the state.

The chancellor also is expected to reflect upon his experiences traveling North Carolina as part of the University's "Carolina Connects" initiative and how those lessons can help shape future engagement efforts with state citizens.

The State of the University speech typically has been an occasion for announcements about University initiatives.

As the pace of activity increases again on campus, the Gazette spoke with Dan Reed, vice chancellor for information technology, chief information officer and chancellor's eminent professor, about the many changes taking place in information technology at the University.

Reed: Although Information Technology Services (ITS) provides services for research, education and administrative capabilities, the larger mission is to view information technology as a strategic enabler. Driven not only by campus objectives, but also by global events. Arguably, the 21st century is all about knowledge economies. In a knowledge economy, information is power.

ITS is in the knowledge and information tools business. That touches on everything from training and education for students who need interdisciplinary skills to mine information and apply it to problems, to how we make the administrative processes of the University nimble and more efficient. The overall mission is to enrich and empower the intellectual atmosphere of the University. To that end, we are very interested in hearing from people about ideas they have to improve the quality of service ITS provides.

Are there changes employees will notice as the semester opens?
We are upgrading the campus search engine to provide better access for people to search content for various campus web sites. We instituted a standardized e-mail/ONYEN policy, ensuring that every employee has an e-mail address assigned in a standard way. One of the reasons for doing this is it offers us an effective approach for delivering information to the campus community.

We are looking at providing secure backups for all campus desktop computers so that if you lose files or a disk fails, we will be able to recover information.

The University is a high-profile target, and as a result, the campus network is under constant attack. We continue to upgrade the security to protect personal information so that whether you buy tickets to a Memorial Hall performance or a football game, we want to make sure that information is secure.

ITS is substantially upgrading the computing system capability for research. The first part was deployed this spring -- a large-scale silicone graphics system. This fall, we will deploy a large-scale Linux cluster. These will add almost two orders of magnitude increase to the computing capability.

What about 'behind the scenes' projects?
UNC has some administrative applications that are older than the students. In a technical sense, some of the companies that support the software are no longer in business, so the University is the primary supporter. Continuing to find technical staff who know how to work on systems that are 30 years old is more and more of a challenge. A replacement of the administrative computing infrastructure of the campus is planned and will be a multi-year process. The first year will largely be planning and there will be multiple years of execution that follow. That will touch everyone from clerical and administrative assistants to most high-level functions of the University.

Will ITS efforts translate to classrooms?
As there are laptops in the hands of all undergraduate students, through the Carolina Computing Initiative, one of the challenges is to improve upon the use of those for educational purposes. Charlie Green, the new assistant vice chancellor for education and learning, is looking at these issues.

We are also bringing back IT training -- everything from how to use Word and PowerPoint to higher-level training in various software technologies. All of this goes back to being tied to the priorities of the University -- enriching faculty and staff, improving the quality of the educational experience.

Can you update the new spaces planned for ITS?
We will move into ITS Franklin, located at 440 West Franklin Street, in November and ITS Manning, located on Manning Drive, will open late next year. One of our challenges is that IT staff are distributed in nooks and crannies all over campus. We are looking forward to bringing all ITS staff together and into two buildings.

How important are these facilities to the ITS mission?
Although information technology lets people work across time and space, there are enormous social advantages to having people co-located. It will put them in some state-of-the-art facilities, both in terms of the computing infrastructure and physical plan.

The buildings will also serve as laboratories to test technologies and ideas that we expect to rollout over time across campus.

For example, on of the things we are doing in the Franklin Street building is deploying the first large-scale test on campus of voice over IP, which means that there will be a single jack in the office that supports telephone and networking.

All the telephony will be transmitted as digital data. That will be a prelude to what will take place across campus.

Where is technology headed in the near future?
There is a day down the road where your PDA, e-mail, telephone, wireless networks and cellular will merge. Imagine having a telephone in your office that you pick up and take down the hall to a conference room, but it is still your desk phone.

You can walk across campus to another meeting and it is still your desk phone. It is a single number that rings no matter where you are.

It moves across networks invisibly and electronic data -- such as e-mail – is accessible at all times.

