Kyle Riggs uses a battery-powered leaf blower on the SOU campus

New battery-powered landscape equipment reduces campus noise and pollution

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Leaf blowers may seem somewhat comical: gangly plastic tubes that push air to corral bits of dead trees. But the pollutants they emit, the gasoline they waste and the hearing-damaging noises they produce are no laughing matter, so SOU is working to replace them and other gas-powered landscape tools with battery-powered versions.

Some communities have considered outright bans on gas-powered leaf blowers, in particular, but SOU landscape supervisor Zack Williams has initiated a more gradual phase-out.

“When I began working for the university in January of this year, we had several battery tools, and I’ve expanded our fleet,” Williams said. “As the technology and power output improves, we’ll continue adding until we can replace gas-powered tools completely – perhaps in another two to three years.

“The benefits are obvious: zero emissions and low noise.”

An hour of gas-powered leaf blower use produces pollution equivalent to about 1,100 miles driven in a 2017 Toyota Camry, according to the SORE (small off-road engines) Fact Sheet, published by the California Air Resources Board. Similarly, the automotive review and shopping website Edmunds did an emissions test in 2011 which showed that half an hour of leaf blower use created as much pollution as 3,887 miles driven in a 2011 Ford Raptor.

Gas-fueled blowers, trimmers, mowers, chainsaws and other landscape equipment create environment-damaging emissions due to their engine design. A 2017 New York Times article, “On Banning Leaf Blowers,” said the two-stroke engines they use “are light enough to carry but produce significant exhaust and noise.”

“The gas and oil mix together, and about a third of it does not combust,” the Times story said. “As a result, pollutants that have been linked to cancers, heart disease, asthma and other serious ailments escape into the air.”

The story also cited a report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that said as little as two hours of unprotected exposure to a leaf blower can lead to permanent hearing loss.

Williams – who oversees landscape maintenance as part of SOU’s Facilities, Management and Planning Department – said battery-powered tools address nearly all problems associated with the gas-powered versions. They cut down the noise to non-damaging levels and release no emissions to harm the environment, students or others. The batteries are also easy to use.

“Wall-mounted chargers are at our shop,” Williams said. “We remove battery packs from the tools and plug them in to charge.

“They are high amp-hour output lithium-ion batteries that last for many years,” he said. “At the end of their life cycle they are returned to the manufacturer for recycling – but that hasn’t occurred yet, and some of our batteries are almost five years old.”

One downside to battery-powered equipment is that it isn’t as powerful as gas-powered counterparts and there are some instances where that power is a necessity.

“We have not converted all of our landscape power tools to electric … this category of tool is not yet comparable to gas-powered equipment in performance, and we use a mix of both depending on the needs of the project/site,” Williams said. “We’ll favor battery-powered tools if noise is a concern, or if the job is appropriately sized. We use battery-powered chainsaws for tree pruning, but will opt for larger gas saws for tree removals or large limbs.”

There’s also the matter of cost – Williams said battery-powered equipment is at least double the cost of gas-powered equipment. The gradual conversion won’t add to students’ expenses or take away from other SOU departments or services, but has required a shift in Williams’ budget and that of Facilities, Management and Planning.

Williams expects the issues with battery-powered equipment to be resolved over time.

“Like electric cars, as market adoption increases, and technology improves, the price will come down,” he said. “When electric vehicles can be purchased for the same price as conventionally-fueled vehicles, we’ll see the same situation with smaller tools.”

Even now, he said, the benefits of battery-powered tools outweigh their shortcomings.

“I think (the adoption of electric tools) meshes well with our values – low-noise, zero emissions,” Williams said. “SOU’s sustainability initiatives certainly call for this.”

Story by Blair Selph, SOU Marketing and Communications student writer

Javier del Rio

SOU to present Distinguished Alumni Awards

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(Ashland, Ore.) — An arts graduate with a 30-year career as a museum curator and a regional education leader who has championed the underrepresented will be honored Friday when Southern Oregon University presents its annual Distinguished Alumni Awards during a luncheon on campus.

