"Dr. Mote" helps nature heal the sea

By Judy Taylor Cramer
Managing editor, Florida State Times

All in all, Bill Mote would rather be fishing.
But on this June day, the fish will have to wait. Because William Russell Mote is receiving an honorary doctor of science degree from Florida State University during a special ceremony at the marine lab that bears his name and is a testament to his love of the sea.
It's the first college degree for Mote, who says he "never got around to getting any degrees" because he was just too busy building a successful business.
At 89, Mote is still busy. For the past 30 years, he's been president of the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota. Although he handles the business side of the lab, Mote says he's around "all those Ph.D.s" so much, he considers himself a marine biologist.
"Half the people around the laboratory already call me 'Dr. Mote,'" he said with a laugh.
In 1994 Mote donated $1 million to establish the William R. and Lenore Mote Eminent Scholar Chair in Fisheries Ecology and Enhancement at FSU and the Mote Marine Laboratory.
Through FSU's department of biological science, the gift allows a scientist to spend six months at FSU and six months at the marine laboratory, provides internships for graduate students and supports a symposium on fisheries ecology. The first Mote International Symposium on Marine Stock Enhancement will be Nov. 21-23 at the Sarasota lab.
"We've been taking from the sea for a long time, and it's about time we put something back," says Mote. "We're depleting our fish population. What we need to do now more than anything is help nature along with this fish enhancement."
Mote grew up in Tampa, surrounded by the bays and warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Even after he founded Republic Carloading and Distributing Co. in New York, he still found time to travel to exotic locales in search of the big catch.
He found it in 1957 in Peru, where he landed a 1,180-pound black marlin.
As a sport fisherman, Mote saw firsthand the decline in sea life. After his retirement in 1960, he launched a series of excursions around the world to explore marine life. When he decided to build a marine lab on the west coast of Florida, he discovered one already existed - the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory.
Mote became its principal benefactor and then its president. In 1967 the laboratory was renamed in honor of the Mote family. Through it all, his wife Lenore, who died in 1991, shared his interest and involvement in marine research.
That involvement has now earned him an honorary degree. But "Dr. Mote" won't be resting on his laurels. He says he'll still be in the lab four or five times a week, and he'll still be going fishing.
"As the old saying goes," he says, "you go where the fish are."