How is RENCI progressing?
The whole notion of RENCI is to look broadly at how information technology enriches and empowers people. The name, Renaissance Computing Institute, was drawn from a former colleague and modeled on Renaissance teams. The idea was that by bringing people from the arts and computing together, one could do creative problem solving that neither group alone could do. RENCI is attempting to bring people from various disciplines together to ask and answer questions.

We just received funding from the North Carolina General Assembly to support an anchor facility in Chapel Hill and regional centers throughout the state.

The first year funding is $5.9 million and $11.8 million for on-going operations starting next year.

We will have satellite branches throughout the state to engage large companies and small companies to keep them competitive and to create new jobs.

We want to make information flow freely across the state. Groups across the state can participate equally in these activities and be citizens of the world.

Can you share any of the ITS vision of the future?
Now that the ITS reorganization is complete [see Aug. 17 Gazette], we are about to kickoff a campus-wide strategic information technology planning process.

We will look broadly at how information technology touches on all the things I have just described and how it touches the mission of the institution.

We will appoint a committee to work on this. This will help us lay out a five to 10-year strategic vision of how information technology is an enabler for the University's role and mission.

We want the best ideas from the best minds on campus on what the future should look like. If you have been a faculty member at UNC for a substantial fraction of your life, where does the institutional knowledge you have stored electronically go when you leave or retire? How do we make library materials accessible?

Not only do you have to capture it and store it, you have to manage it and index it in a way that you put the right idea in the right head at the right time.

That notion of the University's attic writ large, but broadly accessible to campus, the state and the world. That is a big idea we are thinking about.

New federal guidelines approved earlier this year present a different challenge that comes with an educational rather than financial twist.

The guidelines, sponsored by the Office of Innovation and Improvement in the U.S. Department of Education, were included in the Senate appropriations bill pushed by Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., in May.

They designate Sept. 17 as “Constitution Day and Citizenship Day” and state that “each educational institution that receives federal funds for a fiscal year shall hold an educational program on the United States on Sept. 17 of such year for the students served by the educational institution.”

And it includes Carolina, too. This year, because Sept. 17 falls on a Saturday, many institutions will schedule programs for Sept. 19, and Carolina will be among them.

Gail Agrawal, interim dean of the University’s School of Law, said work continues on a panel discussion on Sept. 19 that will explore a wide range of constitutional issues.

One of the law professors now involved in putting together the program is Michael J. Gerhardt, the Samuel Ashe professor of constitutional law and professor of law.

Gerhardt said the panel of faculty was not yet finalized, but that the topic of discussion will look at the confirmation process for Supreme Court nominees. Gerhardt said the panel will explore the division of powers at play in selecting Supreme Court judges, as well as some of the constitutional questions that the Supreme Court will take up once a new judge is approved.

Sanitizing milk may be a healthy thing to feed children, but sanitized history is not.

That was one of the messages that author Timothy Tyson, the day after hundreds of first-year students talked about his book as part of the summer reading program, shared during group discussion with faculty and staff at the Frank Porter Graham (FPG) Child Development Institute.

Tyson, a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin, has been a visiting professor at Duke University over the past year. On Aug. 28, Tyson challenged students to "lean into" racial dialogue to break down the barriers to racial equality that still exist.

At the discussion group at FPG, Tyson argued that cleaned-up versions of history wipe out understanding, and without understanding there can be no healing.

In "Blood Done Sign My Name," Tyson tells the story of the racially motivated killing of Henry Marrow that took place in May of 1970 in the town of Oxford. Tyson's father, at the time, was a liberal Methodist minister who made waves in the town and trouble for himself by taking a stand against racial inequality.

Tyson was 10 the day of the killing, and remembers how his friend Gerald Teel said his father and older brother had killed him. There was no mystery who committed the crime, but there was rage when the Teels were acquitted -- rage that erupted the night of the acquittal when black Vietnam veterans firebombed about 40 buildings in Oxford.

A woman who led one of the student discussions told Tyson that students in her group were unclear about his attitude toward violence as a tool for social change.

"It is important to understand the difference between coercion and dialogue," Tyson said. "Power is always happy to appoint a committee and study the issue and then issue a report, preferably a long, very boring one. That stuff was a ruse, a way of defending the status quo."

