Alumni Comments About TCF Bank Stadium

We asked alumni to answer the question:

What are you looking forward to or hoping for as Gopher Football returns to campus?

Here's what they had to say.

When I was a graduate assistant, my office overlooked Memorial Stadium. Having the stadium back on campus has the potential to create a much stronger connection for students to the University and its emotional importance - the way I used to feel when I looked out my window in Cooke Hall.
Dr. Thomas P. Jandris, Ph.D. '78

As a band alumnus, this was everyone's dream that finally is becoming a reality. I can't wait for the opportunity to watch the band march where they belong and have a space of their own. It was a proud tradition that was taken away from campus for many reasons and everyone should always remember that traditions are bigger than we ever will be.
Rachelle Price, B.S. '07

Read the rest of the comments here.

What Does the U Mean to you?

On November 5, news coverage focused on the election of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States. Throughout the evening, I searched for results of the races for the Minnesota House of Representatives, whose 134 seats were up for election. Why was I so interested? Because the University of Minnesota receives about 25 percent of its operating funds from the state legislature.

The Alumni Association encourages members to get to know their legislators and become ambassadors for the U. When I learned that Paul Rosenthal was member-elect for District 41B, which includes south Edina and west Bloomington, I wanted to meet him as soon as possible. I arranged a meeting at the state capitol with Rosenthal and my state senator, Geoff Michel (J.D. ’91), who was first elected in 2002. Michel has not only voted his support for our state’s flagship institution time and again, he coauthored the on-campus football stadium bill.

Michel and I have had many conversations by phone, e-mail, and in person, including at my home for legislative coffee parties—informal gatherings to bring legislators and alumni together in their districts. My goal was to begin establishing the same type of relationship with Rosenthal. I learned that he’s a native of New York and a graduate of New York University, so he doesn’t have an established relationship with our institution (though his wife, Liz McCall Rosenthal, attended the U).

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Path out of Crisis is through the U

By Bruce Mooty, Alumni Association National President

As the state’s leading graduate and undergraduate educational facility and its only research university, the University of Minnesota plays an essential role in Minnesota’s economic future. Consider these facts:

-More than half of Minnesota’s science, technology, engineering, and math graduates received their training at the U.

-Last year alone, the U won $619 million in higher-education research grants (98 percent of the state’s total) providing vital innovations and more than 25,000 jobs.

-In 2007, nearly 14,000 people earned a U degree, and more than 66,000 people took a U class

-Alumni from the U have created over 10,000 companies across all 87 counties in Minnesota, employing 500,000 people statewide.

These are staggering statistics, and they make us wonder, Where would Minnesota be without the U? Where would any of us who benefited from an education at the U be today if not for that education and opportunity? To a large extent, it is alumni who are in the best position to speak as ambassadors to the importance of this institution.

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Sports: Fresh Air

New faces are the name of the game this year at the Barn. Coach Tubby Smith, now in his second year at Minnesota, is counting on underclassmen from his top 25 recruiting class to compete in a Big Ten conference that, like the Gophers, is replete with rookies. But will they be able to improve on last year’s 20-win season and make a run for the Big Ten crown?

This is a good time to find out. Although pundits are predicting that the conference title will run through Michigan State’s or Purdue’s backyard, the rest of the conference is in a state of flux, as every other team has either lost key players or, like Minnesota, is trying to rebound from years of mediocrity. In a transitional period such as this, when recruits will make the difference for every team, the Golden Gophers are in a position to make this season very interesting. “Provided we stay healthy, we’re going to compete with everyone,” Smith says.

Minnesota’s fledgling talent, which includes five players, will start games and dramatically improve the bench. “We won’t have a drop-off when we bring guys in off the bench,” Smith says. “In fact, we’ll improve in some areas.” Furthermore, he hopes that these rookies won’t just complement the returning players, but step up and become leaders in their own right. And, they will have to counter the departure of Lawrence McKenzie (B.S. ’08), Dan Coleman (B.S. ’08), and Spencer Tollackson (B.A. ’08), last year’s top three scorers.