Anyone can play, FSU leaps into the future

By Margaret Leonard
Editor in Chief, Florida State Times

Some aspects of academic life are about to become light-years easier at Florida State.
FSU is set to become the first university in the nation to offer students, faculty and staff a magic, high-speed needle finder to approach the giant haystack of modern information.
The needle-finder is online research created by LEXIS-NEXIS, a leading computer research service already used by many law firms, businesses and news organizations with heavy research needs.
"Students will be able to complete some of the ordinary undergraduate research in minutes that could take days or weeks in a traditional library," said Franklin D. Murphy, director of university communications and a long-time user of LEXIS®-NEXIS® research.
"Imagine having a cadre of professional researchers at your beck and call," Murphy said, "people who understand how to string Boolean commands together so that they can find a single reference to nearly anything amongst hundreds of millions of pages of documents."
LEXIS-NEXIS' database has more than 10,000 sources and more than 580 million documents - 3 million of them updated each week.
Murphy and others have spent much of the past year negotiating a partnership with LEXIS -NEXIS that will bring the service to anyone on campus for about the price of a good dictionary.
In exchange, FSU will test the service and supply LEXIS-NEXIS with information on how it works in a university market.
The test began Aug. 1, and is expected to be available to everyone on campus after the first of the year. Communication researcher Barry Sapolsky is directing the test.
"We will be looking to see how students and faculty use the service," Sapolsky said. "We'll examine how much time they spend using it, which databases they explore, and how they adopt the service. In general we hope to learn how they fit LEXIS-NEXIS into their academic life."
The service is being offered for the first time through the Internet and distributed by a computer system owned and operated by the university. Such an arrangement controls the cost of delivery and allows the university to share in the revenue. LEXIS-NEXIS' more expensive commercial on-line service directly connects its clients with the company's databases in Dayton, Ohio.
"LEXIS-NEXIS has long been available at FSU and on many other campuses under special promotional pricing arrangements and with certain limitations," Murphy said. "But now it will be offered campus-wide, will be far more user-friendly and will be affordable."
Users won't need to know the technical aspects of conducting sophisticated searches.
With some simple pointing and clicking, students will be able to home in on information in publications from nearly every English-speaking country in the world and many of the non-English speaking.
Dean Dan Maier-Katkin of the FSU School of Criminology and Criminal Justice welcomes the service.
"Scholarship in criminology and criminal justice ... draws on the social sciences, humanities, public policy, law and related areas," Maier-Katkin said. "LEXIS-NEXIS will improve our students' abilities to comprehend the full range of factors that influence patterns of criminality and the administration of criminal justice."
Public-relations firms throughout the country rely on the service to check out companies, commercial competition and issues.
"We think LEXIS-NEXIS will be invaluable to our students, especially in issues research," said Jay Rayburn, who teaches public relations in the College of Communication. Rayburn is reviewing the service and preparing to test it in classes this fall. Professors of debate and political science also have hailed the arrival of the service.
Although the School of Library and Information Services has had access to the service for many years, Beth Logan, associate dean, is looking forward to seeing users in a controlled laboratory setting.
"Our new facility will give us the chance to observe behavior that might not be apparent to those interpreting surveys or leading focus groups," Logan said. "We will be able to observe and document user behavior while students are interacting with the system."
If students agree that LEXIS-NEXIS is powerful, time-saving and user-friendly, the remaining questions should center on price. At this stage, LEXIS-NEXIS believes price will be based on units of use, with the average cost to the student expected to be about $50 per semester.
The expanded database for the new FSU service not only includes the legal research libraries of the LEXIS® but also the NEXIS® service, the most comprehensive news, financial and business information service in the world.
NEXIS offers more than 5,800 sources of news and business information, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Fortune, Business Week, wire services and transcripts of television programs, such as "Nightline" and CNN News, as well as the Congressional Record.
Some distance learning programs being created at FSU are computer and Internet related, and administrators believe LEXIS-NEXIS could become their on-line library.
"Access to such a database service will make FSU's distance learning programs unique in providing serious research capabilities at our students' fingertips," said Judith Boettcher, director of the university's Office of Interactive Distance Learning.
Once the service is tested and any improvements made, students will have a chance to subscribe for as much time as they want.

George Dawson demonstrates the making of a simple scale

Ingenuity helps out in Bosnia

By Judy Taylor Cramer
Managing editor, Florida State Times

George Dawson is an expert on how to make something out of nothing.
Give him a piece of paper, a clothes pin, some paper clips and an aluminum can, and he can create a simple scale - no fancy equipment needed, just some everyday items and his Swiss army knife.
A curriculum and instruction professor in FSU's College of Education, Dawson has worked as a consultant in 45 countries, holding workshops for teachers who must make do with few or no science supplies.
So when the Soros Foundations, a network of foundations that aids the development of "open societies" in formerly Communist countries, was looking for someone to venture into the "black hole of education" in Bosnia, it called Dawson. His first trip to Sarajevo was an eye-opener.
"All the schools were broken into," he said. "Much of the equipment had been stolen. Anything that could be burned - cabinets, desks, chairs, even windowsills - was used for fuel."
For four years teachers there have worked without pay and dodged sniper fire on the way to school, Dawson said. More than half the teachers in Bosnia have fled the country or been killed.
Throughout the months of shelling in Sarajevo, makeshift classes continued, often with small groups of pupils crammed into basements.
When the new school year begins in September, many students will be undereducated or uneducated, he said. Courses in mine education - about 3 million mines remain unexploded - will be added to the curriculum. As a stopgap measure, some eighth-graders will be sent to a special high school so they can be certified in elementary education when they graduate.
"The Bosnians have a real opportunity to revamp their educational system," Dawson said. "The books are gone, the materials are gone. They've got to refurbish and to restaff."
In the fall Dawson will return to Bosnia's Dalmatian Coast to lead workshops on how to teach science without money or equipment. He doesn't know if Serbian teachers will be allowed to attend.
Dawson's work in Bosnia isn't all low-tech. The FSU professor is also a high-tech whiz, and he'll be helping Bosnian educators connect to the Internet's worldwide resources.
International aid is pouring into the country, and the sound of hammers has replaced the sound of gunfire. Their spirits unbroken, the Bosnian people are ready to face the future, Dawson said, but they are puzzled about the past.
"They say they didn't have a clue that this (war) was going to happen," he said. "They never thought their neighbors could pick up guns and start shooting at them."