Tyson's book also touches on a range of violence incidents throughout the state of North Carolina over the past century. Some older women in the group talked of how they had lived in North Carolina all their lives and never heard about the white mobs that terrorized blacks business leaders in November of 1898.

Tyson said the 1898 riots was the most important political event in the history of North Carolina except for the Civil War because it helped to destroy an inter-racial Republican coalition of former slaves and slaveholders. That coalition had "a thunderous majority" throughout the state that could not be defeated at the polls, Tyson said.

Their adversaries were the Ku Klux Klan and the Democratic Party who by force and fraud -- "and making people resign from office at gunpoint" -- reclaimed control to establish a new social order of oppression that would not be broken until the 1970s.

"The history that we give our children has cleaned itself up," Tyson said. "I was in graduate school before I really heard about it."

Real progress, Tyson said, comes it fits and starts, and it is never easy -- or comfortable -- and the people who want it should never take for granted that it will continue.

"Blood Done Sign My Name" begins when author Tim Tyson learns of a racial murder in his hometown of Oxford on the evening of 12 May 1970. By coincidence, that's one of those days when I also remember where I was and what I was doing. I was in my senior year at Carolina and I was camped out on Polk Place. We were protesting shootings by National Guardsmen at a Kent State anti-war rally that left four students dead.

The coincidence is not incidental to one of the main points Tyson makes in his book. As it is often remembered, the Civil Rights Movement started with the sit-ins in Greensboro in 1960, continued with the March on Washington in 1963 and Mississippi Summer 1964, and ended with "victory" in the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. With the splintering of the movement in the mid-'60s after the rise of black consciousness, the counterculture, and most important, the antiwar movement, the energy of activism and the attention for those protesting had moved elsewhere.

Tyson's book reminds us that while the movement years resulted in court action and legislation that made change possible, realizing that change and securing the gains promised in those acts would be a trench-by-trench fight, and after the cameras left, the folks doing most of the fighting were the people most concerned with the change, African Americans themselves.

This was nowhere so true as in the small towns of the South, where change came slowly and local whites retained a lot of power to resist and intimidate. In Oxford, as in many towns even in "progressive" North Carolina, schools remained segregated until 1970, 16 years after Brown, and there were still no blacks among the town's elected officials in that year.

Tyson's book, part history and part coming-of-age story in an integrating South, tells the story of the murder of Henry "Dickie" Marrow by three whites reacting to an alleged insult to the wife of one of the men, the ensuing trial, and the protests and violence that roiled the little town in the following months. In telling that story Tyson also comes to grips with his own family's experience of race in the movement years and his search for meaning in a disturbed society that let murderers go unpunished and jailed suspected arsonists for life in racially tense communities.

As we look at the reasons for creating a summer reading program for the campus, Tyson's book is something of a model in the way it sparked discussions and engaged the campus community. Because it's a North Carolina story with national implications, it provided a crash course in the history of race in the state for students coming to Carolina from out of state or even for native Tar Heels. Written by a historian, it's subversively "scholarly." Tyson can tell a fine yarn, but once he has hooked us, he "plays" us long enough to teach us a good deal of North Carolina and U.S. history.

Moreover, it's a book about the meaning and uses of that history and the importance of studying it. For Tyson, real racial reconciliation is possible only when we can be honest in facing up to the history that brought us to our present predicament. History matters.

Finally, it's a book about growing up and finding one's place in the world. Like many young people of that era, Tyson's path to adulthood did not follow the straight and narrow. His story reminds us that real education doesn't always come in the classroom, in a neat package tied up with a four-year-long ribbon. For entering freshmen, that idea is well worth contemplating.

The choice of "Blood Done Sign My Name" has not been accompanied by the controversy of some of the earlier choices, and that's a good thing. Perhaps the freshman reading program can be just a freshman reading program for a while, and future committees can make their choices without having to look over their shoulders to see who might be watching them. Tyson's book worked as we hoped the freshman reading books would -- it inspired all of us involved in the program, and the energy generated by those activities promises to last well beyond the orientation week.

By Cookie Newsom
Director of Diversity Education and
Research, Office for Minority Affairs

"Blood Done Sign My Name" by Tim Tyson was mentioned as a possible choice for the summer reading program early in the process of book selection. At this early stage it is customary for the committee to scan books, looking for a good read with some interesting discussion topics.

