College Reports
College of Letters and Science
The College of Letters and Science remains fully committed to the liberal arts and traditional scholarship, while simultaneously pursuing new ways of engaging the wider community and providing research and other opportunities for our students. As the University’s largest and most varied academic unit, the College offers courses in 35 different majors as well as in general education.
Community
- UW Oshkosh is developing a space science curriculum for special education elementary students with the help of a $3,000 grant from the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium. The UW Oshkosh Science Outreach Program will pilot test the program in several northeastern Wisconsin elementary schools, before posting it online for teachers throughout the state.
- The Science Outreach program also has a plan for getting students, their parents and the general public interested in the health of the Fox River. With a $4,970 grant from the Wisconsin Environmental Education Board, students will measure the river’s quality as it runs through Oshkosh and then share the results on the Web.
- Titan TV, or channel 66 on Time Warner Cable, has added foreign news and cultural programming in English, German and Spanish. The station partnered with Deutsche Welle, the European communications network, to offer this great educational tool for foreign language classes, both at UW Oshkosh and in the Oshkosh public schools.
Teaching
- For the fifth consecutive time since 1978, the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications has reaccredited the UW Oshkosh journalism program. The program was praised for its longtime leadership of the Northeastern Wisconsin Scholastic Press Association, which each year sponsors a competition and daylong conference for hundreds of students from high schools throughout Wisconsin.
- The UW Oshkosh computer science program has been accredited by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology Inc. The program is one of only two in Wisconsin accredited by ABET.
- The UW Oshkosh Model United Nations team extended its world-record winning streak at the National Model United Nations competition at U.N. headquarters in New York. For the 21st consecutive year, it was ranked an outstanding delegation at the international event that involved 3,200 students from 220 universities on four continents. That’s the longest string of consecutive outstanding delegation awards at what is the largest intercollegiate Model UN competition in the world.
Scholarship
- Economics faculty member Marianne Johnson was awarded a Fulbright Scholar grant to teach finance during spring 2005 at the University of Tartu in Estonia. She was the third female faculty member (10th total) from UW Oshkosh to receive a Fulbright.
- A study to see why Wisconsin students, especially women and minorities, are being lost from the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education pipeline is being conducted by the UW System Women and Science Program. The GE Foundation has awarded the program a $10,000 grant to complete Wisconsin’s portion of the national study it is doing in partnership with the Education Trust to track students in large, connected state university systems.
- The Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin is contributing $11,032 to fund a UW Oshkosh survey of all the lakes and wetlands on the Menominee Reservation. The goal is to assist the tribe in reintroducing wild rice production back into some of these wetlands.
- A geology research project funded by the American Chemical Society is underway to analyze a half-ton of rocks collected in Japan. The research relates to the return of life after the earth’s largest mass extinction about 250 million years ago. Way before the well-known extinction of the dinosaurs, the event eliminated more than 90 percent of life on earth. One hypothesis is that the mass extinction resulted from heavy volcanic eruptions and other events that began a process of global warming.
- Nine undergraduates from colleges and universities across the nation teamed up with professors at the UW Oshkosh for a summer of research. Ten UWO professors and a chemistry professor from Lawrence University are part of the three-year program funded by a $260,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. The students used state-of-the-art research equipment in the university’s new NSF/Robert E. Moore Proteomics and Functional Genomics Core Facility, includes advanced spectrometers and other instruments purchased by the university with a nearly $400,000 NSF grant in 2003.
- English faculty member, poet and cultural historian Robert T. Hayashi won the first William C. Everhart Award from Eastern National, a nonprofit organization providing educational products and services to visitors to America’s national parks. Hayashi’s article, “Transfigured Patterns: Contesting Memories at the Manzanar National Historic Site,” appeared in the fall 2003 issue of The Public Historian, a University of California publication.
- The College’s faculty and staff produced more than 100 peer-reviewed scholarly articles during the past year.
Partnership
- A new articulation agreement between UW Oshkosh and the Wind River Tribal College in Wyoming will help the tribal college earn academic accreditation while increasing the opportunities for students and staff at both institutions. This is UW Oshkosh’s first such agreement with an out-of-state campus. The tribal college serves primarily nontraditional students from the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes. One of the goals is to have Wind River students earn an associate’s degree at Wind River and come to UWO for their bachelor’s degree. UW Oshkosh faculty and students also could use the central-Wyoming campus for field courses in the sciences, literature and creative writing. Two courses have been scheduled that will be shared via compressed video, allowing students at both campuses to interact throughout the semester.