KU News Release

May 16, 2008
Contact: Lynn Bretz, University Communications, (785) 864-7100.

Text of Chancellor Robert Hemenway’s All-University Supper remarks

LAWRENCE — The following are University of Kansas Chancellor Robert E. Hemenway’s prepared remarks for tonight's All-University Supper.

May is a special time of year at the University of Kansas. The whiff of celebration is in the air. Degrees earned, families gathering, careers in the waiting, honored alumni returning home. The good feeling we share is probably more palpable in May 2008 than previous years, for this in many ways has been a banner year.

It began normally enough. For the fifth consecutive year, close to 30,000 students enrolled in August. By dint of its ACT scores, the freshman class laid claim to our best and brightest ever. Our campuses continued to show more diversity. We welcomed 3,193 students of color, second largest on record. We also have record high numbers of minority and women faculty. We have increased minority faculty by 54 percent over the last 10 years and increased women faculty by 33 percent.

As we do every year, we again accepted an investment of more than $250 million from the state of Kansas and turned it into more than $1.1 billion of educational goods and services. For every dollar that the state invested in KU, it received three dollars in return.

Our research engine, despite several years of flat investment by the federal government, continued its healthy purr. Now purr is probably the wrong metaphor actually. I’d like to have a research effort that resembled rampaging buffalo. In 10 years, KU has seen a 97 percent increase in its total research effort, as measured by dollars. Our faculty competed for and won $290 million in research grants and contracts.

And there is another scorecard we will cite in 2008.

How do we rank compared to other schools? Well, we rank pretty well, even without a national championship. But, what the heck, let’s talk a little KU athletics.

As the Jayhawk nation knows, this spring we celebrated the winning of a national basketball championship. The first in 20 years, the fifth in KU history.

And our football team did better than ever before. The historic season ended with a victory in the Orange Bowl, the first Bowl Championship Series game to be won by any Kansas team.

But don’t drop that “We’re No. 1!” chant. Keep that gesture for other KU teams:

— Our debate team ended the season ranked No. 1 in the nation, for the second time in three years.
—Our journalism program won the Hearst intercollegiate writing competition — the “college Pulitzer” — for the second consecutive year.
— U.S. News and World Report ranked both our special education graduate program and our city management and urban policy graduate program No. 1 in the nation.

And there is more:

— Our School of Law won the National Criminal Procedure Tournament.
— Aerospace engineering took first in the international Undergraduate Aircraft Design Competition.
— School of Medicine is No. 1 in placing graduates in family practice residencies.
— The School of Engineering’s Society of Black Engineers brought home the Best Regional Chapter award.
— Our School of Business won the Investment Education portfolio competition.
— KU received the Confucius Institute of the Year award as one of four best such institutes in the world.
— Our Center for Service Learning was named to the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll for service to disadvantaged youth.
— The School of Architecture was cited No. 1 in the Midwest by DesignIntelligence magazine. I would venture that the school’s 804 design studio and its 22 students rank also as No 1 in the hearts of the citizens of Greensburg, Kan. The students devoted this semester to a Herculean 17-week effort to erect a $300,000 arts center in the storm-ravaged town. The green, sustainable structure harnesses wind and sun, producing more energy than it uses. CBS featured Studio 804 on “The Early Show.” The Discovery Channel is on campus this weekend for its feature on Studio 804.

The gods clearly looked favorably on the efforts of the University of Kansas this year. But not deliriously so.

The state Legislature took a cautious tone mid-session, reflecting national concerns about an economy sliding into recession. With ever-climbing costs for energy and technology, recruiting and retaining faculty, maintenance of bricks and mortar, we are concerned about the fiscal challenges ahead.

But challenges are not new to this university — nor to those who for over a century have walked the hill and left it ready to meet life’s challenges.

The beauty of the evening is that tonight we celebrate two alumni of the University of Kansas who by their example show the power of the individual to address hard times and triumph over adversity. They are two remarkable individuals who have made a difference in a world beset by destruction, disaster, and disease. Henry David Thoreau said, “One man, standing for the right, changes things.”

Tonight we honor Eric Sundquist and Roger Youmans, two people who have stood for the right. They are examples of a kind of archetype: Kansans who cared enough to try to change the world.

Eric Sundquist was born and raised in McPherson, Kan. Of Swedish descent, Eric Sundquist has always been open to crossing boundaries. Despite little exposure to people of color or people from ethnic backgrounds different from his own surroundings, Sundquist sought to know more about others who did not look like him.

He became a scholar of national renown, someone who has brilliantly probed American literature and culture, from the Civil War to the 20th century, bringing to light the complex interplay between race and ethnicity in American culture. Honoring Eric Sundquist is a special privilege for me. He and I share scholarly fields. He writes about African-American literature. I write about Zora Neale Hurston. I cannot stress strongly enough how widely respected he is. As he puts it, he writes “about the complex dialectic between black and white cultures that has given rise to some of our most important national literature.”

As his interests have expanded, he has also offered great insight into Jewish literature and how Jewish writing brings special meaning to American letters.

Race in America to this day stirs discomfort. But tonight we honor two people who have looked into the mirror of American culture and given us a provocative rereading of who we really are. Eric Sundquist has helped us better know this sensitive but rich terrain of alliances and influences, this e pluribus unum that defines where we live and who we are.

With Roger Youmans we have the example of the courageous healer willing to go anywhere in the world, forsaking physical comforts and what most of us would view as necessities, to minister to the sick. He was a special person from the moment he came to Mount Oread, pledging Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, the only white member of a black fraternity.

He preserved that vision as a doctor who took his family to the Congo. Imagine Dr. Youmans’ wife, four children in tow, arriving with her husband in Wembo Nyama, hundreds of miles from urban areas of Congo. Imagine Dr. Youmans seeing every day, the charred remains of the house lived in by the previous doctor of Wembo Nyama, a sight that reminded him that not everyone loved the American surgeon and his ministry. He understands what happens when bull elephants fight.

Roger Youmans chose sacrifice over the normal comforts of a professional life. He focused on alleviating human illness and disease in areas of the world that ached for help. This surgeon in the wilderness had the courage to see beyond difference and trust in people as human beings, no matter what the color of their skin.

Roger Youmans and Eric Sundquist hold a vision of the common ground that human beings share, despite the social and physical barriers that would keep us a world apart.

The world is a richer place because of these two Jayhawks. We take pride in their accomplishments, and we thank them for the inspiration they provide to all Jayhawks brave enough to accept the human consequences of a life of devotion to others.

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