I approached Tyson's book with some skepticism. The topics of race, racism and race relations are still, in many ways, raw and tender and I was not certain that we wanted to go poking and prodding at them as a University community, particularly not with newly enrolled students.

I also was not too certain that someone who was not black could tell the tale of the racially motivated killing of a black man well or even adequately.

I knew this book was special when I could not put it down. Instead of scanning it I read it in about two days.

Tyson manages to address complex issues like racism and hate crimes without oversimplifying them or presuming to totally understand them. His own insights and feelings serve to make the story both more compelling and more thought provoking.

The primary topic of the book, the murder of a black man by a white man is almost eclipsed by Tyson's skillful handling of the many dimensions of race and the internal struggles encountered by him and his family. Tyson also provides a good overview of the modern civil rights movement and its impact on the lives of average people, both black and white. But one of the primary values of the book is that it reinforces the idea that good people have, can and must stand up against injustice.

In an era when many still make apologies for historic racist behavior by framing it in the time period it occurred, Tyson points out that even when it was common practice to denigrate, oppress and abuse blacks, there were always some white men and women willing to listen to their conscience and, often at great personal risk, take action to fight the evils of racism. Their actions deflate the supposition that historic racism is immune from criticism because that is just the way it was, the normal state of things at that time.

Tyson's parents and other whites of the period profiled in the book prove that true morality and honor are not vulnerable to peer pressure, no matter what time period we are talking about. As an old, black preacher once told me "Right is right, and right don't wrong nobody."

Despite his comprehensive handling of the complexities of race, the ambiguous nature of defining roles, mores and culture, Tyson never allows the reader to waver from one central point. Racism is wrong and people who engage in it should not be excused or explained. He manages to convey this without either preaching or beating the theme to death.

He also manages to tell the story without allowing the viewpoints or stories of one race to eclipse the other. This is truly a story of community, sometimes a dysfunctional community, but community nonetheless.

Along the way he presents us with interesting people from both races involved in the struggles we all face today, how to make sense of the world and our place in it.

School of Public Health's research center dedicated to address critical health issues

The School of Public Health recently dedicated the Michael Hooker Research Center to the former chancellor who passed away in 1999.

On Aug. 31, the state-of-the-art facility officially welcomed the public with speeches by Chancellor James Moeser, N.C. Secretary of Health and Human Services Carmen Hooker Odom, N.C. Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue, Barbara Rimer, dean of the School of Public Health and William L. Roper, dean of the School of Medicine, vice chancellor for medical affairs and chief executive officer of the UNC Health Care System.

This facility offers new tools for researchers, teachers and students to continue and expand their work addressing the critical public health challenges that face the world.

The 125,000 square feet center features 31 laboratories and 30 offices for the departments of environmental sciences and engineering, epidemiology and nutrition; provides meeting spaces and an auditorium for large gatherings. The American Institute for Cancer Research -- World Cancer Research Fund Institute for the Advanced Study of Diet, Nutrition and Cancer, a second floor wing in the new research center, is dedicated to researching the role of diet and nutrition in the causes, prevention and treatment of cancer.

While the Hooker Center houses laboratories and offices for the school's departments of environmental sciences and engineering, epidemiology, and nutrition, it also serves as the living room, providing inviting meeting spaces for interdepartmental collaboration. The Jane Hall Armfield and William Johnston Armfield IV Student Commons on the building's first floor is furnished with groupings of couches, chairs and tables to facilitate discussions and collaborations.

These facilities bring together the finest researchers and also assistant professors in the Marilyn Gentry Fellowship Program (a unique faculty development program funded by the American Institute for Cancer Research) to make new discoveries and create future scientists who will move forward the understanding of nutrition and cancer.

Ongoing research in the new facility includes scientific explorations of ways to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, examinations of the influence of diet on cancer risk and explorations of methodologies for improving drinking water worldwide.

With campus construction at its height, parking is at a premium this fall. To relieve some of that pressure, a new 550-space park-and-ride lot dedicated to University employees opened Sept. 6.

The Chatham County facility, located just north of Cole Park Plaza along U.S. 15-501, offers weekday express service to campus from 6 a.m. to 9:42 p.m. Every 15 minutes during peak demand hours, and at 20-to-25-minute intervals thereafter, buses serve the lot.