Bruce Guenther, who earned a bachelor’s degree in applied design from SOU in 1971, will receive this year’s Distinguished Alumni Award. The award recognizes alumni whose personal and professional achievements have significantly benefited humankind and brought distinction to Southern Oregon University.

Javier del Rio, currently the assistant superintendent for business and human resources at the Phoenix-Talent School District, will be recognized with the Excellence in Education Award. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from SOU in 1994 and a master’s degree in education in 2005.

Bruce Guenther

Bruce Guenther

Guenther grew up in Medford and came to what was then Southern Oregon College in the late 1960s to study art and participate in the honors program. He found his career path when he landed a National Endowment for the Arts curatorial internship at the Portland Art Museum after graduation. Guenther served in curator roles at the Seattle Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Orange County Museum of Art in California. He returned to the Portland Art Museum as chief curator in 2000 and oversaw two major expansions before retiring in 2014.

Del Rio, who came to SOU as an exchange student from Spain, went to work for MCI Telecommunications in Los Angeles after earning his bachelor’s degree. He discovered his calling a few years later when he began teaching under an emergency credential in the Los Angeles Unified School District. He earned his teaching license from Cal State, Northridge, while he worked and then returned to SOU for his master’s degree. He has served in a variety of roles in the Phoenix-Talent School District and as principal in the Medford School District. At each stop in his education career, del Rio has advocated for underprivileged and underrepresented children, and those for whom English is a second language.

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Paul Condon on mindfulness

SOU’s Paul Condon has essay on mindfulness published

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Paul Condon, an assistant professor of psychology at SOU, recently published an article in Current Opinions in Psychology’s special issue on mindfulness about how meditation may increase empathy and altruism in certain contexts.

Current Opinions in Psychology, a scientific journal dedicated to recent discoveries and papers in the broad field of psychology, published the special issue on mindfulness in August. It included the work of more than 100 scholars from around the world to create the largest ever field-wide collection of texts on mindfulness since it became a scientific discipline two decades ago.

“It is without a doubt the most comprehensive and authoritative scholarly work on mindfulness that is currently available,” Condon said.

Mindfulness is defined as the awareness of one’s present experience, a type of pure “living in the moment” that was particularly central to Buddhist teachings. Nowadays, people practice mindfulness across many disciplines, including health care, social justice movements, corporations and mobile applications. Scientists have looked at mindfulness with an increasingly critical eye as it has increased in popularity, trying to explain how useful the practice is without making it seem like a cure-all.

Condon’s article focuses on how meditation and other mindfulness exercises can increase pro-social behavior, such as those that help the collective instead of the individual. Condon notes that the increase in pro-social behavior seems to only happen in certain contexts, and when meditating in a certain way.

“Various (historic) meditative practices support the cultivation of virtuous mental states and behavior…,” Condon said in the article. “In contrast to Buddhist traditions, many modern mindfulness programs emphasize an ethically neutral context. Yet an ethically neutral context could lead to problematic applications of mindfulness-based training.”

Testing and research hint that neutral-value meditation – which focuses on letting all feelings, even negative feelings and ideas, enter and leave one’s mind – can both raise and lower pro-social behavior depending on what the person was like before meditating.

Positive-value meditation – in which a person discerns between morally negative and positive thoughts while meditating, and focuses only on the positive ones – shows a stronger link to increasing pro-social behavior.

“Participants who completed a mindfulness or compassion meditation program offered their seat to (a) suffering confederate at a much higher rate (50 percent), compared with those in a wait-list control (15 percent)…,” Condon’s article said. “Other measures of prosocial behavior include reductions in hot sauce used to punish a transgressor; willingness to include an ostracized individual in the online ball-tossing game ‘Cyberball’; email messages written to an ostracized individual; and visual attention to scenes of suffering measured with eye-tracking.”

