Access Utah

According to NPR, the Defense Department estimates there are about 19,000 sexual assaults in the military per year, but according to Pentagon statistics, only a small fraction of these cases go to court-martial. Last fall, nineteen current and former members of the U. S. military filed a lawsuit alleging that they were sexually assaulted while serving. They claim that even though reform has been promised for years, the military doesn’t seriously investigate or punish sexual predators.

Poet, playwright and Logan native May Swenson would have been 100 this year and USU scholars have organized a centennial celebration, including readings by A Prairie Home Companion host Garrison Keillor and former Utah Poet Laureate, and current University of Utah English Professor, Katherine Coles, on April 25 at 7:00 p.m. in the Morgan Theater of the USU Chase Fine Arts Center. (The reading is free but seating vouchers are required and are available through the USU Caine College of the Arts Box Office in the Chase Fine Arts Center, room 139-B.)

Today on the program Sheri Quinn talks to author David Gessner about his latest article "How Vernal Utah Grew to Love Big Oil" in the March 2013 issue of One Earth magazine.

Eva Kor is a Holocaust survivor and victim of Dr. Josef Mengele’s medical experiments on twins at Auschwitz. Mengele was given the name “Angel of Death,” because of his position as a SS physician in charge of selecting which new prisoners of the camp would be killed or selected for forced labor. Kor and her sister launched a search for other twins who survived Mengele’s experiments and located 122 individual survivors. She founded C.A.N.D.L.E.S. Holocaust museum in Indiana.

Moab resident Steph Davis is a superstar in the climbing community. But when her husband made a controversial climb of Delicate Arch, the media fallout and the toll on her marriage left her without a partner or an income. Accompanied by her beloved dog, Fletch, she set off in search of a new identity and discovered sky diving. Though falling out of an airplane is antithetical to a climber’s control, she discovered new hope and joy in letting go.

When nine Vietnamese women arrived at Virginia Sudbury’s law office in Pago Pago, American Samoa she wasn’t sure she would take the case. She ended up as lead plaintiff attorney in precedent-setting case which drew international attention to issues of involuntary servitude and human trafficking in far-flung U. S. territories. Virginia Sudbury now lives in Utah, and is author of a new book: “Sweatshops in Paradise—A True Story of Slavery in Modern America.”

We’ll address issues in Higher Education on Tuesday’s Access Utah. How did Utah’s colleges and universities fare at the Utah legislature? How best to plan for the change in age requirements for LDS missionaries? What does the future of higher education look like? Will we see more online classes, video conferencing and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs?) Will these new methods of teaching and learning displace traditional face-to-face classrooms? Should they?

Jack Schmidt, professor in Utah State University's department of watershed sciences and head of the US Geological Survey's Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center, has long studied the Colorado River. He's among the team of scientists that designed a series of controlled releases of water from Glen Canyon Dam in an effort to restore habitats altered by the use of dams.

Mark Lynas, author of “The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans” joined us for the hour on Wednesday. He says we need to embrace Nuclear Power and Genetically Modified Organisms as parts of any successful portfolio of solutions to Climate Change. Many fellow environmentalists disagree.

Mark Lynas is the author of a number of books, including The God Species, and is Tom Williams guest for the hour. We discuss Lynas' idea that we must master human technology, like nuclear power, to save the world from ourselves.