On campus, bus stops for the Chatham lot are located at Mason Farm Road and along East Drive near the hospital area, at the Student Union and near the State Employees Credit Union on Pittsboro Street.

This park-and-ride addition is one of several efforts by the University to alleviate vehicle traffic around campus.

"We want to lessen dependence on single-occupancy vehicles by offering viable alternatives," Randy Young, Department of Public Safety, Transportation and Parking spokesperson, said. "We're working to lessen that demand by facilitating carpool and ridesharing and by promoting the use of buses, including park-and-ride, as well as other transportation options."

Take advantage of Zipcars
As another alternative to parking a personal vehicle on campus, four Zipcars are available for rent by the University community. Users, who must be at least 21, can go online at www.zipcar.com to register and reserve a car.

Once an online reservation is made, the user's membership card provides access to the vehicle. Zipcars can be used for short or long trips, at cost of $5 per hour with a $55 per day maximum. Cars can also be reserved for several days at a time. A gas card is inside the vehicle, so there is no additional cost to the driver.

"There are two forms of membership in the Zipcar program -- personal and departmental," Transportation Demand Manager Claire Kane said. "Personal members pay an annual fee of $20, reimbursable with rental time if the car is used within the first 30 days of membership. Departments pay $20 annually for each member who will use the vehicle."

While being used as a departmental vehicle, the Zipcar can be parked in any service space on campus.

Currently, 37 departments and about 300 users total are registered, which is almost double the amount from last year.

SmartCommute challenge under way
Through Sept. 30, the SmartCommute Challenge offers incentives for trying an alternative to driving to campus at least once.

"This is a regional campaign in Orange, Wake and Durham counties," Kane said. "Online at www.smartcommute.org, you can pledge to take one form of alternative transportation. Print out a pledge form from the web site and bring it to the Department of Public Safety to get a green wristband, which reads 'one less car today.' With the wristband you get discounts at area merchants."

Participants are also eligible to win prizes, such as two round trip airline tickets and hotel stay anywhere in the continental United States, an iPod Mini, a bicycle and more. The challenge began Aug. 15.

For the first time, Triangle Transit Authority (TTA) is providing direct bus service between Chapel Hill and Raleigh.

In the morning, buses depart from North Columbia near Spanky's roughly on the hour from 6 to 8 a.m. and make one stop at Eubanks park-and-ride before making the 40-minute trip to N.C. State and then downtown Raleigh.

Buses arrive from Raleigh at the Student Union at 6:47, 7:47 and 8:47 a.m. and Spanky's eight minutes later.

"With a TTA pass, riders pay 50 cents to ride the express bus," Kane said. "This a tremendous savings over full fare of $2.50."

Evening service resumes at 4:30 p.m. from Wilmington Street in Raleigh, and runs hourly until 6:40 p.m. The express route back to Raleigh runs at 4:30, 5:30 and 6:40 p.m. from North Columbia near Qdoba and arrives six minutes later at Fetzer Gym. The schedule is subject to change.

P2P buses switch to biodiesel fuel
The fleet of three P2P buses recently switched to biodiesel fuel. Biodiesel is a clean burning alternative fuel, which contains no petroleum, is biodegradable and is non-toxic. Petroleum diesel is often mixed with biodiesel to create a biodiesel blend.

These buses run on "B20," which is a 20-percent mixture of biodiesel with regular diesel fuel.

"This required no retrofitting of the vehicles," Young said. "Any vehicle running on regular diesel can use this alternative fuel. It is a renewable energy source that can be made from new or used vegetable oil."

Biodiesel reduces particulate matter emissions from the buses, can be made from soybeans -- providing a cash crop for farmers and reduced dependence on non-domestic fuel sources.

A group of applied mathematicians in the mathematics department recently received a $1.7 million funding award from the National Science Foundation.

This five-year research training group (RTG) award, titled: "Laboratory and Mathematical Fluid Dynamics: Experiments, Computation and Modeling," will support 10 undergraduates, five graduate students and three postdoctoral fellows to perform research directed at the fluid dynamics experiments taking place in the applied mathematics experimental fluids laboratory directed by mathematics professors Roberto Camassa and Richard McLaughlin, and the nanoscale science research group laboratory directed by physics and astronomy professor Richard Superfine.