Ultimately, while the evidence is encouraging, Condon concluded that much still needs to be done and the study of mindfulness and pro-social behavior is still a burgeoning field.

Students and other members of the SOU community can read Condon’s entire essay, and the rest of Current Opinions in Psychology’s special issue, for free on this website until Oct. 30.

Story by Blair Selph, SOU Marketing and Communications student writer

Satellite program coordinator Susan Faller instructs prospective teachers

Coalition of colleges educates rural teachers in satellite program

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Southern Oregon University, Southwestern Oregon Community College and Klamath Community College are teaming up to help aspiring teachers from Klamath Falls, Coos Bay and Brookings earn bachelor’s degrees in education and teaching licenses, all with minimal commuting.

For the past three years, the satellite teaching program has helped students from rural communities – who often work full-time jobs or have studied in other fields but want to start teaching – by making a degree from SOU’s School of Education more accessible. It allows students to take most of their classes online or in the evenings in their community, and lets them do all of their student teaching in their hometowns.

“There is a significant teacher shortage right now and it is incredibly difficult to find teachers for our rural communities,” said SOU faculty member Susan Faller, the program’s coordinator. “These satellite programs are fantastic because we are pulling from the community itself – people who already are invested in their towns and want to be part of the education of future generations.”

The first cohort of satellite students recently graduated, and are currently working as fully-licensed teachers in their home communities. There are currently more than 75 students participating in the program.

Meetings for those interested in the satellite program are at the Brookings SWOCC Campus from 5 to 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 22; the Coos Bay SWOCC Campus from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 23; and Klamath Community College from 5 to 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 5. For more information, contact Susan Faller.

Story by Blair Selph, SOU Marketing and Communications student writer

Students learn about excellence and innovation in sustainability at SOU

SOU receives national “Excellence and Innovation Award” for sustainability

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(Ashland, Ore.) — The American Association of State Colleges and Universities recognized Southern Oregon University today as this year’s recipient of the organization’s Excellence and Innovation Award for comprehensive sustainability and sustainable development.

The AASCU program, now in its sixth year, honored member institutions for excellence and innovation in 2019 by announcing award recipients in each of eight categories. SOU and the other winning colleges and universities will receive their awards this month at AASCU’s annual meeting.

AASCU recognized SOU for developing “a comprehensive and impactful sustainability program by collaborating across operations, academics and engagement.” The higher education organization noted that SOU has achieved energy savings of 121,000 kilowatt hours annually, an increase in campus solar electricity generation of 319 percent in the past five years and reductions in drive-alone trips of 24 percent for students and 15 percent for employees. SOU is the nation’s first university to offset 100 percent of its water use with Water Restoration Certificates purchased by student government.

“We are all very well aware of our commitment to sustainability and the natural environment, but it is gratifying to be recognized by an organization with the stature of the AASCU,” SOU President Linda Schott said. “This is not the finish line. Our students, faculty members and others on campus will continue to achieve, innovate and lead in the field of sustainability – just as we do in many other areas that benefit our students, our region and the world.”

Other institutions recognized with this year’s Excellence and Innovation Awards are California State University-Bakersfield, for excellence in teacher education; California State University-Fresno, for civic learning and community engagement; Columbus State University (Georgia), for international education; Oakland University (Michigan), for leadership development and diversity; State University of New York College of Agriculture and Technology at Cobleskill, for regional and economic development; Northwest Missouri State University, for student success and college completion; and Millersville University of Pennsylvania, for innovative sustainability projects.

“Each year, I am inspired by how AASCU institutions move the bar to serve their students and advance the economic and cultural development of their communities,” AASCU President Mildred García said. “These Excellence and Innovation Award winners truly demonstrate how our members serve as ‘stewards of place,’ prioritizing student success and leaving a lasting impact on their regions.”

AASCU said all of the winning programs had top-level administrative support, connected with their institutions’ mission and strategic agenda, contributed to significant institutional improvements or programming, were grounded in research and incorporated best practices.

