New UF provost comes from Michigan State
By Times Staff
Published June 3, 2005
Janie M. Fouke, the engineering dean at Michigan State University, is the new chief academic officer at the University of Florida.
UF president Bernard Machen announced Fouke's appointment Thursday. As provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, she will earn $300,000 a year.
Fouke, 54, is the daughter of a tobacco farmer. She spent two years teaching science in public schools in North Carolina, then earned a doctorate in biomedical mathematics and engineering from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Before becoming dean at Michigan State in 1999, Fouke was a division director for four years at the National Science Foundation.
She replaces interim provost Joe Glover, who has served in that post since February 2004, when provost David Colburn stepped down.
Two pilots faulted in Blue Angels crashPENSACOLA - A Navy report blames two Blue Angels pilots and an outdated flight manual for a crash that destroyed one of the precision flying team's F/A-18 Hornet jets, valued at $18-million.
Lt. Cmdr. Ted Steelman, 32, of Star, Idaho, was rescued in good condition Dec. 1 after his plane crashed into the Gulf of Mexico off Perdido Key on the Florida-Alabama border.
Steelman, a new team member on a familiarization flight, was completing a "split S" maneuver, in which the plane turns upside down at a high altitude and makes a half downward loop so it is flying low and in the opposite direction, when his jet hit the water.
He kept it flying and tried to make an emergency landing at Pensacola Naval Air Station, where the Blue Angels are based, but was losing altitude too rapidly and ejected, the report states.
The report by Rear Adm. G.E. Mayer, chief of naval air training at Corpus Christi Naval Air Station, Texas, concluded that Lt. Cmdr. Craig Olson, of Kirkland, Wash., another Blue Angels pilot who had briefed Steelman on the maneuver, contributed to the crash. He should have clarified the maneuver and been more assertive when he noticed deviations by Steelman, it states.
However, no punishment was recommended, and the report indicated Steelman should stay on the team.
The report also recommended that a flight manual in use for 10 years be updated because information on the maneuver was "somewhat ambiguous and potentially misleading."
Lt. Garrett Kasper, the flying team's spokesman, said Thursday new pilots now will be required to first practice each maneuver in a simulator.
Man guilty of murdering girlfriend's toddlerMIAMI BEACH - A jury convicted a man Thursday of first-degree murder for beating his girlfriend's 21/2-year-old son to death.
Claudychel Leyva, 26, faces a mandatory life term without parole at sentencing Wednesday.
Leyva reported Marco Uti missing from the couple's apartment in May 2000. The boy's mother had left him with Leyva while she was at work.
Police soon discovered the child's body in a trash bin near the apartment.
The mother, Graciela Jimeno, screamed at Leyva after his conviction. As Leyva sat with his head bowed, Jimeno said: "Today, after five years, I hope you go to hell."