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Friday, January 23, 2015
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L awrence J ournal -W orld
Not all about star power: KU focuses on issues, too By Sara Shepherd Twitter: @saramarieshep
To be sure, President Barack Obama’s star power was the driving force behind many Kansas University community members who flocked to see him speak Thursday on campus. But plenty of students, administrators and professors were there for the issues, too. Obama’s “middle class economics” themed speech — the phrase emblazoned on a blue banner behind the podium inside Anschutz Sports Pavilion — reiterated initiatives he pushed Tuesday in his State of the Union address. Some of those were college-specific. KU Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little said when the president spoke of today’s workforce requiring more people with higher education, “that certainly includes us.” Also included in Obama’s remarks was the need to support research, which Gray-Little said also is important to all of KU’s campuses. William Elliott, associate professor of social welfare and director of KU’s Assets and Education Initiative, has written extensively on the value of relying on assets to pay for higher education instead of loans. Elliott said the country needs to advance the middle-class economic framework. “We all grow up believing that work and effort should lead to outcomes we can achieve,” he said. “That’s really at the core of what it means to be an American.” But will Obama’s suggestions for providing free community college and forgiving existing student debt make that happen? Elliott isn’t so sure. He’s concerned steer-
Nick Krug/Journal-World Photo
KANSAS UNIVERSITY CHANCELLOR Bernadette Gray-Little and her husband, Shade Little, smile as President Obama takes the stage.
Richard Gwin/Journal-World Photo
PRESIDENT OBAMA SHAKES HANDS with happy students as he leaves Anschutz Sports Pavilion on Thursday.
Tom Keegan/Journal-World Photo
KANSAS UNIVERSITY SOFTBALL PLAYER Morgan Bohanan left this message on her locker for the president, and got an autographed response. “Dream big!” Obama wrote in reply. More on the president’s note in Sports, Page 1C ing more low- and middle-income children to community college could simply reinforce a “twotier system.” It could also hurt enrollment at state colleges like KU, where high-achieving but low-income students who do go to college usually would end up. Elliott also sees bailing people out of student debt as a short-term fix,
at best. In line with his research, Elliott said, such initiatives should not be in place of programs that help students start saving on their own earlier. “We really have to build an infrastructure in which we’re teaching people to save, helping people to save and really helping them build assets,” Elliot said.
KU freshman Zachary Grant said Obama’s community college initiative drew him to Thursday’s speech. And he supports it. “In order to keep up in this world, everyone has to have access to knowledge,” Grant said. “I think it just bridges the gap.” Sophomore Asad Morani said he, too, thinks such a program could help people get a foot in the door toward higher education. “I know a lot of people that need a way to get involved in education, but they don’t have financial ways,” he said. “It just gives a chance to people that really don’t have that many resources.” Of all his State of the Union initiatives, however, the president made affordable child care the theme of the day during
Holiday Inn staff had week to prepare By Conrad Swanson Twitter: @conrad_swanson
Will Kimble said he knew President Barack Obama would be staying at Lawrence’s Holiday Inn, 200 McDonald Drive, about a week before the presidential motorcade arrived at the hotel’s doors Wednesday evening, but he wasn’t allowed to tell anybody. Kimble, who has worked for the past two years as the hotel’s banquet supervisor, said the secret wasn’t difficult to keep, but the amount of work hotel staff put in during Obama’s stay was another matter. “There was Secret Service, and I had to go through a metal detector to make sure there weren’t any bombs and stuff,” he said. “Everyone just kept moving around quick. We had to keep everything looking nice. It was a lot more work than usual.” The presidential visit culminated for Kimble on Thursday morning, he said, when he caught a 30-second glimpse of Obama heading out the hotel’s doors. “He didn’t eat at the banquet,” Kimble said. “But Secret Service did.” Heather Shull, the hotel’s assistant director
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HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE WAIT OUTSIDE the Holiday Inn on McDonald Drive late Wednesday, hoping to get a glimpse of the president, who was staying there overnight. The presidential motorcade, however, deposited him at the hotel’s back door, beyond the view of spectators. of sales, said the hotel didn’t have much time to prepare for Obama’s visit and the logistics were mostly decided by
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on-campus child care facility in Hilltop Child Development Center, Gray-Little said, but it’s not large enough to meet demand and it’s too expensive for many students, even with efforts to keep the cost down. “The difficulty is affording quality and how you pay for that, that’s really the question,” the chancellor said. Plenty of students in the star-power camp cared less what Obama was going to talk about than just seeing him — live and in person. Saleh Alameri, a freshman from United Arab Emirates, was one of those. “You don’t always get a chance to see the president,” Alameri said. “I’d rather seize the moment than try to fly away. This is a golden opportunity for me.”
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— Reporter Conrad Swanson can be reached at cswanson@ljworld.com or 832-7144.
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Obama’s security detail. “They have plans of how they like things to go,” she said. “And they tell the hotel what they’d
like to do, and we try to make it happen. It was a lot of work, but we were happy to do it.” As crews hauled off concrete blocks that had been placed around the hotel grounds, Shull said many security details were set up by Obama’s staff, rather than left up to the hotel. Shull wouldn’t speak further on Obama’s visit in relation to the Holiday Inn but added for herself: “Personally, it was a very cool experience.”
his visit to Lawrence. He visited young children at a Lawrence Head Start program prior to his speech. Alyssa Cole, a KU student and single mom of three who wrote to Obama about the need for affordable childcare, introduced the president at Anschutz. And he spent a significant amount of time talking about the issue during his speech. Gray-Little said finding affordable care is a hardship for some students as well as faculty and staff at KU. “It is an issue that is important at universities, and it’s certainly one that we’ve had conversations with some of our faculty and students about this year,” she said. “It’s a continuing conversation and a continuing challenge.” KU has an “excellent”
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