SOU has received numerous awards and recognitions for its sustainability practices in recent years. The university received an honorable mention two years ago at the Presidential Climate Leadership Summit and won the national Best Case Study sustainability award in 2015 from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s (AASHE) for collaborating with Bee City USA to establish a Bee Campus USA designation. SOU has been named a Tree Campus USA for three straight years, was named a Bicycle Friendly University by the League of American Bicyclists and a year ago was named the nation’s top pollinator-friendly college by the Sierra Club, as part of its “Cool Schools” rankings.

SOU’s Lithia Motors Pavilion and adjoining Student Recreation Center earned LEED Gold certification this year from the U.S. Green Building Council – the fifth SOU facility to earn a LEED designation. The RCC-SOU Higher Education Center in Medford earned a LEED Platinum certification, the Green Building Council’s highest sustainability rating, and the McLaughlin and Shasta residence halls, and The Hawk dining facility, all have been certified as LEED Gold.

Roxane Beigel-Coryell, who served as SOU’s sustainability and recycling manager for the past several years, left the university in July to take a similar position at California State University, Channel Islands. A new sustainability and recycling manager is expected to be announced later this month and begin work at SOU on Nov. 8.

SOU President Linda Schott and Board of Trustees member Sheila Clough will receive the university’s  Excellence and Innovation Award at the Oct. 27 opening session of AASCU’s annual meeting in Phoenix, Arizona.

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Real food – sustainable, human and socially equitable

SOU exceeding expectations in Real Food Challenge

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(Ashland, Ore.) — Southern Oregon University joined universities across the country last year in working toward sustainable food practices by participating in the Real Food Challenge. Now that a year has passed, statistics show that SOU is exceeding expectations.

SOU joined more than 40 U.S. universities and four university systems by joining the Real Food Challenge, a student-founded activist organization dedicated to supporting and creating ecologically sustainable, human and socially equitable food systems.

When President Linda Schott signed the “SOU Real Food Campus Commitment,” she pledged that at least 20 percent of SOU’s food budget would be Real Food – created through sustainable, human and equitable systems – by 2023.

SOU also committed to establishing a transparent reporting system and filing annual progress reports to evaluate where the SOU Real Food Challenge team should focus. The data of the first year’s budget was recently released, which has been organized by category and color-coded for easy comparison.

Bar graph of SOU's real food by category

The bar graph shows percentages of SOU’s overall food budget by categories (in brown), and the percentage of the overall food budget that Real Food accounts for in each category (green). For instance, produce makes up 13.1 percent of the overall food budget, and the produce that qualifies as Real Food accounts for 3.2 percent of the overall budget. The Real Food percentages from all of the categories add up to 9.4 percent of the university’s overall food budget – nearly halfway to the university’s goal of 20 percent by 2023.

Pie chart of real food at SOU, across all categories

All of that progress was made in a single year of the five-year challenge, and even more changes have been made to how the school purchases coffee, produce and grocery items since this data was collected.

By the end of the spring term 2020, SOU’s Real Food Challenge team will be able to compare the changes they’ve made across multiple years to see how quickly they’re reaching the 20 percent goal. The Real Food Challenge team’s student leaders, Jamie Talarico and Jessica Zuzack, can be reached via their email for questions about the program.

Story by Blair Selph, SOU Marketing and Communications student writer

SOU's Alison Burke receives Fulbright scholarship

SOU criminology professor awarded Fulbright scholarship to teach in Bosnia

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(Ashland, Ore.) — Southern Oregon University criminology and criminal justice professor Alison Burke has been awarded a Fulbright scholarship to lecture and teach a course on women and crime in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Burke will serve at the University of Sarajevo during the current 2019-20 academic year. She received a four-month teaching assignment that will begin in February.

Fulbrights are among the most prestigious scholarships in academia, and Burke’s award is the third for an SOU faculty member in three years. Erik Palmer, an associate professor of communication at SOU, is currently teaching and conducting research as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Ghana. Theatre arts professor Eric Levin was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study in Ireland during the 2017-18 academic year.

