DEMANDS FOR THERAPY DOGS INCREASE AT U PG 8 THURSDAY, MAY 3, 2018
LATE WEEK
NEIGHBORHOODS
Rising home values affect UMN area Campus-area neighborhoods have seen single-home values rise up to 11 percent this year. BY MADELINE DENINGER mdeninger@mndaily.com
Rising home values in neighborhoods around the University of Minnesota have prompted concerns from residents and local officials. The average estimated market value of single-family homes in Marcy-Holmes, Southeast Como, Prospect Park and CedarRiverside neighborhoods rose between 7 and 11 percent since last year — similar to a citywide average of just over 10 percent. While these increases aren’t unique to areas near campus, they can drive up housing prices and create difficulty for first-time buyers. Over the past year, market value increases for single-family homes in neighborhoods near the University varied: • Southeast Como homes increased an average of 11.1 percent • Prospect Park homes increased an average of 9.4 percent • Marcy-Holmes homes increased an average of 7.8 percent • Cedar-Riverside homes increased an average of 7.1 percent u See HOUSING Page 3
THE TREND COMES DESPITE LOW EVIDENCE OF IMPACT.
MNDAILY.COM
ADMINISTRATION
What Kaler will leave behind
The UMN president has two years left on his contract to accomplish his major priorities. BY RYAN FAIRCLOTH rfaircloth@mndaily.com
Eric Kaler strode into Rapson Hall on April 18 to meet with students and faculty from the Department of Landscape Architecture. During the hour-long department visit, the University of Minnesota president heard from and queried eager graduate students on their wide-ranging research: autonomous systems, water issues in India and green-space needs in St. Paul.
STUDENT GOVT.
When Kaler took office in 2011, he
MSA wraps up year; looks to fall semester
identified roughly 180 departments to visit in his nine-year tenure. But a sched-
years,” he said. “If something needs chang-
ule that often exceeds 70 hours per week
ing and you haven’t done it in the 10-year
has left him with around 120 depart-
period, either you don’t want to change it or
ments to visit in the last two years of his
you can’t change it.”
An academic career Kaler is a lifelong academic. He re-
Kaler’s leadership of Minnesota’s largest
ceived a chemical engineering Ph.D.
The student government body hopes to address some unresolved issues in fall.
As time dwindles, Kaler’s goals are
university has been filled with triumph and
from the University in 1982, before
getting more difficult to finish — and his
turmoil. To his colleagues, Kaler is known
spending the next 29 years in faculty
window to stamp his legacy is waning.
for his fundraising prowess and holding
and administrative roles at public institu-
BY MAX CHAO mchao@mndaily.com
“In administrative jobs … there’s a cer-
resident tuition down. But his term has also
tions across the country.
tain period of time, for presidents. This
been marred by numerous athletics depart-
[window] probably would be about 10
ment scandals, steep nonresident tuition
The University of Minnesota student government is finishing up an active year and shifting its focus to the fall semester as new leadership moves in. The Minnesota Student Association began numerous campaigns TRISH and policy initiatives PALERMO this year and hopes to continue pursuing them in the 2018-19 school year. At the beginning of the year, MSA President Trish Palermo and Vice President Erik Hillesheim laid out an agenda based on their campaign platform promises. The agenda grew as the semester went on, eventually consisting of almost 100 items. “Erik and I ran on an extremely ambitious platform, and to have watched all of u See MSA Page 8
COURTESY OF TIME MAGAZINE
Keys’ research was the subject of a Jan. 13, 1961 TIME Magazine cover story, ‘The Fat of the Land,’ shown at left.
contract.
hikes and scrutiny from state legislators.
u See KALER Page 2
CAMPUS
New CLA career readiness tool receives mixed reviews from students The RATE tool aims to help students share liberal arts skills with their future employeers. BY ELLA JOHNSON ejohnson@mndaily.com
A new career readiness tool piloted by the University of Minnesota’s College of Liberal Arts this year received mixed reviews from faculty and students. The tool — called RATE — guides students through reflections on how classwork
connects to other aspects of their lives and, ultimately, their careers. Student polls show increases in participants’ confidence in their education and ability to articulate its value after using the tool, though some students said the reflections felt like busywork and that the program’s purpose wasn’t clear. The RATE tool focuses on connecting classroom experiences to CLA’s Core Career Competencies, a set of skills including engaging diversity and analytical and critical thinking, said Ascan Koerner, CLA associate dean for undergraduate education. The competencies are meant to represent
marketable skills liberal arts teaches best, he said. The tool is supposed to provide an opportunity for students to practice articulating the value of their education, an area in which employers said CLA’s graduates were sometimes lacking, Koerner said. He stressed that RATE is still a work in progress. The tool is part of CLA’s Career Readiness initiative, which aims to push back against the dominant narrative that u See CLA Page 2
RESEARCH
Ancel Keys’ complex nutrition legacy Once the pride of University research, the diet guru’s legacy poses a fat problem for his field. BY NICK WICKER nwicker@mndaily.com
In 1957, Ancel Keys and a team of researchers embarked on an ambitious, global mission to reverse the heart attack epidemic through studying diet. The University of Minnesota academic and his team traveled the world, from Japan to the Netherlands, testing men’s physical performance and collecting information about their diets. Two decades later, Keys’ work was published in a landmark study – the Seven Countries Study. It evaluated a range of diets and was one of the first studies to pin cardiovascular disease, or CVD, to diet. The work helped define national nutrition guidelines today. The study launched Keys’ already successful career into the stratosphere, and he became an academic celebrity. He made the cover of TIME magazine and emerged as the common person’s dietary guru, and his findings became nutrition science orthodoxy. In recent years, studies accumulated that cast doubt on his findings, methods and prestige. The most damning result of his work, for some, is their claim that it played a role in creating the American obesity and diabetes epidemics.
The “Diet-Heart Hypothesis”
After Ancel Keys earned his Ph.D. in oceanography and biology in 1930, he worked briefly for the Mayo Clinic in Rochester before relocating to the University of Minnesota to found its Laboratory for Physiological Hygiene, which the War Department quickly conscripted for research work. He died in Minneapolis in 2004. Keys’ interest in human nutrition was viewed as pioneering at that point, and his study in the halls beneath the University’s old football stadium on human starvation informed Allied Forces’ attempts to recover large portions of the war-torn world from malnutrition. During this period, Keys made his name as the father of what would become nutrition science. “But a big part of the public wants to know facts about diet and health. … The man most firmly at grips with the problem is the University of Minnesota’s Physiologist Ancel Keys,” the 1961 TIME magazine cover story said of Keys. “Keys’s findings, though far from complete, are likely to smash many an eating cliche.” Keys’ Seven Countries Study became his most controversial and most important contribution to nutrition science. Starting in 1957, Keys studied men from then-Yugoslavia, the U.S., Greece, Italy, Finland, the Netherlands and Japan and derived his famous “Diet-Heart Hypothesis,” u See NUTRITION Page 3
VOLUME 118 ISSUE 59