Abolish Football? Yes

By Kevin Begos
Football should be abolished at FSU.
I am aware that such a statement is sure to provoke outrage and charges of gross ignorance or cultural insensitivity.
But I reach this conclusion after moving to Tallahassee and being stunned at how football eclipses all other cultural and academic fields in the school. Many teachers feel suffocated by the non-intellectual atmosphere this situation creates.
Now, I enjoy football, and in New York City, sports fans are fond of saying that the best professional QB in New York plays for the Knicks (Charlie Ward).
The problem is not any fault of the game, players or coaches. It comes out of the notion that Academics and Sport enjoy a happy and balanced coexistence. That's a farce, and it corrupts both higher learning and sport.
Today, football at the FSU level is a business, and a large one. It should not pretend to be otherwise.
The players are amateurs only through an arcane maze of rules that result in constant friction among backers, coaches and administration.
In a university, learning and intellectual discussion should be the total focus.
We should admit that the aim of FSU football and better college sports teams in general is to reach the highest level of play, to win and to be the best possible team. That is something to be proud of, but it has nothing to do with higher learning.
Much is made of the money the football program generates. But does that benefit the school, or mask problems? A friend who teaches at FSU told me about the financial problems in many departments where senior professors take on a dismally low course load, and it is from such problems that the financial woes of this or any university arise.
In a business sense, the academic departments are running in the red, and football is used to bail them out. If there are budget deficits, they should be addressed by focusing on the students, teachers and equipment in each department. If a true cost is higher, raise fees in that area.
It is through such hard choices that education will be reformed - not through football, or blaming a stingy Legislature.
Millions of young people in China, Russia and the rest of the world look at education as their only hope for a better life - and they take it very, very seriously. Our young people are going to have to compete with those students.
Education must be the top - and only - priority of schools.
Keep the football program, but separate it from the school. Let Bobby Bowden and others in college sports continue to strive to be the best. Perhaps they can formally become a semi-pro league for, in fact, college football has been the minor league system for the NFL.
Let the teams play and the students learn. But keep them separate, so that learning is the highest focus in the school.
Kevin Begos is a book publisher who has recently moved from Manhattan to Alligator Point.

Abolish Football? No

By Sandy D'Alemberte
Quick: Name the universities you hold in high regard. Which have never been football powers? Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Chicago - all were once great.
Even my undergraduate college, Sewanee, was great (in 1899).
What is the point? Only that most great universities have at some time had great football.
I believe competitive athletics attract exceptional students.
The FSU experience bears this out. When I was dean of the FSU College of Law in the late 1980s, FSU football was coming into its own. I noticed that applications to the law school were climbing sharply. I think the quality of the law school played a role, but only after applicants looked at a school they knew first through football.
All the data suggests that athletic programs draw the attention of good students. What universities attract the most interest from high-school students? Penn State and Florida State, as we learned from College Board statistics about students' requests to forward their scores.
Now, I do not believe it is sufficient to have a successful athletic program. The athletic program that will help the university is one that is run with integrity and humanity.
It helps if there is a widely admired coach who does not blow up at players and blame a loss on everyone else. The NCAA has publicly recognized ours as one of the best operated football programs in the country.
Most important, there must be substance to the academic programs, because athletics bring only the first attention, which is quickly lost if the academics are not exceptional.
Because our columnist is new to Tallahassee, we can excuse him for saying that "football eclipses all other cultural and academic fields" at FSU. After he has been here a while, he may come to appreciate the third largest music program in the country, the second best dance program, a theatre program consistently ranked in the top 10 and one of the top 10 film schools in the country.
I will not linger on other programs, which our author will find, in time.
It should not take any time to correct his mistake about the role of athletic finances. The truth is that professors are carrying increased course loads, and no academic department has been bailed out by athletics. That assertion is pure fantasy.
Finally, he suggests that we should separate athletics and learning. I wonder if he really is the fan he claims to be.
At FSU, distinguished professors act as "honorary coaches" on game weekends. To a person, they come away with respect for the coaches as teachers, for the athletes as students and for the complexity of the systems that athletes must master. Sport is very decidedly a learning experience.
Abolish football? No thanks.
We will continue to put an excellent team on the field, recruit great athletes who perform in the classroom, and employ coaches with character.
Equally important, we will continue to build our academic program, in which we are very happy to offer an honors program that makes our football program proud.