“It is a huge honor for me to participate in the Fulbright program and collaborate with colleagues at the University of Sarajevo,” Burke said. “Living and working in Bosnia and Herzegovina will be a phenomenal learning experience and I look forward to returning to SOU with new international connections, deeper cultural appreciation and a fresh perspective I can share with my students.”

Burke, who has been an SOU faculty member for 11 years, served in a variety of juvenile justice positions before earning her doctorate from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 2008 and shifting her career to higher education.

Her research interests include gender and juvenile justice, and delinquency prevention. She teaches four courses – Introduction to Criminology, Theories of Criminal Behavior, Crime Control Theories and Policies, and Juvenile Delinquency – and a seminar series that includes a segment on women and crime.

Burke earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of New Mexico and her master’s degree in criminal justice from the University of Colorado at Denver. She has also studied at England’s Oxford University.

Her work has appeared in publications including the International Journal of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Journal of Active Learning in Higher Education and the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry. She has authored the books “Gender and Justice: An Examination of Policy and Practice Regarding Judicial Waiver,” published in 2009 by VDM Publishing; and “Teaching Introduction to Criminology,” published this year by Cognella Press.

Burke is SOU’s 18th Fulbright scholar. The university’s first Fulbright scholarship was awarded to Economics Professor Byron Brown for the 1986-87 academic year, which he spent lecturing on economics at Karl Marx University in Budapest, Hungary.

Fulbright scholarships are part of a merit-based, international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. It was founded by former U.S. Sen. J. William Fulbright and has awarded scholarships each year since 1948. It currently offers about 8,000 grants annually for graduate study, research, lecturing and teaching in more than 160 participating countries.

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Ronald McNair Scholarship program

The McNair Scholarship Program seeks professor-nominated students

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The SOU McNair Scholarship Program recently opened its application period, and is seeking assistance from faculty members in finding students who can benefit from the intensive McNair Program.

The majority of McNair Program Scholars reported that they heard of the program by being nominated and/or encouraged by an SOU faculty member. Dee Southard, the program director of the McNair Program, encourages faculty to nominate sophomore, junior or early senior students for the McNair Program by emailing her the students’ names, SOU email addresses and undergraduate majors.

Since 2003, SOU has been home to a McNair Program funded through the U.S. Department of Education. The SOU program offers one-on-one guidance from faculty mentors as it helps participants complete their undergraduate degrees, enroll in graduate school and prepare for doctoral studies. More than a dozen SOU McNair alumni have completed their doctoral programs since the program began 15 years ago.

Dedicated to Ronald E. McNair, a civil rights activist and astronaut, the McNair Program is for students facing socio-economic adversity who want to achieve a graduate education. However, Southard recommends ignoring that criterion when selecting students to nominate for the scholarship, as she’ll be giving advice and information to all who are nominated, even if they don’t make the McNair cut.

McNair Scholars are “targets of recruitment” for graduate programs across the nation. Students who participate are also often offered fully-paid campus visitation opportunities, have their graduate application fees waived and frequently receive offers of multiple years of funding support.

The McNair program was initiated in 1989 by the U.S. Department of Education to increase doctoral studies by students from underrepresented and disadvantaged groups. SOU’s McNair program serves 28 undergraduate scholars each year.

Story by Blair Selph, SOU Marketing and Communications student writer

SOU's Hala Schepmann is co-director of $1 million NSF grant project

SOU professor to co-direct $1 million NSF grant to advance women in STEM

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(Ashland, Ore.) — Southern Oregon University chemistry professor Hala Schepmann will co-direct a five-year, $999,899 National Science Foundation project to support mid-career women faculty members nationwide in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.

The project – Advancing STEM Careers by Empowering Network Development (ASCEND) – will focus in two directions. It will help individual faculty members advance their careers and also address systemic issues that prevent mid-career women from achieving full professorships and leadership positions in their disciplines and institutions.

