It is with reluctance that, after a lifetime of service, Marian Battey Andersen has assumed the role of matriarch for the numerous organizations that she has elevated over the years.

Not that she isn’t proud. In speaking with the 91-year-old one gets the sense that the trailblazing, philanthropy-championing, dame of the Cornhusker state would rather be considered just another woman born and bred in the capital city who never lost track of home or how to support those who claim it. 

But with apologies to Andersen, the innumerable list of accomplishments and of lives forever altered has rendered that desire for relative anonymity impossible.

Andersen is the daughter of C. Wheaton Battey, one of the University of Nebraska Foundation’s first trustees. Over nearly a half-century of involvement, she said she has watched something her father helped establish “evolve into a really significant, great part of the university.” 

Her fingerprints can be found on many of the levers that moved the foundation to where it is today.

It was Andersen who, in 1984, became the first woman to chair the University of Nebraska Foundation Board of Directors, a role her late husband, Harold Andersen, assumed in 1991. The Andersens also co-chaired the foundation’s Campaign Nebraska, which raised more than $725 million.

The Andersens philanthropic efforts touched everything from buildings on the university’s campuses to scholarships to groundbreaking medical research. 

“I continue to like to know what’s going on,” Andersen said with a laugh, explaining why she remains so involved. “I’m still very invested.”

She hasn’t lost her curiosity, either. 

Andersen is quick to abandon the role of interviewee in favor of being the interviewer.

That inherent interest in the unknown has guided her to every state in the U.S. and dozens of countries, to high-ranking volunteer positions at the Public Broadcasting Service and the American Red Cross. It also led her to every major league baseball stadium. 

Years ago, Andersen and a co-worker were traveling to various cities to conduct interviews. “Why not go watch some baseball?” the two thought.  

“So one day I started,” the self-described sports junkie said. “And then I just finished it off, I guess.” 

Having attended Nebraska football games since she was a child, Andersen says her expectation is to be in the stands at Memorial Stadium this fall for what’ll be her 89th season as a Husker fan.

Not far from the stadium is Harold and Marian Andersen Hall, which since 2001 has housed the College of Journalism and Mass Communications, of which Andersen is an alumna.

For Katie Knight, a 2018 graduate of the college, Andersen is an inspiration.

“In an industry that was predominantly male-occupied, she was fearless in making sure her voice was heard and that she had a seat at the table,” said Knight, a former recipient of the Harold W. and Marian B. Andersen Honors Scholarship. “Marian’s generosity and desire to lift up emerging journalists through financial support is essentially the reason I ended up attending UNL.”

Andersen abruptly stops interviewing the interviewer at one point.

“I’m just so proud of what those in this state achieve,” she said.

The state could surely say the same about her.

This story is one in an ongoing series of features that highlight trustees’ engagement with the University of Nebraska and the NU Foundation.

University of Nebraska–Lincoln alumna Willa Cather was not only a famous writer, she also survived a pandemic. The so-called Spanish flu ripped across the globe from 1918 to 1920, its spread accelerated by the troop movements and combat conditions of World War I. At that time, Cather was in her 40s and living in New York City, having left teaching and magazine editing behind to be a full-time writer.

Cather’s letters describe some things that sound familiar today. She wrote to her mother that she needed to spend some time in the hospital, but her doctors suggested waiting until the flu had died down (Letter No. 2414). In the same letter, she added that her friend Ethel Litchfield was exhausted from caring for her sick children, so Cather had her over for a respite, complete with a good meal and a little time to rest by the fire. In a note to her Aunt Frances Smith Cather in November 1919, Cather said that she couldn’t write too much, as she had so many letters of condolence to write “to friends who have been bereaved by this terrible scourge of Influenza” (Letter No. 440).

Cather knew how brutal the flu could be — she caught it herself in September 1919 and had a bad time of it. She wrote to a friend, “I have been in bed with Influenza for two weeks, and it has ended in a stubborn bronchitis which refuses to quit me and keeps hovering on the edge of pneumonia. … I am simply unable to make any plans at present — I’ve had to call off ever so many engagements on account of this stupid illness” (Letter No. 474).

In an odd twist of literary fate, Cather’s bout with the flu ended up strongly influencing the novel she was writing at the time, the story of a Nebraska farm boy serving in what was then called the Great War. The doctor who treated her during her illness had previously been a physician on a troop transport ship that was struck with influenza. Cather borrowed the doctor’s journal and used it extensively when writing her novel.

That novel, “One of Ours,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923.

Please visit the Willa Cather Archive at cather.unl.edu to explore more of Cather’s life and letters.  Thanks to the support of donors and UNL’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and University Libraries, this free online archive shares a vast collection of Cather material with the world. The collection includes not only Cather’s writing but also photos, letters, interviews and biographies.

Eric Weaver, Ph.D., Scientist

Most researchers love to see their work impact the real world. They are thrilled when their theories are tested or their papers widely read.

Özgür Araz, Ph.D., is not so thrilled. He is a business professor at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and he studies pandemics, applying the science of data and supply chain management to difficult questions like school closings and the availability of ventilators. While he is glad his research is useful, he never wanted to see it in action.

Araz’s background is in industrial engineering. However, he said he “finds the social side of technical problems very interesting,” an interest which led him to supply chain management. He first studied pandemics as a dissertation topic for his Ph.D. and taught complex systems thinking at the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s College of Public Health before being recruited to UNL’s College of Business to teach supply chain management and analytics.

Supply chain management education is a strength at the university, with programs at UNL, UNK and UNO. Supply Chain Management and Analytics is the newest department in the UNL College of Business. Araz describes the ultimate goal of SCM as creating systems which produce “the right quantity of items, in the right place, at the right time.” Students study logistics, production, procurement and distribution, leading to jobs in fields as diverse as manufacturing, health care, global sourcing and inventory control. Currently, around 140 students major or minor in SCM at UNL, in addition to about 45 graduate students in the department’s online master’s degree in business analytics.

The battle against COVID-19 rages on many fronts: hospitals, labs and even private homes as people carefully wash their hands and practice social distancing. But Araz argues that, in many ways, fighting the virus is fundamentally a supply chain and capacity management problem. Are there enough masks, ventilators, test kits, hospital beds and other supplies? Are there sufficient health care personnel? SCM is also about timing. It’s not only a question of whether the needed ventilators are available; they are needed at a certain time and in a certain place. Next week may mean they are too late to save lives. If they are in a warehouse three states away, that’s not much good either.

Araz’s most recent article, published in Decision Sciences in November, studies capacity optimization under resource shortages. Previously, he looked at the challenges of stockpiling ventilators for influenza pandemics and school closure policies for cost-effective pandemic decision-making.

A pandemic is also a living math problem, and Araz is a numbers guy. How many people does one infected person generally infect? How quickly does the disease spread? What are the fatality rates? Araz explained that economic impacts are taken into consideration when modeling effective decision-making.

“We want to answer whether school closings and social distancing policies are cost-effective,” Araz said. “Both questions, of when to close schools and when to reopen, are equally important. We take information about how fast the virus is spreading, using a basic reproductive number, and estimate the number of secondary cases generated in a completely susceptible population. In the case of the coronavirus, it’s spreading fast.”