CU News
News from the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Lyndi McCartney, wife of former CU coach Bill McCartney, dies of emphysema
Mar 21st
WESTMINSTER – Lyndi McCartney, the wife of former University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney, passed away Thursday afternoon after a lengthy, hard-fought battle with emphysema. She was 70.
“We have four children and 10 grandchildren and we all loved her very much,” Bill McCartney said of his wife for a half century; the two celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary last Dec. 29.
Lyndi spent her last days in Hospice care and was surrounded by family when she finally succumbed after decade-plus long battle against the disease. Grandsons, the sons of daughter Kristy, T.C., a CU graduate assistant coach, and Derek, a freshman on the football team, were among those present when she passed.
The eldest McCartney son, Mike, announced his mother’s passing on his Facebook page with simply, “RIP Mom. I am who I am because of you. Love you.” He works as a player’s representative with Priority Sports out of Chicago.
The youngest son, Marc, posted this on Facebook: “Today I mourn, but my mom suffers no more. She is forever in heaven now and that gives me a great peace that surpasses all understanding. Thank you to all of the people who loved my mom and have been praying for her. Your thoughts and prayers have been a great encouragement and comfort to me and my family.” Marc is the vice president for special events with RightNow, a non-profit ministry in Rockwall, Texas
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The couples’ other son, Tom, is the football coach at Fairview High School in Boulder.
Services are pending.
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CU gets a real conservative professor for a year
Mar 13th
Steven Hayward, Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Fellow at the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University in Ohio, will begin his one-year appointment in the fall.
“Dr. Hayward brings an impressive breadth of knowledge to this position, having researched a range of environmental, historical and political issues,” said Steven R. Leigh, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at CU-Boulder.
Hayward’s recent investigations of environmental issues “bring important dimensions to discussions on campus.” Leigh said. “He also shows dedication to our teaching mission, planning a well-defined range of courses. We are pleased that he will join us as a visiting scholar.”
Hayward is tentatively scheduled to teach four undergraduate courses, three in political science — Constitutional Law 1 and 2 plus a course in American Political Thought — and one in environmental studies, Free-Market Environmentalism.
Hayward will teach in both fall and spring semesters in 2013-14. Additionally, he will be encouraged to foster discussion by hosting public events in the campus community and perhaps around the state.
“This is a bold experiment for the university and me to see whether the ideological spectrum can be broadened in a serious and constructive way,” Hayward said.
Hayward added that the college classroom should not be a forum for ideological advocacy.
“Good teaching should make all students, of whatever disposition, better thinkers,” he said. “In the humanities, this should be done by considering fairly the full range of perspectives on a subject. That’s the way I intend to conduct classes while I am visiting at the university, and I hope that students of every kind of opinion will feel welcome in my classroom.”
Hayward holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Claremont Graduate School. He has been the F.K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he was principal author and project director of the AEI’s “Energy and Environment Outlook.”
Hayward has been a visiting lecturer in the Government Department of Georgetown University and is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy. He has also served as a Bradley Fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
Hayward’s essays have been published in The Washington Post, National Review, Weekly Standard and other publications. His most recent book, published in 2010, is “Mere Environmentalism: A Biblical Perspective on Humans and the Natural World.”
Since last summer, an advisory committee has been working to identify candidates for the visiting scholar position. The committee sought a “highly visible” scholar who is “deeply engaged in either the analytical scholarship or practice of conservative thinking and policymaking or both.”
The advisory committee that selected Hayward includes five faculty members and five community members. Keith Maskus, associate dean of social sciences and professor of economics, chairs the committee but does not vote.
Maskus said committee members worked together extremely well and were committed to the goal of bringing an exceptional scholar to campus.
Non-university committee members include David Pyle, founder and CEO of American Career College; Mike Rosen, long-time radio host on AM 850 KOA and Denver Post columnist and political commentator; Bob Greenlee, former Boulder mayor and City Council member, and current president of Centennial Investment & Management Company Inc.; CU President Emeritus Hank Brown; and Earl Wright, CEO of AMG National Trust Bank.
CU faculty members on the committee include Vanessa Baird, associate professor of political science; David S. Brown, professor and chair of political science; Bradley Monton, associate professor of philosophy; Murat Iyigun, professor of economics; and Susan K. Kent, professor and chair of history.
“I am delighted to welcome Steven Hayward to the faculty of the University of Colorado Boulder as our inaugural Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy,” said CU-Boulder Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano. “His record of scholarship, commentary and publishing on subjects ranging from energy to the environment to the U.S. Constitution will spark further debate, discourse and critical thinking among our students and contribute to the diversity of our academic community.”
The Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy is a three-year pilot program supported by private funds. More than 20 donors have raised $1 million to support the program.
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CU Boulder study: More power leads to more dehumanization (No sh*t, Sherlock)
Mar 6th
The study, to be published in the May issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, found that participants given more powerful roles in two experiments attributed fewer uniquely human traits — characteristics that distinguish people from other animals — to their peers who were given less powerful roles.
“I think a lot of us have the intuition that some powerful people can be pretty dehumanizing,” said Jason Gwinn, a doctoral student in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and lead author of the study. “But our goal was to test if power, when randomly assigned to ordinary students, would have that effect. That would say something about power itself rather than about the sort of people who have the drive to take power.”
The researchers enlisted about 300 CU-Boulder students taking an introductory psychology course to participate in two experiments. In the first experiment, students were assigned to be either a manager or an assistant for a mock hiring task. The assistants were asked to review resumes for an open job and then list the strengths and weaknesses of each applicant. The managers then reviewed the list made by their assistants and made a final decision about whom to hire.
In the second experiment, participants were asked to play a game and were assigned to be either an allocator or a recipient. For the game, one allocator and one recipient were tasked with splitting a pot of money. The allocator, the higher-power role, made the first offer, suggesting how the money be split. If the recipient, the lower-power role, accepted the offer, both people received their share of the money. If the recipient declined the offer, neither person received any of the money.
At the end of each experiment, the participants were asked to rate each other on 40 traits. The result was that students in higher-power roles assigned fewer uniquely human traits to the students in lower-power roles than vice versa. Examples of traits considered to be more uniquely human, as defined and tested in a 2007 Australian study, include being ambitious, imaginative, frivolous and insecure. Examples of traits that are less uniquely human — those that could be used to describe a pet as well as a friend, for example — include being passive, timid, friendly and shy.
The question of whether power leads to dehumanization has part of its roots in the renowned Stanford Prison Experiment conducted in 1971. Twenty-four male students were randomly assigned to play the role of either inmate or guard in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. During the study, the guards were psychologically abusive to the prisoners, many of whom passively accepted the abuse, despite the fact that the participants knew that they were all students at the same elite university.
Though the guards were described as dehumanizing the prisoners, the term “dehumanization” was well defined at the time and the experiment was not designed to allow the researchers to confidently state that it was the increase in power that lead to the dehumanization. By contrast, Gwinn’s study, now available online, was designed specifically to test the relationship between power and dehumanization.
Gwinn cautions that the researchers cannot yet say whose perspective is being changed by the power differential imposed on participants in the CU study. It’s possible that being in a position of less power makes a person see those in power as more human rather than the other way around, or that both people are affected.
“We haven’t pinned down why this happens,” Gwinn said. “We don’t know whose perception is being affected.”
Charles Judd and Bernadette Park, both professors in CU-Boulder’s Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, co-authored the study.
