Want to win my money?

Yes. It’s true. I’m giving away money, but for good reason.

We’re bringing back the Win Dean Manderscheid’s Money contest. This year we’re asking students to tell me what I could learn from their favorite assignment.

The student with the best answer gets $100. I’ll also visit the winning student’s classroom to present a certificate, hand over the cash and recognize the classroom instructor.

We first ran the contest last year as we were looking at how we could improve the way we describe what the College of Arts and Sciences is all about. Who best to do that than the students?

We had such fun with the contest last year. It was a way for me to get into the classroom again and learn about the great things going on in the college. It’s also a way for students to showcase things they love about their classes.

Students can enter as many times as they want by March 20. To enter, visit http://ascweb.unl.edu/windeansmoney2011.asp

Pooling our Strengths

We’ve had some visitors on campus this week from the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, better known as the CIC.

The CIC is an academic consortium of the Big Ten universities as well as the University of Chicago. The CIC is a way for the member institutions to share resources and ideas. It’s a way for us to benefit from the strengths of other institutions and for other institutions to gain from our expertise.

UNL is joining the Big Ten Conference and the CIC on July 1, but planning already is under way, which is exciting. The CIC delegation’s visit was part of that effort.

We’ve been talking a lot about the move to the Big 10 amongst the department chairs within the College and what opportunities that would present for us. For one, there’s course sharing. Our students could take a course in Tibetan at the University of Indiana through video conferencing and pay Nebraska tuition, for example. Or we could take our Omaha language class here and offer it to other schools in the Big Ten.

We’ve always been an academically distinguished institution. We’re part of the Association of American Universities, a selective group of leading research universities in the country. Every university in the CIC is also in the AAU. We’ll be among our peers.

The Big 10 and CIC just raises the bar in so many different ways.

I hope to share more as our discussions continue and as we see the benefits of this cooperation take root.