Richard McLaughlin was principal investigator for the award, along with co-principal investigators Roberto Camassa, Greg Forest, Mike Minion and Richard Superfine (physics and astronomy) and senior personnel David Adalsteinsson, Tim Elston (pharmacology), Jingfang Huang and Sorin Mitran.

Funds will be used train students and postdocs to perform experimental, computational and theoretical research directed at new fluid phenomena being studied over length scales ranging from nano-scales to meters and larger in the laboratories in mathematics, and physics and astronomy, and will interface mathematics trainees to the virtual lung project which was featured in the fall 2004 issue of Endeavors.

A $200,000 University match provided by a three-way split among the mathematics department, the College of Arts and Science and the vice chancellor for research also will aid research.

The RTG award is part of the competitive "NSF Enhancing the Mathematical Sciences Workforce in the 21st Century" program.

Since the program's inception two years ago, a total of 12 RTG awards have been made nationally. The UNC award is only the second awarded in the field of applied mathematics, and was the only RTG awarded in the field of applied mathematics this year.

The Carolina Entrepreneurial Initiative (CEI) Innovations Fund is accepting grant applications from faculty, staff and students interested in developing new programs.

The Innovations Fund offers competitively awarded grants of $5,000 to $50,000 for development of new programs that will infuse entrepreneurship education across campus and throughout its disciplines.

In its inaugural year, the fund awarded grants for two new programs launching this year; a new Social Justice Entrepreneurs Incubator created by the Campus Y and a Communications Studies project to explore creation of an artistic entrepreneurship track and the development of a pilot course in artistic entrepreneurship and technology course being offered in Spring 2006.

Applications for the fall must be submitted by Oct. 17, 2005 at 5 p.m. The deadline for the spring grant cycle is March 15 at 5 p.m.

For more information on the Innovations Fund and to download a grant application, visit www.unc.edu/cei/innovation.

Do rows, cells and columns filled with numbers also fill you with dread? Do you want to know more about what those terms mean when using Excel? Do your friends and colleagues talk about using spreadsheets in ways you would find useful -- but you don't know how to get started?

If so, one of the new LearnIT workshops is for you. Excel 2003/XP: Getting Started is being offered for the first time on Sept. 7 followed by Getting Started 2 in October. In the workshop, you'll learn the basics of spreadsheets. You don't need to know anything about spreadsheets, but you do need to know the basics of using your computer (including using the mouse).

Web Authoring with Mozilla is another new LearnIT offering. If you know how to navigate the web, use your mouse and perform simple word processing, and you'd like to also learn how to create simple web pages, this workshop will help.

It is intended for web authoring beginners. (You must subscribe to the web page publication service by selecting subscribe to services from onyen.unc.edu.)

If you're a Java programmer -- or a programmer in another language wanting to learn Java -- there is a series of five-day workshops this fall that may be useful. Basics for Programmers, Introduction to Swing, JavaServer Faces and Servlets and JSP are each being offered this fall for a fee (payable by department account transfers only).

To enroll in these or any other LearnIT workshop, visit LearnIT.unc.edu and select the option for Current Schedule of Workshops on the right-hand side. (And if you'd like to investigate the 500-plus online courses, select the option for Computer-Based Training.)

Megan R. Bell, with ITS communications, and Elizabeth Evans, with ITS teaching and learning, provide information for What ITS About and LearnIT@unc.edu. They welcome your feedback. Questions may be sent to its_communications@unc.edu. The ITS web site is its.unc.edu.

PERPETUAL EXCELLENCE Carolina Environmental Program Director Doug Crawford-Brown, far left, and Jim Alty, Facilities Services director, far right, watch, as Sustainability Coordinator Cindy Pollock Shea, right, presents the 2005 State Government Sustainability Award to Nancy Suttenfield, vice chancellor for finance and administration. UNC is developing and implementing sustainable policies, practices, and curricula across the University. Started as a grassroots initiative six years ago, the effort now engages students, faculty, staff and the administration. A Vice Chancellor's Sustainability Advisory Committee was formed in 2004.