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Panty Raids: A Brief History

By Tim Brady

Rumors of the raid had been circulating on campus all day. Some guys had even put signs in dorm windows that afternoon, announcing plans for the group heist come evening. But then again, rumors of this sort had been flying around the University of Minnesota all spring and nothing had yet happened. There was no certainty that this Monday would be any different, until the gang actually began to gather around 8 p.m.

A handful of male students, and then a handful more, started to mill on the lawns near Pioneer and Centennial halls, all-male dorms on the U’s Minneapolis campus. Around 200 assembled for the first rush, and the atmosphere was squirrelly from the get-go. Some of the guys even decided to go bare-chested in the chill spring air—hoping, wrote a reporter for the Minneapolis Star in the next day’s paper, that they would soon be wearing “some feminine souvenir back to their dormitory.”

Exactly who pointed them toward Powell Hall, a dormitory across campus that housed nursing students, is unclear. But as with any mob, it didn’t take much to steer them. Off they went with a whoop and a testosterone-fueled howl toward the University’s various female quarters, beginning with Powell. By the time they were through, their numbers would swell to nearly 1,500 students and they would raid not just Powell, but Comstock, Sanford, and several sorority houses. They would also draw the wrath of three separate police forces; get their first whiff of tear gas; and set off a round of hand-wringing and recrimination among University administrators and public observers about the state of college youth.

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Sexual Healing

By Cynthia Scott

The shelves and window ledges in Eli Coleman’s office on the West Bank of the Minneapolis campus are a glorious mess. They’re cluttered with hundreds of items—ceramic houses, animals, divinity figures, coffee mugs, and stuffed toys, to name a few—that Coleman (Ph.D. ’78) has collected in his years of crisscrossing the globe as director of the Program in Human Sexuality (PHS) at the University of Minnesota Medical School. “They’re a memory of all the different places in the world where I’ve met wonderful people and maintained friendships,” Coleman says. But these are not just the baubles of an inveterate traveler. Rather, they tell a tale about the distances that Coleman has traveled in a career devoted to advancing healthy attitudes, practices, and policies toward human sexuality.

In his 30 years at PHS, almost 20 of them as director, Coleman has become one of the world’s most highly regarded experts in human sexuality, and the program he directs has achieved international stature as the premier center for sexual health. In 2007, the same year that he received the prestigious Gold Medal from the World Association for Sexual Health (WAS) and was elected president of the International Academy of Sex Research, Coleman was named the holder of the world’s first academic chair in sexual health, established at the U with a $4 million endowment. A psychologist by training, Coleman has devoted his life to helping people struggle with problems in the most intimate aspect of their lives: unfulfilling sex lives, compulsive sexual behaviors, confusion about gender and sexual identity, and myriad other issues. “The constant refrain we hear from people who were so troubled and despairing is ‘you saved my life, I don’t know what I would have done without PHS,’?” Coleman says.

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Down to Earth

By David Mahoney

Sitting behind his desk at the Institute on the Environment’s offices on the St. Paul campus, sleeves rolled up to better shape thoughts in the air, Jon Foley elucidates his vision for the University of Minnesota’s two-year-old institute. While his words illuminate his plans, however, the only light in the room itself comes from a window framing an overcast November sky.

Focused on a vastly wider world of environmental issues, Foley doesn’t notice such details as the office lights turned off. He’s the new director of the institute, a position he assumed this past August after an eight-year stint as director of the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE), which he founded at the age of 32.

Now 40, Foley is a scientist at heart, as comfortable analyzing data sets as he is talking about his plans for the institute. And when he begins talking about current environmental problems, he exudes a clear and forceful confidence that conveys not only that he knows what he’s talking about, but that he’s determined to do something about it.

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