Schepmann and co-directors from Willamette University, Western Oregon University and Gonzaga University in the Northwest; John Carroll University and University of Detroit Mercy in the Midwest; and Claflin University, Furman University and the Citadel in the Southeast will lead the project that will include as many as 75 participants. Colleges and universities in the three regions will collaborate to provide educational opportunities, training resources and professional support.

The NSF grant to support the project began this month and will run through September of 2024.

“The ASCEND project aims to both develop women leaders among faculty and enable university administrators to remove systemic and institution-specific barriers to support the advancement of a diverse STEM faculty,” Schepmann said. “Professional development trainings will focus on self-advocacy, collaboration, leadership, change implementation, conflict resolution and negotiation.”

The grant is part of the NSF’s ADVANCE program, which is intended to increase the representation and advancement of women faculty members in STEM fields. It is part of the NSF’s strategy to broaden participation in the STEM workforce. The NSF has invested more than $270 million in ADVANCE projects at over 100 institutions nationwide since 2001.

The ASCEND project that Schepmann is co-directing is one of two prestigious NSF grants announced this fall that have SOU faculty members in leadership roles. A two-year, $299,000 NSF grant to develop the “computational thinking” skills of kindergarten-through-fifth-grade students is being led by Eva Skuratowicz, an adjunct professor of sociology and anthropology, and director of the SOU Research Center (SOURCE).

“I couldn’t be more pleased that Dr. Schepmann received this grant,” said Susan Walsh, SOU’s provost and vice president for academic affairs. “This award acknowledges Hala’s substantial commitment to increasing the advancement of women in science, and paves the way for SOU to continue to make a significant contribution to this important work.”

Co-directors of the ASCEND project will lead the creation of peer mentoring networks in each of the project’s three regions. Members of the networks will meet online each month and in-person once per year to collectively identify barriers to their professional advancement and strategies to address them.

Each regional network will be made up of one administrator “alliance” made up of four or five academic leaders and five faculty “alliances,” each aligned with a STEM-specific academic discipline and made up of four or five members.

“In collaboration with faculty, administrators will strategically design and implement comprehensive campus-specific change plans that reduce barriers encountered by women in STEM fields, create more equitable communities and foster the retention and advancement of a diverse STEM faculty population,” the project’s written summary says.

The project is intended to establish a “critical mass” of change and precipitate reforms that benefit women in STEM fields throughout U.S. higher education.

More information is available on the ASCEND program website.

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SOU inventors will participate in InventOR competition

SOU joining Oregon inventors’ competition

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SOU is participating for the first time in the annual Invent Oregon Collegiate Challenge, aka InventOR, a statewide competition designed for student inventors and entrepreneurs to find funding and make their prototypes marketable realities.

Teams interested in participating in InventOR should attend the informational meeting on Oct. 17, at 12:30 p.m. in Central Hall, Room 106. Alternatively, teams can contact Rebecca Williams, an assistant professor of business at SOU.

According to its website, InventOR defines an invention as, “a new, innovative, and tangible product, process or service that affects the communities and environment in a positive way.” While there must be a physical element to the project, the invention can be in any field and teams are even allowed to compete with only an idea in hand.

The competition will start with a preliminary, school-level round. Once the two best and brightest teams of inventors at SOU are picked, they’ll move onto a semifinal competition, where they’ll be given $500 to develop their prototype as they go head-to-head against 18 other participating schools. One team from each school will then move on to the finals, where teams will be given $1,500 to improve their prototype. A total of $30,000 in prizes is up for grabs for the finalists.

Prototypes will be judged based on four criteria: the quality of the prototype, the clarity of the pitch, the environmental and/or social impact, and accomplishment of a team’s goals.

Invent Oregon is sponsored through the Lemelson Foundation, Business Oregon, The Oregon Community Foundation, the Oregon Lottery and the PSU Center for Entrepreneurship.

Story by Blair Selph, SOU Marketing and Communications student writer