A $2 million grant from the Freeman Foundation Undergraduate Studies Funding Initiative means that the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies will substantially strengthen its Asian studies undergraduate program.
The Freeman grant—one of the largest humanities grants ever received by the University—will enable the department to hire three new faculty members, bring eight writers from East Asia to the University’s renowned International Writing Program, and provide $90,000 in scholarships for undergraduate student study in East Asia.
Iowa currently offers 61 Asian language courses, from beginning to advanced levels, in Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, and Sanskrit. In addition, the program offers 79 courses taught by Asia specialists in history, religion, art history, journalism, anthropology, political science, sociology, and law.
Nine hundred Iowa students danced for 24 hours in February to raise $519,991 to benefit children with cancer, the student-run Dance Marathon committee has announced.
The fund-raiser, in existence since 1994, benefits the Children’s Hospital of Iowa through the Children’s Miracle Network. It has become one of the nation’s largest fund-raisers for the network.
Each of the 900 students had to raise at least $375 to participate, and 400 other students helped by volunteering time to organize and help with the event. More than 600 family members from the 200 sponsored families attended the event, another record.
In eight years, Dance
Marathon has raised more than $2 million. The Children’s Hospital
of Iowa has named its new Pediatric Blood and Marrow Transplant Unit after
the UI Dance Marathon. The unit will open in late spring.
Next fall, 139 students
will live in Parklawn Residence Hall, formerly a University apartment
complex. The new residence hall will contain two-person and three-person
units. They will retain the full kitchens of the former apartments, so
students will be able to choose whether to sign up for meal plans or cook
their own meals at Parklawn.
President George W. Bush has signed a bill into law that averts a threatened crisis in guaranteed student loans. It halted an impending change in the formula used to set the interest rates on student loans. The change would have significantly reduced the cost of loans for borrowers, but lenders argued that their profits on student loans would drop so drastically that they would have to leave the program.
As of July 1, 2006, the interest rate charged to borrowers will become a fixed rate of 6.6 percent. It had been a variable rate based on market conditions. When financial conditions force lenders to charge a higher rate, the difference between what borrowers pay and lenders are due would be paid by the government.
Currently, 8.25 percent
is the maximum rate that borrowers may pay under federal student-loan
law.
The University of Iowa Library System is celebrating a milestone–it recently made its four-millionth acquisition.
The acquisition is an artist’s book on Hildegard von Bingen, 12th-century medieval philosopher and composer. It was chosen to acknowledge the significance of the artist book and private press collections at the UI Libraries and to complement existing resources in women’s history.
The libraries held a public celebration in April that also recognized the 10th anniversary of both the Iowa Women’s Archives and the Information Arcade, the libraries’ multimedia facility.