Humanitarian brings kindness to work

By Judy Taylor Cramer
Managing editor, Florida State Times

An angel is pinned to Dianne Smith's shoulder, a crystal-and-gold gift from her brother.
"She keeps me straight," Smith said with a smile.
To cancer patients and their families, Smith has been something of a guardian angel herself, keeping them straight about how to be positive in the face of such a frightening disease. It's how she lives each day in her own battle against cancer.
Smith, senior executive in the FSU Office of Research, received the 1996 President's Humanitarian Employee of the Year Award for her "selfless and life-affirming character that forms the very essence of the humanitarian ideal."
"I was totally speechless," she said. "I had no idea this was coming ... It has a very humbling effect on you. But I accept it gladly and with open arms."
Smith, who has worked in the Office of Research since 1986, calls her co-workers "my family away from home."
"We've always been a close-knit group. They've been my support during this fight with cancer. They send me e-mails every day, little love gifts.
"I don't need a cancer support group because I have it here. It's a special environment because of the love and caring that goes on every day."
Smith was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1990. After surgery, treatment and recovery, she and her family hoped the cancer was arrested.
But in 1994, the disease spread to her lungs, and this past December, another tumor was discovered.
Through it all, Smith said, she's chosen to enjoy life, rather than worry about death.
"When I found out I had cancer, I completely turned it over to God. I told Him, 'Your shoulders are bigger and they can handle it.' I believe God is a healer. There's no physician like him."
Her message to other cancer patients and their families: "Keep a positive attitude. Don't give up. Have faith in God."
Her faith, her family and her friends have been her strength, she said. She has two grandchildren, one just born in June. Smith spent two weeks with her daughter in Tampa, helping her take care of the newest addition to the family.
In his letter nominating Smith for the award, Robert M. Johnson, recently retired vice president of research, wrote eloquently of her "indomitable spirit":
"What is truly astonishing is that given such constraints, the quality of Dianne's work has wavered not the slightest degree. When she's in the office - as she is nearly every day - so is her 'can-do' attitude, along with her signature smile and kind word. With humility and grace, she has accepted life as it is, and cheerfully credits her office unit with being the source of so much of her strength, little realizing that it is her extraordinary courage in the face of the mounting pain that strengthens us for what we all know may lie ahead."Quick: Name the universities you hold in high regard. Which have never been football powers? Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Chicago - all were once great.
Even my undergraduate college, Sewanee, was great (in 1899).
What is the point? Only that most great universities have at some time had great football.
I believe competitive athletics attract exceptional students.
The FSU experience bears this out. When I was dean of the FSU College of Law in the late 1980s, FSU football was coming into its own. I noticed that applications to the law school were climbing sharply. I think the quality of the law school played a role, but only after applicants looked at a school they knew first through football.
All the data suggests that athletic programs draw the attention of good students. What universities attract the most interest from high-school students? Penn State and Florida State, as we learned from College Board statistics about students' requests to forward their scores.
Now, I do not believe it is sufficient to have a successful athletic program. The athletic program that will help the university is one that is run with integrity and humanity.
It helps if there is a widely admired coach who does not blow up at players and blame a loss on everyone else. The NCAA has publicly recognized ours as one of the best operated football programs in the country.
Most important, there must be substance to the academic programs, because athletics bring only the first attention, which is quickly lost if the academics are not exceptional.
Because our columnist is new to Tallahassee, we can excuse him for saying that "football eclipses all other cultural and academic fields" at FSU. After he has been here a while, he may come to appreciate the third largest music program in the country, the second best dance program, a theatre program consistently ranked in the top 10 and one of the top 10 film schools in the country.
I will not linger on other programs, which our author will find, in time.
It should not take any time to correct his mistake about the role of athletic finances. The truth is that professors are carrying increased course loads, and no academic department has been bailed out by athletics. That assertion is pure fantasy.
Finally, he suggests that we should separate athletics and learning. I wonder if he really is the fan he claims to be.
At FSU, distinguished professors act as "honorary coaches" on game weekends. To a person, they come away with respect for the coaches as teachers, for the athletes as students and for the complexity of the systems that athletes must master. Sport is very decidedly a learning experience.
Abolish football? No thanks.
We will continue to put an excellent team on the field, recruit great athletes who perform in the classroom, and employ coaches with character.
Equally important, we will continue to build our academic program, in which we are very happy to offer an honors program that makes our football program proud.

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