Support Physics at the University of Northern Iowa

11/28/2012

If you are free Thursday night, please consider attending a special presentation, "The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University: by Professor Benjamin Ginsberg of John Hopkins University. The presentation is open to the public and will occur at 7pm this Thursday (NoOv 29th) in the Northern Iowa Commons Ballroom.

11/16/2012

Scholarships from the "Iowa Tuition Grant" for private schools range up to $4,000. They are supposedly heavily "need based," but the median income of students' families is $53,257. The "Iowa Grant Program" provides scholarships of up to $1,000 for students at public schools. The median income for these students' families is $26,585. So - students with twice the financial resources are eligible for FOUR times the financial aid.

When Sandy Baum gave a presentation on Iowa’s tuition set-aside program at the Iowa Board of Regents meeting in Iowa City last month, it wasn’t obvious her report would end up raising more than a...

11/16/2012

The state of Iowa spends 40 million dollars of taxpayer money every year supporting financial aid to PRIVATE colleges in Iowa. This $40,000,000 is NOT available for students at public colleges. State funding for public colleges in Iowa has plummeted. Scholarship money for students at public schools is under threat of elimination. Yet, STATE funding for PRIVATE schools has remained consistent. Isn't it time students at public schools get the opportunity for this type of support as well?

11/02/2012

This article about sums up the dysfunction with administration-faculty relations at UNI. We hope that all returns to normal soon for the student and the professor, who both appear to have handled the manner professionally. It appears the process worked just fine after all. It's a shame it had to come out in such an ugly manner.

A grievance filed by a student in the National Guard against a University of Northern Iowa professor has been resolved, according to the student.

10/25/2012

This is a news clip from China about high quality of the UNI physics department This is the result of some hard work by Rui He, our newest professor whose future at UNI was very uncertain only a few months ago. Glad we were able to keep her here!

Tuesday, May 22, 2012, 6 pm news broadcast for Jingzhou, Hubei Province, China. Jingzhou is a city of 6 million people. This story discusses Chao "Louis" Ji,...

10/20/2012

We've been quiet here for a while now. Needed time to catch up on things after last spring: teaching & science, that sort thing. We also know that while we were affected by the cuts last spring, others were hit a lot harder: french, german, Price Lab School to name a few. Didn't seem a time to really celebrate. Anyway - we'll be moving our science & education related material over to the official department page. Please join us. And we'll leave this page up, too. Never know when a bit of unofficial social media might be needed. Which reminds us....
Isn't it about time to be thinking of who to vote for?

"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?" Albert Einstein

04/26/2012

Dr. Escalada, Physics Education faculty, will be presenting to the board of regents tomorrow at 4 (I believe). He won the Regents Award for Faculty Excellence this year!

04/26/2012

Been a while. We've been busy catching up with classes and starting some new recruitment strategies. Tomorrow, however, looks to be an interesting day.

Several groups will hold a rally during a Board of Regents meeting on the University of Northern Iowa campus.

04/03/2012

A question: UNI has athletics expenditures far greater than our peer institutions. Is this viable for a university that can't afford French, German, or geology?

The idea for this column started with a nagging question: why does Truman State, the former Northeast Missouri State University, keep beating the University of Northern Iowa every year in the U.S. News & World Report rankings of Midwestern public universities?

04/03/2012

With all the controversy over the decision to close Iowa's official R&D lab school, we wondered: would the state's teachers really be any worse off without it?

03/30/2012

Why walk out in the middle of an Senate Oversight meeting?

03/30/2012

Representative Rogers quote is sufficient

Funding for higher education has become a hot button issue in Cedar Falls with budget cuts at UNI.